Nine thoughts for Labour moderates after the Corbyn landslide

Socialist or social democrat? The old tensions between Labour as a socialist party and Labour as a modern European social democratic party are not resolved by Jeremy Corbyn’s victory. The debate around revisionism dates back decades, to the Fabians, to Crosland and the debates about Clause 4. New Labour was an articulation of social democracy influenced by globalisation, the new post-Cold War Europe and Clinton’s Democrats. Does Labour today stand for creating, for example, new socialist institutions to counteract or replace capitalism in parts of the economy or does it aim to do this via regulation, international agreements and checks-and-balances to make capitalism fairer? I am more of a social democrat than a socialist for a number of reasons. One of the more pragmatic objections I have is that the inevitable creation of new, national state institutions represents further centralism in a country which is far too centralised. However, many people who voted for Corbyn feel that there is too much private sector and therefore you need a strong public sector to remedy this. Ed Miliband, for all his obvious faults, at least attempted to articulate a version of social democracy. Labour needs to ensure that we don’t reject all of his work just because he didn’t win. A task for moderates will be to salvage what was best and shape a vision around growth, fairness and the responsibilities of companies.
Know who you are talking to. The Labour Party membership hasn’t necessarily moved left since 2010, it’s changed. There are fewer centrists in the party than when David Miliband stood. Many have left. This inconvenient fact became more apparent as the campaign went on. Early interventions by Peter Mandelson and Tony Blair were too easily interpreted as attacks on this new selectorate, never a good move. You wouldn’t slag off the voters in a General Election, so why do it in a leadership election? John McTernan’s name-calling was particularly unhelpful, so was Chuka’s “petulant child” intervention — as it motivated the other side to punish Tony just as in 2010.
Moderates need to jump through the Overton Window sometimes. The Overton Window is used to describe the range of possible political ideas the public will fund acceptable. Jeremy Corbyn effectively challenged that while more moderate candidates were seen as having little to say (or Tory-lite). New Labour won first in 1997 when it promised what the public wanted (e.g.lower class sizes) while promising to deliver from more radical means (e.g. the windfall levy on excess profits). Corbyn’s success in presenting pretty old ideas (borrow-tax-spend-grow) as ‘new’ comes in part from how empty the moderate policy locker appears to an outsider. Allegations that modernisers are ‘Tory-lite’ is just the language of sectarianism, which Corbyn won’t be able to control. That said, modernisers allowed themselves to be cast as ‘small-c’ conservatives in this election by appearing to substitute tactical position for substance or alternative.
Modernisers need to own their history. The history of New Labour in power has effectively been bastardised by the far left in the party, allowing the argument to be set in terms of pragmatism versus principle. A lot of historical comparisons used in this campaign to suggest that Corbyn recaptured some lost Spirit of ’45 hijacked by the evil Blairites was effective, but just not accurate. Clem Atlee used the tools of the war economy for peaceful ends. He created the NHS and ensured there was the basis of the modern welfare state after the war. But he was also an ardent monarchist, supported NATO, helped build the UK’s nuclear arsenal and sent troops to Korea. His NHS was criticised from the Left at the time for giving too mich money and power to private consultants. He lost in 1951 because people desired more than the command economy and rations — they wanted to get richer, own their own homes and participate in consumer society. New Labour’s 13 years were seen in this campaign as a succession of negative things in order to maintain power: PFI, the banks, tuition fees, the war. While Ed Miliband sought to move on from New Labour and, wrongly in my eyes, dissed the record and allowed an alternative account to develop which undermined inequality. True, Blair said he should have done more on this but it is more than mere irony that the incomes of the poorest 10% rose more (and inequality stopped rising) under Blair than under any other Prime Minister in modern times. Blair record on inequality will stand until Labour is elected again, like it or not and Ed failed on inequality because he failed to get elected.
