The Labour Party, from Blair to Corbyn and beyond

The Labour Party has suffered a massive defeat at the last general election on 12 December 2019, that caused the smashing of the so called Red Wall.

I asked David Landon Cole, political science tutor at the University of York, and a Labour member for many years, to talk to us about the last twenty years of the second largest party in the UK.

 What happened to the Blairites and to the New Labour?

 I joined the Labour party in 2002, so Tony Blair was the leader I joined under. When Labour won in 1997 I was just becoming aware of politics, victory was huge and they won a massive majority, 179 seats. I think that had a couple of effects. Labour had been out of power for a long time, so it didn’t have a lot of experience. The first term Labour made a lot of mistakes in legislation, and spend a lot of the second term dealing with these mistakes and so it went from something that was quite transformative and new to something more managerial.

Labour was in this managerial mode, and it had lost a lot of the 1997 spark, and then it became tarnished by the Iraq war, and the financial crisis hit. There is an argument to be made though that the Gordon Brown government, particularly Alistair Darling, who was Chancellor of the Exchequer at the time, did a good job in dealing with the issue in the short term. The Royal Bank of Scotland was like six hours from running out of money and so the way they dealt with it was just to make money available to keep them liquid. The problem is, you always have to pay up in the end, and so what happened was that there was less money available for everything, and you have the financial crisis, and every government that was in power at that time was going to be punished.

So, I think you have a combination of things: you lost the elections in 2010, people having paid the price because of money spent on dealing with the crisis, and if you like the zeal of 1997 had gone and so what you were left with in the Labour party was this slightly plodding managerialism that wasn’t very exciting, and because things had changed so much, Labour had been in power for a long time (1997-2010) people were wondering what do we do now. I think what happened to the Blairites to a large extent was  they had been in power for a long time, a lot of them lost their seats, a lot of them started retiring, and but also Blairism is very much of its age, when Tony Blair came to power in 1997 there were very benign economic circumstances, the economy was growing, we were talking about climate change already but it wasn’t such an existential threat, unemployment was low, inflation was low, and this is in part stuff the government did, though it can’t take credit for all.

Then Ed Miliband won the leadership, who was seen to be more to the Left. Criticism started to manifest as Tony Blair not really being Labour, and being rather a centrist. At the same time, a lot of people left the party, others retired, and others joined the party. It’s a process of natural wastage, but also a time the party stated to reflect about its period in government. At the same time, the party started thinking about its missed opportunity, which is partly what happened in 2020. Shortly before the 1997 election, Paddy Ashdown was looking at a coalition with Labour, and the party was expecting to be there for five-ten years, not to win three elections.

One of the things Labour was terrified about was its reputation for economic incompetence, so when Labour had lost in 1979 we’d had the “winter of discontent”, and also under Wilson, the pound had been devalued. So, one of the things Labour said is, we are committing to the conservative spending plans. So the Labour got this huge majority and started doing interesting things, like the independence of the Bank of England – Gordon Brown went to the Treasury and said right I want the Bank of England to be independent, how long do you think it will take, and they said six months and Brown supposedly said no I want it by next Friday. Later on, with Blair and then Brown we were just doing the business of administering the Government, we weren’t doing things like the New Deal, Sure Start, the independence of the Bank of England came relatively early on, and you can’t just keep setting on new things.

Labour promised to be economically responsible and social liberal, promoting low interest rates and low inflation. In the Eighties the interest rate hit 20%, and people still had memories of the Eighties when they suffered with mortgage payments and interest rates. So Labour wanted to show itself competent and wanted to be clean- the Conservatives were quite tired and they were hit by a number of scandals from 1992 – John Major had a campaign of “back to basics” about family values, and then there was a series of scandals with MPs, adultery and prostitutes and all of this, so you could say that Labour came in with a huge amount of zeal, a huge amount of enthusiasm, and I mean we still won in 2001 and 2005, but not with the same turnout, because of a decreased enthusiasm.

