And that includes the Corbyn years, argues Mike Phipps, reflecting on some of the issues raised in Jon Cruddas’s A Century of Labour, published by Polity and reviewed earlier this year on Labour Hub.

Why has Labour underperformed in British politics? Why has the Party often struggled to win elections and then hold on to power? Jon Cruddas asks the right questions in the Preface to this book, but I’m not sure he finds all the answers.

Cruddas locates the answer at the ideological level. Now, compared to other European democratic socialist parties, Labour is often seen as lacking in ideology, substituting Labourism for any founding commitment to socialism. But alongside other parties – the Tories especially, until recently – Labour has often been seen as too ideological. Or is the problem the wrong ideology: too much, or arguably too little, collectivism relative to individualism?

The ‘Betrayal Myth’

The author rails against those in Labour who have a “sentimental attachment and an idealized sense of its past, one that is prone to misrepresentation and historical myth making and that promotes widely held false beliefs about the purpose of the party. This has regularly fostered disunity, for instance with myths of a leadership betrayal of an essential Labour purpose such as over the events of 1931, or In Place of Strife in 1969 or the actions of the New Labour government after 1997.”

But is ‘leadership betrayal’ a myth? Virtually the entire Party viewed Ramsay MacDonald’s becoming head of a National Government in 1931 as a betrayal – were they wrong? Then there is Labour’s propensity to ignore the yearnings of its voters and do the direct opposite, as with its anti-union White Paper in 1969, and so often under New Labour. This is a recurring theme, whether you call it a betrayal or not.

More specifically, the complete collapse of the Labour vote between 1929 and 1931 from 287 MPs to just 52 can hardly be attributed to internal disunity fostered by a readiness to look for betrayals, however palpable the treachery may be. Cruddas’s judgement that, “The two minority governments suggested the party had grown too quickly and lacked a coherent policy programme” ducks the obvious question. Why had so many put their faith in a Labour government and what – programmatically or not – did they expect it to do? Why did they abandon it so quickly? These are pertinent questions for the contemporary Party leadership.

The question is posed again after 1945. Political exhaustion is often suggested as the main reason for the collapse of the post-war Attlee government, after six energetic years of impressive reforms. But why was Labour then out of power for 13 years?

Then came the Wilson years. Rather like Tony Blair’s first term – are invariably praised in terms of their liberal achievements – legalisation of abortion and homosexuality, relaxation of censorship, etc. – rather than any decisive shift in the economic and social fundamentals. That clearly wasn’t enough for voters.

Cruddas doesn’t really address why Labour lost the 1970 general election. Nor does he explain why it regained power in 1974, even though the left had increased its influence markedly. His verdict on Labour in this period – that its redistributionist focus was derailed by lack of growth – is true up to a point but too general. The supposed failure by 1979 of the ‘Social Contract’  – the arrangement with the TUC whereby the latter would lean on its members to restrain their pay demands in return for government improvements in the social wage – neglects the fact that it did actually work for a while. It was derailed primarily by the government’s IMF-imposed cuts, which turned out to be entirely unnecessary, based as they were on Treasury miscalculations.  

In the wilderness

The book’s analysis of the 18 years Labour spent in opposition isa bit thin. It’s easy to dismiss the 1979 to 1983 period as simply one of “factional conflict” and equally easy to dismiss the dire 1983 general election results as the fruits of this. But it’s lazy to suggests that “With Kinnock gradually asserting his authority, Labour improved its performance”: in fact, the factionally motivated approach of the Kinnock leadership often held the Party back. Electoral gains – such as there were – were often achieved, similar to now, as a consequence of the unpopular policies of the Tory government.

As Cruddas lists Neil Kinnock’s ‘achievements’, it’s clear these amount largely to settling scores with the left, whether it’s attacking the National Union of Mineworkers leadership during their historic strike or expelling ‘entryists’ – rather than mounting effective opposition to the Tory government.

As we have argued previously on Labour Hub, Neil Kinnock lost the 1987 general election on his own terms – a lacklustre manifesto and a big emphasis on his own personality – although overturning a Tory majority of 144 was always going to be hard.

“But the lesson Labour’s leadership drew from the 1987 defeat was the need to replace the values of social solidarity and collectivism with a Thatcherite commitment to individualism, consumerism and the market – even though within a few years the economic downturn would make these ideas look hollow. None of these changes helped Labour’s performance, however, because Neil Kinnock’s personal ratings were so low – just 18% in December 1988…

“Part of the problem was Kinnock’s obsession – like that of the current leader – with witch-hunting the left of the Party, proscribing groups and suspending members. Kinnock spent more time on internal Party management than any previous leader and consequently he came across as a functionary rather than a future Prime Minister.”

