Considering the turnaround in fortunes during and after the 2017 general election, why didn’t Labour win? The answer is to be found both in the Labour party’s governance, and in the whole system of British government, explains Ed Straw.
Given the dire display of their government opponents, some have asked the legitimate question: why did Labour not win? Let’s start with New Labour, a body that both connected with the real world and failed to grasp the big levers for change. This government, busy attempting renewal on all fronts, failed to renew itself. Stuck with those answers it first thought of in public sector reform, the old guard of dominant ministers and advisers hung on for far too long. Fresh blood, and with it fresh thinking and fresh faces, was needed and never happened.
The New Labour government also suffered from the absence of serious competition – a consequence of First Past the Post (FPTP). Representative democracy is competition, but when one major party is out of action – as the Conservatives were for most of this period – then standards drop. New Labour had little to challenge it, until David Cameron appeared. Even then, it took some doing to lose to an Old Etonian ex-PR executive.
Of course, even with an effective choice of only two parties, standards will never be that high. Any self-regarding competition authority in the world would rule FPTP illegal. But it is a challenge to get across to the average party politico, eyeing all that apparent power, that he or she would do a far better job under Proportional Representation. But they would. Theresa May could even get round to understanding that, when she comes to write her memoirs. But, few of them get it before, alas fewer still with power in their hands.
That absence of a credible alternative allowed the remarkably self-indulgent Blair-Brown feud to fill the void. Its continual strife sucked energy, purpose, and votes. New Labour had demanded discipline from its members as the price of election, yet tolerated the most self-centred and ill-disciplined leadership. Both should have read the Riot Act through the party’s governance.
Another great irony here is that every government in the world would improve – and its politicians be more successful – with comprehensive, independent, and balanced feedback. None has this. This is one of the several large reasons for global discontent with government performance – local, national, regional, and global. If you don’t know the score, how do you know if you’re winning? You don’t. If you don’t know where you are, how will you know how to get to your destination? You don’t.
So, vast resources are spent on trying to convince themselves and the electorate that policies are working – or not, if you’re the opposition. Self-scoring and news spinning is the vapourware that occupies the space that real feedback should. We are all getting monumentally disgruntled with it. But until we grasp that feedback of results has to be institutionalized and put somewhere where the politicians can’t tamper with it, spin is what we’ll get.
New Labour went into the 2010 election pretty exhausted, splintering, with little idea of what it would do next, and with the baggage of another leader who was not going to win. The legacies of the failed Iraq war and of the banking crash did not help. A refreshed Labour would not have lost.
Refreshments came in the form of Ed Miliband. Labour embarked on a muted why-are-we-here quest, but a stale New Labour vs Old Labour vs Only-Used-Once Labour, conducted with lashings of labellism, judgementalism, and moral superiority, unaware of the major shifts in circumstances wrought by neoliberal economics and in values.
Underlying these five confused years in opposition, Labour knew not why it was here. After all, its historic mission to take the masses out of poverty, disadvantage, and inequality had succeeded. To compare their lot today with even when I was growing up, let alone to the conditions when Labour was founded, is to rejoice. But the old mantras continued to be chanted by a party unable to come to terms with the modern world. It needed a trip to the political psychotherapist but instead sat on its hands.
It was quickly evident that no matter his various qualities, Miliband was not going to win. This repeated Labour’s most enduring failure of party governance – to enter elections with a leader without sufficient electoral credibility. The party’s unwritten policy is to replace the CEO only once the company has gone bust.
The Conservatives don’t self-handicap like this. Why? Their ‘1922 committee’ is composed solely of backbenchers and thus has far more freedom to discuss difficult issues than if overseen by the management. Its role is to take soundings and suggest changes, and to tell leaders, whose shelf life has expired, to move on. Their process for challenging sitting prime ministers works too, as Labour’s did not for Blair and Brown. The Conservatives would have replaced Kinnock with John Smith, Brown one year before the 2010 election, and Miliband after two years as leader. The party is far more important than the person.
Onwards to the Corbyn era – an essential disruptor for a drifting party. The Parliamentary Labour Party of all its MPs continued to behave as a failed state. It should have shut up, backed Corbyn for two years, given him a good run (and enough rope if you like) and then taken stock. Instead, the ruling faction threw its toys out of the pram and embarked on continuous strife.
