A bad awakening on Friday the thirteenth

Friday the thirteenth. Unlucky for some. Unlucky for the British Labour Party. Above all unlucky for those the Labour Party is intended to protect.

A party goes into an election seeking a fourth successive victory, something that has only happened once previously since universal suffrage was introduced in Britain. It does it after nearly a decade of ruinous austerity leaving the nation unprotected by a police force starved of resources, and with its national health service struggling even to survive. It does it under the leadership of Boris Johnson, a man entirely exposed as a liar and a cheat.

Such a party with such a leader stands not a chance of success.

Boris Johnson: gloating, entitled, triumphant
The face of Britain for maybe five years, and maybe more

And yet Boris has not merely succeeded, he has emerged with a comfortable majority. Why? Because the forces arrayed against him were so utterly inept that they couldn’t win an election that was offered up to them on a platter.

The Liberal Democrat party had a new leader, Jo Swinson, who ran a lacklustre campaign which left her party with ten fewer seats at the end that it had had at the beginning. One of the seats lost was her own.

Outside parliament, the People’s Vote campaign, far from uniting all the forces favouring continued British membership of the European Union, fell into faction squabbling and purges. Other Remain organisations came up with recommendations for tactical voting to keep the Tories out which contradicted each other. An unedifying, chaotic babble of voices with no clear leadership.

The worst of all, though, was Labour, because it was the biggest party and therefore had the most responsibility.

Jeremy Corbyn consolidated his place in Labour history as the second worst leader the Party has had, behind only Ramsay MacDonald, its first Prime Minister, who betrayed everything it stood for by forming a coalition government with the Tories in 1931. His action reduced the party’s parliamentary presence to just 52.

Corbyn campaigned as a man of principle, but wouldn’t tell the electorate where he stood on the biggest question of his time, Brexit. Most suspected that he remained what he’d always been, a Brexiter, but he compounded that suspicion by making it clear that his refusal to say was designed to avoid alienating either Leave voters or Remainers. Since both sides knew he was equivocating in order to make them both think he was on their side, both sides turned against him.

Few voters understood what was honest about that kind electoral opportunism.

Equally, Corbyn failed to act on allegations of anti-Semitism in the party. At first, my sense was that he was just extremely indolent and couldn’t bring himself to move quickly on the charges that were brought. But then I realised that there were skeletons in his closet too. For instance, he wrote a foreword for the reissue of Imperialism: A Study by John Atkinson Hobson, in which he described the book as “brilliant”. The book talks about European finance being controlled “by men of a single and peculiar race, who have behind them many centuries of financial experience,” which puts them “in a unique position to control the policy of nations”. No prizes for guessing which race Hobson meant.

Was that Corbyn’s problem in dealing with anti-Semitism? He might have had to take action against people expressing views like those he had endorsed in this foreword.

I don’t think many British voters care all that much about us Jews, either for or against. But they’re quick at identifying equivocation and evasion, and what Corbyn was doing over anti-Semitism was extremely dodgy. It wasn’t the anti-Semitism itself that killed him, it was the dodginess.

In the same way, it wasn’t the position he took over Brexit that damaged him, it was the sense that it wasn’t straight.

He compounded these strategic errors with tactical ones, starting with agreeing to the election being held on 12 December, to suit Boris Johnson’s timetable rather than his own. Corbyn, it strikes me, is not particularly bright and didn’t see that if Boris wanted the election now, that was an excellent reason for saying no. Instead, Corbyn went ahead and got creamed.

This is the second time we’ve been through this in my lifetime. The first was in 1983, the last occasion on which the hard left took control of Labour, and was reduced to its smallest parliamentary representation since 1935. That 1935 election, by the way, was significant because it was the first step back towards office by the Labour Party, after its catastrophe of 1931.

The election of 1983 was appalling, therefore. But it has been outdone by the 2019 one. In 1983, Labour emerged with 209 MPs, in 2019 with just 203. The 2019 election has taken over from 1983 as the worst for Labour since 1935.

The common theme Corbyn’s and the others’ dismal attempts to confront Boris was lack of leadership. None of them could rally the disparate forces opposed to his plans into a focused movement against him. Now he’s in with a vengeance, and his vengeance will be terrible.

He will, of course, now force Brexit through. Since it is not the fact of leaving the EU that will be hard or soft, but the nature of the trade agreement we negotiate or fail to negotiate with the EU, we are by no means yet safe from a hard Brexit.

