Labour has three paths forward – and we’re picking between the hardest two

May 7^th was a tragedy for Labour and for everyone counting on us to form a government. But I do remember that for a brief few weeks in May, I somehow still managed to feel strangely hopeful for the future of my party. Two months ago, a real debate had begun in earnest about how Labour could tackle the big questions that a tonnage of evidence told us had just cost us the chance to win power and make progressive changes in our country. For an instant, it seemed possible that we might learn the right lessons. And several bold leadership candidates stepped forward - representing three distinct paths for the party - once the dust settled on who had cleared the PLP nomination threshold on June 15^th.

Sadly though, it wasn’t long before that momentum was lost, and it seems Labour has quickly regressed to some of its worst habits and begun making life more difficult for itself (which by extension literally makes life far harder for millions who sorely need a Labour government to rescue them from the Tories). The ‘Corbynmania’ currently gripping the party is ultimate proof of that, but it is only the latest symptom.

Labour leadership candidates Jeremy Corbyn, Liz Kendall, Andy Burnham and
Yvette Cooper at the LGA Labour Group leadership hustings, July 2nd
(courtesy Anthony Mckeown, Flickr)

Electability – Liz Kendall

I wrote a blog back in May on why Liz Kendall is the strongest of our candidates for 2020 – a fresh face unburdened by the past, a clear voice for decentralisation, feared by the Tories and unflinching about lancing the boils that are keeping Labour from putting our values into practice in government.

However, it has become clear that her boomlet was not to last. Precisely because she was less of a known quantity in the party, Liz’s blunt honesty with the Labour selectorate about the scale of the problems we face has cost her dearly among a party still coming to terms with the difficult political realities it faces. I also cede this was compounded by miscalculations she herself made when commenting on divisive party issues that are less of an electoral necessity - her early comments on not closing any successful free schools were a case in point. As Stephen Bush commented recently, this has meant that in the eyes of much of the party, “no amount of worthy, left-wing policy on early years, ending tax reliefs or implementing a genuine living wage [or workers on boards, protecting trade unions and child tax credit, opposing inheritance tax cuts etc] will make up for Kendall’s early heresies”. 

I will still back her all the way to September 12^th, as she remains our strongest candidate and has earned our support, but right now it is hard to be optimistic about her chances.

Rebuilding – Yvette Cooper or Andy Burnham

Failing a long-shot Kendall victory, it would have been wise to assume conventional wisdom would have held, with either Andy Burnham or Yvette Cooper winning and at least uniting the party (more likely Andy if YouGov is to be believed). As I said in my pro-Kendall post in May, I believe both have great strengths and either could carry the party forward in 2020, although Cooper offers us more of a chance for a “Ferraro moment” where Labour finally cracks the glass ceiling that has seemingly existed for Labour women.

My concern has more been that the reality of entrenched narratives, never to be underestimated in politics, will simply hold them back from taking us all the way into government. After boundary changes we will be over 100 seats from a majority of one, and there is a deep disconnect remaining between Labour and the public which can only be bridged through clarity and sustained focus. 

Both have in some way referenced the party’s acute challenges on economic competence, immigration and to a lesser extent on welfare, but so did Ed Miliband’s Labour party – it just didn’t do it early or consistently enough. Andy and Yvette’s close associations with the last government and Ed’s frontbench and the way in which the dynamics of the leadership contest have forced them to be cautious could well combine to prevent them from moving us onwards enough. Despite their best efforts, either may be constrained in their attempts to renew the party for 2020. I’ll also add that I dearly hope I’m proven wrong in all that analysis – as I said, Andy and Yvette are both impressive, and I’d be proud to have either of them as leader. But I remain fearful that iron laws of British politics cannot be outrun, just as Ed couldn’t escape them in May.

Because of that, I had viewed the leadership contest as a tacit choice for Labour about our aims in 2020. On the one hand, Andy or Yvette could represent a repetition of what Labour did achieve in 1987 with Neil Kinnock – uniting the party and rebuilding and advancing from the 1983-style defeat of 2015, but with no expectation of winning and the need for at least one subsequent electoral “heave” thereafter. By contrast, I recently saw Kendall backer Wes Streeting MP summarise her candidacy as a bid to “skip the 80s and the 90s and just get to the winning”.

But in that, Kendall has exactly the same problem Dennis Healey and Roy Hattersley in the 80s (and David Miliband in 2010) had – she is the best choice if electability is the whole party’s priority, but in practice the Labour movement as a whole would be less comfortable with her and would struggle to stay united during modernisation. That means there is still logic in choosing Andy or Yvette, given the additional constraints Labour chooses to impose on itself.

Self-immolation – Jeremy Corbyn

In recent weeks, however, even the hope of that 1987-style fightback have been ripped away, as the sharp leftward lean of tens of thousands of new Labour members and an adverse reaction to May’s result have catapulted far-left backbencher Jeremy Corbyn into a strong position in the contest. If the YouGov poll that came out last week is to be believed, he currently has 43% of the first preference vote, to 26% for Andy and 20% for Yvette. On transfers, Corbyn then beats Andy 53%-47%. The final part I still find hard to imagine happening in practice, and some have of course raised caveats about the poll. But unless it is wrong in its entirety, it seems Labour is now in the process of voluntarily narrowing its options to its second-best path in Andy/Yvette and an unquestionably self-defeating one in Corbyn.

