If Hopes Were Dupes,
Fears May Be Liars
In the wake of Labour’s landslide general election defeat on 9 June 1983, leading lights of the left gathered their thoughts in a New Socialist and Polity Press collected volume, The Future of the Left.* The book fought back against the near-unanimous demand in the mainstream media for a return to the ‘middle ground’. It can be read as a message in a bottle, from those who watched the neoliberal era coalesce, to us who are witnessing its elongated crisis, and, if we want to avoid suffering the same disappointments, we must learn from the debates of that time.
Existential questions are today being asked about Labour’s viability as an electoral coalition and political project. Successive elections have been lost by the right, centre and left of the Party, though Jeremy Corbyn remains the only Labour leader since Tony Blair to gain seats at a general election. For the neoliberal centre, 2019’s election manifesto ‘It’s Time for Real Change’ can be portrayed as another ‘longest suicide note in history’, but the left cannot allow the myth to take hold that socialism was to blame for the latest election fiasco, or that success at the ballot box will follow from the Party ditching the left-most elements of the Corbyn programme.
In 1983, Margaret Thatcher exploited a nationalist opportunity – in place of Brexit, the Falklands – to rout a Labour opposition divided over policy, leadership and reselection. Labour lost sixty seats and the Tories secured a Commons majority of 140. Contributors to The Future of the Left agonised over whether Labour would ever be able extend its electoral reach beyond its industrial heartlands. Concern about class dealignment was already evident. Sociologist John Westergaard noted a drop in support for the Party among manual workers, as well as a failure to attract voters in the expanding white-collar and ‘white-blouse’ groups, but according to Richard Hyman, ‘the class basis of party choice’ had been weakening for a quarter of a century. Other demographics appeared equally unfavourable for Labour, too. The swing away from Labour ‘was more marked amongst first-time voters than amongst other age-groups’, observed Philip Cohen, with 42 per cent of eighteen- to twenty-four-year-olds voting Conservative.
What had gone wrong? ‘The unpopularity of the left is not so much due to popular disagreement with left ideals (if they’ve ever heard of them), as to an absence of any apparent strategy for putting them into practice and therefore a feeling that they are pie in the sky’, argued Doreen Massey, Lynne Segal and Hilary Wainwright. Tony Benn argued similarly: ‘If hope is to replace fear, people have to be able to believe that there is an alternative. Unfortunately for us, the electorate did not believe in Labour’s alternative – and wondered whether we all believed in it either.’
Contributors tried to get a handle on the essential character of the Conservative government. Anthony Barnett seemingly misjudged Thatcher as ‘more the flotsam left behind on the beach by a retreating post-war tide than she is the tide of history itself’. The prime minister had been ‘over-estimated ideologically and under-estimated economically’. Barnett was even clearer than other contributors that a total break from the post-war consensus would be welcome: ‘Consensus politics meant restrictive practices writ large, not reform. Its passing should not be lamented.’ Realisation was dawning that Thatcher’s first term hadn’t been a historical blip but rather marked the start of a new political epoch, and some were clearer about how. ‘Paradoxically, she does raise hearts and minds an inch or two because, vile, corrupt, awful as her vision of the future is, we know what it is,’ commented Stuart Hall. ‘The one thing nobody knows is what Labour conceives to be an “alternative way of life”. It currently possesses no image of the future. It provides no picture of life under socialism.’
David Edgar sketched out distinctions on the Tory right between economic liberals and social authoritarians. The Institute of Economic Affairs and Centre for Policy Studies successfully propagandised for the so-called ‘free market’, while, on the other hand, philosopher Roger Scruton was hoping that ‘sentiments of sovereignty and national honour’ stirred by the Falklands War ‘would be reflected in domestic policy, such as that relating to immigration and capital punishment’.
Was the answer for the left a ‘progressive alliance’ with the SDP-Liberal Alliance? Almost every paragraph in Neil Kinnock’s offering for The Future of the Left contains the words ‘liberty’ or ‘freedom’, perhaps with one eye on Alliance voters. It fell to Raymond Williams to sound a note of warning. His essay examined the potential for both a ‘Big Coalition’, involving some or all of the Alliance, and a ‘Smaller Coalition’ consisting of a Labour Party which had set aside disagreements to unite around a minimal centre-left agenda. If either group was united around some generally progressive ideas, he observed, there was little to be lost from coalescing, but none of the potential areas of commonality were ‘in any distinctive sense socialist’. If socialists did not believe that moderate Keynesian social democracy was adequate for sustained economic recovery or political advance, then there was little to be gained from a coalition based around it:
Whether it’s the Big or the Smaller version, the advocates of either have in effect abandoned the struggle to transform belief and opinion. In a cold climate, they say, the many but now disparate remnants of decent and sensible opinion must huddle together, pooling their surviving resources against the Tory storm. I can see how easy it is to feel like that or to respond hopefully to a few brave words flung back against the wind … We can sustain the Smaller Coalition without any real work on policies, or reach out for the Larger Coalition, adapting ahead of its formal arrangements by trimming or underplaying those innovative socialist policies which are known to be incompatible with it. But we can then draw a clear line, to our mutual advantage, between socialists and coalitionists. We can begin to see where we really are, and what we have to change.
In some ways, the difficulties we face in 2020 are worse than those of the 1980s, with ‘heartland’ seats lost and little evidence of a realignment elsewhere happening fast enough to compensate. Scottish voters returned forty-one Labour MPs in 1983. The miners and printers had not yet been smashed and trade union membership – around double today’s level – had only just begun its decline from its historic high.
