The Tory Party keeps winning because it keeps reinventing itself – Labour is in a straightjacket
“The basic strength of the Conservative Party – that it has once again adapted itself to a profound social revolution – remains”.
No, this isn’t a statement provoked by Boris Johnson’s capture of “Red Wall” seats, though it might be. It is the first sentence of an article written in 1955 by Henry Fairlie who was then The Spectator’s political correspondent. The title of the article was “Labour And The Working Class”. It was timely then, in the wake of that year’s General Election, and it is again timely now.
Fairlie was a very intelligent and thoughtful journalist to whom I owed much of my early political education. He made a mess of his private life, fled to the US, and years later died in poverty, camping out in the office of the New Republic magazine. But for a few years in the ’50s his articles were essential reading.
In this one he asked “whether the Labour Party today has any social relevance, whether it represents the interests of anyone at all.” Of course, he admitted that the easy answer was that it represented the working class. But, he asked, “which working class?”
That question is even more to the point today. Fairlie conceded that it represented the trade union movement, and in the 1950s, and for perhaps another 30 years, the trade unions, and especially those representing heavy industry, were a power in the land. When the Attlee government rejected British membership of the Schuman Plan – the pooling of iron and steel industries which was to be the first step towards a European Union – it did so because, as one Cabinet Minister put it, “the Durham miners will never stand for it”. But where is the National Union of Mineworkers now?
Fairlie remarked that, partly because of the achievements of the 1945-51 Labour governments, “the working class, as it existed in 1935, has now disappeared. There is no longer any underlying identity of interest between the prosperous and unprosperous workers, and if Labour represents one, it cannot represent the other”. This wasn’t apparent to most people. It may not even have been true then. It is surely true today. There is no unified working class seeking a fundamental change in society – something Fairlie spotted more than 60 years ago, perhaps prematurely, for it would be another 40 years before Tony Blair persuaded the Labour Party to revise its constitution by dropping the clause which committed it to taking control of the commanding heights of the economy, there being by then no such heights. Before then, even into the Thatcher years, national newspapers had a highly-valued industrial editor or correspondent who would develop links with trade union leaders. This mattered in the days when trade union leaders were regularly engaged in negotiations with ministers over beer and sandwiches in a smoke-filled Downing Street.
New Labour, the party given a new focus and identity by Blair, Gordon Brown and Peter Mandelson, was a recognition that the idea of organised Labour seeking a fundamental transformation of the political landscape was dead. The medicine of Thatcherism had been swallowed, however reluctantly. The targeted voter was now Mondeo Man who didn’t look to political action to change his life. There were of course still big unions – Unite and Unison, meaningless names – but they existed only to protect their members, mostly in the public sector, many white-collared, not to change society. Of course millions still called themselves working-class, but there was no longer any working-class solidarity, no longer a political purpose. The Conservatives recognised this while Labour after the Blair-Brown years reverted to denial.
In response to the Austerity politics of the 2010-15 Coalition, there was a flurry of a Labour revival. It was brief and deceptive. Even Corbynism – the word applied to it – was evidence of its vacuity. Corbyn represented no body of interest; he offered only attitudes and opinions, and many of these disgusted traditional Labour voters. Compare the anaemic Corbyn for whom Britain has always been in the wrong with the red-blooded Ernest Bevin, who believed in the British nuclear deterrent “with the bloody Union Jack flying on top of it”, and you can see why Labour has lost the patriotic vote.
There is only one reason left to vote Labour: that they are not the Tories. But the Tory Party being always more interested in power than in programmes has repeatedly shown itself to be capable of adapting to changing social and economic circumstances. When the landed interest was powerful it represented and defended it; now it ignores it. It has been in favour of protection and of free trade, in favour of European Union and against it, in favour of the free market and in favour of planning and the direction of industry. It appeals to old values and discards them when convenient. At moments, like Millwall fans, it chants “nobody loves us and we don’t care” – so long as we win elections. It can shed one skin and don another, and do so without apology for inconsistency. It used to have roots; where are the knights of the shire now?
In his old age Harold Macmillan snidely or sourly remarked that there were “more Estonians than Etonians” in Thatcher’s Cabinet (and by Estonians he meant Jews). What would he make of Boris Johnson’s with its children or grandchildren of immigrants? What would Enoch Powell have made of it? Johnson himself is of course an Etonian and much is made of this by opponents and detractors. But he’s only a clever Etonian, a scholarship boy, not the grandson of a Duke like the Harrovian Churchill, or the son-in-law of a Duke like Harold Macmillan or a 14th Earl like Alec Douglas-Home.
His Cabinet is full of very rich men and women, but theirs is new money, not old, made by property-dealing or by spotting a gap in the market, starting a company, prospering and then selling it on, very profitably. Inasmuch as they offer an example, it’s one that any bright young man or woman may follow, no matter their origins or education.
As for Johnson, he is scarcely even a professional politician. Unlike that other great Tory chancer Disraeli, he hasn’t spent a long apprenticeship in the Commons with many years on the Opposition benches. He’s a journalist and not even a fact-finding reporter, but a flashy and whimsical columnist. His lack of professionalism is part of his appeal, and he has had the wit to move in on ground that Labour has abandoned. He offers uplift, even if he may not know how to provide it, and his beating of the patriotic drum pleases all those who would still call themselves working-class and were disgusted by the follies of Corbynism.
The Tories, as Fairlie remarked, can adapt themselves to a profound social revolution. Now we have an economy in which everything is provisional, the Tories, interested in power, can respond to this while Labour, dreaming of a world that is gone and failing to recognise the disintegration of the old working-class, finds itself at a loss.
Fairlie’s argument was perhaps ahead of its time, his analysis prophetic. But its time has arrived and Labour is baffled. In what is thought to be its natural constituency, there is no powerful force for coherent political change. So Labour finds itself in the wasteland of identity politics, a place where Socialism has become a meaningless word.