Labour must learn to respect the people it wants to govern
By Pete North - May 2, 2021
It is said that America doesn’t have a left wing party. It has two centre right parties with different priorities. I’m not sure how well this holds up under Biden. Certainly you get the woke virtue signalling but it’s largely from out of touch politicians who haven’t really thought about what they’re saying as opposed to the actual left who very much do mean what they’re saying when they say defund the police and “trans women are women”.
There is a certain “safe space” to say certain things when you know there is no realistic chance of them getting through congress. Despite various cultural and demographic shifts, America is still essentially a capitalist country with an instinctive distrust of government and I don’t see that changing in my lifetime. Thus, if the Democrats ever did become an unmistakably leftist party, they would consign themselves to the fringes in much the same way our Labour party has.
Essentially, to have any hope of governing a western democracy a party needs to be aligned with, and convinced of, the essential national character and adapt to the subtle fluctuations therein. Sometimes it goes right a bit. Sometimes it goes left a bit, but seldom will it drift very far away from its core neuroses.
This is ultimately why Labour struggles to find its way back. Its own wokeists get nowhere because critical race and gender theories are alien to the British condition. It finds some traction in London but not really anywhere else. The only real manifestation outside London is in the SNP where it serves as a device to sucker twentysomething Scottish graduates.
As to the far left radicalism of Corbyn, forget it. Brits don’t mind free stuff at all, but not if they have to pay higher taxes. Though Theresa May spoke to a particular conservative instinct, her “Dementia Tax” cost her an outright majority. The propertied and pensioned working class and middle class wants the freebies but wants somebody else to pay for it.
Blair understood this. He understood the inherent hypocrisy of the British. You can get them to vote for left wing parties with left wing policies if somebody else can be made to pay for them. That was central to his entire ethos. You can’t have a vast welfarist estate without a supercharged economy and a large influx of cheap foreign labour to exploit. He banked on most people not minding mass immigration just so long as they got richer and goods and services got cheaper. And this did seem to suit rather a lot of people for quite a long time. That’s just as well really because it’s not like we had a choice in the matter. The only actual chance to have a meaningful say was the referendum of 2016.
Though people have generally enjoyed cheaper goods and services, they started to notice we were losing a lot of what’s important. Community. Kinship. Country. It took the Brexit vote for the political class to take a long look at what we had become. To inspect the wreckage of forty years of industrial decline. Derelict towns and abandoned coastlines. A collapse of social mobility. A gaping cultural and political gulf between London and the regions.
It is argued this is the product of Thatcherism and its successor ideology, Blairism – and the EU is not to blame. But certainly the transformation into a services economy was contingent on EU migration giving rise to a generation of upwardly mobile Europeans living in Britain while the working class were left to rot in their rainy northern towns to be drip fed with welfare and subject to the social engineering whims of Westminster.
It’s not surprising that fishing became the poster boy for Brexit. I had to laugh at leading remain campaigner, Mike Galsworthy, calling the failure to strike a cod deal with Norway a “betrayal of the working class”. Most of the cod quota is fulfilled by a single Dutch owned supertrawler manned almost entirely by Filipinos and processed almost exclusively by immigrant labour. Meanwhile the “coastal communities” that used to boast family owned fishing fleets for generations, are now basket cases.
The folly of the Brexiteers was believing Brexit could undo it. Blue Labour activist, Paul Embery, played hard on this kind of shtick, arguing for a left wing industrial policy to address this, but there is no undoing what was done. Forty years of technological change and globalisation is not reversible. And we wouldn’t want that either. There’s a reason we exploit labour from the developing world in the fishing industry. It’s hard work and it’s bloody dangerous, and though there is money in it, only the bosses ever see it.
Over forty years we have made a very serious mess of this country, and though Brexit may put the brakes on “neoliberal” trade liberalisation and EU migration, it’s going to take a lot more to restore a basic sense of fairness. For a long time we have outsourced infrastructure to multinationals who, thanks to liberal borders, can cream off the best of European talent without training, and while we have a welfare system that incentivises idleness and a corrupted education system, working class people have little hope of competing.
