Craig Ryan

Writer | Reporter | Editor

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  • Book review: Citizen Clem by John Bew

    Published in Public Service Magazine, Autumn 2017. Photo: National Library of Australia (CC)

    For someone often cited as our greatest prime minister, something of a reverse cult of personality surrounds Clement Attlee. The aura of heroism attaches more readily to his government than to the man himself. Who knows much now, for example, about Attlee’s distinguished service in World War I, when he was, as John Bew gleefully tells us in this classy new biography, “shot in the buttocks as he carried the red flag over the top”?

    That red flag was the flag of his regiment, the South Lancashires, not the socialist standard sung about at Labour conferences. Bew argues convincingly that Attlee’s deep sense of patriotism and loyalty is the key to understanding his enduring political achievements. As a “social patriot” his patriotism, “meant not fidelity to caste or cohort, but to the commonwealth”. Attlee himself said his proudest achievement was not the NHS, but taking Labour into the wartime coalition with his friend Winston Churchill.

    Bew explains how Attlee “matured into socialism” – developing the sense of purpose and steely determination that turned this shy and diffident man into the great achiever of the British left. Attlee “went left by going east”: his politics were forged in the years he spent as an East End social worker, subsisting in a garret above the youth club – an experience that Bew says inured him to the “Fabian aloofness” that infected many of his comrades.

    Attlee’s genuine modesty led almost everyone to underestimate him (but not Churchill who, while often rude about his rival on the stump, deeply respected Attlee and defended him fiercely in private), and historians have long puzzled over how he survived 20 tumultuous years as Labour leader. While admitting that luck catapulted Attlee into the leadership in 1935, Bew suggests he was simply better than anyone else: “One of his undoubted skills was the navigate around the larger egos surrounding him, without letting disputes over personality get in the way of the swift execution of government policy.”

    Like most effective revolutionaries – Thatcher, Lenin, Napoleon – Attlee was well read but always more of a doer than a thinker. Rejecting Marxism early on, he doggedly disputed the idea that socialism demanded an abrupt and complete break with Britain’s history and traditions, accusing more doctrinaire and impatient colleagues, like Harold Laski and Nye Bevan, of “demanding a caesarean section rather than a natural birth” for socialism. Poverty and inequality were a “national problem” which required the attention of the state. Attlee may have been a gradualist, but he knew where he wanted to go.

    Without ever setting down a doctrine, Attlee painstakingly accumulated a bag of ideas about how democratic socialism should work, which he assembled into a distinctly British programme for government in the post-war years. They included a firm commitment to social justice, a balance between radicalism and pragmatism, a deep sense of patriotism, an emphasis on personal probity and loyalty, and a willingness to work with other traditions within society: Attlee knew that conservatism and socialism were different, but not opposites.

    For today’s Labour Party, looking to combine radical socialism with electoral credibility, Bew’s book is a great place to start. Bew is right to argue that Attlee’s was a quintessentially 20th century project – 1945 cannot be repeated – and Labour would do better to learn from Attlee’s ethos rather than just basking in the reflected glow of his government’s achievements. After all, Attlee’s socialism – democratic but patriotic, principled but pragmatic – is the only kind of socialism that ever really worked.

  • The clock’s still ticking

    Published in Public Service Magazine, Summer 2017. Image: Chapman Design.

    With Brexit Day just 21 months away, Britain’s government, parliament and civil service face perhaps their greatest peacetime challenge. Craig Ryan asks the experts if we have the resources, skills and time we need to make Brexit work.

    If Brexit was hard before, how much harder is it now? Theresa May’s government now faces the greatest policy and legislative challenge since 1945 without a clear mandate or a majority in parliament, and with the prospect of a change of leadership or a fresh election constantly hanging in the air. And with the smallest civil service since the war to boot.

    “For the civil service, the problem is the Brexit clock is still ticking,” says Sir Paul Jenkins, Treasury Solicitor and head of the Government Legal Department from 2006 to 2014. “When will they be able to get on with negotiating and will they even get near having something they can implement before the end of the Article 50 period?”

    If the parliamentary arithmetic doesn’t change, or moves further against the Government, Jenkins warns that it’s far from certain that any Brexit deal negotiated with Brussels will be approved – increasing both the risk of a ‘cliff-edge’ exit and the need for parallel planning. “With time running out fast, the civil service urgently needs clarity and direction from ministers. It appears they’re getting neither at the moment. But, who knows, it might all change tomorrow!”

