Is Labour really done for?

Covering last week’s cornucopia of elections from Scotland was a bizarre experience. Scottish voters were grappling with existential issues for their country, while in the rest of the UK, all the talk was gossip about the Labour party, which was an also-ran in England and the beneficiary of an as-you-were Covid leadership bounce in Wales.

For all the chirpiness and self-confidence of Anas Sarwar, Scottish Labour’s new leader, the real question was did anyone care about the Labour party? Precious few seemed to. Labour secured 22% of the first past the post votes, about the same as the Conservatives. Those who backed the party seemed to have two motivations: tribal nostalgia for the last century when Labour was the dominant party of Scotland, before being eclipsed by the SNP.  Secondly they manifested non Scotland-specific angst that Labour would stand no chance of leading a majority UK government should independence shut off its access forever to all those once fabled, Scottish Labour seats. 

The ghosts of Labour’s Scottish greatness hovered over proceedings. John Smith, Donald Dewar, Robin Cook, John Reid, Gordon Brown, where are they now? Long gone or irrelevant, as Brown set out to prove with agonized ramblings about Scots feeling “more Scottish than British,” a relaunch of his laughable Britishness branding exercise as Prime Minister. 

If Labour can fade out in Scotland – could it just die away elsewhere? 

Responsible government-ready Social Democratic parties are in decline across Europe, except for patches of Scandinavia. In Madrid, the populist Conservative Isabel Diaz Ayuzo has just trounced the Socialists, Vox and Podemos. In France the left is divided and comatose, leaving Marine Le Pen to be the main opponent for Macron, who in any case inclines to the right. In Germany the SPD – the party of Brandt, Schmidt and Schröder – is an also-ran, while Annalena Baerbock, the forty-year-old co-leader of die Grünen is widely fancied to succeed Angela Merkel as Chancellor after September’s elections.

The hegemony of the Clinton-Blair axis now feels so late Twentieth Century. In his post-election pep-talk to Labour in The New Statesman, Blair acknowledged that the victory of Democratic President Joe Biden was more a fluke of circumstance brought about by Trump’s mishandling of Covid than a sea change in the political mood. Bang on cue the Republicans confirmed their fealty to Trump by chucking out Liz Cheney as a leader for daring to say that Trump’s claims that the election was stolen from him are lies.

Voting systems often make transformative surges by other parties easier. The Alternative Member System helped the SNP and Greens get established in Scotland, for example. But the plights of centre-lefties everywhere have much in common. The structural decline of organised mass labour, with those left behind in de-industrialised communities feeling that the traditional parties of the working class have not done much for them. Left-wingers who disguise their vestigial nostalgia for class war by dragging their party to endorse “progressive” causes – on race, gender and foreign policy – and thereby alienate potential supporters who feel such blinkered engagement, is not for them. Blair castigated his party for explicitly rejecting JK Rowling and Trevor Phillips. Similarly, the last Labour conference in Liverpool was awash with Palestinian flags, and the TUC issued a statement backing them this week. A more measured approach might be appropriate, given Labour’s unfortunate record on anti-semitism and the fact that the military escalation from street fighting to deadly bombing was started by the firing of missiles into Israel from Hammas controlled Gaza.

The Labour party though is one of the most established centre-left parties in the world, which has historically been seen as the alternative party of government in a two-party system. It is the widening of choice which threatens its future. It needs to find allies and form alliances rather than cherish factionalism. Asked what went wrong last week Ian Lavery MP, party chairman under Corbyn had a one word answer: “Brexit”. This is more accurate as a description of what happened, than as an analysis. It is undoubtedly true that former supporters of the UKIP, Brexit and Reform insurgencies have folded back into the Tory vote, while those to the left remain disunited offering a choice between, Labour, LibDems, Greens and Nationalists. 

Last week could have been much worse for Labour. May 2021 was essentially a standstill election reflecting the voting patterns of the General Election of December 2019. For most people politics has been in suspended animation since then because of the pandemic. After the mistakes and worse of last year, Johnson, unlike Trump, maintained his standing because he eventually took the virus seriously and presided over the very successful UK vaccine programme.

If the Labour leadership had stayed united it could have weathered this off-year storm. Instead, incompetence and division have turned a set-back into a crisis. Sir Keir Starmer has faced his first dynamic test of leadership and failed. 

Labour allowed the loss of Hartlepool to become the centrepiece of this year’s election – presumably because of a rather patronising obsession with its storied history as a classic Northern Labour seat, even electing Peter Mandelson and all that. Combined, the Conservatives and Brexit would have captured the seat in 2019, and now they have.

The by-election didn’t have to be at the same time as the Mayoral contest on Teesside in which the popular Ben Houchen was bound to turn out Conservative supporters but that is what the Chief Whip Nick Brown decided. That seems to have led to his sacking. But Baroness Jenny Chapman, who lost her Darlington constituency in 2019, is still in post, at time of writing, as Starmer’s closest advisor. She saw to the imposition of an ardent remainer, and personal friend, as the Labour candidate in a constituency which backed Brexit overwhelmingly. 

As Boris Johnson, and his giant inflatable doppelganger, arrived last Friday morning to celebrate victory in Hartlepool, Starmer could have turned his attention to the places where Labour was set to do well. These included Wales and most of the Mayoral contests such as Manchester, London, Liverpool, Bristol and, as it turned out, the West of England. Instead he tried to knife those he considered disloyal to him at the top of the party and missed most of his targets.

Whatever went on between Starmer and his deputy, Angela Rayner has emerged stronger in the party with multiple promotions and Starmer is weaker. His moves against them were rebuffed by a close-knit group of soft-left members of the Shadow Cabinet – including Rayner, Ashworth, Nandy – some of whom still harbour a tendresse for the Corbynites. They stayed in post and Starmer’s PPS, Carolyn Harris, Deputy Leader of Welsh Labour and MP for Swansea East, was forced out allegedly for spreading false rumours about the personal relationships in the group.

Just days after his promotion the courageous Wes Streeting has had to withdraw from front line politics to battle cancer. Starmer has created the brief of Shadow Secretary of State for Child Poverty, even though there is no such Tory Cabinet minister for Streeting to shadow.

The new Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rachel Reeves, is the most important promotion. She should have got the job when Starmer took over but was blocked by colleagues for being too right-wing and being Chair of Labour Friends of Israel. She has the political and intellectual heft Starmer has so far lacked, to start formulating a post-Brexit, post-Covid economic strategy and wasted no time starting to do so in her first confrontation in the chamber with the slick Rishi Sunak.  

If she succeeds, her leader will be in her debt. But her efforts could be submerged in another scrum of intra-party viciousness before it begins. Tony Blair, Jeremy Corbyn, Gordon Brown, Diane Abbot, Peter Mandelson and John Macdonnell all joined in, fighting the same old battle. Starmer has so far dithered about picking a side. 

Right now, British Labour’s problem is not its structural position, it is the people leading it.