Back on the Road to Power.

The Labour Party has a problem. A big one.

I’m not just talking about the current leadership battle between Jeremy Corbyn and Owen Smith and the all-out war that seems to have broken out between the Corbynistas and the rest of the Labour Party though that is a problem. I’m talking about a problem which Ed Miliband’s policy chief Jon Cruddas identified in his post-election inquiry.

Labour is losing the support of its base.

This was demonstrated with startling and painful clarity during the EU referendum. If you look at the results almost all the areas that voted most heavily in favour of leave (with the exception of course of London and Scotland) were Labour heartlands in the north of England and Wales. In his speech to the Mile End institute in September last year Jon Cruddas described the problem like this

“ Labour is losing its working class support and UKIP benefits. Since 2005 voters who are socially conservative are the most likely to have deserted Labour. They value home, family and their country. They feel their cultural identity is under threat. They want a sense of belonging and national renewal. Tradition, rules and social order are important to them. Labour no longer represents their lives.”

Cruddas’ point was quite clearly that those who Labour used to rely on to get themselves elected can no longer be relied on automatically. Of course there are still half a dozen donkey seats out there but no-where near the number that there once were. During the Blair years Labour ran after the middle class commuter vote with such fervour that it left its main support behind. But that’s not the only problem. Those old supporters could probably be tempted back into the Labour fold if Labour actually stood for something, but at the moment it appears people struggled to understand what Labour is for, beyond just being against the Tories. In the same speech Cruddas’ also had this to say.

“Since 2010 Labour has marched decisively away from the views of voters on issues that are fundamental to our electoral prospects: immigration, personal financial interest, welfare, public services, and business. In short, that Labour is out of step with the wider electorate and this divide is growing.”   

So this is Labour’s problem. It doesn’t have half the support it once did, and those that do support it don’t know where it stands. If at some point in the future Labour hope to be in government it has to stand for something, and something that is uniquely Labour.

So how does it go about doing this?

I think Owen Smith has made a good start talking about a “British New Deal” and stating that he wants to rewrite Labour’s sacred clause IV to talk about inequality. But it’s easy to talk about inequality and harder to deal with it. So how should Labour go about dealing with the staggering levels of inequality in this country? How do you create a manifesto dedicated to eradicating inequality?

For me you have to go back to Beveridge.

For those who aren’t ware the Beveridge Report was a report put together by social reformer William Beveridge which served as the cornerstone for the Attlee Governments welfare reforms. In it Beveridge identified what he called “the five giants of evil,” ignorance, want, disease, idleness and squalor.

Those five giants while much weaker than previously I think are still very much prevalent in this day and age. This is what I think a manifesto based around Beveridge’s ideas would look like.

Ignorance

Education, Education, Education was one of Tony Blair’s famous lines. Education has to be one of the most important and vital things that a government can invest in. Decent education easily available to all can be the key to turning someone’s entire life around.   A Labour party that invests heavily in education will be one that has demonstrated its interest in levelling the playing field. However this cannot just involve putting people on the school to university conveyor belt. Resources needed to be invested in apprenticeships, diplomas and further education so that everyone can find the form of education that suits them.

Want

The gap between the rich and the poor is widening as well know, and food bank usage has risen by a startling amount. Any future Labour government will need to address this, presumably with spending on the welfare state. However as was pointed out in Cruddas’ inquiry one of the things that concerns people about the Labour party is that they just wanted to give people money for nothing, so the party will have to come up with a way to make work pay, while still leaving a suitable safety net in place for those with no other option but to rely on welfare.

Disease

The National Health Service is one of Labours proudest achievements and so it should be. But it cannot be denied that it is also to a certain extent overworked and underfunded. A future Labour government will have to find ways to increase funding and recruitment to the NHS as well as at the same time investing in its future, in new hospitals and new technology. This may mean some form of public/private partnership but this does not mean that the NHS should be privatised. Whatever happens it’s free at point of use nature must be maintained.

Idleness

For many people, especially those out of work, lack of something to occupy time is a great problem. A future Labour government should seek to invest in new volunteer schemes, possibly tied into the welfare system in order to help give people a purpose as well as extra skills that they can use to find a job. It should also work with local councils to invest more money in sports clubs and local events to give children and young people somewhere to go and something to do as well. This will in turn hopefully create a sense of community cohesion, as well as keep young people off the streets, which may help reduce crime numbers.

