It has been a bitter, divisive and brutalising campaign – and not just between the parties. Throughout it, one question has gone unasked and unanswered: what is Labour for?
We are at a crossroads when the party should be confronting the most defining challenge of capitalism seen in our lifetime. The collapse of the world banking system is of the same order as the fall of the Berlin Wall. But Labour’s most senior election strategists appear to have been more intent on jockeying for position for themselves expecting – and in some instances possibly even courting – defeat.
It is politics, after all, so that is to some extent only to be expected. But lowly candidates have been left to fend for themselves as unelected grandees secure fiefdoms and consolidate patronage.
A fraction of the time, effort, ingenuity and political skills deployed by these people plotting the succession (see pages 11-13) would certainly have been welcomed by candidates deprived of many of the basic campaign tools.
Yet the campaign directors have no difficulty telling themselves – and others –that even coming a poor second place is a mighty victory. Since 2008 the world has seen the destructive force of unchecked capitalism: it has not been creative, cathartic or restorative. Some of the solutions from the left have been.
The bank bailouts have been unavoidable and necessary: it is a cruel irony that the first time a Labour Government has been openly redistributive, the wealth has gone from the workers to the banks. Politics and history are full of such ironies: Jim Callaghan and Denis Healey took the unavoidable, unpopular path in calling in the International Monetary Fund in the 1970s and in so doing paved the way for Margaret Thatcher to claim credit for the ensuing recovery.
This election has been full of its own cruel ironies. Gordon Brown received justified opprobrium for revealing in private the impatience and disregard for ordinary voters characteristic of virtually every professional politician.
His particular bad luck was that the overheard remarks reinforced a narrative – that he is obdurate and will not be told anything – which those around him allowed to unfold.
In their rush to limit the presentational damage of Rochdale, party managers berated themselves (well, everyone else really) for not better controlling access to Brown’s radio microphone – but not for what a lifelong Labour voter actually had to say.
The Labour Party has long been a proud, fractious, noisy vehicle for principles, values and, above all, for social justice.
Party workers and candidates have been left to find their own voices and messages, to persuade their traditional constituencies – people who depend on, trust and need Labour – that they are listening to them. Watching the leaders’ live television debates, confronted by the spectacle of three white professional men in suits, one would be hard-pressed to see evidence of how diverse modern Britain has become.
That the United Kingdon is also a more tolerant place is in no small part down to those times when Labour has acted on its genuinely held values and instincts to try and make this society fairer, better.
One would not necessarily know that from Labour’s utterances during this campaign.
It is as if the practiced evasiveness and defensiveness (for some it is guilt, shame and anger) over the still hotly contested “legacy” issues such of Iraq and Afghanistan have dulled the party’s higher-ups to why they are supposed to be in government in the first place.
This might be in no small part down to the years of large House of Commons majorities which corrupted Labour into all too often acting in an autocratic and authoritarian fashion: its plans for national identity cards and 90-day detention without charge still bring a shiver.
In the final week of the campaign, Gordon Brown’s barnstorming commitment to a fair minimum wage at Westminster Hall had for some the qualities of a deathbed conversion; for others, it was a welcome return of the genuine article. A casual onlooker could only have been struck by the passion with which he railed against the unfairness that two cleaners at the Treasury, of all places, could not live on their wage: more of that ubiquitous political irony.
In 1987, Labour’s then director of elections (one Peter Mandelson) brushed aside the party’s defeat by Margaret Thatcher by saying the party had won the campaign but lost the election.
In 2010, Labour may have avoided the extreme apocalyptic scenario predicted by many. It has had a brush with mortality and a lucky escape from oblivion. It must now decide what it is for, what it wants to be, what it wants to accomplish and why.