    Despite the political rhetoric, Jenkins believes some ministers – David Davis, in particular – now “get it”, and realise there’s no chance of securing a long-term trade deal by Brexit Day. This means they will have to ruthlessly prioritise what they do with the 21 months that remain.

    In negotiating terms, that probably means agreeing the basic package on withdrawal terms – the “divorce settlement” – and a transitional agreement, lasting perhaps two to five years, while Britain’s future relationship with the EU is worked out in detail. “The transitional deal won’t be the status quo or a long-terms settlement; it will be something different. In what way, we don’t really know,” says Jenkins.

    Running in parallel with the negotiations, but interacting with them in a wickedly complex way, will be process of legislating for Brexit – transferring the huge ‘acquis’ of EU and EU-derived legislation into UK law and making sure everything will work in the post-Brexit environment. 

    That means replacing every law made under the powers of the 1972 European Communities Act, and trawling through other UK legislation which has an EU dimension or refers to EU standards or institutions, including thousands of EU directives. EU regulations, which apply directly in the UK law, will all have to be carried across to British law. Perhaps the trickiest job will be identifying and replacing the large volume of judge-made law – much of EU tax legislation, for example, exists only in European Court rulings.

    The white paper published by the Department for Exiting the European Union (DExEU) before the general election won praise from some experts for not trying to do too much. “The white paper was not as ambitious as I thought it might be, and others feared it might be,” says Sir Stephen Laws, who as First Parliamentary Counsel, was Westminster’s chief drafter of laws from 2006 to 2012. “It confines itself to two issues: what do you need to do to preserve continuity after Brexit, and what do you need to implement the deal.”

    As ever, the devil will be in the detail. One big problem the white paper doesn’t address is what exactly constitutes “EU-derived” legislation. Laws cites the example of the 1985 Consumer Credit Act, which was supposed to implement the UK’s obligations on product liability. “The European Court of Justice ruled that, whatever it actually says, it’s got to be construed as if it’s consistent with the European obligations. What you do about that, I just don’t know,” he says.

    Despite the slimmed-down Queen’s Speech, the legislative workload for Brexit still looks formidable. Emma Norris, programme director at the Institute for Government (IfG), reckons Brexit will requite at least 15 new bills, plus the so-called ‘great repeal bill’. “On top of all that, you’ve got everything that’s in the Queen’s Speech and there’s lots of legislation left over from the last session that didn’t get through in time. This is a parliament under strain,” she warns.

    The IfG’s recent report, Legislating Brexit, said the government and MPs need to strike a balance between proper scrutiny of potentially controversial legislation and the need to move at speed to meet the Brexit deadline. 

    “I see parliament as a political filter for proposals coming from the government,” says Laws. “It’s really up to parliament to set its priorities for what it thinks it needs to scrutinise, and if it’s a question of how rather than what, fairly often parliament can adopt a looser approach to scrutiny, as they already do with legislation coming from Europe.”

    Laws, who was more optimistic than many commentators before the election, says the inconclusive poll will make things much tougher. “The government is more vulnerable in the Commons to people trying to extract a price, more vulnerable in Lords because it has no mandate, more vulnerable in committee because may not have majority,” he warns.

    “We have all the same problems as before, but now it’s politically difficult as well as technically difficult,” he adds. “They can’t use broad brush solutions because people have the power to unpick them – and that makes it technically more difficult too.” 

    What makes the Brexit process so fiendishly complicated is that policymakers are aiming for a moving target. No one knows what the final settlement will be, or if there will be one at all.

    To deal with this, the repeal bill will give the government similar powers those granted under 1972 Act it will be repealing. “It will be a power to implement whatever rules we come up with in negotiations with the other European countries,” Laws explains.

    But the “nightmare scenario”, says Sir Paul Jenkins, is no deal at all. “The legal consequences of no deal are much greater. If we just run out of time and there’s no extension – all the treaties would cease to apply overnight, so there’s nothing.”

    While much EU law could be copied across to the UK statute book, treaties involving third parties would not operate. As an example, Jenkins cites the EU-US open skies treaty, without which there will be no legal basis for planes flying from the UK to America. 

    “What I would like to ask David Davis is, ‘at what point in the next two years are you going to begin bilateral negotiations with the US government for a contingent treaty so the planes can keep flying the day after we fall out of the EU?’” says Jenkins. He warns against leaving such contingency planning too late, because the entire Brexit deal could fall apart at the last minute over a single issue, even when the rest of it has been agreed.