Squalor

Housing is an issue that needs to be addressed. Not only do more houses need to be built, but with regards to the rental market, a future Labour government would be well placed to introduce new regulations for landlords in order to ensure that their properties are well maintained and suitable for habitation, as well as new laws regarding rental prices, in order to prevent the exploitation of the young. However squalor does not just refer to housing. It would also be sensible for Labour to look at urban regeneration projects in the future, in order to improve towns and cities, especially looking at the state of council estates. Again if fresh life was breathed into these places and people took pride in where they lived, this may help with crime figures.

Above all though, Labour should bear in mind the old saying that “all politics is local.” For too long, politicians from both parties, have attempted to create one size fits all laws, forgetting that the needs of Hull are different from the needs of Cambridge and the needs of York are different from the needs of Truro. Any future government should work with the local governments (preferably devolve more powers to them first) and help create laws and policies that fit what the country is actually like, not just what policy makers think the country is like.

Of course all of this is just my opinion. But it is one way that Labour could get out of the ditch it is currently in, and get back on the road to power. 

Redkip, Middle Class Labour, and a possible realignment.

If the recent referendum has shown one thing, it’s that the traditional beliefs about where our political parties draw their support from are beginning to fray at the edges. In fact it could even be said that they are unravelling rather quickly. I believe that somewhere on the horizon is the biggest realignment of British politics since the First World War. So what does this realignment involve and why has it happened?

The Conservatives

On the surface the Conservatives appear to be a rock solid party, the rock around which the shifting sands of Westminster move. To an extent that is because the word Conservative means many things to many people and the Tory party contains many differing groups, from the One Nationers to the Thatcherites and everything in-between. But the basic concept of allowing people to get on without too much government interference and not trying to change anything too quickly, appeal to a lot of people. This softly softly ideology is another reason I think why the Conservatives continue to hang on. 

The UK is by its nature a conservative country. While we may occasionally adopt a more left wing outlook, when the going gets tough we inevitably return to the safe arms of Nanny. This may well explain why in the 71 years since the end of the war, the Tories have been in government for 41 of them. While on the surface it may seem as if all Tories are aristocrats and lawyers we must remember that Mrs Thatcher was a grocer’s daughter and John Major’s working class roots were the centre point of the 1992 general election campaign. Conservatives can be found anywhere, and so they have a permanent source of supporters to mine.

Never has this been made clearer than by the European referendum results. If you look at areas that voted most heavily for Leave with the exception of Scotland, they were right in Labour’s heartlands, Wales and the industrial north. The places Labour need to take in order to win back power. This is on top of the Scottish Conservatives becoming the official opposition in Scotland earlier in the year. I suspect in the next few years we will see both the Conservatives and other right wing parties chip away at Labour support in these areas.

This does not mean however that I don’t think the Tories are indestructible. While I will go more into the future of UKIP below, I believe that it is likely that following the EU referendum we will see a large influx of former UKIPers returning to the Tories. This influx of hard line Eurosceptics, who will almost certainly fall into the “Faith, Family and Flag” camp. Nick Boles has already suggested the creation of a National Liberal party as a conservative counterpoint to Labours alliance with the Co-Op party and I believe that as the Tories head further to the right, this party may take off, taking with it the majority of One Nation Tories.

Labour

Labour on the other hand is in some serious trouble right now. As mentioned above while Labour is largely a Europhilic party, the areas that that they rely for their bedrock support have quite clearly gone the other way. This combined with the fact that they have been all but eliminated in Scotland by the SNP means that Labour will possibly struggle in the near future to gain power, unless it can figure out why they have lost so much support.

So why have they?

I believe the problem lies with Tony Blair’s New Labour. Following eighteen years of Tory government Labour were desperate to get back into power, however they knew they could not do it solely through their industrial heartlands and so they moved right in order to appeal to the commuter belt in the Home Counties. And for thirteen years, with the Tories in disarray it worked, and they didn’t worry about their old stomping grounds, believing (mistakenly) as it turned out that they could hold onto them, as they had no-where else to go. However those communities have begun to feel neglected and used and are now starting to pledge their loyalty to other parties, leaving Labour with no support upon which to call. So what’s the solution?