Image credit: The Labour Party
Post the referendum, one year in, spooked by a quick election rumour, it repeated the mistake by mounting a hopeless challenge, and continued its tantrum. It showed a remarkable detachment from people and their genuine disadvantages, unable to comprehend their role in Brexit through preaching, ignoring, and fixating on its own semi-ideology.
Apparently struck by a vision on a two mile walk in the woods around that Victorian watering hole of the English in Dolgellau, May announced the latest election. I have wondered what would have happened if, instead, she had climbed the adjacent majestic mountain of Cader Idris.
Jeremy Corbyn played a blinder, Theresa May the opposite. In an unusual way, he was aided by Murdoch and the Mail and the rest of the fundamentalist Tory press. Such was the extreme picture painted of this threat to the security, stability, and anything else held dear that could be concocted, the comparison – once we were actually allowed to see and hear him – was far greater than if the news media had left him alone. Blimey, he’s not a monster. Goodness gracious me, he’s even saying things I agree with.
But he did have some real negatives from his first year as leader. At first he could only find reverse gear as he came up with mostly very old Labour policies. Second, the organization of the leader’s office and output was not competent. Third, his performance in parliament was limited. But bear in mind that he had become leader not after years of planning alongside a slick team of advisers, but suddenly on a wave of grassroots enthusiasm for something very different. It would always take time to learn these complicated and sometimes bizarre ropes.
Whilst absolute levels of prosperity are light years from those on Labour’s founding, mass disadvantage, inequality, and disempowerment have returned. No-one is starving but the basis for a New New New Labour mission is there. Whether Corbyn recognized this or whether what he thought happened to be right for the time, I don’t know. Either way, his essential message resonated.
But did not win. That would have taken not a different leader this time, but a party that had left its proud history in the history books, that grasped where many people were, that had thrown away the old recipes and thought long and hard about new and workable solutions, that really got behind their leader and their leader behind them, and shouted with one voice.
That it did not is down to years of decline in every wing, faction and tendency, itself the product of the weak governance of the Labour party and of the broken system of government and democracy. It still has no backbench governance. I propose a committee identical in membership and role to the Conservatives.
I further propose that Jeremy Corbyn, the MPs, the members, and actually all of us, get some serious thinking caps on as to how to reform the system of government – feedback, competitive democracy, policy by design, powerful check and balance. Until the system is redesigned and fixed good and proper, government and us will muddle on, not a lot will actually change for the better nor lives made easier, political parties will keep their bad name, and every government – including your or my choice – will disappoint.
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Ed Straw is a writer and campaigner for the reform of government, and a visiting fellow in Applied Systems Thinking in Practice at the Open University.
The most important thing for any leader is to gather people around them that will tell them the truth, but the civil service does everything it can to prevent that from happening.
It’s not just the civil service. The blame lies at the feet of every single human being in this country. It’s systemic. This nation is a counterfeit fake democracy. The evidence for hat is all around us. Just look at the bogus and spurious referendum and the lies perpetuated by May just last Monday claiming that “more than 80%” of the UK support Brexit. Grenfell Towers should be floodlit as a monument commemorating British society and culture as a reminder for all. Instead, the government has already swept it under the carpet. It’s worse than the Hillsborough Disaster.
. WHAT WE NEED IS NOT FRESH GOVERNANCE OF THE LABOUR PARTY BUT AN ELECTORAL SYSTEM HICH REFLECTS THE INCREASING DIVERSIFICATION OF SOCIETY. THE BINARY SYSTEM IS DEAD. THE SOONER WE RECOGNISE IT THE BETTER
I like a lot of what this blog says, and it is refreshingly different. However, in its resort to a a managerial explanation – the need for better feedback, policy by design, it is in itself more than tinged with the technocratic ideals that failed New Labour, and eventually, the nation.
Politics is not about service delivers and service providers, it is about power; and that any kind of designed feedback – be it your performance appraisal to larger scale mechanisms – is not a wholly politicized and political process, and is somehow instead objective, is were systems thinking starts to go wrong.
