How to transform unequal Britain

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On Saturday 23rd November Bryn Griffiths travelled to Lewes to join a discussion about how the Labour Government should transform an unequal Britain. Read on to find out why Bryn chose to travel all the way to Lewes for a Labour Party meeting and why the event left him a worried man.

We all live in a volatile period so, like most Labour Party activists, I yearn for political discussion about how we can respond effectively, as democratic socialists, to the challenging political environment.  I want my views as part of the Labour left to be included in that discussion but I also want to hear my stance challenged by serious arguments put by others who come from the other parts of Labour’s broad church. 

Most people I know joined the Labour Party because they wanted to build a wide coalition for radical change but unfortunately many former Party activists have resigned or failed to renew their membership. I think they’ve done this because they no longer recognise the Labour Party a place where these simple aspirations will be met.

Lewes Labour Party, I am pleased to report, is swimming hard against the tide within our Party.  It holds excellent events that always have an uncanny habit of asking exactly the right questions and inviting great speakers to try and answer them.  One of the reasons that Lewes Labour Party can organise such events is that the principle of radical pluralism seems to be part of their political DNA.  The only requirement for attendance at a Lewes Labour Party festival of ideas event is that you come with an open mind.  The result of this unusual approach to Labour politics is that you find yourself in a room full of left-wing socialists, Labour centrists, Labour loyalists, Green Party members, single issue campaigners, community activists, people of no party at all and even the odd radical liberal.  Open, robust and serious political discussion at a Labour Party-hosted event might sound unusual but believe me it really works!

At its latest event, Lewes Labour Party posed the urgent question ‘How can we transform unequal Britain?’  The key note speakers were Danny Dorling, Polly Toynbee and David Walker.  On the day Danny spoke first but given the nature of David and Polly’s contributions it makes more sense to start with theirs.

Polly Toynbee is a luminary of Labour centrism.  She writes for the Guardian, specialises in social policy and her centrist pedigree stretches all the way back to the Limehouse Declaration on 25th January 1981 which paved the way for the Social Democratic Party which so badly damaged Michael Foot’s Labour Party in the first term of Thatcher’s government.

Polly Toynbee spoke together with David Walker, the co-author of her new book The Only Way is Up – How to take Britain from austerity to prosperity.  The bulk of their presentation was taken up by a rear-view mirror look at the appalling fourteen-year legacy bequeathed to the new Labour Government by the Tories.  Toynbee and Walker’s presentation was ‘forensic’ and captured what they called the “necessary memory” of the appalling Tory record. It was a record that led Britain to decisively reject the Tories and deliver what is coming to be known by many of us as Keir Starmer’s loveless landslide. The book gives us all the latest data and expert analysis across the fields of health, children’s services, the economy, the environment, policing and defence.

To be fair to Toynbee and Walker, they went beyond a diagnosis of what is wrong with Britain to give prescriptions of what they would like to happen in each of their thematic areas. If anything even close to their suggestions were to be delivered, my expectations of Starmer and Reeves would be significantly exceeded. I would be a happy Labour Party member.  The problem was that all the suggestions for action were accompanied by a plea for patience and warnings that seemed to imply that the good stuff might have to wait for a second term.

Perhaps the most important passage of the Toynbee and Walker address was when they turned to the economy.  Toynbee, surveying the appalling state of the country bequeathed to Labour, suggested that our only hope is that Rachel Reeves’s investment to deliver growth does indeed deliver.  It was at this point I started to become a worried man.

Toynbee’s compelling picture of the state of Britain is accurate.  We have an economy already weakened by Trussonomics, Brexit, Covid, the war in Ukraine and frighteningly there are more economic shocks to come if the USA proceeds with Trump’s tariffs. What makes me so worried is if our ‘only hope’ is that some energetic, but low-budget, economic interventionism by Rachel Reeves delivers substantial growth, the picture could rapidly degenerate into a scenario where a Labour Government does not deliver much hope at all!   

At this point, I think I’ll turn to Danny Dorling’s presentation to report what light he shone on the worrying scenario which took a vice-like grip on my thoughts during the course of the event. 

Danny Dorling is a Professor of Geography in the School of Geography and the Environment at Oxford University. Dorling is the author of the Policy-published, Peak Injustice Solving Britain’s Inequality Crisis.  Dorling joined John McDonnell’s big tent of economic advisers when McDonnell was our Labour Shadow Chancellor. I think we can safely describe Dorling as the more radical voice in Lewes Labour’s pluralist debate.

Dorling injected further stark reality into the event, as he focused our minds on the rise of Farage’s Reform UK.  He reminded us that the election night exit poll had suggested that Reform’s seat count could have been as high as 13 seats.  Casting our worried thoughts into the future, he reminded us that Farage represented the biggest right wing electoral threat since Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists in pre-Second World War Britain.  He observed that today’s economic conditions provide fertile ground for the rise of a populist right led by angry middle-class voters.

Dorling invited us to imagine an unequal Britain where Kemi Badenoch formed an informal pact with Nigel Farage which enabled them to deliver two sets of messages to different electorates.  The scenario might be that Farage goes after Labour in dissatisfied working-class seats – the old Red Wall – and Badenoch seeks to recover core Tory votes in her party’s former heartlands.  It’s a potential pincer movement which should trouble every one of us.

My worry is that Rachel Reeves has placed the Labour Government in a fiscal straitjacket which will make it impossible to deliver noticeable improvement through redistribution for the voters who gave us victory in July 2024.  Combine that scenario with a populist right which overcomes its 2024 divisions, in the manner suggested by Dorling, and we have every reason to abandon any Labour complacency brought about by Badenoch becoming the new Tory Leader. Opinion polls are already showing Labour and the Tories running neck and neck with a few outliers showing the Tories already pulling ahead.  We must realise that Starmer’s loveless landslide is far from impregnable. A Badenoch victory is not assured, we can still win, but she certainly has a possible route to office if Labour does not act to deliver for its core voters. 

A glance across the Atlantic shows us both what can go wrong and what we need to do to avoid America’s fate in 2029. On 6th November 2024, Bernie Sanders issued a short statement on the US presidential election results.  Bernie’s social media posting below places us on notice.  If we do not act soon, I am worried that in five years’ time we could find ourselves in exactly the same place and none of us want that.

You can find the whole of Bernie’s statement here.

I think we are in danger of facing Bernie’s dire scenario at home precisely because of the terrible picture of Britain painted for us in Lewes, by Toynbee and Walker.  If we can’t deliver noticeable improvement for our British working-class voters, who feel abandoned, no number of pleas for patience or references to the terrible Tory legacy will help us one jot.  Trump’s victory means that we know exactly where a failure to deliver will lead.  Now is the time to act and that means radical redistribution on behalf of the many at the expense of the few!

At the end of a successful Lewes Labour festival of ideas, Mark Perryman, the event organiser, told us that next summer Lewes Labour plans to be back with another event to look at how we can stem the rise of the populist right.  After last weekend’s event, I can’t think of a better subject to help us continue the conversation.

Bryn Griffiths is an activist in Colchester Labour Party and North Essex World Transformed. He is a member of both Momentum’s National Coordinating Group and the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy’s Executive.

Bryn also hosts Labour Hub’s spin off – the Labour Left Podcast.  You can find all the episodes of the Labour left Podcast here  or if you prefer audio platforms (for example. Amazon, Audible Spotify, Apple etc,) just search for Labour Left Podcast.