So Labour lost and were all but wiped out in Scotland. Ed Milliband fell on his sword quickly and took full responsibility – but where did it all go wrong and who / what was to blame?
A few themes have emerged already – some contradictory.
Some say Labour’s problem was a late swing to the left – nom dom loopholes to be closed, rent controls introduced, bedroom tax abolished.
Others have long argued that Labour has lost touch with its base – that it no longer represents the common man, leaving the way clear for UKIP to fan racist resentment against immigration as its vote winner.
In Scotland the sight of Cameron & Clegg standing alongside Ed Milliband in opposition to Scottish Independence supplied the final few nails in a coffin that Labour has spent a long time building.
While Labour’s Scottish demise is certainly linked to their referendum stance – I think we can trace Labour’s decline across the whole of the UK much further and deeper than this.
Labour’s collapse as a viable alternative to the tories has been a slow motion horror show.
When a party over a number of decades decides to abandon its core values, ingest all manner of tory tropes and effectively abolish itself, its hardly surprising that voters surmise that those tory lies / tropes and values must be true. After all, The Labour Party doesn’t oppose Tory values and narratives anymore – it embraces them.
It never used to be so – how about this for a manifesto to believe in?
* £11 billion to be invested in British Industry
* Measures to stop currency speculation (abolished by the tories) re-introduced
* Privatisation of north sea oil to be halted and reversed
* Foundation of a national bank to invest a mixture of public and private money into our industrial base
* A renewed commitment to affordable public housing.
* Significant public stakes to be taken in electronics, pharmaceuticals, health equipment and building materials; and also in other important sectors, as required in the national interest
* Recognising that “radical, socialist policies for reviving the British economy” would be in conflict with the rules of the treaty of Rome, a withdrawal from the EEC will be necessary.
* Restore the link between pensions and average earnings
* A new annual tax of personal wealth would be introduced, targeting the richest 100,000 of the population.
* Part-time workers to be given the same employment rights as full-time workers.
these were all key pledges of the 1983 Labour Party manifesto – the last time that a Labour document even tried to outline a future for this country that was in opposition to neoliberalism.
Some of the 1983 proposals – such as devolution to Scotland and Wales, a Freedom of Information Act, and equal rights for part-time workers – were eventually enacted by Labour after it came to power in 1997. But the bulk of the manifesto was never implemented. A relentless anti-Labour campaign by much of the media – aided by rightwing figures within the party – together with the splitting of the anti-Tory vote on account of the SDP secession, meant that the Conservatives were returned in 1983 with a greatly increased majority, even though their share of the vote was actually lower than in 1979.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2008/jun/10/labour.margaretthatcher
The Labour Party’s oft maligned leader – Michael Foot said of that defeat:
“The defeat for the Labour party in the early 1980s was not only a defeat for the Labour party but also a defeat for decency all over the world”
Never a truer word spoken.
Look at the last thirty years.
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Look at our degraded public services, the collapse of affordable public housing, the withered state of our industrial base, a banking system beset by endless scandals, grotesque bonuses and systemic instability – to say nothing of food banks, zero hours contracts, homelessness and rising inequality. Our society is divided and full of toxic hatred for the unemployed, immigrants and anyone who has fallen foul of the great neoliberal experiment.
Our libraries are closed, our post offices and the Royal Mail sold off on the cheap – our railway system is one of the most expensive, over-crowded and unreliable in Europe and yet we still spend more money subsiding the grotesque profits of private train operators than we ever did on British Rail.
The NHS is being undermined and broken up in a prelude to full privatisation and is on the brink of collapse as neoliberal reforms poison its cohesion.
During the last thirty years we have done none of the urgent work required to tackle climate change or address looming overlapping ecological crises.
As a final act of sabotage against the (increasingly flimsy) state shield against corporate power – this tory government will meekly surrender our sovereign democratic rights and sign up to TTIP. In the future, teams of corporate lawyers, will decide whether our laws afford multinationals sufficient freedom to exploit us as they choose, if they don’t, they’ll sue us in closed courts presided over by judges schooled in corporate law.
and in all of this – where has Labour been? and where is it now?
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For the most part Labour has been a neoliberal cheerleader in government and opposition since the end of the eighties.
It was Tony Blair’s New Labour government who extended Thatcher’s deregulation of financial services – reaping a bitter harvest in 2007/8 as the private banking system imploded with greed.
What you, as the City of London, have achieved for financial services we, as a government, now aspire to achieve for the whole economy.
Gordon Brown, Mansion House Speech, June 26 2002
It was New Labour that came up with the heinous waste of the Private Finance Initiatives (PFI).