    There’s also a big risk that Brexit will become all-consuming, devouring ministerial attention and leaving departments unable to cope with anything else. Norris reels off a list of initiatives which were already going nowhere fast before the election: Heathrow expansion, the national funding formula for schools, grammar schools expansion and English devolution – not to mention Theresa May’s vague personal commitments to social mobility and industrial strategy. 

    “There’s definitely a strain on ministerial attention. It’s absolutely critical that ministers are absolutely clear about what the priorities are, so that ministerial intention will guide the system,” she says. 

    She adds: “This is not just about the Brexit departments – it’s about departments like DEFRA, the Ministry of Justice, Revenue and Customs – they’re going to be taking on roles they simply haven’t played for decades. It’s enormously increasing their workload and they’ve got to carry on with business as usual as well.

    There are already signs that government is short of skills it needs to negotiate and implement Brexit. In mid-May, it emerged that the five departments most affected by Brexit – DExEU, DIT, DEFRA, BEIS and the Home Office – were urgently trawling other departments for policy staff, mainly at EO to Grade 6 level – with candidates expected to move with just two weeks notice.

    “I’m not sure the government has a proper understanding of the capacity and capability it needs to deliver Brexit, and what the implications are for departments,” says Norris. “I think this one of the key planning questions the new government will need to get a grip on.” 

    But Jenkins insists press reports about Remain-supporting civil servants dodging Brexit-related jobs are wide of the mark. “Everything I pick up suggests that’s rubbish. What I love and admire about the bright kids that I had working with me is that so many of them, whatever their personal views, have done what the British civil service does and gone rushing into to those departments because that’s were the action is.” 

    Despite the intense pressure, Jenkins says Whitehall can still pull it off. “I wind all sorts of people up by saying I was a proud bureaucrat for 35 years and I’m still proud of it. If something can be sorted out, the great British civil service is capable of sorting it out.”

  • Three words that won it

    Ten reasons why “take back control” was probably the most devastatingly effective political slogan of modern times.

    Looking back on last month’s EU referendum, my hunch is that the “take back control” message probably swung it in the last week. As a political message it had everything — all packed into three words. I don’t know if this was a stroke of genius on the part of someone at Vote Leave or just a happy (for them) accident. Although it was never actually printed on their publicity material, here’s ten reasons why “take back control” was probably the most devastatingly effective political slogan of modern times. 

    1. It’s irrefutable

    How could you not want to take back control? What’s your counter-argument: “Less control, more impotence!”? “Better off with someone else in charge”? To argue against it you have to waffle on about “pooled sovereignty” or “sharing control”, or you have to say something that sounds downright peverse. Either way, you lose. 

    2. It’s tangible

    How clever to replace the abstract concept of “sovereignty” with the much more solid and immediate “control”. People have to think about what sovereignty means, and then you’re into a discussion. But everyone knows what it means and feels like to be in control.

    3. It’s flattering

    No one ever won an election by telling people they were shit. It says “you’re more powerful than you think”, “you can do this”. At a time when people feel increasingly powerless, telling them that they weren’t was incredibly powerful. 

    4. It’s optimistic

    Instead of assailing people with a lot of doomy statistics about how bad the EU is and how many migrants are going to arrive, “take back control” simply told people that a better future is in their own hands. John Lanchester has written brilliantly about how most working people feel bewildered and powerless in the post-crash world. “Take back control” seemed to offer both an explanation and a way forward. 

    5. It’s nostalgic

    The “back” was important. Nostalgia is very powerful because it’s reassuring. When proposing a radical change it’s much better to say we’re going back to something we had before. That way, it seems achievable and less of a leap in the dark. And it’s more tangible. For the same reason, “Bring Back British Rail” sounds much more attractive and doable than “take the railways back into public ownership”.

    6. It’s empowering

    It’s not us who will take back control, not the government, not even an abstract entity like “the British people”. YOU will take back control. This ties in very powerfully with the idea that the EU is remote and undemocratic, and carries the clear implication that individual people will somehow have more control over their lives. 

    7. It’s grown up

    It doesn’t promise free money, cheap beer or handouts. It says you are an adult, you can take responsibility for your and our future. It’s quite challenging in a way: “it’s up to you to make this work”.