But the contrasts with 1983 are no less important. Michael Foot had been James Callaghan’s deputy and was elected leader on a unity ticket, rather than on a left manifesto from the backbenches. Mike Gapes and Chris Leslie are not Roy Jenkins and Shirley Williams, and Michel Barnier is not General Galtieri. In 2019 the new ideas belonged to Labour, not the Conservatives, but we failed to frame our vision for the country and were trumped by the promise of a Johnson Brexit which won the support of voters for whom ‘things were better back in the day’.
Labour’s policies last December were popular in themselves but we have been told repeatedly that – echoing Benn in 1983 – voters didn’t believe we would, or could, implement them.* Key pledges from 2017 – higher income tax rates for the wealthy, nationalisation of the utilities and free university tuition – were familiar enough to the electorate, but 2019 additions, such as a four-day working week, universal basic income, net-zero emissions and free broadband, required imagination.
This doesn’t mean Labour must limit its horizon to what has gone before, but it reminds us that capturing the initiative requires more than just announcing new-sounding things, and that futurism in itself doesn’t guarantee greater electoral success than speaking to already existing interests and desires.
For decades, all wings of the party (but especially centrists) have attempted to put some distance between themselves and the 1945–79 period, in an effort to appear modern. For all the political and economic shortcomings of ‘welfare capitalism’, we have to consider whether the effect of renouncing its era has been to concede a pivotal moment to those on the right who want to claim its most reactionary elements.
While in some respects the outlook is gloomier than it was in 1983, there are chinks of sunlight, and not just in the youthful profile of Labour’s vote. Thatcher’s reforms successfully kickstarted capitalism in the aggregate by redistributing power from labour to capital and unleashing the finance sector. Subsequently, with headline growth and profits healthy, and wages rising for many, New Labour was able to provide better public services and tax credits to prop up earnings for those who weren’t benefiting.
But in the post-2008 world, it’s unclear whether either Boris Johnson or post-Thatcher Tory ‘moderates’ have any solution to the economic problems implied by productivity growth of just 0.3 per cent over the last decade. Wage rises must generally come from either increasing productivity or increasing workers’ bargaining power: there is no evidence that the Conservatives have an answer to the former, beyond a smattering of capital investment, or that they are willing to countenance the latter. Labour’s failure to oust the Tories in 2019 means we are left with a government which, despite having won the political battle, doesn’t have a plan to cope with the big economic challenges of our time.
Is Johnson as much of a departure from his Conservative predecessors as Thatcher was? The prime minister may be determined to prosecute a culture war while ditching ‘fiscal discipline’ but questions remain over how deeply committed his party is to the public spending aspects of his programme, with widespread grumbling in the Tory base about possible tax rises. Four years after Theresa May floated compulsory worker representation on company boards, Johnson’s threat to ban public sector strikes and a planned local government settlement that redistributes upwards hardly suggest a straightforwardly leftward shift in economic policy.
Williams’s comments about coalition unity between the left and the centre left remain valid. Keir Starmer’s commitment to ‘common ownership’ – as distinct from public ownership – potentially leaves the door open to leaving key utilities in the hands of the few, not the many: perhaps along the lines of Welsh Water, a private non-profit company structure run by opaquely appointed ‘members’ unaccountable to the public, staff or voters. Crossing our fingers or pleading for unity will not make this political faultline go away.
Others would now like to build a coalition through rotating the left onto the axes of the culture war, taking up Johnson’s invitation to a fight on his own terms by lining up with socially liberal centrists. On this basis, the correct observation that the working class is not just northern, white and Leave-voting invites adherence to anything that signals distance from that ‘old-fashioned’ left. The divide ceases to be left–right and becomes open–closed or Remain–Leave, with the last one sharing a liberal distaste for organised labour. Massey, Segal and Wainwright’s ‘Great-Moving-Right-Male-Left-Show’ describes today’s ex-Trotskyists and post-capitalists as neatly as the Eric Hobsbawms and others for whom it was coined.
The alternative is not a plea to concede or shut up about ‘cultural’ issues. Fighting to defend and extend non-economic rights is a necessary but insufficient condition for the left. There will also always be areas of overlap and common interest with those who are not socialists. But even small coalitions must start, as Williams says, from an honest assessment of where we are, not from pretending existing ideological questions have disappeared.
During the years of Peter Mandelson’s ‘sealed tomb’, the Labour left may have hoped that, if only our ideas were heard, they would automatically mean electoral success. If that was wrong, it’s clear from 2017 that a shift to the left doesn’t automatically lead to electoral annihilation either. The economic problems that burst out into the open in the financial crisis of 2008 have not been tidied neatly away.
If there is one lesson from the defeats of the 1980s, perhaps it ought to be the one from Massey, Segal, Wainwright and Benn: an ambitious programme can only succeed if the Party truly believes in it and knows how it is going to make it a reality. As Corbyn likes to quote from Pablo Neruda, they can cut the flowers but they can’t stop spring from coming. We can be forgiven for mistaking snowdrops for daffodils, but we need to learn humbly from our mistakes and those of our predecessors if we are to see where we really are, and what we have to change, and to tend effectively the stirring of socialist thought and activity in the Labour Party, which now exists thanks to those who led, supported and sustained Corbynism while it lasted.
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* James Curran, ed., The Future of the Left, Cambridge, 1984.
* Canvassers also reported many people asking, in one form or another, whether a party that promises to implement a referendum result and then changes its mind is to be trusted to implement the most far-ranging and ambitious restructuring of the British economy in forty years.