The Labour Question

(Originally printed in The Mancunion: Issue 13, 20th February 2012)

The Coalition is struggling. Unemployment claws stubbornly to the eight-percent mark, while national produce, fuelled by falling rates of profit, remains defiantly stagnant. An attempt to rewire the core engines of the UK economy through austerity has failed catastrophically to yield the ‘strong, enterprise-led recovery’ promised by George Osborne in his first budget statement as Chancellor. Unfortunately, it only gets worse; inflation looms well above the Bank of England’s target of two-percent, coupled with decaying wages, serving only to choke living standards for the majority.

Yet curiously, the Labour Party, the principle parliamentary opposition to the Con-Lib government, appears utterly unable to establish a strong standing among the British electorate; latest polls suggest Labour to be either level, or a mere percentage-point above the Conservatives. Between the 1997 and 2010 general elections, Labour lost an entire five million voters of whom the majority simply abstained, rather than vote Tory of Liberal. The party appears fractured by diverging and in many cases, conflicting beliefs and ideals, while its leadership appears all too often inept in its attempt to woo the public. What exactly, one must surely ask, is Labour doing wrong and furthermore, how may the party reform itself to the point of governance once again?

One issue is the utter absence of cohesive direction among the party; Lord Glasman’s ‘Blue Labour’ programme was a failed attempt to engage with elements of xenophobia and reaction among the electorate, while Ed Miliband has recently been waving the flag of a more ‘responsible capitalism’, having finally realised, apparently, that austerity has ‘failed’ to provide the prosperity and growth promised by the right. That Labour leaders had generally supported austerity, albeit a different form to the one implemented by the Tories, appeared irrelevant to Miliband and perhaps exposes his current mantra as an attempt to manipulate the aims of the ‘Occupy’ movement to a political advantage. In the midst of all of this, David Miliband’s essay in the New Statesman only this week called for an end to the ‘big state’, in classic Blairite fashion, and emphasised a ‘politics of growth’, rather than of simply equality and regulation. A cohort of different opinions exist, from the centre-left to beyond the centre-right, yet no distinct plan of action, alongside a specific, detailed set of goals exists through which all Labour MPs appear comfortable to work within.

And coherence is vitally important. Democratic capitalism across a range of Western states stands at a cross-roads; election turnouts over the past decade have been remarkably low and suggest a wider distrust of the effectiveness of parliamentary or even congressional democracy among electorates. The pledges of a manifesto, be it closing Guantanamo Bay or promising to vote against a rise in tuition fees, appear to mean nothing to a party once in power, and voters are wising up to this. In addition, the waves of inherent turbulence and systemic frictions of capitalism have ran untamed to the effect of a social tsunami, giving way to three decades of gross inequality and of late, a series of crises which threaten to injure the very sovereignty of the likes of Greece and Spain. Not only does capitalism appear unable to ensure a balanced, stable distribution of resources yet the style of democracy within which it exists seems inept at confronting crises, and representing the views of an entire population.

Rather than simply scrambling for the political yolk of the latest populist, trending issue, Labour should set out to confront these problems. Paul Hunter’s report through the Smith Institute regarding Labour’s lost five-million votes, indicated the majority of these losses to derive from the working classes, and in addressing the key issues outlined above, a portion of these votes could be regained. Proliferate apathy among the lower classes, shocking inequality, the empowerment of the electorate and addressing whether or not capitalism can ever be ‘responsible’ rather than simply assuming it can, must surely be the crux of any programme for Labour government.

That no such programme has been forthcoming is a severe source of despair and forces one to consider whether or not Labour can ever be an electable party ‘of the people’, rather than a slight alternative to Conservative rule. Yet has Labour ever truly offered a government of the people? The Bevanism of the late 1940s offered top-down nationalisation, shifting ownership from private enterprise to state-bureaucracies, rather than offering workers a stake in the running of the industries in which they worked. Certainly, Labour appeared to favour governance for the people, and rather than by the people. This issue is pertinent, and perhaps explain why the party has failed to seek out apathy and engage people in politics. A party of the ruling class for all else, arguably offers a succinct description of Labour’s history. Tony Blair’s premiership, through the notable removal of Clause IV in 1994, appeared to redirect the initiative to a party of the ruling class, for the ruling class; the inequality and enriching of the upper classes commenced by the Thatcher years only continued, alongside a commitment to the deregulation and denationalisation of markets completed by the previous Tory rule, perhaps explaining the merely timid debate regarding capitalism and its exact future as an economic system within the Labour party.

The swiftly changing paradigms of the political world pose a vital question for the future of the Labour Party; evolve to incorporate new, radical ideas and provide a visionary, specific future for the British electorate with which the public may engage and participate within, or simply wither away to political insignificance, fighting the Conservatives over tiny fractions of ideological battleground. Whether or not Labour as a political party has the capacity and internal will to evolve in such a way however, is an entirely different question altogether.