    8. It blames

    No one was under illusions about who we would be taking back control from. The target was clear, and if you’re going to base a campaign on blame, it’s better to be clear about who you’re blaming: we had control, the EU took it, we want it back.

    9. It’s short

    There’s a saying in the copywriting world: “good things come in threes”. Many of most our most effective and memorable political slogans delivered their hit in just three words: “thirteen wasted years” (1964), “Labour isn’t working” (1979), “Labour’s double whammy” (1992) and “Britain deserves better” (1997) were all election winners. Although shorter (#TakeControl) and longer (“Let’s take back control”) variants were used on Vote Leave publicity material, it’s the three-word version recited by Brexit leaders that everyone will remember. It says just what it needs to say and no more. By contrast, can anyone remember the Remain campaign slogan? 

    10. It’s not an argument at all 

    “Take back control” doesn’t promise anything, doesn’t refute anything, doesn’t warn about anything. It doesn’t pretend to offer solutions. Like a mantra, it can be thrown back in the face of almost any argument, without making the speaker look too foolish. Probably the most effective way to sell anything is to make people feel good about buying it. “Take back control” was just a simple instruction to do something that would feel good. 

    Photo: ChiralJon/Flickr.com

  • My thirty years of hurt and joy with Elvis

    Long, digressive, funny and deeply moving, Elvis Costello’s stunning memoir is a sort of biography of popular music itself.

    I still remember the day – it was 15 March 1986, an unusually warm early spring Saturday – when I walked into an Our Price record shop and saw that cover for the first time: a scruffily bearded man wearing a country and western shirt and a replica of the Imperial State Crown. The sleeve simply said “King of America” but Our Price had helpfully put a sticker on the front: “The New LP from Elvis Costello: PLAY LOUD”. I did – more times than anyone around me will care to remember. But we all grew to love that record. Even my Dad liked it.

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  • Private affluence, public squalor

    Even in the most prosperous places, Britain is literally turning into a dump.

    A few weeks ago, I went to a school reunion. The next morning, with a couple of hours to kill and a hangover to walk off, I drove over to my old school and retraced the two-mile walk home I used to make every day. The grounds of the school, a former comprehensive now rebranded as an “academy”, adjoined two small lakes (ponds really – everything looks smaller once you’re grown up), a stream and some small open fields, all of which were maintained by the local council as a public space. Although technically “out of bounds”, this was where we spent most of our lunchtimes.

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  • I’m no Bennite. But I’m increasingly tempted by Jeremy Corbyn

    Published by the New Statesman, 17 August 2015. Photo: YouTube/CC.

    It’s a roll of the dice – but increasingly one that seems worth making.

    In politics, I like to think of myself as principled but realistic. I’m a social democrat, not a Marxist. My political heroes were mostly practical, moderate socialists – intellectual heavyweights for sure, but people who didn’t mind dirtying their hands in getting something done: Denis Healey, Tony Crosland, Shirley Williams, François Mitterrand. People who understood the grubbiness of the material world and were prepared to work with it. People who had few illusions about how working people think, or about where extremism can lead.

    When I was at university, 25 years ago, I was mocked (in a comradely way) for being the most right-wing member of the Labour club (although, as I remember, I was the only one prepared to join the Anti-Poll Tax Federation, a proscribed organisation in the Labour party at the time). When I left, the committee gave me a copy of The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists, inscribed with warnings not move further to the right or become any more “careerist” (no worries on that score).

    Inevitably, more than one or two of the wellwishers in that book went on to be leading lights in Tony Blair’s New Labour project. The party moved round me. What I thought of as mainstream social democracy went from being on the right of the party, to the centre and then to the left.

    Even “Red Ed” Miliband couldn’t put together a coherent social democratic programme – although that had as much to do with lack of confidence as lack of conviction. By about 2000, it was a mark of the hard left to be in possession of, to use Denis Healey’s preferred definition of democratic socialism, “an obstinate will to erode by inches the conditions that produce avoidable suffering”.

    The definition is, I think, Kolakowski’s. But in his memoirs, Healey went on to expand on his own feeling for what socialism should be:

    Socialism emphasises the community rather than the individual, consensus rather than confrontation, public welfare rather than private gain; it puts the quality of life before the quantity of goods. But its priorities are not absolute; it does not deny that the values which it normally puts second will sometimes need to come first, or that it’s opponents may also give some importance to socialist values.”  

    Spot on. But that’s Denis Healey, one-time monetarist chancellor and bête-noire of the Labour left in the 1980s. Spout that kind of stuff within earshot of today’s shadow cabinet and they visibly flinch.