Next will be the continued attacks on the poor and on public services. Boris will continue to promise greater investment in the police, in social care and in healthcare, but the reality will be otherwise. After a few years, the poor and many of the not-so-poor will be a great deal less well off than they are today.

What does all this mean? 

The fightback starts today.

The first step is to take back control of the Labour Party. Though Corbyn has said he will not lead Labour into another election, there are signs that some Corbynists at least will attempt to retain their dominance in the party. That may be less easy for them to do than they think. Some of the most zealous will certainly stick with the project but others may drift away, disappointed by the results. Others may simply realise that they would do better to work with other currents inside Labour, that a compromise that gives some of what they want is better than purity which gives them none of it.

Assuming that we can pull together to elect a leader who actually leads – and there are people who meet that requirement in Labour, such as Yvette Cooper or Keir Starmer – then a long slow process begins. After the crushing defeat of 1983, Labour lost two more elections before winning one. Can we win more quickly this time? Let’s hope so, but let’s remember what a long haul it was back then.

The other crucial step is to start the process of getting Britain back into the EU. That will certainly be a generational matter. I don’t expect to live long enough to see it myself, but it needs to be started. It is linked with the first step, since Labour has a crucial role to play in the process, and can’t while led by closeted Brexiters.

There are difficult times ahead. But difficulties aren’t overcome by not confronting them – Corbyn’s experience on Brexit and anti-Semitism shows that. A real leader will confront them, and real leadership is what we need.

Above all, we have to learn from our mistakes. We’ve been through it twice, in 1983 and 2019: the hard left takes charge and we’re thrashed in the subsequent election. That demonstrates the principle that if you don’t learn from your mistakes, you merely repeat them.

Two such routs were bad enough. Let’s make sure we don’t have a third.

A little humour, a little much-needed bloody-mindedness

Many years ago, I enjoyed watching the French film Ridicule, which focuses on how the court of Louis XVI – yes, the one who ended up losing his head on the guillotine – had made a cult of wit, deemed to be fiendishly clever though it was often also fiendishly cruel. 

The film contrasted such wit with a more British quality, which it called  ‘humour’, and clearly viewed as greatly superior.

At one point, the protagonist, a celebrated wit, meets the King who asks him to say something funny, there, immediately, on the spur of the moment.

“Be witty this minute!”

But on what subject could he be spontaneously witty? The King has a suggestion.

“Use me, for example.”

The wit has the perfect answer.

“Sire, the king is not a subject.”

I thought that was brilliant, but I suppose you could argue that it is perhaps spoiled by a deferential quality verging on the obsequious.

The contrast is emphasised at the end of the film by a French aristocrat, by then in exile in England while the revolution is running wild in his country, walking along a cliff path above a breath-taking seascape. A gust of wind takes his hat. He cries out.

“My hat! I’ve lost it.”

“Better than your head,” his English companion replies.

“Humour!” replies the Frenchman, “it’s marvellous!”

Ridicule: A hat is lost, but a head is spared

To me, that is as witty as the first rejoinder. But there is indeed a difference: it doesn’t establish any kind of hierarchy between the speakers, it shows neither deference to the other person or superiority over him, but merely shares a smile between equals. If that’s humour rather than wit then, yes, I too prefer it.

Sadly, in the last two or three years that famous British sense of humour has been a little scarce in public discourse. The leadership of both the Labour and Conservative parties take themselves far too seriously to allow of any smiles. So it was good to see something of the spirit reappear a little, even though it was  on the Tory side at the expense of Labour, and it felt more like wit than humour: the comments were designed to belittle opponents.

It seems that Environment Minister Michael Gove, even though he’s generally someone to laugh at rather than with, showed some elegance when he described MPs who hope Theresa May can get a better Brexit deal than she has so far, as swingers in their fifties hoping that Scarlett Johansson would show up at one of their parties. Quite amusing though I was glad to read that Amber Rudd, speaking up for the female side, suggested “or Pierce Brosnan”.

The Justice Secretary, David Gauke, went one further and described the official Labour Brexit position as hoping for Johansson to show up on a unicorn. Cruel but hardly unfair: Jeremy Corbyn keeps suggesting that if elected, he will somehow bring home a hugely preferable deal to May’s, with absolutely no evidence to suggest that he could do any such thing.

At least the comments were worth a smile, not something that marks British politics much these days.

