It is a victory most Tories could never have dreamed of, and a defeat beyond the nightmares of most of their opponents. The collapse of Labour in Scotland, and the stirring of English nationalism, Ed Miliband’s personal ratings, the blame directed at Labour for the economic crisis, the lack of a coherent Labour alternative, the Tories’ devastatingly effective messaging: all could be ignored, fingers in collective ears, because the polls consistently suggested David Cameron was heading for the exit.
The polls seemed to defy gravity, but after the great 1992 polling calamity, it seemed impossible they could be so monstrously wrong. And so, in the final weeks of the campaign, the doubts could be suppressed in the name of evicting the Tories, an outcome that seemed tantalisingly close. Well, no longer.
“Labour wasn’t Blairite enough” will be the rallying cry of Labour’s right. A Blairite leader, according to this theory, would have prevented a collapse in support to a Scottish party positioning itself to Labour’s anti-austerity Left. It would have stopped the Greens mopping up disillusioned Leftwing voters. And it would have avoided the defection to Ukip of working-class supporters angry at the immigration of the Blair-Brown era, for which Labour under Mr. Miliband had apologised, adopting an anti-immigration stance that appalled Blairites.
Mr. Miliband had taken on the trade union link in a way Tony Blair declared he wished he had, committing to cutting public spending every year; he was the first Labour leader to do so, as he himself boasted.
The rhetoric of moving on from New Labour was there, but the supposedly Leftwing policies amounted to increasing the minimum wage in line with inflation, adopting Japan’s top rate of tax, stealing the Tories’ coalition partner’s policy on the mansion tax, a gimmicky temporary energy price freeze, and New York-style controls of rents. The party’s economic narrative was certainly calamitous. As Labour engaged in a protracted, navel-gazing leadership contest in 2010, the story that overspending had caused the economic crisis was spun into accepted fact by the Tories and their media allies.
The Tories’ own backing of Labour’s spending plans until the end of 2008, or the Tories’ advocacy of even fewer bank regulations: well, that was ironically left to critics of New Labour to point out. A global economic crisis was successfully pinned on Labour. When the Tory government’s cuts came, much of the electorate blamed them on Labour. With Labour held responsible for wrecking public finances in the past, its economic credibility always lagged behind the Tories, even when austerity choked off a 2010 upturn and led to the worst economic recovery since the 19th century.
In Scotland, Labour’s decision to form a strategic alliance with the Tories in the referendum campaign was described to me by one senior Scottish Labour figure — now beyond vindicated — as a mistake of “historic proportions”. It looked like a political elite closing ranks in a campaign of fear.
It is difficult to emphasise how disgusted erstwhile Scottish Labour supporters were with their former party: they felt the bitterness of ex-lovers and the zealotry of the convert, as I’ve put it before. The rottenness of Scottish Labour’s political structures — including Labour MPs who had never even knocked on constituents’ doors — allowed the SNP to position itself as filling progressive space abandoned by Labour. All this contributed to the party’s collapse.
The blowback was even worse: the rise of the SNP allowed the Tories and their media allies to stir up an already awakening English nationalism.
For most of the last parliament, Labour was a policy vacuum: it was filled with highfalutin concepts such as “predistribution” that went over the heads of anyone who wasn’t a thinktank wonk.
While the Tories had clear messages — “clearing up Labour’s mess”, balancing the books, reforming welfare, and so on — Labour never built a coherent alternative. Difficult political issues, it was believed, could be addressed with a set-piece speech in the middle of the day that only a few political geeks bothered to watch, let alone process. Mr. Miliband was often derided for his failures to communicate, but here is the product of a Labour party leadership that has become ever more professionalised and technocratic.
It is beyond delusional to believe that narrowing the political gap with the Tories will win back SNP, Green and Ukip voters. Labour faces what happened to its social democrat equivalents in Greece and Spain: there, they have been challenged by more radical elements. Here, it is the SNP, the rightwing populism of Ukip, and the Greens. There will be a big debate now over the future of the Labour party, and what the Left does next. This country desperately needs a politics of hope that answers people’s everyday problems on living standards, job security, housing, public services and the future of their children. That is needed more than ever, no matter what happens with the Labour leadership.
What is needed is a movement rooted in the lives of working-class people and their communities. The future of millions of people depends on it. — © Guardian Newspapers Limited, 2015