There were things that happened under Blair which were mistakes, and I’m thinking in terms of privatisation, so you have an increased use of private finance initiatives. Labour had pledged to keep the deficit down, so we went to PFIs. It’s more expensive for a private company to borrow than for the state, but because private companies were doing the borrowing they were kept off the state’s box, and it didn’t show up on the national deficit. In retrospect, that was a mistake, but the thing that was really a disaster was the PFI of the London Underground, so there were these companies set up to make infrastructure and maintenance work, tube lines and metros, that ended up collapsing. Basically, you can’t run a tube with a profit, and also the tube is really old, it’s got very particular problems, but in general the problem is that we were going be seen as going back to Callaghan, to Wilson, and spending out of control.

The NHS itself, often defined as the closest thing we have to a national religion, was never fully nationalised- the GPs are still private contractors, and you get partnerships where 3-4 GPs run a business, so when people see GPs as NHS employees, that’s not quite true. So, it is possible for private companies to run NHS services, and it’s interesting since 1948 nobody has really cared about GPs strange position. It could happen that private companies pick up the easy things and government in general is bad at doing contracts. So, in 1997 a lot of hospitals and schools were built quickly and that made a real, immediate obvious improvement, and the way it was done was through the private sector, and it was done without looking like economically insane.

Also, in the run up for 1997 elections, Labour had this wonderful new campaign technique, it put VHS tapes in the post. Now it sounds archaic, but way back then it was something different. Labour should have made hay when the sun shone. It should have been preparing during the good and for the bad times, as in Machiavelli, virtù e fortuna. I think it was true of all countries, I don’t think anybody was prepared for the financial crisis. You know this book by Nicholas Nassim Taleb, Black Swan, I think the crisis could not be predicted.

There was a certain amount of hubris, I remember Gordon Brown saying “we conquered boom and bust”, which had been the pattern of the Eighties, we conquered that, then the independence of the Bank of England, and then the interest rates would be cut, because it helps people with their mortgages and it feels better before the elections, we haven’t, it was just a globally benign economic period. Maybe we should have been more sceptical of the market.

Another thing was the expansion of the European Union, we allowed people to move to the UK without controls and that was a mistake because lots of people came to the UK and that caused a sudden increase of people in one specific area just because the government is very slow and bureaucratic it took a long time to give councils the money they need to deal with an increase in population.

My PhD was about the opposition to the far right and I interviewed many MPs from relatively deprived urban parts of England and they were warning from around 2003, 2004-2005 they were warning Blair and Alistair Campbell that some people were not benefiting from the developments here and Labour didn’t pick up on that. So, there were lots of things that Labour was doing to attract the middle classes. The feeling was, they had nowhere else to go. Now we know, after 20 some years, with Brexit and everything.

Wrexham, a town in North Wales, went conservative for the first time at the last election. If you went back 10 years they would have never thought that. Labour did not focus on the working classes. Now, a lot of what they did economically benefited financially the people at the bottom of the socio-economic pyramid. This was the time when we started doing devolution to Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland and to London. London is a wonderful city, but it’s a different country to England. Now England did not get that- and there was this perception that anybody expressing English national identity was racist, or dubious. Now, part of that goes back to the hooliganism of the 1980s, but also Labour was an elite project and thought that these people were backwards and that didn’t help. All of these things take a long time- would you have known in 1997 or 2010, that the effect of all that would be, much later on?

People talk often about the English parliament and I understand the sentiment, that you should have political representation for the nation, I understand that completely. Let’s go forward a little in the future: let’s say Scotland has left, let’s say that Northern Ireland has left, and you’ve got England and Wales, Wales has its own parliament, would you make a parliament for England? Administratively, that would seem very strange because you would still have a very centralised state, I think there’s an argument for more regional government in England, we have four levels of municipal government and nothing in between, and often overlapping. You’ve got some very strange boundaries and you end up going to MPs, when they have national concerns, and even the transmission of citizens concerns is very slow, particularly in England.