But there’s another quality my compatriots regard as quintessentially British. It’s a certain cussedness, if not downright bloody-mindedness, which refuses to allow power to do just what it likes. “Over my dead body,” it seems to say, or even “over your dead body” – after all, we cut off our King’s head nearly a century and a half before the French more famously did the same to theirs.

It’s particularly welcome to see that spirit stirring again.

Twice in 24 hours, the May government has been defeated in the House of Commons by MPs across parties working to prevent a cliff-edge, no-deal Brexit. It is heartening, in this parliamentary democracy, to see parliamentarians asserting their right to resist the government.

What’s more, the initiatives came from the backbenches, not the party leaderships. Yvette Cooper, leadership candidate defeated by Corbyn led one attack. Dominic Grieve, ex-Tory Minister, guided the other. The leaders merely opposed, in the case of May who was defending her deal, or followed, in the case of Corbyn who is, well, Jeremy Corbyn.

The government was particularly angry over the second defeat, with the Speaker of the House of Commons, John Bercow, who allowed the vote to take place. Precedent was against him, and it was a decision that seriously threatened the government’s usual prerogative to decide what gets discussed and what gets voted on. But what it showed was a Speaker intent on seeing all parliamentarians able to decide national policy, and not just the minority of them that form the government.

A refreshing notion.

The Speaker, though originally a Conservative himself,
getting right up Tory noses by asserting the authority of Parliament

And there’s a delicious irony to it, too. Brexiters keep saying that the aim of leaving the EU was to ‘take back control’. I don’t think this is what they had in mind, but I’m revelling in the spectacle of Parliament reasserting its authority over the Executive, which had been allowed to erode away far too far.

Now, that’s the kind of control I’m only too glad to see us taking back.

Especially as it’s so cussed. And gives us a lot to smile about.

Labour: the greatest fun for the greatest number

No one’s ever disappointed by the British Conservative Party. It always entirely fulfils expectations, which it has learned to set painfully low. So it generates indifference rather than enthusiasm, shrugs rather than frowns, murmurs of “whatever” rather than cries of “betrayal.”

People hope for much more from Labour. Expectations seem to range from ushering in the earthly paradise down to, at a minimum, ending poverty, eliminating nuclear weapons and teaching business executives a sense of community.

The Party is currently in a contest to elect a new leader, to replace underwhelming and soundly beaten Ed Miliband. And, inevitably, that has engendered disappointment.

The campaign is generally deemed stodgy, dull, uninspiring. Why, even David Cameron, minimally revered Conservative Prime Minister, has got in on the act, warning journalists that Labour seemed not to have learned a thing from its election defeat. It’s a view to be taken as seriously as one would expect, given the acumen he has shown, along with his concern for the good of the Labour Party.

The disappointment’s unfair. The contest has provided many edifying sights. For instance, after calling the 7 May General Election lamentably wrong, you might expect a period of humbled silence from the polling organisation. So it’s been a delight to see YouGov publishing its findings that Jeremy Corbyn, the veteran Left Winger, was set to win the election. By the way, he’s always often to as “veteran”: it seems that the word just means 66 years old, or possibly having been in parliament for 32 years.

Jeremy Corbyn:
Labour's way of spreading delight across the political spectrum

YouGov had Corbyn winning over Andy Burnham by 53% to 47%. Another poll, organisation unnamed (presumably because commissioned by one of the candidates), showing Corbyn winning over Yvette Cooper by 51% to 49%. So polls maintain the track record of consistency which is such a fine indication of reliability.

It’s the election itself, though, rather than polls that is giving the best value for money.

Basing myself mostly on what I can see happening in my local constituency Labour Party and the one next door – both firmly in the Corbyn camp – rather than on polls, a Corbyn win does feel likely to me. In which case it seems to me time for the public to recognise the service that Labour is providing: this is surely the result that brings the greatest happiness to the greatest number.

Most people in the Labour Party will be pleased if Corbyn wins. After all, he says what so many feel. In the past, certain policies that don’t stand a chance of winning majority support have been dropped – say nationalisation of many industries, thoroughly discredited by the experience of the fifties to the eighties: they cost a fortune and delivered lousy service. So instead we preferred to concentrate on the goals that measures such as nationalisation were intended to meet, like reducing poverty, setting out to achieve them by other means.

With Corbyn in charge, though, we could drop all such mealy-mouthed restraint. We can once more proclaim the post-World War 2 commitment to nationalisation, whether voters like it or not.