    Every fibre of my being says I shouldn’t vote for Jeremy Corbyn, but the reasons just keep melting away like snow on a hotplate. I think austerity is nuts; Corbyn is the only anti-austerity candidate. I think the NHS has had enough marketisation and privatisation; he’s the only one to rule out any more of it. I’ve always supported renationalising the railways; Corbyn is only candidate to say he agrees (I suspect Burnham and Cooper agree too, but are afraid to say so – hardly a compelling reason to support them). I’m against the cuts in tax credits which, after years of both parties telling people they’d be looked after if they got a job, are cruel and unnecessary. Corbyn is the only candidate who voted against them in the Commons.

    These are not extreme or “hard left” policies. They’re solid, social democratic positions. And I’m willing to bet that they’re shared by a majority, or at least a very large minority, of the British people.

    And then, just when I thought I’d found my personal red line, Corbyn ruled out supporting Brexit in the EU referendum.

    But, scream Corbyn’s enemies, he can’t possibly win the election! True, all conventional wisdom and experience says it’s very unlikely. (I actually remember 1983). But that argument only holds water if you think any of the other three can win. I don’t.

    Liz Kendall is in many ways an admirable candidate, but I’ve already written about how her England-only strategy simply cannot work. Andy Burnham and Yvette Cooper have so far offered little that’s new or interesting. And don’t even get me started on the delicious irony of a shadow cabinet which has led Labour to two disastrous defeats in a row lecturing the rest of the movement about winning elections.

    What passes for Corbyn’s electoral strategy involves winning over non-voters and supporters of the Greens and the SNP. We don’t know if that can work; no one’s really tried it before. Election gurus tell us that non-voters are very hard to mobilise and many people think Scotland has “gone” already. So it looks optimistic, to say the least. But, after an election in which Labour lost 40 seats to the SNP and the Tory vote hardly changed, to say all we need to do is move closer to the Tories is just witless.

    The best argument against Corbyn is simply that he isn’t a serious candidate. He doesn’t really want to be leader, still less prime minister. It’s hard to imagine him going up against Cameron at PMQs. He’s too old (71 at the next election). The rest of the shadow cabinet may not work with him. There are some unpleasant people associated with his campaign talking about purging the party. Corbyn himself has taken foolish positions with respect to the IRA and Hamas in the past, which will be ruthlessly deployed against him in the future.

    Much more importantly, Corbyn’s policies, attractive as many are to people on the left, don’t add up to a coherent programme for a socialist government. I’m disappointed with Corbyn on policy; I hoped he’d be more imaginative and serious once it became clear he had a chance of winning. Corbyn’s campaign still prefers to chant slogans about the failures of free-market capitalism rather than do the hard work of transforming it into something better for working people. There’s no attempt to develop a serious political strategy that can unite more of the anti-Tory majority around a progressive platform. And I’m still baffled by Jeremy’s reluctance to back electoral reform. (Corbyn is now promising to make his website a forum for serious policy debate. Marina Mazzacuto and Will Hutton’s thinking about an “enabling” or “entrepreneurial” state – refracted into a political programme by Peter Hain – might be a good place to start.)

    But if Corbyn’s campaign looks like a protest movement, that’s because it is. It increasingly resembles a typically English, cobbled-together version of the movement against austerity and neo-liberalism we’ve seen in Scotland, Greece, Spain and other parts of Europe. Young people, in particular, are flocking to Corbyn and his campaign seems to be igniting interest and passion in politics in the same way as the Scottish indepedence referendum did last year. If Corbyn can forge that movement – which stretches from moderate social democrats like me to the far fringes of the Occupy movement — into a political fighting force, that might be better for the left than trying to scrape together a Labour majority from soft Tories and refugee Lib Dems. But that’s a big “if”.

    Voting for Corbyn means gambling with the life of the party we love for an uncertain, amorphous return. In normal circumstances I’d never go near it. But these aren’t normal times; across Europe, the future of the democratic left itself is at stake. It might just be worth rolling the dice.

    Craig Ryan is a Labour member, writer and blogger. You can read his work here. 

  • Remember — a right to buy is also a directive to sell

    Conservative plans to force housing associations to sell off homes are a warning to all charities and social enterprises: toe the line – or else.