As strange as it sounds, I think Labour are going to have to take a leaf from the Lib Dem’s book. Accept that they may not be in government for a while, maybe for the next ten years, and focus on building up community support and community leaders. Show people that Labour are capable of running local government and then go from there. Stop taking activists for granted and respect the opinions of the members. However loss of support may not be Labour’s only problem.

Jeremy Corbyn has a massive mandate from the people. While his views may not be that of the majority of the Parliamentary Labour Party (as this last week has shown) or even that of a majority of the population, this mandate must be recognised. Labour must find some way of reconciling its left and right wing, and finally ending the battle between them that has been going on for decades. If they don’t then they face a situation worse than that of the 1980s. There is a very real chance that the Labour party could split, very soon, which would not only guarantee Tory dominance for decades, but possibly remove left wing opinions from the national debate.

What could such a split look like? I suspect the line would be drawn between the old left wing socialists like Corbyn and the Third Way Social Democrats (the so called Blairites). So instead of one whole Labour party we would end up with say a small Socialist rump, and a larger Progressive Party which would probably hold onto the majority of the Labour party machinery, but would find itself discredited in the eyes of the electorate and which may struggle to define itself as a separate entity.

The Other Parties

With the announcement yesterday that Nigel Farage is stepping down as leader of UKIP, the parties future is a lot less certain than it once was. Once I would have said that with the UK about to leave the EU, UKIP would wind itself up, its lifetime aim having been achieved, but I think that is less likely to happen now. It will stick around if only to act as a pressure group during Brexit negotiations. But what form it will take and what ideology it will pursue depend on who is elected leader.

The Nationalist parties in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, are likely to go from strength to strength.

The wildcard here is the Liberal Democrats. I think the Lib Dems have the capacity to do quite well in the coming years. They have the advantage of being able to be all things to all people, with their views on electoral reform, clean energy and civil liberties, appeal to the middle class graduate set and their community activism allows them to tap into less well-off areas too. However the stink from the coalition, and the fact that they are positioning themselves as pro-European shortly after membership in the EU was rejected may cause problems. In a few election cycles though, they may be worth watching, especially if Labour continues to splinter.

One Final Option

One final option of course is a new political party, not just spun off from one, but from many. A centrist party made up of liberal Tories, right wing Labourites and the Liberals. However this is extremely unlikely to happen, and will probably remain a fantasy of armchair analysts and counterfactual history fans.

In conclusion, it is difficult to predict what Westminster will look like in ten years. It may well look exactly the same. But I am fairly convinced that the ideology of some mainstream parties will have changed and that some new parties may well have emerged. We, who are interested in this sort of thing, can only wait and see what they are like.

Redkip, Middle Class Labour, and a possible realignment.

If the recent referendum has shown one thing, it’s that the traditional beliefs about where our political parties draw their support from are beginning to fray at the edges. In fact it could even be said that they are unravelling rather quickly. I believe that somewhere on the horizon is the biggest realignment of British politics since the First World War. So what does this realignment involve and why has it happened?

The Conservatives

On the surface the Conservatives appear to be a rock solid party, the rock around which the shifting sands of Westminster move. To an extent that is because the word Conservative means many things to many people and the Tory party contains many differing groups, from the One Nationers to the Thatcherites and everything in-between. But the basic concept of allowing people to get on without too much government interference and not trying to change anything too quickly, appeal to a lot of people. This softly softly ideology is another reason I think why the Conservatives continue to hang on. 

The UK is by its nature a conservative country. While we may occasionally adopt a more left wing outlook, when the going gets tough we inevitably return to the safe arms of Nanny. This may well explain why in the 71 years since the end of the war, the Tories have been in government for 41 of them. While on the surface it may seem as if all Tories are aristocrats and lawyers we must remember that Mrs Thatcher was a grocer’s daughter and John Major’s working class roots were the centre point of the 1992 general election campaign. Conservatives can be found anywhere, and so they have a permanent source of supporters to mine.

Never has this been made clearer than by the European referendum results. If you look at areas that voted most heavily for Leave with the exception of Scotland, they were right in Labour’s heartlands, Wales and the industrial north. The places Labour need to take in order to win back power. This is on top of the Scottish Conservatives becoming the official opposition in Scotland earlier in the year. I suspect in the next few years we will see both the Conservatives and other right wing parties chip away at Labour support in these areas.

