This time, I could stand the hope – lessons from the election
On Thursday evening, a group of around 20 Labour staffers sat in my front room in Brussels. The clock was about to strike 10.00pm UK time. In a few seconds we were going to hear the results of the exit poll…
Earlier a friend of mine had tweeted me with John Cleese’s classic line from ‘Clockwise’: “It’s not the despair… I can take the despair. It’s the hope I can’t stand.”
I know what he meant. In the previous week, one outlying poll, using a brand new methodology, had suggested that we were on course for a hung Parliament. While everyone else saw a Tory majority as inevitable, YouGov broke with consensus and thought Labour would exceed expectations. It sounded too good to be true. And yet… And yet… It was the hope I couldn’t stand.
We’d been here before, as well. Two years ago, roughly the same group of people had gathered in a bar expecting to see Ed Miliband on his way into Number 10. By 10.01pm, that dream had died. A year later, we were together again to see if we had done enough to convince British voters to stay in the EU. The polls were neck and neck, the hope was there… and then, once more, it was dashed.
So you could forgive us for clutching our glasses tightly, teeth clenched, peering worriedly at the screen as Big Ben sounded 10 o’clock… and the screen turned a familiar Tory blue. “We are predicting the Conservatives will be the largest party,” intoned David Dimbleby. A groan and a resigned sigh around the room. It had happened again.
And then a small voice of hope from somewhere at the back: “Hang on: ‘largest party’? So they haven’t got a majority? It’s a hung parliament?!” A few seconds for this to sink in, and then a huge cheer. They were right! Maybe we were going to do well. Maybe this was going to be a good night!
And it was. Anneliese Dodds, my fantastic MEP boss, turned an impressive 15,000 majority into an astonishing 23,000 one and became the new MP for Oxford East. Labour won back seats in Scotland that were supposed to have been lost for a generation. We held on in Edgbaston, in Exeter, in Ilford and in Hove. Not only that, we won new seats – in Reading, in Plymouth, in Canterbury… in Kensington, for Christ’s sake. The constituency in which the Daily Mail’s office is situated now has a Labour MP!
It was a good night. We stayed up too late, we drank too much and we slept too little. And now, as the dust is starting to settle, I think there are three important things to say.
- Jeremy Corbyn is owed an apology, and a lot of credit…
I don’t think I’m alone – and I certainly shouldn’t be – in saying that I misjudged Jeremy Corbyn. While I never joined in with, nor approved of, the vehement criticism of him from the moment he was appointed leader, I hadn’t voted for him and I did harbour real doubts about the direction he was taking the party in.
Like a lot of people (including former Gordon Brown adviser Theo Bertram, whose Corbyn mea culpa blog is well worth a read), I thought there were some central truths about how modern political campaigning works. It is infinitely harder, the accepted logic goes, to persuade a non-voter to get out and cast their ballot than it is to change the mind of someone who already votes and bring them over to your cause. Non-voters will only let you down. They’ll come to a rally, they’ll retweet and ‘like’ to their hearts content, they’ll even tell pollsters that they are “definitely” going to vote, but when it comes down to it they’ll stay at home and do something else instead.
We were wrong. Corbyn, and the team around him, saw the untapped potential in a lot of those non-voters (especially the young), decided that the rewards of converting them were worth the effort, and developed a strategy to get them out – by delivering a message of hope, by being unapologetically authentic and honest, and by challenging accepted wisdom rather than being resigned to it. He and his team deserve a huge amount of credit for increasing Labour’s share of the vote by ten percentage points, and our total number of seats by 30. And he of course deserves to keep leading the party and building on this success.
- But we mustn’t forget that we still didn’t actually win…
Those who harboured doubts about Jeremy Corbyn aren’t the only ones who need to show a little humility, though. Yes, the Labour results of 2017 are a massive improvement on those of 2015. But certain truths are unavoidable.
Theresa May is still the Prime Minister. The Conservatives are still in power. Worse still, they are reliant on the deeply unsavoury DUP to stay there. For all the progress we have made as a party in the last two years, the fact remains that the UK government is likely to continue cutting public services, pushing for a hard Brexit and generally letting down the working people of our country. It’s only when we are actually in power that we can deliver on the promises set out in our manifesto, and reward those who came out and voted for us in the hope of seeing a better society.