    I am going to bang on about housing again. I’m probably going to bang on about housing until some Russian squillionnaire decides to launder his moolah by buying our east London maisonette (Crossrail’s coming soon, tovarishch!). At which point, we’ll be off and you’ll never hear from me on this subject again.

    Almost everyone knows the government’s plan to force housing associations to flog off homes will make Britain’s (and especially London’s) housing crisis worse, not better. Almost everyone knows the replacement houses won’t get built – look what happened in Manchester, where only two out of 863 council houses sold off were replaced. Almost everyone knows less social housing will increase competition for privately rented hovels, forcing rents and prices ever higher for everyone. (Yes, I know about the existing “right to acquire” scheme – but the discounts are tiny and it’s had very little take-up.) 

    So much for the consequences. But what about the policy itself? The effects will indeed be quite similar to the forced sale of council houses. But the politics behind it are quite different, and actually quite scary. “Right to buy” for council tenants was the state deciding to sell off a state asset for social policy reasons. The motives may have been suspect and the consequences disastrous, but it seems to me something a government with a democratic mandate was entitled to do. 

    Housing associations are charities. They are not arms of the state. The new policy amounts to sequestration of their assets because their aims and purposes differ from those of government ministers. Most housing associations were not set up to facilitate home ownership (however laudable an aim that may be), still less the profiteering that will follow as sure as night follows day. They were set up to provide affordable housing for people in need. That is what philanthropists give their money for and it’s what volunteers and housing association staff work for. The government is saying it doesn’t like those aims and is prepared to use the full force of the law to make housing associations serve the social policy objectives of the Conservative party instead.

    It’s deceitful to call the policy “right to buy” without admitting that someone’s right to buy is also someone else’s obligation to sell. And in a democratic society, rights and obligations are supposed to be universal. So why won’t private tenants have a “right to buy” and private landlords a corresponding “obligation to sell”? (The fact that many Conservative MPs are buy-to-let landlords might have something to do with it.) Giving rights and public money to tenants who have enjoyed subsidised housing while denying it to people who have borne the brunt of Britain’s brutal housing economics is simply perverse. 

    But of course it is, because the policy has nothing to do with “rights” or extending home ownership. It’s about further reducing social housing, which Tories see as eating into the profits of private landlords and providing an electoral base for Labour and other dangerous lefties like UKIP.

    It’s also a pretty naked attack on charities and social enterprise – the so-called “third sector”. Many Tories give money to the poor. Generally, they’re quite in favour of individual altruism, provided it’s on a modest scale. But the kind of grand, collective, entrepreneurial altruism which housing associations represent is beyond the pale. Charities that actually try to cure social problems rather than just alleviate the symptoms pose too much of a threat to their vision of a completely individualised and market-driven society. 

    Many people see social enterprise, self-help and community action as a democratic and non-statist way forward for the left. Perhaps the Tories agree. The government’s “directive to sell” policy for housing associations looks their first attempt to block that way forward. It won’t be their last. 

  • Wake up or smell the coffin

    Labour isn’t the whole left and it can’t do everything on its own. We need a progressive alliance to beat the Tories and change these islands for good.

    The UK, with or without Scotland, now faces permanent Conservative government. Once the Tories have redrawn the constituency boundaries in their favour, it will be virtually impossible for Labour to win a majority in England and Wales on its own, and Scotland is no longer willing to ride to its rescue. Exit poll guru John Curtice says Labour needs at least a 12% lead south of the border to form a majority government – greater even than Tony Blair achieved in 1997 – and that’s without the boundary changes.

    Nevertheless, retired Blairites like Peter Mandelson, David Miliband and Alan Milburn insist the party must return to the New Labour strategy of the 1990s. If only it were that simple. The three Ms ought to understand their own project better: New Labour relied on both a two-party system and the existence of a substantial number of “soft” Tories willing to consider voting Labour. That way, Labour could safely move to the right knowing that it’s “core” support among working class people had nowhere else to go. 

    To borrow Jim Callaghan’s phrase, I tell you in all candour that that option no longer exists.

    First, there aren’t that many soft Tories. The Conservatives polled only 36% in 2015, compared to the 43% in 1992. There are your soft Tories, right there in that 7%. Secondly, move to the right and Labour’s core voters now have other choices. The SNP tsunami in Scotland, the UKIP surge in the north and east of England and the more modest progress of the Greens in the south, shows they’re increasingly willing to exercise them. Slim pickings on the right and leaking votes to the left – pursue the New Labour strategy and the fate of the next Labour leader will look more like Nick Clegg’s than Tony Blair’s.