Moreover, those in the Labour Party who preferred a more “politician-like” response to events have to salute him too. Just a few days ago Corbyn wouldn’t rule out campaigning for Britain to leave the European Union; now he’s clarified his position and favours Britain staying in.

Isn’t that wonderful? Corbyn’s not above the “clarification” ploy, the standard means by which a politician realigns his views when he realises they aren’t popular. And the “won’t rule out” stance is an excellent preliminary to the ploy: it means “I’m keeping my options open until I work out which way the wind’s blowing.”

Clearly the veteran’s come of age. He may not be quite the Tony Blair yet, but he’s shown that he too can play the duplicitous game.

So Corbyn has everything to please the Labour Party, across the spectrum. And as for the Tories, a Corbyn will delight them. The Conservatives couldn’t possibly hope for an adversary preferable to Corbyn. They’ll pick out quotes from his speeches to turn him into a bogey man to frighten the timid back into their camp. They just have to hope he won’t clarify his position on renationalisation of industries.

It’s hard to imagine what else Labour could do to please so many people, from its own ranks to those of the Tories, in one simple step. Indeed, the only ones who might not be pleased will be far-right UKIP: the radical right probably don’t want to see a radical leader emerge on the left, who might steal some of their thunder.

Still, you can’t please all of the people all of the time. I think if we’re doing the Conservatives a favour, that’s already enough in the way of cheering the right. UKIP can look after itself.

Labour: it's got to be Cooper or Burnham

The main mouthpiece of British high Toryism, the Daily Telegraph, is involving itself in a Labour Party election.

The Telegraph gets stuck into the Labour leadership election

This is made possible by the rules adopted for the election of a new leader to replace Ed Miliband. The old system gave massive weight to the voice of the Trade Unions, which is what gave us Ed Miliband in the first place. This time round every member of the party has exactly one vote (“one member one vote”, as the system is accurately if not imaginatively called).

To accommodate the many trade unionists who are Labour supporters but not Party members, a special category has been created which allows such people to register and, on payment of £3, take part in the election.

The Telegraph has decided to urge Tories to register themselves as Labour supporters and vote for the most left-leaning of the candidates, Jeremy Corbyn. This is because it has rightly decided that Corbyn would stand no chance of winning a general election. Indeed, the paper believes that as leader, he would bury the Party for good.

No one younger than their late forties will have been particularly aware of politics the last time the Labour Party elected a leader from the Left. This was Michael Foot, in the early eighties. Foot was one of the gentlest, most tolerant and most intelligent of leaders the Party has ever had. An expert on Jonathan Swift, he could be regularly seen in the British Library researching the author of Gulliver’s Travels, when he might have been in the House of Commons.

That gentle soul was crucified by the right-wing press. On one occasion he turned up for the annual ceremony commemorating British war dead in a duffle coat. He was mercilessly hounded in the media, as though what mattered in a potential British Prime Minister was his willingness to dress conventionally.

In 1983, Foot led the Party to crushing defeat by the Tories under Margaret Thatcher. The Party took fewer votes than at any other election since the end of the Second World War. Indeed, although there has been much heart searching about the disastrous election result earlier this year, the 1983 results were nearly 900,000 votes worse.

The depth of the disaster was due in large part to a massive, radically left-wing manifesto which has come to be known as the longest suicide note in history. It is a measure of the capacity for self-delusion of certain people on the far left – not I think Michael Foot, who was far more of a realist – that another veteran of that wing, Tony Benn, described the result as a major success for socialism.

Michael Foot and Tony Benn
Didn't work out so well as we might have liked

His argument was that never before had eight and a half million people voted for so strongly socialist a manifesto. To Benn it was apparently irrelevant that nearly 21 million had voted against, 13 million of them for the Tories. And as a result one of the most radical right wing governments we have seen was elected with a massive parliamentary majority.

The Daily Telegraph may be obnoxious and unprincipled, but it’s not stupid. It has realise that Jeremy Corbyn as leader would be as disastrous for Labour today as Michael Foot was 35 years ago. It’s a lesson Labour members need to bear in mind. Corbyn may be the choice of many activists, as Foot was. He does not appeal to the floating voters we need to attract back to us, any more than Foot did. To elect Corbyn is self-indulgent and it plays into the hands of the Telegraph and its ilk.

So who should we choose?