On this, Labour has not learned the lessons. The policy thinkers around Labour want to restore freedom of movement at the first opportunity. Middle class metropolitan Labour did quite well out of the deal and it suited their pretentions of liberal internationalism. Moreover, they were largely insulated form the consequences. And they still treat the bottom decile as a welfare fiefdom. They argue for hand outs, but not a hand up. It sounds trite, but nonetheless remains true. Labour will go to bat for illegal immigrants crossing the channel in dinghies, but it won’t speak up for white workers in the north.
The one thing they could propose, if they were serious, is to dismantle Blair’s university empire designed to warehouse the young and get them off the unemployment statistics. Instead it should look to rebuild polytechnics, scrap the degree requirement for a number of jobs, and incentivise industrial training of all ages. One of the benefits of Brexit is that employers can no longer hyper-tailor their job specifications. to meet their exact requirements. They will have to work with the people they can get and train them accordingly. Labour should offer tax incentives to do exactly that.
Ultimately very few people want what Labour wants for people. There is a cult of socialism in the cities, which is what put Corbyn at the top of Labour, but Brits don’t to live as protectorates of a nanny state. They want a stable home, a secure job, a viable pension and a nice environment to raise their family in. As far as London goes, that dream is dead, and it’s increasingly a pipedream elsewhere in the country. Meanwhile, we’re losing our cities to gang warfare. Newham is turning into West Baltimore.
It shouldn’t be rocket science to work our what people want from life in Britain. We all basically want the same things. A clean, safe country and a chance to succeed independently, and a fair deal. It’s not fair that a degree is increasingly useless. It’s not fair that a good deposit and a clean credit rating still only gets you a shot at “affordable shared ownership”. It’s not fair that our pensions are going to vanish the moment we go to collect them. It’s not fair that inheritance is now the main route to middle class home ownership. It’s not fair we’re working longer and harder over longer commutes just to make ends meet.
Labour’s basic problem is that it no longer shares those concerns and aspirations because they never really understood what was wrong with the way things were. At the core of this recent drive to decolonise British institutions is a belief that that the English are fundamentally defective which is why they keep voting the way they do. Instead of respecting our decisions and understanding our drives, they look to correct us, re-educate us and reprogramme us in the hope we will come around to their way of thinking. The basic assumption that we’re bad people and Britain is a racist country is what will keep Labour, rightly, away from power for a long time to come.
Central to the British psyche is a fundamental sense of fairness. That’s why the relatively small numbers of people arriving in dinghies is a national outrage. It’s not that people are racist, only that our asylum system, notionally there to protect the vulnerable, is being abused on an industrial scale, largely benefitting organised crime. It’s why we also take very dim view of benefit cheats.
The central political evaluation in Britain is whether the scales are properly balanced. Having eastern Europeans undercut us in terms of wages and overheads may boost GDP so politicians can keep lavishing welfare on their pet voters but it’s not fair on our own young. For Labour to then chastise voters and bleat about “white privilege” to working class northerners is, unsurprisingly, not going to do them any favours at the polls.
The nation is not overly enthused by the Tories. We’re just horrified by the alternatives. Under the Tories things aren’t going to get any better but we’re not being given an alternative so this is what we have to put up with. Until an opposition can show us that it likes and understands the country, and respects its people and their choices, it cannot be considered fit to govern.
The answer is not a reversion to Blairism. That didn’t work and is in part responsible for bringing us to where we are now. But then Corbynism wasn’t the answer either. Labour has to recognise that Britain is not a socialist country, welfarism is an obsolete relic from the previous century, and if it wants to govern it has to be the conservative minded nationally focussed force that the Tories presently aren’t. If Labour can’t bring itself to trust the instincts of voters then it has no hope of ever winning – and doesn’t deserve to.