    How does Labour solve this conundrum of having the be both more left-wing and more right-wing at the same time?

    I don’t know. Perhaps someone can work out a programme that will be both convincing to working class voters and credible to the Tory-leaning middle classes. Perhaps the Tories will tear themselves to pieces over Europe and people will flock back to Labour. Perhaps a spectacularly charismatic new Labour leader will generate such enthusiasm that all these dilemmas and past disappointments will be swept aside. Perhaps if all three of these things happen, Labour will be able to win next time. But I doubt it. And I bet you do too.

    So let’s look at this another way. Labour can’t solve the conundrum, but maybe it doesn’t have to. The conundrum isn’t the problem. The problem is Labour.

    The Tory MEP Daniel Hannan said something very important on the BBC last Friday. He said people have stopped seeing Labour as part of the British radical tradition and now see the party as “something narrow” and Labour politicians as “just in it for themselves”. He’s right. Since the election, Labour politicians have been talking about Britain as if it was a political party with a small country attached. Stop it! I’m sick and tired of hearing about how “only Labour can” save the NHS, solve the housing crisis, end poverty and deliver a better life for working people. As we’ve seen, all too often Labour can’t. And if I’m sick and tired of hearing it, you can bet your last penny working people are fed up with hearing it too. 

    I love the Labour party (I’ve been a member for 30 years) and the labour movement (ditto), but they aren’t the the only progressive forces in the country. We face a daunting task in opposing the Tories’ ruthless programme, which seems to be nothing less than reimposing the plutocratic rule of the pre-democratic era. To stop them we will have to take on and beat the most powerful alliance of right-wing forces we’ve ever seen: global financial capitalism, a ferocious right-wing media controlled from abroad and a deeply-rooted Conservative party establishment, which extends into most areas of national life. Yes, the coalition of opposition we could range against them is formidable too. But only some of it is in the Labour party and the wider labour movement. Labour can’t do this on its own. And it shouldn’t try to.

    Instead, we need some sort progressive alliance of all the anti-Tory forces in the country. We need to get a government elected that will introduce a fair voting system so we can – for the first time – elect a parliament that actually represents us. This is no time to be tribal, narrow-minded or cynically detached from electoral politics. The alliance needs to stretch from the Liberal Democrats through Labour, Plaid and the SNP, to the Greens. At a minimum, would it really be that hard to come to some arrangement that would allow Labour supporters to vote for Caroline Lucas with a clear conscience or save social democrats like Vince Cable from defeat by another Tory?

    I know I might lose some of you here, but we also need to reach out to UKIP, or at least the millions of working people who voted for them. UKIP’s support for PR is self-interested, but that doesn’t make it any less justified. A single seat is an insult to the four million people who voted for them and the left shouldn’t be afraid of saying so. 

    But a progressive alliance or popular front is about more than a pact between political parties. It has to include anyone who rejects the Tory vision of a society based entirely on market relationships, where working people are just hamsters on a wheel in a global race that ever ends, where nothing humans make or do has any value except the profit someone (usually someone else) can extract from it. There are enough things we can agree on – an end to ideological austerity, investment in housing, universal human rights, fairer wages, better rights at work, fair votes, to name but a few – for us to put aside our differences for a few years. 

    And the same alliance should work together to make the Tories sweat for the next five years and beyond. Progressive politics in this country needs to be much more robust. Too often we’re content to fling statistics around to win the intellectual argument, and then to give in. A progressive alliance needs to link up all the groups around the country who will otherwise spend the next five or ten years campaigning in isolation. We need to win and be seen to be winning. People like winners. They vote for winners.

    We can spend the next five years working our socks off in our different parties and campaigning silos, and the odds are we’ll be wasting our time. Or we can try to change our islands for good. The choice is ours, for once, not theirs. 

    None of this will happen, of course. No Labour leadership candidate will dare whisper his or her nagging fear that Labour can’t win on its own. The collective ego of the labour movement can’t take that kind of honesty. Probably the best we can hope for is a minority Labour government with a pact for voting reform cobbled together after the voting’s done. But if we’re going to do deals, wouldn’t it be better to do them well before the election so everyone knows where they stand? And wouldn’t it be so much better, so much more powerful, if Labour were to grow up at last and take the lead in such a progressive alliance itself?

    Photo by Michael D Beckwith on Unsplash