It takes a long time for neural pathways to reroute. It has been said that you need 10,000 hours to achieve proficiency in any task — but, once achieved, it leaves a rutted road through your braincells from which it is hard to deviate. But while humans can relearn, political parties find it almost impossible.
Right now, the Labour party seems trapped by the muscle memory of what it used to do. A leadership battle that began as “least-faceless technocrat wins” has become “Stop Jeremy Corbyn!” Whoever wins, everybody is happy because — at last — there is a left-right contest they can understand. The TV archive companies are dusting off their tapes of the era between the electrifying leftwing speech Tony Benn made in Blackpool in 1980 and the SDP’s first victory at Glasgow Hillhead in 1981. What everybody seems to want, subconsciously, is a reenactment.
What the party really needs is the “Five Whys”. Sakichi Toyoda, who founded Toyota in the 1920s, encouraged his engineers to solve problems by tracing chains of causality through five stages to isolate, if possible, a root cause of failure. Labour’s problem is not just that it lost an election. It has lost one of the constituent nations of Britain, once its heartland, and is now stuck in a leadership crisis that could, as many MPs acknowledge privately, see it fall apart.
So why? First, because millions of people expressed their discontent by voting other than Labour. Nearly four million people voted for a party that wants to leave Europe; 1.2 million voted for the Greens; 50 per cent of all Scots who voted backed the SNP. Furthermore, in large parts of the north of England, huge numbers of people did not vote.
So, following Toyoda’s method, we ask: why did the above happen? It’s obvious that radicalism has fragmented — along national lines, and along the faultlines of the cultural demographics that separate typical Greens from typical Ukippers. We also have to acknowledge that the party and its leadership failed to react in any coherent way. It assumed that Scottish nationalism was driven by economic grievance instead of a positive cultural renaissance. It assumed UK Independence Part (Ukip) would hurt the Tories; and that dismissing the Greens as flaky would make them go away. It talked at people on the famous “Labour doorstep” instead of listening. So if we say social reality has changed, and yet Labour did not realise and could not react — then why? Labour, unlike the Conservatives, has always been an overt class alliance: between the left wings of both the bourgeoisie and the working class. Conservatism can morph from Thatcherism to the free-market liberalism of the present, losing millions of rightwing working class-voters over Europe, without going through existential agony. Not so Labour. Formed as a class alliance, it was always in danger of simply presenting a negotiated set of diverse demands. Richard Tawney, in the 1930s, described Labour manifestos as “less programmes than miscellanies — a glittering forest of Christmas trees with presents for everyone, instead of a plan”. Tawney pointed out that Labour could either be the instrument for the creation of a classless society, or a “political agent” pressing the claims of different groups, but it could not successfully be both at the same time.
Awkward bunch
Labour mythology will tell you that the only times Labour was successful was when it presented a hegemonic vision: in 1945, armed with the Beveridge Report; in the Wilson era, armed with “white heat of technology” rhetoric in the face of a sclerotic and fragile establishment; and under former British premier Tony Blair. But this is only another way of saying that Labour is successful only when the interests of its two constituents — the left bourgeoisie and the working class — coincide. This takes us to the third level of causality: in the modern world, so far, they do not. What is striking, when we read the list of rich Labour donors who threaten to walk away if Corbyn wins, is their atypical nature. Labour business people have always been an awkward bunch — think Lord Kagan under Wilson. But in the 2015 election it was striking how little organic support they offered. If you combine this with the lack of enthusiasm displayed by Labour’s working-class base, you begin to understand the crisis of existence that underpins the farce of the leadership race. We’re only on to our fourth why, but we are close to an answer. Labour is in crisis because the social dynamics of Britain have changed, and it cannot adapt to them. Its alliance structure — the modern version of which Maurice Glasman has called “a middle-class mum married to a working-class dad” — does not adapt well to a world where neither family nor class dynamics operate.
In Scotland, of those who voted, 55 per cent of people in the referendum, and 50 per cent on May 7, voted for a party offering a left, plebeian break from neoliberalism and a breath of fresh air. Large parts of smalltown England and Wales voted for a party that wants to break with neoliberalism in a different way: towards controlled borders, regained economic sovereignty, and the cultural values of the past. And more than a million people voted Green.
Only by stepping out of the leadership race did Tristram Hunt gain permission to say the first unsayable: that the party has to start from scratch in Scotland; and that — borrowing from a party like Podemos — it has to find a through-line of English radicalism to complement the successful socio-nationalism it practises in Wales. Here we come to the fifth why. Building an alliance of ethnic, ideological and demographic radicalisms is much harder than building an alliance of two historic classes.
Where it works, you often find a mesmeric leader whose entire life is spent camouflaging or mediating the conflicts of interest. And it draws on cultural moments during which the diverse elements of the coalition can sink their differences — like Euro 96 or the last big Oxi demonstration in Greece. Modern radical parties are built around a cause, a vision, an aura. All parts of modern Labour are struggling to define what their cause and vision is, and the aura is non-existent.
— Guardian News & Media Ltd
Paul Mason is economics editor of Channel 4 News.