By the end of his term as Party leader, investigations into local parties and disciplinary action against individuals had affected members in over 80 constituencies in all regions of the country, as Richard Heffernan and Mike Marqusee have documented in their definitive 1992 account Defeat from the Jaws of Victory: Inside Kinnock’s Labour Party. In September 1991, polls showed that 85% of Tory supporters were satisfied with John Major, but only 57% of Labour supporters were happy with Neil Kinnock. Less than a year later, Labour lost the 1992 general election.

We should remember those figures and bear in mind too that a poll last year had 47% of Labour voters satisfied with Keir Starmer’s leadership, with 45% against, compared to 75% of Tory voters satisfied with Rishi Sunak. Then as now, Labour was expected to win the next general election: these figures show it’s not guaranteed.

New Labour

Two leaders later, Labour did win. 1997’s landslide victory is usually attributed to Tony Blair and the proclamation of New Labour but contemporary surveys suggest that the electorate had more radical instincts. A Gallup poll showed that 86% of voters believed that taxes would go up under Labour – yet still voted for them. 72% of voters in May 1997 wanted an income tax increase to fund better education and public services. 74% wanted no further privatisations. 58% wanted wealth redistribution. 

New Labour was a disappointment to many by this yardstick, missing a golden opportunity to deal with poverty and exclusion, build affordable housing or modernise the economy. But it was also a failure on its own terms. As Cruddas suggests, Tony Blair’s governments were “judged against own proclamations of national reformation rather than more mundane criteria of incremental change and service delivery.” In particular, there was nothing new and ground-breaking about the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Blair’s tawdry tailing of an extreme neocon US Administration, devoid of moral purpose and sold to the public on the basis of fabrications and subterfuges.

The author understands how catastrophic this policy was – not least for the Prime Minister himself: “Blair’s popularity collapsed. From once having received the highest recorded approval ratings of any Prime Minister, the onset of the Iraq War and the carnage that followed saw him record some of the lowest.”

Cruddas is keen to celebrate the achievements of the first half of the Blair decade, although it should be remembered that the most radical of these – the constitutional reforms from devolution to Lords reform and the Human Rights Act – had largely been lifted from the Liberal Democrats’ programme. On other fronts, the record was less substantial and at times quite regressive: welfare cuts, tuition fees and a relentlessly socially authoritarian approach from successive New Labour Home Secretaries.

Gordon Brown’s stint at Number Ten was largely shaped by the economic crash. Cruddas is perhaps being too optimistic when he suggests that, until that took over the agenda, “Brown looked to be embracing democracy and equality as key organizing principles for a post-Blair revival.“ In any event, declining electoral support – fuelled by internal squabbles at leadership level while members could only look on in despair – signalled a terminal crisis for the New Labour experiment, introduced with such fanfare and orchestrated optimism.

The Corbyn phenomenon

The author rightly roots the failure of Ed Miliband’s leadership of the Party in his reluctance to follow through on the radicalism promised in his campaign and sketched out in the early days of his rule. It was also due, in my view, to the undermining that he faced as leader, both organisationally and politically, from the right of the Party, who continued to push warmed over uninspiring New Labour themes such as fiscal orthodoxy and social conservatism – particularly anti-migrant rhetoric.

Miliband was succeeded in 2015 by Jeremy Corbyn. Cruddas acknowledges the authenticity and “moral clarity” of Corbyn but doesn’t fully appreciate just what a “phenomenon” he was – not my words, but Gordon Brown’s. I remember a meeting in northwest London during his 2015 leadership campaign, which had been organised at just a few days’ notice, which saw hundreds queuing around the block. This was utterly unprecedented.

And so was the campaign of destabilisation against him once he became leader, by both MPs and Party officials, culminating in the pathetic attempt to remove him in 2016 by the unknown Owen Smith – nobody more senior had the courage to front such a lost cause. Amid these distractions, the new leadership was attempting to map out a coherent programme of radical policies that gave expression to Labour’s traditional values of collectivism, community and solidarity, rather than abandoning them for egotistical individualism in the manner of Blair.

Where others have written out of history the shock general election result that cost Prime Minister May her majority, Cruddas at least recognises the achievement of Corbyn: “He successfully forged a populist socialist politics built around housing, student debt, anti-racism, anti-imperialism and ecological concerns, alongside support for unions and a wider precariat that in 2017 brought Labour close to securing one of the most astonishing election victories in British history.”

