UK
Opinion

This narrow, win-at-all-costs strategy could take Labour to victory, but not to power

Neal Lawson
Wed, 9 August 2023 

Photograph: Jacob King/PA

How can a party be convincingly leading the polls and still appear so weak? Labour may be 17 points ahead but it continues to behave with all the nervousness of unwelcome gatecrashers at a party.

Here it does no good to be unfair. On some impressive and yet rather cynical scale Labour has worked miracles. It has come back from the dead much quicker than anyone expected. Keir Starmer was meant to be the bridge for the eventual return of Blairite true believers. Under the temporary cloak of Corbynism-without-Corbyn, the plan was not to win but to snatch the party back – a first step, and one that counted on another electoral failure as an inevitability, given the scale of Labour’s 2019 loss.

What no one saw coming was the utter collapse of the Tory governing project, first via Boris Johnson and then Liz Truss. Rishi Sunak, thus far, seems unable to do much but prolong the agony. Probable victory is being handed to Labour on a plate – and herein lies the problem.

A schism is opening within Labour between those who believe winning the next election under almost any circumstances is the only objective of the next 18 months of politics, versus those that want electoral success but with a purpose and a mandate.

The two sides stare at each other aghast. “How could you not see winning is everything?” decries one camp – nothing matters more than getting rid of the terrible Tories. This strategy provides the smallest possible target for the Tories and their media allies to take aim at. A victory based on this strategy would be an unprecedented success story given the scale of 2019’s defeat. So why does it feel that outside a narrowing leadership circle, so few party members and supporters seem happy with this state of affairs?

On the other side of this minimalist stance is a deep and profound worry that while electoral success is necessary, it is far from sufficient. Electoral success at any cost simply ties the hands of any incoming government. Set against enormous environmental and economic challenges, the looming danger is that Labour could be busy constructing a cage for itself from any victory that relies on Tory ineptitude.

If Labour wins office but fails to capitalise on the opportunity, the fear is not just that progressive politics will be damaged, perhaps irrevocably, but that people start to turn away from democracy itself.

In the short term, even attempting to win on this narrow ticket is fraught with danger. If everything rests on continued governing failure, what happens if the Tories stop failing? What if the economy ticks upwards enough, and their relentless anti-woke and anti-boat agenda takes hold? Labour has too little to come back with.

Labour or a Labour-led alliance must win office, but it also needs to be in power. Being in office means taking executive decisions, being in power is the wherewithal to decisively intervene and transform the country. Such power is based on a vision for change, a mandate to achieve it, the deep-rooted policies and institutions that can oversee the gradual but systematic transformation of our economy and society, and the alliances to defend and promote the politics of big change. By luck, all the above helps Labour electorally too.

Instead of an either/or approach to office and power, Labour needs to adopt a both/and position. Here we should make a plea for the return of the much-maligned word “pragmatism”. A pragmatic politics is an approach that evaluates theories or beliefs in terms of the success of their practical application. To be pragmatic is to know where you want to go but act cannily to get there.

Pragmatic politics is about starting where people are, connecting or reconnecting with them, but knowing in a profound sense where you want to take them. It’s about the steady building blocks of change so that gradually, step by step, progressives become stronger, winning over people and political ground. It is a base to build from, not a deep hole to get out of.

Governments alone are not powerful. Just look at the Tories with their 62-seat majority. Ideas and movements are powerful and can be transformative when they chime with emerging cultures, technology and elected office. Just being there is not enough. Starmer says he wants to fix things, not theorise. But fix what, for whom and how? These are deeply political decisions that demand hard thought and profound answers.

Of course, this is not easy. It is neither impossibilism nor capitulation and therefore requires deep strategic thought and planning, which appears to be somewhat lacking.

I should know, I’ve been here before. After the soul-crushing 1992 defeat, I too slipped dreamlike into the false comfort of the win-at-any-cost camp. But New Labour was the product of more profound loss, not just that 1992 election defeat, but the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall, the defeat of the miners in 1985, of socialist hope. In such systemic and disorientating loss, the only salvation seemed to be electoral victory, at any cost.

There I slept until a double epiphany in the shape of sociologists Stuart Hall and Zygmunt Bauman woke me from my slumber and set me back on the long road to power with a deep purpose.

And I’ve been here more recently still. In the wake of the Jeremy Corbyn leadership victory in 2015, I remember a young activist telling me not to raise questions, or dredge up difficult problems. Instead, they said, I should just believe and support the new leader. At that early moment I knew the Corbyn project would struggle.

Labour is running for high office, but it feels too much like it is running from everything, from the climate catastrophe and the fact so many cannot afford the cost of living. It is running from itself and its lack of depth and confidence.

As Labour shrinks its offer and its base before it’s even in office, it feels as if some who lead it can only look down, never up. This spells disaster. An improbable victory is being handed to Labour on a plate – but the gruel is thin. Too thin.

Neal Lawson is director of the cross-party campaign organisation Compass