Labour’s Long Haul

Once again the Labour party risks further erosion of support by discussing its leadership. So it is time to get real. Labour’s problems are not about Corbyn. It is almost certainly the case that under another leader they would have lost both Copeland and Stoke. Stoke held because Corbyn saw off UKIP’s Nuttall. But that is not the message of this post.

The message is that Labour is not the natural party of government, it is a movement for change; moreover it has its roots in socialist principles, it is of the left, it is for ordinary people and it will govern only when its socialist ideology, its proposed economic reforms and the demands of ordinary people align themselves. It is a startling fact that in the 100 years during which Labour can be ranked as a major political force, only three leaders of the party, Attlee, Wilson and Blair, have ever won a majority at Westminster and formed a government. Callaghan and Brown fought one election each and both lost. Over the same period there have been twelve Tory prime ministers, including May. Only two Conservative leaders in that hundred years have failed to make it to Downing Street, having fought one or more general elections, Hague and Howard.

There is more. Labour’s roots are socialist, but also Scottish and Welsh. It is not an English party by heritage and sends MPs to Westminster from cities and deprived areas in England but never from prosperous rural shires or suburbs doing okay. So if you factor in annihilation in Scotland, with little chance of that changing, Labour is in a serious predicament, not only missing over forty MPs, but also a good deal of talent. So to imagine that changing a leader who has twice been elected by a mass membership which he has grown to the biggest in Europe is, it seems to this blog, to simplify a complex problem. Where that to happen, you would change the cast but not the play. Soon the old refrain would be back; ‘we cannot win under Bloggins’. So how can Labour win?

First of all if the parliamentary party, including the best talent, does not unite behind the leader, it cannot. The British public never vote for split parties. But and this is a a serious point, moving from the left to the centre will make matters worse. The present crisis for Labour has its origins not in Corbyn, but in Blair. For it was the perceived and mostly actual abandonment of the traditional working class and its ability to rely on decent employment prospects in worthwhile jobs, by New Labour, which shrank the Labour vote by over 5 million post 1997. These lost voters have yet to be recovered and until they are Labour will have to content itself with Opposition.

To win them back requires a narrative which people can follow and remember, which relates to them and which offers hope. Its core has to be an economic re-boot of spectacular scale which erases the failures of austerity and delivers real, consistent, economic growth of 5% for several years, driven not by asset inflation but new production to create new wealth. If Labour can present that manifesto of hope and ambition in 2020 it will achieve, post Brexit, a spectacular win, even with Corbyn as leader. Just as Attlee did post  WWII in 1945. Yes May is riding high at the moment and in 2020 could be riding higher still, but Labour need have no doubts. Just think how high the victorious Churchill was riding in 1945, yet he lost to a Labour landslide, because Attlee’s message of a better way forward resonated with the people. In politics nothing is impossible.