How did we get to Jeremy Corbyn, then?

I’ll put my cards on the table: I don’t like Jeremy Corbyn, I do not like the effect he’s had on the Labour party, I don’t like unfortunately a lot of the people who have come in.

Let’s go back to when Ed Miliband had just lost the election. Harriet Harman is the leader of the Labour party and was the leader of the house under Tony Blair – not a Blairite, but still. There was a welfare reform bill going through the Conservative government. Labour was worrying about being seen as wasting money and so it abstained instead of voting against it. That was at the time of the leadership election and enter Jeremy Corbyn, whom I don’t know anyone knew much about, he’s a fairly obscure backbencher. He came out saying very loudly “we should vote against it” and he’s seen as being properly left wing, properly Labour, and he had been very vocal against the Iraq war, and there was  a moment, these strange things happen, when the was a “corbynmania” and so because we’d had tried to move a bit left with Ed Miliband, and it didn’t work, people went for somebody that they felt was truly Labour.

I think Jeremy Corbyn is pretty close to being a communist, in a lot of his politics. The Labour party is emphatically not a communist party.  1945 is often seen as the great moment for Labour, with Atlee we set up the NHS, but we also set up the NATO. The foreign minister was Ernest Bevin: he was pretty clear it should be against the communists. I think two things happened; Corbyn comes to power without much scrutiny, some people usually go through the things said in the past and people he associated with, and it didn’t really come through, people didn’t think until very late in the contest who Jeremy Corbyn was, and under the system at the time to run to be a party leader you needed to have a number of MPs to nominate you, and people said we should have the left of the party have someone. Later on, Margaret Beckett MP admitted the biggest mistake of her political life was to nominate Corbyn.

You have this issue when Corbyn is suddenly the leader, but there’s no such thing as Corbynism, I think that it’s something very close to Bennism, you know from Tony Benn in the Eighties and a lot of it comes down to controlling the economy, but also very anti-Western.  I think lots of Corbyn’s positions are not pro-peace, they are anti-West, he has this narrative of being against imperialism, and therefore anything opposing imperialism is good, and this is why you see him supporting Hezbollah and such.

During the troubles in Northern Ireland, the IRA tried to assassinate Margaret Thatcher and it very gravely injured Norman Tebbit’s wife; now, whatever you think of Margaret Thatcher, assassinating your prime minister is not acceptable. Two weeks later, Corbyn had members of the IRA to the House of Commons, to have tea on the terrace. The narrative that’s emerged is that he was trying to bring peace to Northern Ireland, but there were other parties he might have gone to, the Labour party in Ireland, and in Northern Ireland, the SDOP, but her didn’t, he went to talk to Sinn Fein because it was an anti-imperialist party.

There’s one thing called EDM and there is one in the early -mid 2000s signed by Jeremy Corbyn praising a film about John Pilger, saying that the intervention in Kosovo was not real and the genocide did not happen. This is not okay. Intervening in Kosovo, and then in Sierra Leone was the right thing to do. So Corbyn has come to power and there was a group supporting his leadership campaign, called Momentum, which is not formally part of the Labour party. Like it or not, it was very effective at mobilising people… and you have quite a lot of people with quite familiar politics to the Eighties who had started reappearing.

And so you’ve got this hard left politics going on, and at the same time in the Labour party you have  what in jargon is an identity protective coalition. People had got very enthusiastic about Jeremy Corbyn, and there were things coming out about him- he sat down with Hamas, whether he’s an antisemite or not there’s a lot of very dodgy things he has said and people he's associated with, but people’s identity is tied up with their support for Corbyn, and so if you criticise him either you’re wrong, or you’re saying this because you want to do Jeremy down. So the reason people were attacking Corbyn was because people were scared of him.

The media doesn’t like the Labour party: Tony Blair was described as “the most dangerous man in Britain”. Famously, The Sun printed a picture of Neil Kinnock in a lightbulb, saying if this man wins will the last person to leave Britain turn the lights off. Corbyn too got a lot of criticism from the media, but you should expect it when you’re the leader of the Labour party.