It was New Labour who aided an illegal U.S. invasion of Iraq and fabricated documents to support the lies that under pinned it.
It was New Labour that colluded with U.S. torture via its ‘extraordinary rendition’ flights.
It was New Labour that gifted us mutiple ‘anti-terror’ legislations, ASBO’s and a huge rise in police and prison population numbers.
Labour has accepted Conservative precepts. The private sector knows, and grows, best. The City is untouchable: it may be chastised, but never seriously confronted. Unemployment is a form of dependency, best dealt with through market discipline. Competition is the law of all social and economic life, and it is the role of the state to encourage it and to secure public participation in it. And the British state, and its military commitments, are sacrosanct.
Richard Seymour - Bye Bye Labour
Whatever one thinks of the Blair / Brown era – what was Labour offering in 2015 that was really any different to the tories?
Ed Balls had cheerfully signed up to Austerity economics and would have implemented every cut the tories had planned. A died in the wool neoliberal zealot and neoclassical economist – Ed Balls would have made a perfect tory chancellor, so why not vote for the one with a better haircut?
Rachel Reeves aped the bullying rhetoric of the tories perfectly – famously remarking that:
“We are not the party of people on benefits. We don’t want to be seen, and we’re not, the party to represent those who are out of work,”
Which perhaps explains why the millions of working families scraping by on child tax credits and housing benefit didn’t vote for Labour – they weren’t wanted.
Ed knew who he wanted to champion – right wingers – “Let me be your champion” he pleaded eagerly with tory voters which is perhaps not entirely unexpected as Labour long ago gave up trying to win an election based on any progressive values.
The essential fallacy of British politics is that there is a large centre ground, and that this is where elections are decided. As Nick Clegg has discovered to his cost, in a period of economic depression this area has a tendency to shrink. Yet as the political situation polarises and the establishment parties feel the earth fall away beneath them, they cling ever more tightly to their belief in this centre ground. Labour is doing just this, as a matter of both principle and strategy. It is doing it because it thinks it’s the right thing to do, because it’s what the party is used to doing, and because it can’t do anything else.
Richard Seymour - Bye Bye Labour
Labour was going to sign up to TTIP (but had some weasel words in the manifesto about protecting the NHS somehow)
Labour was committed to buying Trident nuclear weapons from the U.S., voted in favour of airstrikes in Libya (a now totally failed state) and cheerfully embraced the UKIP mantras about immigration controls.
Poor old Labour! Caught in a cross dressed muddle between UKIP dog whistles and Tory sound bites they painted themselves into a corner with blue paint.
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Its hard to win an election when all the key narratives are conceded to Conservative Party HQ and the Daily Mail by default before the game even starts.
Even harder to win an election when every word about the 2007 banking crash, austerity, feckless benefit scroungers and immigrants has to take place within campaign guidelines that could easily havc been issued by tory strategist Lynton Crosby.
Trying to woo tory votes went down very badly in Scotland, and didn’t work in England either, as strangely enough, the Tories look pretty convincing when the opposition swallows their tactically contrived versions of history without a murmur of protest.
The Tories had won the argument before the electioneering started because Labour refused to make an argument.
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With the right wing press, the Tories, the Lib-Dems and erm Labour all singing from the same neoliberal hymn sheet its hardly surprising that the electorate has accepted the tory version of events and voted them back in.
Heaven only knows where Labour goes from here – we may be witnessing the beginning of the end for Labour as a party.
One thing is certain – you cannot win elections if you don’t win hearts and minds. All the ‘on message’ political spin in the world will not save a party that refuses to speak the truth for fear of not getting elected or upsetting the Murdoch press. People see through it.
The tory party and the right wing media in this country collude in producing a fog of lies, distortions and distractions that perpetuates the dominance of right wing neoliberal ideologies and dogma. This is not a naturally occurring state of affairs and it can, and must, be challenged and defeated.
If Labour is not prepared to fight for the truth, to challenge the lies and hypocrisy of the tories then it has no business being The Labour Party anymore.
Perhaps it would be better for it to just die and leave the way clear for a new mass movement to represent the people.
After this dire election result has left us saddled with the most regressive government in British history – Labour can either rediscover the fight to tell the truth – or die, there are no other options.
John Lynch, Editor
New Labour did not come up with PFI. The Tories did after the 1992 election. Labout opposed it under John Smith – perhaps this is why he was killed and Tony Blair made leader instead. New Labour massively extended PFI, increasing it from a handful of projects worth a few million to billions representing a huge chunk of the `public sector’.
These are all precisely the reasons why I abandoned Labour and joined the Greens. They’re the only anti-neoliberal game in town with any clout.