Whatever the outcome of the Labour leadership contest, the party cannot – and perhaps should not – win a General Election, argues Mike Parker.
Here is a question. How many remaining Labour voters would continue to support the party if a system of proportional representation was introduced for Parliamentary elections and they were able to vote for an alternative knowing that vote would help get a non-Labour Party representative elected? And here’s another one. If you are a die-hard supporter of the Labour Party, would the answer to that question justify continuing to oppose PR?
Labour is at a crossroads, again. The leadership election is likely to result in another victory for Corbyn. What happens then is potential chaos. It’s unthinkable that the MPs who have worked so hard to undermine him for the last year will fall into line, nor that the majority of constituency parties would be able, or necessarily want, to deselect their MPs.
The most obvious conclusion is that there will be an SDP-style split, probably involving a larger number of MPs than quit in 1981. That would then possibly be followed, depending on the number of splitters, with a battle over who is entitled to use the Labour Party name, and unseemly squabbling over funding and union support.
It’s a conclusion Corbyn supporters have tried to ignore. They seem to imagine that hardened, ambitious politicians, having lost the battle, will then surrender. They do not fully appreciate the contempt those MPs and party apparatchiks feel for the members who have defied them.
That outcome, in our First Past The Post system, could condemn both wings to permanent irrelevance, so I return to my opening questions, and an effort to answer them must begin by considering the fall in the Labour vote, not just over the Blair/Brown years, but since the Second World War.
In 1945, the year of Clement Attlee’s landslide majority of 146, Labour won just under 12 million votes, 47.8 per cent of the total. 1950’s majority of 5 was achieved with an increased vote, about 13.25 million, but a smaller percentage, 46.1. Though Churchill won by 17 seats in 1951, Labour’s vote actually rose to 13.95 million, 48.8 per cent.
During the rest of the 50s and 60s, the Labour vote continued to hover between about 12.1 and 13.1 million, though the percentage share began to fall – a result of a growing electorate. But in the two 1974 elections Labour’s vote fell below 12 million for the first time since the war. And in 1983, the year in which the SDP/Lib alliance ran, the vote was down to less than 8.5 million and 27.6 per cent.
Inevitably, things improved after that, with the SDP subsumed into the Liberals under the Liberal Democrat banner. Tony Blair achieved Labour’s highest vote since 1951 with 13.5 million votes, though notably the percentage was down to only just over 43 per cent on a 10 per cent lower turnout (71.4 compared to 82.6).
By the time of Blair’s third victory, in 2005, that vote had fallen to 9.5 million, or 35.2 per cent on a 61.4% turnout. In losing in 2010, Gordon Brown managed to reduce that to 8.6 million votes, or 29 per cent on a turnout of 65%). Ed Miliband in 2015 actually got the vote back up to 9.3 million, 30.4% on a 66.1 turnout.
Looking at those turnouts, the total was 72.8% in 1945, reached a high of 83.9 in 1950, and averaged in the mid (occasionally low) 70s until 2001. The last four general elections have seen turnouts of 59.4, 61.4, 65.1 and 66.1%. The trend may be upwards again, but nonetheless, 10-15% fewer people vote now than in the 1940s-1990s, and in addition, the Electoral Commission has estimated that up to 3.5 million citizens are not even registered to vote – perhaps 7% of the eligible population. That figure may increase as a result of individual, rather than household, registration regulations introduced by the Tories, and is more likely to include younger, therefore less conservative voters.
It would take an experienced psephologist to offer a comprehensive analysis of these figures, but there are a couple of obvious conclusions to be made. The first is that the Labour vote is in decline as a percentage of the total vote, and that decline is speeding up. The second is that a significant percentage of registered voters, over and above a regular average of stay-at-homes, are not sufficiently motivated to vote at all any more – enough to make a difference in close-fought contests such as the last two.
The core Labour vote is now probably no more than about 30 per cent. And as was seen in 1983, a significant percentage of that vote will abandon the party for a more right-wing non-Tory alternative if there is one available. In 1983 that alternative was the SDP, which erstwhile Labour voters could support because of its candidates’ previous association with Labour. In the future it might be UKIP, because of its supposed independence from existing political elites, or another right-wing breakaway from the Labour Party. To retain that ‘soft’ support in a FPTP system always requires the party to swing to the right, not the left. The left, meanwhile, is forced to continue supporting the party because there is no left-wing alternative that has a chance of winning more than a couple of seats in England and Wales (Plaid Cymru and the Green Party, for instance).
The actual membership of the Labour party has almost always been to the left of the party’s establishment and the majority of its MPs. In a sense that is inevitable – those who seek party office and/or a seat in parliament are likely to be more pragmatic, more willing to compromise principle to get on, more ambitious, ruthless and egotistical, and, it must be said, sometimes more self-serving and even corrupt. In the 50s, 60s and 70s the party was rife with cliques and cabals that controlled local councils, local parties and the selection of parliamentary candidates, and did so with the kind of methods for which Militant were eventually, selectively expelled. They were mostly (though not exclusively) very right wing, dominantly male and opposed the kind of New Left activism that promoted women’s, gay and ethnic minority rights (usually citing the supposed antipathy of working class voters to those kind of policies). These old-style party machine operators were dying off in the 80s, and a more enlightened and sometimes more democratic politics was able to take root. Unfortunately, having ridden to the leadership of the Party on the back of the left, Neil Kinnock abandoned it and conspired with the Party establishment to return to more authoritarian party practices. Building on that, Tony Blair used the platform of his electoral success to further restore centralist, neo-Stalinist machine politics. The fruits of the kind of internal party politics that Blair and his acolytes practised was illustrated by the appalling behaviour of the Party’s NEC on July 15.