There is a lot to criticise the Sharon or the Netanyahu government about, but the problem I have is when people say having a state is fine for everyone but not for the Jews. There’s a difference between saying the Israeli government should do something different from “Israel shouldn’t exist”. At the time of apartheid, everyone wanted a huge change in South African politics, but nobody called for the abolition of South Africa. The problem is that people have become so bound up in their support for Corbyn that if you trying to challenge him, you are not just wrong, but you’re also doing it for bad reasons.

About individual policies, Corbyn called for renationalising the trains and give 58 billions in pensions, and give everybody free internet and so on. The 2017 manifesto was popular, but the 2019 one was different. People keep saying “we nearly won” in 2017, but truth is, we didn’t. And then the catastrophe in 2019 ensued. People are starting to realise that some things fundamentally have changed. I heard people in the Labour party saying Corbynism is coherent, but it’s impractical, but I think it’s actually incoherent. I would want a society with more redistribution and a higher level of taxation, but I still want a capitalist society, with Norway, Sweden and Finland as direct examples. I am a fairly boring European socialdemocrat who finds himself wondering why I am in the same party as people who want a socialist society.  But going back to the proposal of nationalising the Internet, the intention was twofold: first, was to nationalise Open Reach, the second part was to give everybody free internet and the proposal to nationalise Open reach is not necessarily bad, but there’s more important things people need before free Internet.

Lots of people have joined the Labour party under Corbyn, others have left or become inactive, and whether that is going to change now I don’t know, I hope so. We have lots of internal problems with procedures not being followed and antisemitism, where factions within the Labour party made complaints go away, and that’s outrageous. We now have this investigation from the Human Rights Commission. We will accept the recommendations of the ECHR enquiry, they say, without thinking it’s a statutory enquiry, you have no choice whether accept the recommendations or not. You will follow them or you’ll be disbanded. People don’t understand the gravity of the situation. ECHR was set up by the Labour Party itself. It’s worrying people will just go along with the party.

To conclude on a more positive note (hopefully). Prospects for the Labour party?

I’m supporting Lisa Nandy, I think she’s got the best understanding whether the party can become disconnected from its base, though I don’t think she’s going to win.

I believe it’s going to be very difficult to win in 2024, Labour will need to work itself now to becoming a respectable organisation. Over the past twenty years there’s been a process of devolution. A man like Andy Burnham could enjoy more power as major of Manchester; he’s doing a very good job fighting homelessness.

Also housing and transport are showing very good ways Labour could go, making a practical difference to people’s lives. This would be the way to regain people’s trust.

The big thing we haven’t mentioned is Brexit. To a certain extent, Brexit is over: we made the decision, Labour will not have any saying in what the future relationship with the EU will be. Brexit was the major factor for the loss in 2019 and lots of people have crystallized the disconnection of the Labour party from its traditional base. What Labour had to do, was saying Brexit is going to happen, but the way you want to negotiate it is going to damage the UK economically. The 2019 election was a disaster, no matter how much people say Corbyn’s policies were popular, but it was such a disaster that it’ s a sort of zero reset, and Labour should really think why it exists.

I hope we will produce a party that is more in touch with reality and with the people it seems to represent. Eventually it will have to win the elections. I don’t think Boris Johnson made a very good campaign, I think he just sat down, shut up, and said let’s get Brexit done, and watch Labour implode. In 2017, when “we nearly won”, we didn’t win, Theresa May had an absolutely terrible campaign. The biggest policy was on social care and was nicknamed “the death tax”, I mean, and she won.

There is also a thing, social democratic parties across Europe are in decline, PD in Italy, PSOE in Spain, even the Parti Socialiste in France doesn’t exist anymore. To quote The Leopard by Tomasi di Lampedusa, for everything to stay the same, everything will have to change.