The Tories learned from the 2017 near defeat in a way that Labour did not. The author is accurate in his observation that the leader’s staff “reportedly viewed their campaign ‘as a blueprint for future success’, and missed an opportunity for more fundamental reorganization of both personnel and direction.” This ‘one more heave’ mentality was one of the factors in the 2019 electoral defeat. There were others, from antisemitism smears to the balancing act over Brexit, discussed in more detail elsewhere.

But more significantly, the 2017 result had masked a long term decline in core aspects of the Labour vote, which tipped into a significant seat loss in the ‘Red Wall’ in 2019. The hew Starmer leadership misread many of the drivers of this phenomenon and assumed wrongly that a socially conservative line, especially on migration, would neutralise the problem.

“A brutal centralization”

Starmer ran for the leadership on an ethical socialist platform – concretely his famous ten pledges. Most have now been abandoned, along with their philosophical underpinning. Cruddas is scathing:

“The desire for internal reconciliation and the campaign pledge to restore the democratic culture of the party never materialized. Once in office, Starmer oversaw a brutal centralization of power on strictly factional lines and the removal of any signs of independent thought from prospective Labour candidates.”

Besides these internal injustices, a few of which Cruddas documents, Starmer’s moral case for socialism was abandoned, along with many concrete policies. With nothing much offered as an alternative, “Criticism quickly mounted, suggesting Starmer stood for little and lacked any clear vision for the Labour Party.” The author’s attempt to read the Starmer leadership more positively as an “attempt to rebuild Labour’s historical coalition” is not convincing.

It’s assumed that Labour will win the next general election, although to do so, the Party would need a record electoral swing. Cruddas is accurate in his diagnosis that the last Labour government “lost trust and moral purpose following the invasion of Iraq and became increasingly illiberal.” Can it rediscover its moral purpose and liberal instincts under Keir Starmer?

The problem of the current Labour leadership is that is fixated on defining itself against the Corbyn era – rather than putting together an election-winning coalition of support. This may be because the forces around Starmer originally believed that the only thing that could be achieved in a single term, in conditions of an 80 seat deficit, was marginalising the left.

Not any more. The implosion of Johnson’s government and the disastrous Truss experiment mean voters are sick of the Tories. But that may express itself in an anti-politics backlash: many are still not convinced Labour offers a viable alternative.

2017 revisited

If the current Party leadership really want to win, it has to offer something that will enthuse a huge number of non-voters who have suffered greatly under 14 years of Tory rule. As Andrew Fisher has pointed out, an estimated 1.4 million voters who voted Labour in 2017 did not vote in 2019. They need to be inspired.

To reach them means mobilising the Party’s grassroots too – at a time when many members feel undervalued and mistreated by Starmer’s authoritarian factionalism. Rank and file activists who worked so tirelessly at previous elections may not be so keen to tramp the streets for Starmer’s diluted programme.

I’m not sure that Cruddas really answers the questions he raises at the start of the book, in particular why Labour struggles to win and hold power. Perhaps, this is because he looks at Labour history too ideologically, from the standpoint of three competing theories of justice. The answer may be far simpler: Labour fails because, unlike the Tories, its governments consistently fail to deliver for their electoral base, who either stop voting or, in recent years, switch to other parties. It mattered little to electoral outcomes that Labour voters began switching to UKIP in the early 21^st century. But it counted a lot more when Labour were wiped out in Scotland by the SNP in 2015 and lost key heartlands to the Johnson’s Tories in 2019.

It’s an open question as to whether Keir Starmer can build the necessary vote-winning coalition. Young liberal-minded voters are alienated, as are Muslim voters. Poorer voters are de-motivated – as are activists. The problem with aiming all of your appeal at disaffected Tory voters – which pays dividends in by-elections – is that these can be very uncertain supporters in a general election. If Starmer’s central claim is that he can run the country more competently than the Tories – which should not be difficult – his management of his own Party in recent weeks throws doubt even on this.

Instead of writing the entire Coirbyn experience out of history, anyone serious about helping Labour win the next general election needs to take a close look at 2017, when Labour got their best vote in forty years, Blair’s two landslides excepted. That vote was achieved on the basis of a clear, winning narrative, a manifesto enshrining popular policies and an enthusiastic grassroots membership.

It wasn’t enough but it showed the possibilities. What demographics were Labour not winning in that election? What could have been done better? Why was the electoral narrative so much more successful than in 2019? The key to future Labour victories lies in the answers to these questions. Those who deliberately erase the 2017 experience do so at our electoral peril.

Mike Phipps’ book Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow: The Labour Party after Jeremy Corbyn (OR Books, 2022) can be ordered here.