Labour’s route to power
Seventeen thoughts after the Tory landslide in Hartlepool
1. All politics is now about identity. It’s not just “cultural” identity, but a mixture of economic reality (precarity vs retirement, renting vs owning) plus all the new forms of exploitation: racial, sexual, consumption, data-extraction and above all relationship to finance. People want parties to express their values and aspirations and from the SNP to the Greens to the UKIP-ized Tories, the successful ones do exactly that.
2. The Labour Party is still viable as a vehicle for the exploited to create a government that acts in their favour, even if only to shape the nature of reforms. But Labourism is not. Labourism was premised on three things that are rapidly disappearing: (a) white, manual working class deference to Fabian patriarchal politics; (b) the United Kingdom, and with it Britishness; (c ) the futility of trying to do red-green politics outside Labour.
3. The party has become a container holding two, or maybe three, competing visions of the future, plus numerous political and cultural identities. But is overwhelmingly the party of cities, technological modernity, the skilled and educated working class, the ethnically diverse working class and the young. That’s not an obstacle to building an alliance with small town social conservatives — Andy…