There is a general sense Corbyn has caught fire in the CLP nominations race and raised the passions of thousands of Labour party members on a scale none of the three moderate frontbenchers have been able to match, but this is for the same reason that Clegg in 2010 or UKIP and the Greens more recently did in general elections. Unburdened by the hard graft of government, either in the past or by the prospect of it in the future, Corbyn can say whatever he likes against three opponents who have real responsibilities to honour and consequences to think about. That the general electorate was drawn to that after years of let downs by the mainstream parties is understandable, if unfortunate. That Labour is turning to that after two devastating losses and amid the prospect of years of Tory government is unconscionable.

At my local Islington South CLP nomination meeting last Wednesday, the Corbyn supporters were out in force and ultimately outvoted our MP Emily Thornberry, who spoke out against the idea of electing her close colleague from Islington North to the leadership and instead backed Yvette. One of the more articulate Corbynites implored the room to believe that the evidence from history or research on why we lost the election aren’t clear enough for us to draw any conclusions about whether Corbyn is electable. But this was clearly one of those times in a debate when a person saying “it’s not clear what the evidence tells us” essentially meant “the actual evidence contradicts my preconceived worldview".

The supporting nomination I cast at
my CLP meeting on July 22nd 

While we may have lost Scotland to an SNP that appeared to stand to our left, Scotland only has 59 seats out of 650 in the Commons and evidence suggests that voting allegiances in Scotland tend to overstate the ideological gap between Scottish and English voters anyway (I blogged about this last year). Further, a key factor attracting many Scots to the SNP is the dream of an independent Scotland free of English Tory rule, something which Labour only fails to guard the Scots against within the context of the UK because with a few exceptions, we are not good enough at winning elections in England (in turn, this is probably historically attributable largely to the outsize influence of people like the Corbynites within Labour, as it happens).

In England and Wales, the failure of the 35% strategy in May showed you can’t build a coalition purely of left-wing voters. Research has now shown that a fair number of the 29% who voted Labour under Gordon Brown in 2010 rejected the hubristic notion that they still had to vote for us after we adopted a leader they found less credible, with the largest shares of them defecting to the Tories or UKIP (with the SNP in Scotland and the Greens behind). By another order, the more moderate among the 30.4% who backed Labour this time would doubtlessly balk at a Corbyn-led Labour in much the same way.

Lib Dems, Greens, young people and 2010 non-voters also did not come to us in the numbers we hoped, despite a slight leftward shift in the party’s own outlook and intense public debate over the possibility that the SNP would encourage a Prime Minister Miliband to take a firmer anti-austerity, anti-Trident line in exchange for backing him in a hung parliament (this was also likely the moment that the Conservatives secured their small majority, as horrified English swing voters went to great lengths to ensure Labour wasn’t in a position to even be tempted by such a deal). And though the Green vote in England and Wales increased in 2015 to about a million, we would still have been a distant second in the popular vote even if we’d won every single one of them, and much of the Green vote is inefficiently concentrated in urban constituencies that already elected Labour MPs anyway. The Corbyn strategy was already inadvertently fire-tested by Labour this time around, and it performed appallingly.

Some Corbyn supporters also mention Clement Attlee’s win in 1945 as if it were somehow proof Corbyn can prevail, but this too is nonsense. Even putting aside the likelihood that British politics may have changed just a bit in the past 70 years, “spirit of 1945” now appears to be to the Labour left what the Reagan era has become to the Republican right in the US – a distant memory distorted into a nostalgic myth that somehow proves that you can both win and govern from total purity, without compromise with reality. Reagan certainly did realign America to the right, but Tea Party Republicans also mistakenly cite him as proof you can govern without raising taxes (he did, 11 times) or negotiating with your opposition in Congress (Reagan had a Democratic-controlled House of Representatives, so he had to).

In the same vein, Corbyn supporters want to rely on a non-existent coalition of anti-austerity voters because they don’t want to confront the Fabian Society’s challenging finding that 4 of the 5 voters Labour needs in 2020 just voted for the Tories – by contrast, Attlee started out his life as a Tory, proving that no one is beyond conversion. At a Stevenage hustings, Corbyn supporters in the audience cheered him for pledging to scrap Trident and booed Andy, Liz and Yvette for wanting to renew it – the revelation that you can’t be truly Labour while supporting a strong national defence would have surprised Attlee, who established Britain’s nuclear deterrent and took us into NATO. And while Attlee is rightly remembered as the man who built the NHS and the welfare state in government, he also knew that for better or worse, to govern is always to choose – in 1948 he froze wages and in 1951, he split his own party when he controversially dipped into the National Insurance fund to finance the war in Korea. Attlee was a model of hard-nosed achievement, not impotent purity. As LabourList's Conor Pope noted, Labour moderates like Andy, Liz or Yvette can more readily claim his legacy than the Corbynites.

And so we have before us a battle for Labour’s soul. As in the wake of 1983, the party may simply not be in the right frame of mind to pursue its best option, on the grounds that they are felt to be too far to the party’s right for the entire Labour movement to stomach it at the current time. But in a sense our situation is now worse than that. A longer middle road to eventual relevance of the kind Kinnock once trod is viewed with greater disdain now, and as with far-left back then, the new generation of Labour seem more interested in ineffectual, self-righteous protest against the Tories than any honest attempt to remove them from government. Labour’s moderates – all those who want to fight the Tories in deed as well as words – now have less than 50 days left to save the party. I'm left thinking about Kinnock’s stirring words to conference in 1985, as he battled a similar threat to the party in Militant: