As I walked away from the committee rooms of Jeremy Corbyn’s election campaign in Islington North, I did not dare imagine that he had won. It was not only superstition; it was what I thought then was a sober assessment of the power of the Labour machine and the oil on which it had traditionally run: a solid base of habitual Labour voters.
I was wrong. Corbyn won with a 7,000 majority. Four other independents and four Greens were also elected against Labour contenders. So what’s going on with that well-oiled electoral machine?
Labour’s monopoly of working-class representation has historically been sustained by the first-past-the-post electoral system and the institutional links between trade unions and the party. These have underpinned the dominant position of Labour’s parliamentary leadership and its presumption to take for granted the mass working-class vote. The other side of this is that working-class voters historically, especially since 1945, have assumed that voting Labour is part of being working class. Given this passive electoral commitment, the Labour Party has needed those votes to be concertedly ‘knocked up’ on election day. In the past, this was the work of constituency party activists, whose presence in the party as the ‘foot soldiers’ of the electoral battlefield had itself been taken for granted.
Constituency members, however, often see themselves not as foot soldiers but as political militants. The political scientist and senior cabinet minister, Richard Crossman, analysed how these expectations could co-exist: writing in 1963, he said, ‘In order to maintain the enthusiasm of party militants to do the organising work for which the Conservative Party pays a vast army of workers, a constitution evolved which apparently created a full party democracy while excluding (these militants) from effective power.’
Democratic mythology
Since the 1970s and the parliamentary leadership’s espousal of neoliberal economics, this mythology of Labour Party democracy became increasingly unconvincing, and constituency activists led by Tony Benn sought to enhance the power of party conference and enable constituency parties to deselect their MPs. These campaigns were defeated or undermined, and activists turned their energies to extra-parliamentary campaigns, a trend exacerbated by Thatcher’s emasculation of local government.
Nevertheless, a significant minority believed life outside the Labour Party to be politically futile. This left minority retained a significant base, often in combination with those who were active in extra-parliamentary movements. In 2015, this left was sufficiently strong, especially in the unions, for Jeremy Corbyn to win the leadership. Under his leadership many campaigning activists rejoined the party – only to be driven out under Keir Starmer and his close aide Morgan McSweeney, whose ruthless apparatus ditched all pretence of Labour being a ‘broad church’.
The party’s machine for discipline and central control clearly remains in good shape. But where there is an independent, or sometimes Green, challenge to Labour, the electoral machine can no longer be relied on to bring out local constituency party members at election time.
Starmer’s project for government
Starmer is not simply ‘Blair Mark 2’. Acceptance of the economic constraints imposed by market politics is an important continuity, but Starmer’s stress on returning the party to the working class and to the old partnership with labour (in part a snide reference to his expunging of the radical left) indicates that his project is not a return to the aspirational individualism of Blair. Rather, it involves a reinvention of Labourism in the era of neoliberal political economy.
Keir Starmer’s ‘achievement’ has been not so much to return the Labour Party to the working class, as to make the labour movement safe for the establishment
Labourism, the political idea that only the Labour Party is the political means of advancing the interests of the working class, was built into the origins of the party in the Labour Representation Committee. It takes various forms, with an understanding of the working class as subordinate common to all. Subordinate in the economy through the unions organising in the workplace without challenging managerial prerogatives. Subordinate in the polity to provide for stability and a qualified amelioration of working-class wellbeing without challenging the dominant order – the state and with it the power of the City and the Atlantic alliance.
Transformative traditions
There has always been a tension in Labourism, however, with the idea of the working class as a transformative class. An idea of transformation as distinct from mere amelioration, is incipient in the day-to-day militancy necessary to defend collective bargaining and maintain and improve living standards, including against Labour governments. At crucial moments this militancy has overflowed the constraining divide at the heart of Labourism between ‘the industrial’ and ‘the political’.
The Clydeside shop stewards’ movement on the eve of the First World War was an early example of politicised industrial action and the challenge this posed to Labourism, followed by the general strike in 1926, during which a minority promoted ideas of trade unions as a vehicle for economic democracy. Then, post-war, the shopfloor strength that was able to thrive during the boom led to the politicised occupations of the late 1960s and 70s in resistance to corporate rationalisations.
This, in turn, inspired the industrial policies of Tony Benn, which held out a democratic vision of public ownership based on transforming the relations between labour and capital. ‘Worker control with management participation’, as the shop stewards of Swan Hunter Shipyard on Tyneside put it in their proposed model for the soon-to-be nationalised shipbuilding industry.
In an important sense, Jeremy Corbyn attempted, with many limitations, to bring this tradition to the leadership of the Labour Party. The institutions of Labourism however, reinforced by those of the parliamentary and media establishment, proved too strong for a political insurgency that lacked, after 50 years of free market politics, a materially strong and well-organised workers’ movement.
Starmer’s ‘achievement’ has been not so much to return the Labour Party to the working class, as to make the labour movement safe for the establishment.
Fertile grounds for reform
Keir Starmer’s toxic combination of financial austerity with authoritarian paternalism and an appeasement of anti-immigrant racism fuels the rise of Reform. Nigel Farage appeals to a widespread sense of both material insecurity and political powerlessness. Starmer’s government is reinforcing both. Farage is the only politician who highlights the growing gulf between the people and the political class.
A long-term challenge to Reform, and hence the causes of Reform, must involve both a radical break-up of the power of the political class and its economic allies – including a proportional electoral system, a federal political system, decentralisation of power and funds to local government, and tough regulation of the media monopolies and the City – and building up power from below.
The small band of independent MPs, along with some members of the Socialist Campaign Group and several Greens, could prefigure the crucial break from parliamentarism entailed in such a strategy. Like Corbyn, they won against Labour’s collapsing electoral machine through an egalitarian relationship with their constituents, campaigning collaboratively, for example, on Gaza, but also on housing, health and education.
This points to the need to build a movement through which the needs of working and wouldbe working people are met not through paternalism but through strengthening their rights, their collective power and their individual dignity. Only such a movement, resourced with an alternative media and rooted in the everyday resistance likely to respond to Starmer’s austerity, can challenge the paternalistic elitism and contempt for working people on which Reform will otherwise thrive.