The electoral success Blair enjoyed in the wake of the electorate’s boredom with the Tories is long past, replaced with disillusionment among many, particularly younger, voters with the kind of politics he represented and which is now mirrored by those in the Parliamentary Labour Party who oppose Jeremy Corbyn. The party membership is not the docile herd it was in the days when Labour could clock up a vote of 48 per cent. It is better educated and informed, wealthier, more assertive, more articulate, less obedient and less obsequious, less likely to be impressed by the kind of favours that MPs or local councillors can dish out. It has social media with which to communicate, and where it can question and publicise the lies and disinformation that apparatchiks of any persuasion attempt to disseminate. It has also seen the consequences of the argument that was often put forward during the early Blair years to knock lefty idealists into line: “There may be only hair’s breadth of space between the Labour Party and the Tories, but it’s in that space we have to live.” That’s the kind of thing we are hearing again: Owen Smith (or, insert here a name of your own choice) may be a technocrat with an ideological vacuum between his ears, but he has a better chance of beating the Tories than Jeremy. It’s the old argument that to be in power at any cost (and with any policies) is better than being in permanent opposition.
Well, forgive me for sounding like a prophet of doom, but with the SNP dominant over Labour in Scotland, and likely to remain so in the wake of the Brexit vote, and the Tories’ gerrymandering boundary reforms and reduction in the size of the Commons in place by the 2020 general election, the chances of either Jeremy Corbyn or Owen Smith (or, insert here a name of your own choice) being able to form a government at any time in the foreseeable future is somewhere in the region of zero. And the reason for that is First Past The Post.
Things have changed mightily since the Labour Party was formed “to represent the interests of the working man”. As well as all the characteristics mentioned above regarding party members, the electorate as a whole is more diverse; there is no longer a homogeneous working class heavily associated with industry and with powerful trades unions. And politics, too, is more diverse. Poverty, welfare, health and education may be, and should always be, by far the most important issues, but other subjects also affect us profoundly – climate change, global trade and economics, nuclear weapons, foreign interventions, the environment – and the debates about how we deal with them are too complex to be reduced to the kind of class politics symbolised by a party which demands the same right of supremacy in the political system that it did in the 1920s, but whose leaders and representatives have been serially unwilling to put those class politics into action.
One of the arguments many Labour MPs and supporters have used over the years to justify opposing proportional representation is that it would lead to coalition governments and would likely mean the party would never be able to form a majority government able to put its policies into action. Having in my lifetime seen seven Labour governments, all of which failed by varying degrees to challenge the existing capitalist system, I can only say that argument impresses me now even less than it did when I first heard it. But what really offends me is the presumption that if I want to use my vote to help change society there is only one party I should be able to vote for which has any chance of doing that, even when, on all available evidence to date, when I do vote for it, it will betray me.
When I lived in Leicestershire, in Alan Duncan’s constituency of Melton & Rutland, I voted in every national and local election – not always, but usually for Labour. Such is Tory dominance in the area that every vote I cast was worth exactly nothing. Yet with proportional representation, perhaps, just perhaps, I might have been able to contribute to the election of a non-Tory councillor, or a non-Tory MP in a multi-member STV constituency. But the Labour Party is more interested in the now distant possibility of winning an undemocratic majority, on perhaps, as in 2001, just 35% of the vote, than in allowing me and the majority of the electorate outside marginal constituencies, the privilege of votes that actually count.
In July, a private member’s Bill on PR introduced by Green MP Caroline Lucas was stifled at birth by a just a handful of votes. Labour MPs – under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership – were whipped to abstain, and only eight defied the whip and voted in favour. The arrogance of the Labour Party in denying the right of the electorate a fair vote because it sees itself as the only legitimate voice of ‘the left’ is matched only by it’s stupidity in failing to recognise, or at least acknowledge the changed balance of power in British politics, and the fact that without PR, England and Wales face the prospect, with or without a Labour split, of becoming a Tory one-party state.
It may be unpopular to say this in a journal such as Tribune, with such a long tradition of critical support for the Labour Party, but possibly the best thing that could happen for the long-term benefit of our political system would be for the Labour Party to split, and for there to be a political realignment that reflects the changed political landscape of the 21st century. The party has long forgone the right to demand support from those on the left while at the same time belittling their political ideals and denying them the possibility of casting their vote in a way that reflects those beliefs. A Labour Party led by Jeremy Corbyn, albeit a smaller one than currently exists, might be one I could vote for again, so long as it commits to PR. But a Blairite-lite party promoting the delusion of future majority (in fact, minority) rule … well, no, I think I might just have to pass on that.