So those in Team Corbyn cannot just say that we did really well on Thursday night and leave it at that. We didn’t get over the line. We fell short, and in some pretty generous circumstances at that. I think it’s safe to say that we are highly unlikely to ever face such an inept, uninspiring Tory party campaign again. They will raise their game ahead of the next election, and we need to as well. Moving on from New Labour doesn’t have to mean throwing out absolutely everything from the Blair and Brown years. We still need a professional communications outfit; we still need proper message discipline; we still need to think and act strategically. None of those things involve compromising our values. In fact, they’re how we put our values into practice.
- And we need to start doing some serious thinking…
So we need to build on last week’s good news, and not just rest on it. That means considerably stepping up policy development. The 2017 Labour manifesto was good. It set out a range of policies which were progressive, popular, and easy to explain on the doorstep. It was an especially impressive document given that the people writing it presumably thought they had another three years to finesse it, before May’s surprise announcement gave them a matter of weeks to get it done.
But it was also quite conservative. It was a long list of promises, with little in the way of an overarching narrative to tell the country who we are as a party. It didn’t have a clear sense of prioritisation – which were our headline pledges, and which were the smaller ones supporting them? The promises didn’t always pass that key test of meaningful politics: that it shouldn’t be difficult for a sensible person to at least set out a dissenting view. If all you’re saying are things that are generally accepted to be reasonable, then you’re not really challenging yourself or taking tough decisions.
The UK faces some immense tests over the coming years: leaving the EU and making our own way in the world; the pressing need to adapt to climate change and end our reliance on fossil fuels (seemingly without the cooperation of the US); the challenges that automation and casual employment pose to working people; our ageing population and the crisis in social care; the new forms taken by stateless terrorism; rebalancing our economy geographically and sectorally; devolving power in a meaningful way. If we are honest with ourselves, we haven’t started to scratch the surface on many of these issues yet.
I don’t mean to take away for a moment from Thursday’s immense, unpredicted success. Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour has earned the right to be taken seriously, to be allowed to carry on with the job and to be treated with the respect due to a powerful political party in the ascendancy. That’s brilliant. But it’s only half the battle. We have to use the coming months and years to show that we are not just a viable, energetic opposition. We need to push on and show that we are in fact the natural party of government.
To use what seems like an appropriate word – we have the momentum. We now have to build on it.
Six things that led to Brexit
Like most people engaged (or even remotely interested) in politics right now, I’ve spent a lot of the last two weeks trying to work out how on earth we got here: to a situation where the UK is on its way out of the EU, and with most of our assumptions about British politics turned completely on their head.
I’m not for a minute saying that I have managed to work it out, but working on the assumption that writing things down can help to clarify them – and that if we’re hoping to shape what happens next, it’s a pretty good idea to have thought about what came before – here are six things that I think helped contribute to a Leave vote.
(The usual caveats about lists apply. It’s not exhaustive, and there will be plenty of things I’ve overlooked. But right now, for me, these are the main themes that I keep coming back to when trying to make sense of it all.)
- The impact of globalisation on working class people in rich countries. As this fascinating Washington Post article shows, over the last 20 years, every single group of people in the world (rich people in rich countries, rich people in poor countries, poor people in poor countries) has seen their living standards improve except poor people in rich countries. They are globalisation’s losers, and nowhere near enough has been done to acknowledge or address that problem, and so those people are rightly angry. This is not just a British phenomenon – you only need to look at the success of Donald Trump, Marine le Pen and others – but by holding a referendum that put the status quo on one side and the opportunity for change on the other, we provided a lightning rod.
- Labour complacency, followed by confusion, over the impact of immigration. From the end of the 1990s onwards, as the UK embraced globalisation and opened up to the world, we moved incredibly quickly to a new, multicultural future without acknowledging that not everyone would welcome it as rapidly as liberal professionals in big cities. The accession of Eastern European countries to the EU in 2004 with no transitional controls played a part in that, but there was also a wider, less tangible sense that no one was allowed to express any kind of concern about immigration without being labelled a racist or a bigot. The public space to air any kind of concerns was shut down, meaning people had to look elsewhere to find an outlet. This was exacerbated by the Miliband years in which immigration was correctly identified as a weakness for Labour, but for which the solution proposed was not to address the issue head-on, but rather to “move the conversation onto something else”.
- Nigel Farage’s UKIP rebranding. The UKIP of the 1990s was a laughable fringe party obsessed with the idea of “sovereignty” above all else. They asked people why they would want their laws made in Brussels when those laws could be made in Westminster. But for most people, Westminster was just as distant and unaccountable as Brussels, so the idea never caught anyone’s imagination. Then Farage, like the expert campaigner he is, decoupled ends from means: while his main concern over the EU might have been about sovereignty, he saw that the major issue for those people whose votes he needed was immigration. So why not pivot the party’s focus and promise instead that leaving the EU would mean taking back control of our borders, rather than our laws?