This isn’t the 1980s Labour Party…yet. There seems a rush to compare this to the Loony Left in the 1980s. One big difference is local government, which to a large extent is today a bastion for the moderate and soft left of the party. It has had to make difficult but humane decisions about the cuts but still has a track record on Labour priorities around housing, childcare and the living wage. Being directly-elected, local councillors and leaders have their own (slightly different) mandate and responsibilities, of course, and as it stands there are tighter rules on their selection than for the Leader of the Party. How long that lasts is a question which will be answered over the next 4 years. Newer, more militant Corbyn supporters may be keen for councils to resist cuts by not implementing budgets, like I experienced during this debate on welfare cuts in 2013 in particular. ‘Debate’ could spill in local branch meetings and ultimately through to councillor selections in the coming years, starting next year. The real danger here is not the media-hype around purges (although that is not a settled question) but people just walking away from the Party because the question of what we propose to do in government may take second place to outright opposition to the Tories. There is a difference between a left-wing government and a purely contrarian one.
Labour finds it too uncomfortable to talk about modern capitalism and profit. Capitalism — there, I said it — is how people make money and is the basis of the modern economy. It pays and lends mortagages for your home, grows your pension and invests in the businesses on your high street. It is more than just talking about the bankers. Yet such is the culture of puritanism within the Party the term is used pejoratively — or not at all. The far left’s fixation with ‘neo-liberalism’ a concept so abused and overused to have no meaning, also falls into this category. New ideas such as the ‘sharing economy’ should be fertile grounds for the left, a movement that counts Co-operatives as part of its heritage surely. Yet the leadership debate, with perhaps the exception of ideas put forward by Liz and Yvette, kept itself in the comfort zone. Meanwhile Conservatives can talk about growth, exports and productivity alongside apprenticeships and jobs. Labour shouldn’t have a problem with profits, just what you do with them.
Technology is driving change, not just globalisation. Maybe this will all change with Tom Watson, maybe not. The Labour Party was founded as a reaction to the social inequality brought about by the industrial revolution. Today austerity is not the only thing transforming jobs, public services and the high street. This is the age of the Digital Revolution. Over the next decade more and more working class and middle class jobs will be computerised. There will be more Ubers and AirBnBs. So far the union movement and the Labour left have seen change through the traditional lens of capital versus labour. Something else is going on and Labour needs to have a broader and more fundamental discussion.
Far too little is known about the internal politics of unions. Whisper it quietly but at the moment we cannot say with any certainty that even within the unionised workforce that union leader and union activist actually represent the views of the majority union members on the big issues. There’s been much print about Labour’s internal struggles but less about the internal politics of unions, which clearly had a big role to play here. This is important as the larger unions will take a view about how MPs are selected in the future and all manner of party rules. Within unions themselves the leadership tickets are supported by a network of loyalists, sometimes formed into factions whose jobs it is to fend of those further to the left — most notably the SWP. While New Labour prospered, the far left switched its tactics to radicalise of many major trade unions from the 1990s onwards causing a leftward drift. It is little noted in the press (or studied) that after the expulsion of Militant, the far left concentrated their efforts on union entryism where the sclerotic activist structures (my branch of Unite elected a chair for the next 3 years at its last meeting, attended by 6 people) were ripe for takeover. The consequence has been to drag unions further and further to the left over the last two decades: with some disaffiliating from the Party. I’m not saying that unions weren’t left-wing before, it’s just that — with the possible exception of USDAW — there are no longer any big unions which can be considered ‘moderate’ or ‘right-wing’ to act as balance as they did in the early 1980s against bedsit extremism. Unions are linked by birth to the Labour Party so discussions about their political health are as important as discussions about internal democracy in the Party.
The Tories can’t help themselves. If the immediate Tory attack ‘Labour danger’ seems OTT get used to it. Many of the questions raised during the campaign around Hamas won’t go away — presumably this is why Corbyn has been hard on the press from the start. However, more worrying for Labour was the actual content of the ‘Smarter State’ speech — which sets out a compelling account of public service reform. This emphasises efficiency, technology and devolution. I have no idea what a Labour response to this statecraft would be at the moment but it something a prospective government must talk about in more detail than chanting ‘no privatisation’ or only taking the lead from producer interests. One the one hand you can see this as a pitch to Blairites — but he gets it wrong by emphasising the smaller state. Cameron misreads Labour’s modernisers: we are not ideological advocates of the smaller state as the Conservatives are, we are advocates of a state which is the right size for the job it has to do and our parameters for what the public policy should do are wider.