IT’S a strange feature of politics that people can see their opponents’ flaws but not their own. Much of the discussion about combating the British National Party in the forthcoming European elections has centred on exposing its nostalgia, which harks back to an idealised past when this country was supposedly much more peaceful and homogenous.
It’s true that the BNP’s scare-mongering ignores whole chunks of British history and plays on voters’ worst fears, hoping that they will act out of frightened self-interest when they go to the polls. But it isn’t just the hard right that goes in for risky bouts of nostalgia.
Now that Labour is in deep trouble on two fronts, the turmoil of the financial markets increasing the party’s unpopularity, a conversation has started about what needs to be done to turn the tide.
And you don’t have to be a Blairite to worry about the refrain that Labour must return to its roots, re-engage with its old supporters, rebuild the party through its industrial base.
I’ve said before that the industrial working-class still has a role in the party as well as an honourable history; it’s where I come from, even though my paternal grandfather was determined that none of his sons would follow him into the mines.
The world has changed out of all recognition in the past half century, and in many ways for the better.
Of course I was on the side of the miners against Margaret Thatcher’s Government, but I’m glad that hundreds of thousands of men no longer have to spend all their working day underground, risking disease, injury and death.
The industrial working class is a much smaller entity than it used to be, and I can’t see it as the salvation of a party which still suffers in many ways from not being sufficiently modern.
You only have to look at the Parliamentary Labour Party and the front bench to see that not enough women get to the top of the party, and the same is true of people from ethnic minorities. The public face of the party is too male and too white, underlining the fact that the selection process for parliamentary candidates is deeply flawed.
Labour MPs are a strange mix of working-class men and middle-class professional politicians, and a rose-tinted yearning for the good old days won’t do anything to remedy that.
Working-class male politics is often a turn-off for the very constituencies the party needs to reach, while the likes of Jacqui Smith and Tessa Jowell who dominate the front bench aren’t much better.
To take just one example, it’s a shocking indictment of a party called Labour that it still hasn’t delivered the one thing working women want more than anything, which is equal pay.
I believe that’s a direct consequence of the party’s continuing class and gender bias, which was understandable 100 years ago but nothing less than unforgivable in this day and age. I can well imagine the consternation in the Conservative ranks if Labour made pay transparency (the sine qua non of achieving equal pay) the cornerstone of its manifesto for the next general election, signalling that it has finally come to value women’s work as much as men’s.
It’s something the Tories can’t ever do, for the simple reason that their wealthy friends and backers would go nuts, and it would make Labour the natural home for women voters of every class and background.
It would also tackle two of the most intransigent problems that Labour governments have had to face since 1997, namely child poverty and the fact that so many older women have to depend on meagre state benefits because they never earned enough to afford private pensions.
Right now, another generation of poor pensioners is being created in call centres and other poorly-paid sectors of the workforce, and they almost certainly feel that the Labour Party – and perhaps politics generally – has nothing to do with them.
It’s obvious from the declining number of people who vote in elections that this sense of disengagement is widely shared. Politicians wring their hands each time the turnout figures are published, but they don’t seem to understand their own role in the phenomenon.
Specifically, they don’t appreciate that voters regard politicians as unlike themselves and unrepresentative of the country they live in, and that situation will only be made worse if Labour retreats into defining itself as the party of the white, predominantly male working class.
Old-fashioned masculine values mean little to gay couples, single mothers, kids who volunteer for Amnesty International and other human rights non-governmental organisations, and the self-employed – a category wrongly assumed to be Tory when it actually includes many artists, writers and designers whose values are liberal in the broadest sense.
At present, many of these people simply don’t vote, having a natural suspicion of the Conservatives, but feeling little connection to the Labour Party. And the very worst thing Labour could do, facing extinction in the polls, is conclude that its salvation lies in combating David Cameron through a nostalgic return to class politics.
The industrial working class used to be a bastion of radical ideas, but now it’s small, frightened and as prone to xenophobia as anyone else. Working-class communities need help from the Government, in the form of retraining as well as benefits, in areas where job losses loom.
But the Labour Party can’t represent the modern world – gay, straight, men, women, British-born, foreign, old, young, secular as well as religious – unless it’s first able to reflect it.
