Labour’s response to defeat demonstrates why the party is unfit to govern
It has now been over a week since the Tories won Britain’s general election with a thumping majority, and the excuses are still coming in thick and fast from the Labour party’s defeated left wing. It started with Corbyn himself, who, in an article published in The Observer on Saturday 14th December, proudly announced that Labour “had won the argument”, even while managing to experience their worst election defeat since 1935.
If this was Corbyn winning the argument, I would hate to see what happens when he loses it. Initially, his was the most cheerful post-mortem imaginable – even as the beaten corpse of Corbynism lay before him he was happily toasting its good health. In its sheer blasé denial, it epitomised why the Labour Party’s left are unfit to govern the country.
The Dear Leader’s self-delusion has also infected his acolytes and epigones. On BBC Newsnight on the night after the election, Faiza Shaheen, a pro-Corbyn left wing activist who ran and lost as a Labour party candidate in Chingford and Woodford Green, said that Labour’s woeful performance was due to the fact that “the system is rigged”. It was down to “the way in which the leader (Corbyn) has been portrayed” in the “biased” press. Behind all of this, according to Shaheen, was Rupert Murdoch.
A mythology is already emerging, one which explains election defeat as the product of an unfair contest, another symptom of the elitist system manipulating the false consciousness of Britain’s working classes. This was why Labour’s “amazing blueprint for the future of this country” was resoundingly rejected by the party’s former voters, Shaheen believes – “people in this country felt like it was too good to be true.”
This is the line which appears to have stuck with the left. Newly-elected Corbynite MP Claudia Webbe told Nick Robinson on the BBC’s Today programme yesterday morning that Labour “had cause to celebrate”. She lauded “the fact that we had a manifesto, a set of policies that actually were popular with people, and that actually met the needs of the kinds of inequality and poverty that we are facing,” she said. When Robinson had the gall to question why such a “popular” manifesto led to a Tory landslide, Webbe suggested that Labour did not have “the power of mainstream, of mass media, and newspaper corporations that speak to the electorate, that present a story that doesn’t question the Tories and what they are doing.”
This is the type of excuse-ridden, conspiratorial nonsense which populates the mental universe of the Corbynistas. If we look at social media advertising, Labour actually outdid the Tories in terms of spending and audience – between midnight on Tuesday 10th December and the start of polling day on Thursday 12th December, Labour outspent the Tories by £4,300 on Facebook and Instagram. Their ads gained at least 4.9m impressions between them to the Tories’ 2.7m. What they failed to do was provide a message that was credible for those whom they reached.
The truth of the matter is that there is no shady cabal of media elites dictating the result of the election to a passive public. The Labour party did not receive gushing praise in the national press because it did not merit it – instead they presented a platform so unpalatable that even the left-leaning New Statesman could not swallow their doubts and endorse it.
There is a very simple reason Labour lost the election: Labour, and especially the Labour Left, are not fit to govern – they have made none of the sacrifices required to lead a coherent and compelling political movement into an election, and win. Their utter failure to own their defeat and take proper responsibility for its causes merely confirms this truth. Labour must seek to govern from the moderate centre-left, or it will remain in eternal opposition.
The scene is now set: the candidates running to be the next Labour leader are taking the stand to pitch their project against the Momentum-dominated party membership. Yet, if the opening salvoes of this contest are anything to go by, it will not be a period of profound reflection or introspective transformation. Even Labour’s so-called “moderates” are now indulging variations upon the same superficial, delusional mythology as the Momentum rank-and-file.
Emily Thornberry, the first candidate to announce she is running for the post, has written an article in The Guardian in which her argument can essentially summarised as “we should never have allowed a Brexit election”. Even setting aside the implicit admission here, that Labour lost because they did not have a credible policy on the most important issue of the day, there was nothing of substance on why northern working class voters should trust Labour even if Brexit were not the main issue. She did not seem to grasp that the cultural alienation of England’s working classes from Labour extends well beyond Brexit alone.
The shadow Brexit Secretary Keir Starmer’s diagnosis is little better. In an interview on Wednesday, he said: “A Labour Party that strays too far from its values loses”, adding that “in the end, the Labour party strayed too far from its values between 1997 and 2010”. This is certainly one way of describing the three elections and two landslides won by Tony Blair in this period, the only proper majorities won by Labour since 1966. This type of diagnosis serves to highlight the basic lack of intellectual seriousness underpinning Labour’s inability to comprehend the scale of their defeat.
Tony Blair put it well on Wednesday: “There is a risk that the only people speaking the language of reality to the Labour Party today, are those who don’t aspire to lead it.” Already, it seems that any voices calling for meaningful transformation will be drowned out in an assembly of anodyne candidates armed with excuses about how Brexit ruined Labour’s election.
This is the behaviour of a party that doesn’t even want to understand why it is standing upon the precipice of electoral oblivion. Many of its members and potential leaders don’t even seem to have registered that the abyss is there, let alone that it is staring them in the face.