This does not mean however that I don’t think the Tories are indestructible. While I will go more into the future of UKIP below, I believe that it is likely that following the EU referendum we will see a large influx of former UKIPers returning to the Tories. This influx of hard line Eurosceptics, who will almost certainly fall into the “Faith, Family and Flag” camp. Nick Boles has already suggested the creation of a National Liberal party as a conservative counterpoint to Labours alliance with the Co-Op party and I believe that as the Tories head further to the right, this party may take off, taking with it the majority of One Nation Tories.

Labour

Labour on the other hand is in some serious trouble right now. As mentioned above while Labour is largely a Europhilic party, the areas that that they rely for their bedrock support have quite clearly gone the other way. This combined with the fact that they have been all but eliminated in Scotland by the SNP means that Labour will possibly struggle in the near future to gain power, unless it can figure out why they have lost so much support.

So why have they?

I believe the problem lies with Tony Blair’s New Labour. Following eighteen years of Tory government Labour were desperate to get back into power, however they knew they could not do it solely through their industrial heartlands and so they moved right in order to appeal to the commuter belt in the Home Counties. And for thirteen years, with the Tories in disarray it worked, and they didn’t worry about their old stomping grounds, believing (mistakenly) as it turned out that they could hold onto them, as they had no-where else to go. However those communities have begun to feel neglected and used and are now starting to pledge their loyalty to other parties, leaving Labour with no support upon which to call. So what’s the solution?

As strange as it sounds, I think Labour are going to have to take a leaf from the Lib Dem’s book. Accept that they may not be in government for a while, maybe for the next ten years, and focus on building up community support and community leaders. Show people that Labour are capable of running local government and then go from there. Stop taking activists for granted and respect the opinions of the members. However loss of support may not be Labour’s only problem.

Jeremy Corbyn has a massive mandate from the people. While his views may not be that of the majority of the Parliamentary Labour Party (as this last week has shown) or even that of a majority of the population, this mandate must be recognised. Labour must find some way of reconciling its left and right wing, and finally ending the battle between them that has been going on for decades. If they don’t then they face a situation worse than that of the 1980s. There is a very real chance that the Labour party could split, very soon, which would not only guarantee Tory dominance for decades, but possibly remove left wing opinions from the national debate.

What could such a split look like? I suspect the line would be drawn between the old left wing socialists like Corbyn and the Third Way Social Democrats (the so called Blairites). So instead of one whole Labour party we would end up with say a small Socialist rump, and a larger Progressive Party which would probably hold onto the majority of the Labour party machinery, but would find itself discredited in the eyes of the electorate and which may struggle to define itself as a separate entity.

The Other Parties

With the announcement yesterday that Nigel Farage is stepping down as leader of UKIP, the parties future is a lot less certain than it once was. Once I would have said that with the UK about to leave the EU, UKIP would wind itself up, its lifetime aim having been achieved, but I think that is less likely to happen now. It will stick around if only to act as a pressure group during Brexit negotiations. But what form it will take and what ideology it will pursue depend on who is elected leader.

The Nationalist parties in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, are likely to go from strength to strength.

The wildcard here is the Liberal Democrats. I think the Lib Dems have the capacity to do quite well in the coming years. They have the advantage of being able to be all things to all people, with their views on electoral reform, clean energy and civil liberties, appeal to the middle class graduate set and their community activism allows them to tap into less well-off areas too. However the stink from the coalition, and the fact that they are positioning themselves as pro-European shortly after membership in the EU was rejected may cause problems. In a few election cycles though, they may be worth watching, especially if Labour continues to splinter.

One Final Option

One final option of course is a new political party, not just spun off from one, but from many. A centrist party made up of liberal Tories, right wing Labourites and the Liberals. However this is extremely unlikely to happen, and will probably remain a fantasy of armchair analysts and counterfactual history fans.

In conclusion, it is difficult to predict what Westminster will look like in ten years. It may well look exactly the same. But I am fairly convinced that the ideology of some mainstream parties will have changed and that some new parties may well have emerged. We, who are interested in this sort of thing, can only wait and see what they are like.