- David Cameron’s infuriating short-termism. Trying to hold his party together, first through a painful (half-finished) process of modernisation, and then through the compromises of coalition, Cameron used “Brussels” as the catch-all bad guy for anything and everything that was going wrong. Never one to engage in difficult, long-term thinking if he could instead postpone today’s crisis with a cheap shot, Cameron never looked beyond the horizon and saw that he was simultaneously damaging the brand of the EU in the eyes of British people, and burning every possible bridge he might need further down the line. Remarkably, he even carried on doing this once he’d set the country on the path to the referendum and so knew that such a reckoning was coming.
- The spectre of Scotland. Despite (or maybe because of) the fact that everything in politics seems so unpredictable at the moment, people clung to the precedent which they thought had been set during the Scottish independence referendum: a “safety first, don’t rock the boat” approach, with a late swing to the status quo. But it was never as simple as that: what was being defended in Scotland was a 300 year old union, intimately bound up with ideas of culture, identity and patriotism – not a 40-year old economic project which only gradually grew into a multi-lingual, multi-cultural union of distinct countries. People also seemed to forget that the Scottish referendum was an incredibly close-run thing, and that Better Together very nearly lost it. On top of that, Labour’s subsequent annihilation in Scotland in May 2015 led party strategists (wrongly, in my view) to believe that the problem was having shared platforms with the Tories. So any similar spirit of bipartisan cooperation was scrapped in favour of protecting a domestic political base.
- The simultaneous loss of our most pro-EU voices. From a Remain perspective, the last thing we needed, a year before the referendum, was for the unashamedly pro-European Liberal Democrats to be decimated and for Labour to elect as its new leader a former Eurosceptic, who even now could only be described as ambivalent about Europe at best. The Lib Dems could never make enough noise on their own, and Labour was (and still is) trying to work out how to speak to and for disenfranchised working class voters who are concerned about immigration and moving over to UKIP. Perhaps not surprisingly, many people did not consider a full-throated defence of EU membership to be a key part of that strategy. Add to that the fact that Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership was seen as under threat from day one, and that his critics within Labour decided to make the local elections the key test of his viability, and you had a Labour party fixated on winning on 5 May before they would even start to think about what was going to happen on 23 June.
There were of course lots of other factors which influenced the outcome – a rising anti-establishment view that had been brewing ever since the expenses scandal; vast swathes of the media being run by people who would financially benefit from EU anti-competition laws no longer applying to them; the persistent and immensely frustrating unwillingness of most people below the age of 25 to actually vote – but the ones above are the ones that I personally keep coming back to.
None of those challenges present easy solutions. The fact is that the UK government – whichever party is in power – needs a proper industrial and economic strategy to look after those people who have suffered most at the hands of globalisation. Labour has to have a mature debate about immigration, which needs to acknowledge that people’s concerns are valid without running away from open, tolerant, liberal values. The Conservative party needs to decide which is most important: reducing immigration or growing the economy, because you can’t have both.
That’s not to say that rising to such challenges is impossible. Anyone looking for a sliver of hope, and some useful pointers as to what we can do next, could do a lot worse than study the campaign to get Sadiq Khan elected as London Mayor. The people behind it ran a positive campaign in which the candidate neutered the strikes against him without ever abandoning his values. He won across the whole of the city: he had support from business leaders, from faith groups, from civil society and trade unions, and he motivated young people to come out and vote. And he is, so far, governing with the same sense of optimistic realism that characterised his campaign. Yes, his was a London-centric campaign and quite often London might as well be a different country. But in these dark days Khan’s success is a beacon of hope – and as we try to wrestle with the realities of a post-EU UK, his is the example I think we should follow.
In defence of public service
Last Thursday afternoon, the MP Jo Cox was murdered on the streets of Yorkshire, while out and about in her constituency, meeting the people she represented and listening to their concerns.
The wider debate about Jo’s killer’s motive – the extent to which he was acting alone, or linked to a wider movement – will rage on, and will not be easily settled. But one deeply worrying thing about her death could be said with certainty almost immediately: she was killed because she was an MP.
Jo Cox was killed because she had chosen a life of public service, and was therefore seen as a legitimate target. That’s a horrible thought.
It’s a truism in the internet age to say that people have become desensitized to the consequences of their actions when those actions take place online. Remove the eye contact, the personal connection, from an interaction, and otherwise mild-mannered people can say the most offensive and extreme things behind the comfort of a pseudonym and an avatar. Public figures in particular are ‘fair game’, as if several thousand followers and Twitter’s blue tick of verification means you can’t be hurt by awful things being said to or about you.