Seeking to join the Labour Party in the North East in the mid 1960’s, l was told it was “Full up” and “To come back next year”. Similar experiences are now often quoted or seen as being apocryphal. But they are not. If they have come to feel like an Urban Myth it’s because the practice of “reverse entryism”, deployed by those who wanted to control the organisation and avoid scrutiny was widespread. We didn’t need the drama of “Our Friends in the North” to show what that led to; although it helped to explain the consequences.
Often single extended families or a small cluster of colleagues from one industry dominated both local branches and constituency party. That desire to own rather than serve the Labour Party still lingers on and was the antecedent to the internecine disputes that erupted with the election of Jeremy Corbyn.
Fifty years on, and having served as both a European and Parliamentary constituency Chair and Parliamentary and Local Government Agent, it is a joy to see both the growth in membership and broad public support for the aims and values of the movement as expressed by the current leadership.
Those members of the NEC, MP’s, officials of the Party and their financial backers who were the prime movers in actions that brought the Party into disrepute and damaged its electoral chances are the residue of a bygone era – whatever their age!
The process of renewal which is underway is unstoppable and any continuing opposition only fuels the enthusiasm of those who wish to build a more inclusive mass movement – whatever our age!
The party is no longer “Full up” and as it accepts new members and collaborators its shape will more closely follow need and its voice will sound more like what people are saying. Rather than the appropriation or theft of the voice and its misuse, which has been the story so far.
Institutional reform, (or lack of it) both within the Party and across local and national government is a serious constraint. There are still far too many special interests hiding (in Labour Party terms) behind – or squatting on – the ‘rule book’, or evading scrutiny by the electorate through antiquated voting systems.
It really is time for change.
Could it be that Labour doesn’t have a single vision over anything, and that its governance is still a prize to be fought over by factions?
Real feedback would be of great value – particularly from voters who admit to having toyed with the idea of voting Labour at any or all of the last three general elections, but decided against doing so.
The author pinpoints the disconnect between the party’s pre-occupations and the concerns of its potential voters. Perhaps the most overlooked, and the most influential, is the failure to realise that the majority of people no longer define themselves by their occupation (many will change occupations or have ‘portfolio’ work), so that the narrow trades union perspective is less representative than it used to be. People now have interests more aligned with their housing, health, and consumer needs. It isn’t ‘the bosses’ but those controlling the supply of essential services who exploit and control people and limit their life chances. Those with longer memories will be less convinced than younger voters by the ‘re-nationalisation’ mantra; older voters remember that complacency, injustice and neglect happened when the mines and railways were in public ownership too, and that one of the main justifications for privatisation was that it is dangerous for a single body (the State, or the Local Authority) to have both service-providing and regulatory roles. Perhaps if the party were to concentrate on putting service users, rather than providers, in charge of regulation and standards, people would feel empowered rather than embittered and cynical.
Yes, I think that having workers as part of company decisions would be worth trying. Do the workers work for the bosses or do the bosses work for the workers? Perhaps, a little imaginative creative thinking might not go amiss? Of course, for me, I’ve never fit into any category because I have 2 equal careers neither of which are of any interest to anybody: Artist, graphic designer advertising consultant and classical musician. Further, my country is the world, a concept that is alien to Brexwits, bigots, nationalists and anti- internationalists. In short, I’m a time-traveller come back to see how the barbaric primitives used to live.
It’s still valid to state that the Labour party is there to support all who must work for the essentials of life. Yes, careers are now fluid things and trade unions based on a life’s work in a single type of work will suffer a drop in membership. But trade unions are needed as much as ever to protect those in the world of uncertain hours, clocking off for travel and so on. Housing, health and consumer needs are closely aligned with earnings, and yes it is restricting, say, housing supplies and social housing, that keeps many vulnerable and a few billionaires. Agree that complacency is a danger of public ownership, and this should be addressed, but at least energy bills and the matching salaries of executives had not yet gone into orbit. Regulation by service users sounds right, like all the ways we are governed it needs it’s checks and balances.
complacency, injustice and neglect happened when the mines and railways were in public ownership
… and inefficiency and overmanning: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NWqJECZelhQ