There is no doubting the scale of Labour’s defeat in last week’s elections. It is the worst result in the party’s history. It has seen Labour down to 16 per cent of the national vote, beaten by the Conservatives in Wales, the SNP in Scotland and losing control of all of our remaining county councils in England.
The context of the elections was all-too apparent. Most people are facing the most serious economic crisis they have ever known. At the same time, the media have been full of stories, first of bankers’ obscene bonuses, then of MPs abusing public finances to line their own pockets.That toxic combination was bound to create a backlash from voters. The only issue was who would be most affected by it. The suggestion that it would inevitably affect whoever was in government is contradicted by the relative success of the right-wing ruling parties in France, Italy and Germany.
Where the left is in office, as in this country, the issue is whether it is seen as doing everything possible to protect the great majority of people from the impact of an economic crisis for which they are not responsible and over which they have no control.
Unfortunately, that has not been the case. While the British Government did far more than the Tories would have dreamt of, measures such as the new top rate of income tax were not enough. Voters saw bankers being bailed out, while they were left to bear the brunt of the recession.
And so the backlash hit the Government with enormous force and produced the dangerous spectacle of 16.5 per cent support for the UK Independence Party and another 6.2 per cent for the British National Party, as well as 27.4 per cent for the Tories with Labour pushed into third place.
Part of Labour’s right wing had already drawn all the wrong conclusions before the elections. In judging Gordon Brown’s leadership, they either mistook its poor presentational style for its substance or, in most cases, regarded it as insufficiently Thatcherite. Stephen Byers, the erstwhile “outrider” for the Blairite project who was given a platform by Progress to call publicly for the Prime Minister to go, epitomised how out of touch these people are with Labour supporters when he attacked the new top rate of income tax for those on the very highest salaries.
Some were so obsessed by their factional goals that they tried to put the knife in before the vote – reasoning that the worse Labour’s performance was, the easier it would be to depose the leader. Most party members regard this as beneath contempt.
Others tried to exploit the electoral defeat to drive through thecoup – hoping to keep the whole thing within Parliament and carve ordinary Labour members and the trade unions out of their role in determining the party leader.
Now that the right-wing plotters have been defeated, we need to consider how the party can rebuild its support to win the next general election. A shift to the right is the last thing Labour needs. The Government was punished because, by not taking far more radical measures to protect people from the economic crisis, ministers have allowed the right to take control of the agenda.From universal support for massive state intervention as the banks collapsed, we now have a debate on how to cut public services to pay for bailing out the bankers.The left has to seize back the agenda from the right .
What needs to be done is clear. The core of the banking system, which is demonstrably bankrupt, should be fully nationalised and instructed to re-start lending to the public and businesses in order to stop the wave of companies failing due to lack of credit.
Those sectors of the economy in which the market has failed, notably construction and especially house building, require massive state intervention and control. That, not attacks on minuscule numbers of foreign workers, will help to stop halt the rise of unemployment.
Public spending has to be reviewed totally, with the aim of eliminating real waste and starting with a decision not to spend tens of billions of pounds replacing the Trident nuclear weapons system. Such economic policies should be accompanied by a sustained attack on racism and xenophobia. Every concession to blaming immigrants for the crisis, every attack on racial and religious minorities in Britain, helped to create the conditions for the BNP to make its biggest-ever electoral advance. That now has to be stamped out by zero tolerance of the kind of concessions to racism and Islamophobia which have gained currency in recent years.
In these elections, there was no great leap forward for the Tories. Their vote in the local elections actually fell by 6 per cent. There was a very serious Labour collapse. But we are not being overwhelmed by a resurgent right. We are paying the price for the left not rising to the scale of the challenge posed by the worst economic crisis most of us have ever seen. If we correct that, Labour can still regain the support it needs to win. A good signal of the necessary shift in direction would be to abandon all plans to privatise the Royal Mail.