But what if that isn’t the end of the process? What if that desensitization starts leaking back into real life and – to some people – those in the public eye carry the protection of that blue tick with them wherever they go? They deserve it (and ‘it’ can be so, so much worse than 140 characters of vile abuse) because they have put themselves in that position, or so the logic goes. What if online forums and comment sections aren’t the final resting place for awful thoughts that no one would dare give voice to in real life, but instead a breeding ground for those thoughts to become actions?
All of this matters because the contempt with which politicians are currently spoken of is breathtaking. They are viscerally hated by large sections of the public. And it seems to be getting worse.
What is so sad is that this chimes so little with my personal experience working with politicians. Almost without exception, every MP or MEP or councillor I have ever met – from all parties – has gone into public service for the right reasons. They have chosen a path that involves long hours, hard work, intense public scrutiny, and incredibly difficult moral choices when many of them could have done something less all-consuming for more money. They are trying to do the best they can, according to their own values, every day.
But we have lost sight of all of that. Elected politicians are seen as grasping, venal, self-interested megalomaniacs. Unelected civil servants are seen as unaccountable, manipulative pen-pushers stitching up a system that works for them and no one else.
Those attitudes matter. Not just because the people on the receiving end of that abuse are human beings, with real feelings. Not just because we cannot hope to recruit a new generation of MPs or civil servants if that is how the profession is perceived. But because little by little they chip away at the contract between the government and the governed, until those unspoken ties – the ones that say “we put our faith in you to look after us” – start one by one to disappear. And when they go, we are in real trouble.
I’m not naïve. I know that significant responsibility for the way things are rests with politicians themselves. Too often, MPs and others have said the short-term, expedient thing to get them over the line in a single election, without thinking about the cumulative impact that has on the collective consciousness.
Again, that goes for all of them – be it a Labour party narrative that suggests anyone who ever votes Tory is fundamentally evil; a Conservative election campaign built on the suggestion that anyone who finds themselves out of work is a “skiver”; or the SNP turning a blind eye to virtual and physical intimidation carried out in their name. If we are going to rescue politics and public service, then politicians themselves need to reintroduce into the public debate the values and the decency which so many of them embody in their day-to-day business.
The media also has a clear responsibility. One of the more heartbreaking things in the aftermath of Jo Cox’s death was hearing so many people say: “she sounded so wonderful; how come we never heard of her before?” Because journalists don’t write stories about MPs doing their jobs well until after they have retired or, too often, passed away.
Newspaper editors will tell ethics committees that they just give their readers what they want – that the demand is there for salacious gossip and they altruistically respond to it. But at the same time they are attracting advertisers by telling them that their newspaper is an organ of influence: that it has the power to shape debate, to change opinions and behaviour. The truth, as ever, is somewhere in between – which means that journalists and newspapers have a duty to give us a much better and fairer representation of public life than they currently do. They can’t just wait until something horrendous happens before they discover that some politicians were all right after all.
Finally, though, we as citizens need to look at our own role. If the newspaper editors are half-right, then we help to create the demand for stories that do down the role of government and public service as a whole. And those unpleasant, dog-whistle tactics we increasingly see at the tail end of political campaigns are a response to an existing public mood as much as they are an attempt to move that mood in a particular direction.
Democracy is a two-way street. We’re not passive; we are participants – and we have to participate in a civilised and respectful manner if we hope to elect politicians who will do the same with one another. That means taking the time to listen to those who try to tell us that situations are complex and that there may be no easy answer, instead of shouting them down. It means rising above the kind of petty ‘activism’ that sees MPs who voted against action in Syria labelled as “terrorist sympathisers” and those who voted for it sent photographs of dead babies.
We all – the politicians asking for our trust, the press which holds them to account, and the citizens who elect them – need to rise to the challenge that Jo Cox’s death presents to us as a democracy. And that challenge is so simple, so banal that it shouldn’t need to be repeated, and yet on days like this it feels like it has to be: we all need to start being nicer to one another.
Come together
In 2007, Tony Blair gave a speech at Blenheim Palace in which he claimed that “the real dividing line to think of in modern politics has less to do with traditional positions of right versus left, more to do today, with what I would call the modern choice, which is open versus closed”.
On the face of it, this sounds quite neat and obvious, and you can see what Blair meant. He was saying – with some justification – that the forces of conservatism in the early twenty-first century seek to defend people from the winds of globalisation, and retreat to a national or domestic comfort zone, while the forces of progressivism embrace the opportunities of an interconnected world and the cultural and economic benefits they can bring.
