As the Labour election inquest gathers pace, the loudest early voices have been those in New Labour tradition. Here comes Tony Blair, here comes Peter ‘filthy rich’ Mandelson, and here comes the familiar chatter about wealth-generation and aspiration being the only meaningful routes to Labour success.
Nobody could argue with the need to achieve a wide appeal to win elections, especially in the skewed electoral system of the UK. There’s no point in standing on heroically rigid principles if that makes you genuinely unelectable. But from the very beginning New Labour’s smooth marketing created the impression of a simple electoral spectrum between electability at one end and ideology at the other. Over time this idea drifted even further to the point where there were only these two simplistic endpoints. It encouraged the notion of electability over all else, with the ‘past’ as a constant warning – for New Labour, the party could have strong principles, or get elected, but not both. This attitude is now deeply entrenched. It is apparent in the Blairite post-election backlash and the Labour right’s absurd claims that Miliband’s palest of pink manifestos was very left wing and cost the election.
In its day, the creation of New Labour was a clever marketing stroke, separating Labour from everything in its past by using an old advertising trick. New Labour, New Tide. This separation from times past was convincing enough when it referred to the long battles against vested interests or narrow ideologies trying to take over a broad party, though most of the spadework on that had already been done by John Smith and Neil Kinnock. But there was a profoundly damaging side to the break with pre-Blair Labour: everything before the new dawn was designated as Old Labour, sometimes explicitly and sometimes not. It was convenient to link everything in Labour’s past with the bad old days of the block vote and Militant. But designation very easily turns to denigration. Whatever else this Old Labour was it was, well, old, and no longer fit for purpose. To embrace the New you must reject the Old.
This crude dichotomy inevitably attached itself to the voters too. If you had always voted Labour and assumed the party was for you, and for others like you at home or in your street or workplace, you were not only contaminated with the Old virus but were identified as tribal Labour. Again, denigration follows: ‘tribal’ suggests you are a member of an unthinking mass. But whatever they may feel in sentimental moments, the reality of the traditional Labour voter was not about whether your father was on the Jarrow march or you knew all the verses of the Red Flag. It was based in an understanding that the party was always safely positioned somewhere on the left, and was not afraid to say so, and that whatever else it did it represented socially and economically weaker people like you, and tried (not always successfully) to protect everybody from the depredations of unfettered wealth and from exploitation by employers or landlords. And, incidentally, Labour was never anti-aspirational. In 1945, the party of Clement Attlee successfully captured the most aspirational moment in twentieth-century British history.
The coming of New Labour changed the face of the party but never appeared to think much about the long-term conseqences of moving away from the discredited Old and tribal. Maybe the red rose was a sop to them. I suspect a lot of long-standing Labour supporters were not that bothered about the demise of Clause IV, but they would have noticed Peter Mandelson’s ominous landmark comment. Being ‘intensely easy about being filthy rich’ may have been intended as an offhand remark to amuse wealthy mates, but it had far-reaching implications that still resonate. You can only be filthy rich at the expense of others, either directly or via inheritance from people who did it before you. There can be no filthy rich helping themselves to excess without a (filthy?) poor that loses out, so somebody who is intensely easy about the rich presumably has to be intensely easy about the poor too. How can an organisation called ‘Labour’ casually accept such basic inequality and the existence of an exploited poor? Like it or not, it’s Labour we’re talking about.
With the dominance of New Labour and the Mandelsonian wooing of the rich and casually selfish, traditional Labour voters could legitimately ask whether it was their party any more. Combined with the always-overriding importance of electability (‘No nasty left-facing beliefs please. We’re New Labour’) and the desire not to frighten the comfortably-off, especially in the magic kingdom of the City, the party seemed to be for other people now. Add that to the concentration of all parties on swing voters and marginal seats, leaving everybody else feeling like cannon fodder just there to make up the numbers, and you arrive at the disconnected electorate of today. In a nation of job insecurity, poverty, deregulation, blaming of the ‘other’, and the relentless deliberate destruction of the public realm, people who once took Labour for granted now find that it was Labour that had taken them for granted. With nowhere to turn, if they still want to vote they can only turn to the devils they know – such as, bizarrely, the Conservatives – or of course to scapegoaters like UKIP who in tabloid style are happy to massage and exploit disaffection and fear wherever they find it.
That’s the reason why New Labour can’t return. It has lost one of its central planks. Blair, Mandelson and Gould certainly did try to widen Labour’s appeal beyond the traditional core, but there is a limit to the appeal of any party. You can’t claim to be everybody’s friend without appearing shallow and, eventually, treacherous as you act in favour of one group at the expense of another. Blair’s success in 1997 drew on a widened appeal and an explicit move to an identified ‘centre’, and also took advantage of a weariness with long years of Conservatism made worse by the false start of 1992. But in the surge to power something fundamental was rarely acknowledged: New Labour always took for granted the support of the traditional Labour voter. It needed them to stay on side, to believe that they had nowhere else to go. Tribal Labour would always support the cause, whichever way the Westminster party and its gentrified elite set its policy sights.
The 2015 General Election was the moment where this destructive legacy of New Labour finally worked itself out. Blair’s ‘centre’ will never win a UK election on its own now, and that centre is all that a revived New Labour could summon up. The traditional Labour voter is dying out or has finally been driven away. Labour’s poor bloody infantry may well have deserted for good.