I recently listened to Liz Kendall, one of the other candidates, and heard her describe herself, unprompted, as a “fiscal conservative”. We have plenty of those in office at the moment, within the Conservative Party. It’s also beginning to feel as though across Europe, a movement is starting in reaction to the austerity politics such figures represent. In Greece, of course, in Spain too, in Scotland, even in Germany, where protestors have been taking to the streets against the behaviour of their own government towards the Greeks.

It also seems likely that austerity politics may begin to hurt wider sections of the British population who escaped relatively unscathed during the last five years. As they lose faith in the economic policies of the present government, it would seem unfortunate if all we could say to them was “the fiscal conservatism of this government has failed; now give our version of fiscal conservatism a try.”

That leaves only two candidates, Andy Burnham and Yvette Cooper. Both are former ministers, and therefore arguably damaged goods, tainted by their association with the Blair-Brown governments. They are also highly experienced, intelligent politicians. Do they have the courage to take the country in the direction it needs to go? I don’t know. But I do know there is no fifth candidate.

Cooper or Burnham may not be the most inspiring of choices. But neither would take us in the direction of the wilderness of 1983, or into the embrace of the very policies that are failing in the government we oppose.

Avoiding either of those alternatives strikes me as vital if we are to give Labour another chance. And the Telegraph the comeuppance it deserves.

Too soon to write off Labour. If we learn our lessons

There seem to be frequent reports at the moment of the death of the British Labour Party. I’m inclined to consider them greatly exaggerated.

Listening to a recent programme on the BBC – What’s Left, chaired by the Observer’s Andrew Rawnsley – I was amused to hear speakers declaring the 2015 results the worst for Labour since 1918. Two of the panel were Labour MPs, the rest journalists or academics. Even the MPs shared the doom-laden view.

It just feels way over the top to me. Certainly, it was a lamentable result. We were beaten, and still worse, we weren’t even able to prevent David Cameron and his Tories winning an overall majority – right up to polling day, the opinion polls were suggesting he would at most emerge as leader of the biggest single party in parliament, only able to cobble together a minority administration. Instead, he took a small but working majority.

So it was lousy. But the detail suggests things were less dire than the prophets of doom claim. Perhaps I should say, like to claim.

Labour’s share of the vote was actually up on 2010. By only 1.4%, it’s true, which is anaemic, but that was marginally more than the Tories managed – they only increased their share by 0.8%. That still left them 6.5% ahead of Labour, which is certainly a sound defeat, but hardly catastrophic.

The biggest failure of Labour was to protect its Scottish heartland. From 40 seats in Scotland, it feel to just 1. Hugely damaging. On the other hand, overall it lost only 24 seats – in other words, outside Scotland it added 15 seats to its tally. With Scotland still heading inexorably for independence, Labour was going to have to wean itself from its reliance on Scotland in any case. The fact that it has been able to increase its number of seats in England and Wales is a necessary step towards guaranteeing its long-term success.

And let’s not forget that Labour hadn’t put itself in the best possible position to win. Ed Miliband is principled, insightful and probably great company. But he’s virtually unelectable: he’s accident-prone, constantly making disastrous gaffes, and with his lieutenant Ed Balls, apparently unable ever to get off any fence. They would repeatedly dodge the hard questions, preferring to appear a little Tory to Tories, a little socialist to lefties, and convincing nobody.

Andy Burnham, Yvette Cooper, Mary Creagh, Tristram Hunt, Liz Kendall
Will one of them turn Labour's fortunes round as the next leader?

Peter Mandelson rightly points out in today’s Observer that, under their leadership, they failed to answer such opportunistic policies as Chancellor George Osborne’s proposal to devolve more authority to local government in the North of England. That was a policy Labour should have adopted before the Tories, but it failed either to adopt it or to respond to it. The result? Losses to the Tories in the North, another heartland area, including Ed Balls’s own seat, and deep inroads by another adversary, the far-right UKIP.

If despite these self-inflicted handicaps, Labour could still improve its standing outside Scotland by fifteen seats, and marginally improve its popular vote, what could it do with a more effective, more dynamic and, above all, more assertive leadership?

It strikes me that this is no time to throw one’s arms up in despair and talk about defeat on a historically unprecedented scale. Instead it’s time to take stock sensibly of where we stand, without understating the scale of the debacle but also without ignoring the more reasons for encouragement. And make sure we never again saddle ourselves with leaders so hopelessly out of touch with the needs of the day.

Because if we shoot ourselves in the foot like that again, then we would indeed be in serious trouble.