But it’s also easy to see how this rather neat way of separating the world into two camps was ultimately storing up trouble for the future. Telling people that their justifiable concerns about a rapidly changing world are due to them being closed-off, or narrow-minded, is at best patronising and at worst deeply alienating. There are reasons to worry about globalisation. Technological change means people’s jobs require a whole new set of skills or, worse, are rendered obsolete altogether. The life of a town or village will inevitably change if new people arrive there from different countries, with different cultural backgrounds and often speaking different languages. These changes are not inherently bad – in fact I would argue that in the long run they are largely positive – but you cannot just tell people that they are not allowed to be bothered by them.
Nowhere is this more obvious than when it comes to immigration. New Labour welcomed, and trumpeted, Britain’s growth into an open, multicultural society. This is good and should be applauded. But, by using Blair’s “open versus closed” way of looking at the world, it did so in a way that told a lot of people who were less sure about the pace of change that they were bigoted or wrong. The New Labour rhetoric closed out the space in which people could honestly say that they were uncomfortable with what was happening. They never got to air their concerns, and so those concerns never got heard or taken seriously.
Instead of allaying people’s fears, we ignored them. Which meant that it was only a matter of time before someone like Nigel Farage came along and played upon those fears instead.
Tony Blair was right that “left versus right” is no longer a useful way of looking at the political landscape. But “open versus closed” is not particularly helpful either. And yet the fact remains that, like it or not, we do need dividing lines in politics. We need to know how one party differs from another; how each side defines itself against the other.
And so I would suggest a new way of setting out the choice: between the politics of the individual and the politics of the community.
Ever since Thatcher, the Conservatives have successfully painted themselves as the party of the individual, in ways that make this seem sensible and appealing. They want to help people help themselves; they are for the entrepreneurs, for the people who “pull themselves up by their bootstraps”. They want government to be about getting out of your way and letting you get on with your life.
The reason this all sounds so attractive is because the Tories not only picked their own side, but they also chose Labour’s terms for them. So in the Conservative narrative the opposite to “the individual” becomes “the state” – great, clunking institutional structures that want to force everyone into uninspiring mediocrity and to tell them in precise terms how they should live, right down to what they should eat and how much (or how little) they should earn.
This is a reductive, simplistic and wholly unfair representation of what social democracy is all about. But it has too often gone unchallenged and so it has stuck. Voters think that the Tories trust them to get on with things, and that Labour does not. This is wrong, and dangerous, and we have to fight back against it.
Because we are now seeing what having “the party of the individual” in power can mean for a country. It means a lowest common denominator approach to politics in which as long as you individually are OK then it doesn’t matter much about anyone else. It means policies designed to turn sections of society against one another, to determine who is “deserving” and who isn’t. It means telling people that their neighbours are a burden, and that other people’s misfortunes are their own fault.
The answer to that is not to fight back by being the party of the state. It is to fight back by being the party of the community.
I do not believe that people are fundamentally selfish, or narrow-minded, or that what they want most of all is to be left alone. I think people find their greatest happiness in their friends, their families, their neighbours and their colleagues – and that what they want most of all is for those people to be OK. They want their children to do well at school. They want their parents to be looked after in their old age. They want their friends to have good jobs, and their colleagues to be well looked after in the ones they have.
All of this is not just compatible with progressive politics; it is what lies at their very heart. Because following the Tories’ individualistic approach to its logical extreme doesn’t empower people; it alienates them. It turns them against one another and actually diffuses power. It means that a country’s whole can never be more than the sum of its parts.
But the way of dealing with that is not to pull all the way back from the level of the individual to the level of the entire nation and then try to impose a one-size-fits-all Soviet approach to making the country run. It means coming back up just one or two levels – to the family unit, to the group of friends and neighbours, to the village or town or city. Because it is at that level that people can work together, collaborate and cooperate while still retaining a sense of control and choice. It is at that level that most people think when they define themselves as being part of a community. And it is also at that level, back at the end of the nineteenth century, that the Labour party first emerged – congregations of people being brought together in urban centres for the first time and realising that they were more powerful when they acted together.
That would be my pitch for a new way of looking at the world as the Labour party struggles to find its place in it. Let the Tories be the party of the individual. We will be the party of the community – whether that is on the grandest possible scale, arguing for a truly United Kingdom to keep playing its role in a European Union of peaceful, like-minded countries; or whether it is down at the level of a family and their friends in a small town, all working together to make their lives that bit better.
the unfinished article 
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