Well, must it still die?

Nine years ago I wrote a piece called 'Labour Must Die!' which made a minor splash in various places, most oddly on the website of the 'liberal-interventionist' Euston Manifesto, where it can still be found as well as here. My Gramscian critique of New Labour sat rather uncomfortably alongside arguments for extending 'western democracy' to ever more remote and dusty parts of a generally unreceptive world. A lot's happened in the meantime: the 2008 crash and subsequent slump, the decay of the Blair/Brown project and the electoral defeat of New Labour in 2010, the neo-Thatcherite induced austerity  of the Con/Lib coalition, the Eurozone crisis etcetera. On a personal level I finished the PhD of which my article was a snapshot, and got it published as a book 'The Politics of New Labour' (2011) which has sold moderately well and played some small part in the post-mortem. My first novel 'Gramsci in Love', which offers an account of my intellectual hero's tortured love-life, is about to be published. I am even less engaged in the sterile routines of party politics than back then.

So, nine years on, must Labour still die? Well, on a simply existential basis, the Labour Party survives to fight yet more elections and chase more headlines, so obviously it hasn't quite died yet. But on any objective measure it's not exactly thriving either. Membership briefly rose post-Blair/Brown but has since levelled off. Most local Labour organisations are 'hollowed-out' or moribund, and heavily reliant on elected councillors or paid officials with a vested financial interest in their 'political' activity. Joining the Labour Party is now a pretty strange thing to do, even in the conditions of opposition when indignant leftists historically 'return to the fold'. Performance in elections, by-elections and opinion polls is pretty lacklustre, to the extent that 'the Labour vote' is less responsive to the pull and push of the party machine than at any time in its 100 year-plus history. The ideology of Labourism, with its experiential base in the manual work which hardly anyone in this country does any more, and its organisational basis in the trades unionism which is now largely confined to the public services, looks increasingly shallow and ineffectual. It lives on in the ghostly 'cultural' forms of football, light entertainment and xenophobia, but struggles for clear political expression. The subaltern heartlands of northern England are palpably depressed and taciturn.

 But, to pose the question with which Labour has always stymied any challenge to its hold over class and electoral allegiance, what else is there? Personally I wish I could vote for Syriza, which is exactly the kind of 'broad democratic alliance' we Euro-communists yearned for in the 1970s, and whose Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis is right now the coolest man on the planet, but our archaic electoral system won't allow anything of the sort. For most of us in England the choice this May is between the traditional 'hold your nose and vote Labour' or the rather less unsavoury but arguably more destructive 'vote Green'. I've had extensive dealings with the Green Party over the last ten years, and I can't say I'm hugely impressed. It's a strange amalgam of political geeks, with an obsessive focus on the electoral mechanics of 'getting out the vote' to match anything in Labour, and angry hippie dreamers who will gladly embrace any wacky cause that can't find a political home elsewhere. Their politics and organisation are simply not up to the historic opportunity presented by climate change and the decay of traditional party politics. The real Green 'breakthrough' was in 1989, with 15% of the vote in the European elections for a genuinely popular environmentalism, and they blew it. The current 'green surge' is causing a minor media flurry, with party membership over 50,000, but it will not translate into a double-figure vote-percentage let alone Westminster seats. Even Caroline Lucas in Brighton Pavilion looks vulnerable to a focussed and very nasty Labour push. After May I would expect the Green Party to fall away as quickly as it did in the early '90s, when the 'anti-austerity' activists of the 'Green Left' take their pale Labour leftism elsewhere.

As for actual Labour, quite frankly I don't really care one way or another. It simply continues to slide into historical irrelevance, and  I don't see what the career prospects of a bunch of blustering, boring Oxford PPE graduates and ex-special advisers, led by a strange man who is both old before his time and stuck in perpetual adolescence, have to do with me and my life or even my country. If they want to spend their lives shouting at Tories and conspiring in corridors, that's up to them, but I cannot see what possible benefit the rest of us derive from such shenanigans. Labour makes even less of an impact on daily life out here in the real world than it ever did; increasingly what they do feels like make-believe. To sum up – it seems to me that my question of nine years ago has expanded way beyond its original focus. Any prospect of social transformation or even sustained economic recovery in Britain now requires the death of not just Labour but the whole of what constitutes 'politics' in our debased, exhausted, post-pretty-much-everything age. Quite what form the politics of post-politics will take is wholly unclear, and I don't think we should get too carried away with 'social media' and all the other techno-fixes of late capitalism, but one way or another it will always be about people getting together and taking action to improve their lives and prospects; something the Labour Party has signally and consistently failed to do.

 

Andrew Pearmain is a historian and author of 'The Politics of New Labour' (2011) and 'Gramsci in Love' (2015)