Labour, Copeland, Stoke and what is to be done
As always, when I plan to work from home, I inevitably drift to politics rather then my own research. This is even more the case when something big politically is unfolding; national elections, leadership crises or big EU summits. This week it is the two bi elections in Stoke and Copeland and what this means for the centre left in Britain.
Being of, emotionally invested in, and rooting for the centre left, my natural preoccupation with these bi elections is the state of the Labour party. I have been a member of Labour for 7 years, have delivered leaflets, canvased occasionally and followed the ins and outs for as long as I remember; in short, I care. My hope is that Labour might just sneak both of these elections, but it will be close, and much more so then it should ever have been.
The ongoing news coverage, managing of expectations and short attention span will likely mask how bad this is, even if Labour win, hiding the long term decline of the party in these seats, which would be visible from a long term perspective.
For one thing, an opposition political party has not lost a parliamentary seat to the government since 1982, the last time the Labour party was in the metaphorical shit from an electoral prospects perspective. Moreover these particular seats have been held by the Labour party since forever; Stoke on Trent since its creation in 1950 and Copeland and its forbear seat since since 1935!
If the first step is acknowledging how shocking a turn of events this is, the second is to understand why. The inevitable first answer to this is Jeremy Corbyn and the state of the current leadership. We have a leader who is at best policy wise unimaginative, at worst dogmatic and stuck in the past. He is also incredibly difficult to relate to; as a lofty, London, left wing, privately educated liberal, his character can come across as deeply remote to ordinary working class voters in these northern labour strong holds (including the one I am from).
Along with this, the labour party itself and particularly its leadership for the last two years, can at best be described as chaotic, and at worst an absolute shit storm; but it isn’t honest or realistically possible to pin all of the blame on Jeremy and his clique. Labour had been suffering from deep regional shifts in how people vote since 2007, which have been masked by national vote shares. Yes the current leadership isn’t helping, and yes it is making it worse, but it was not the start of the rot in the Labour party.
For this you have to look further back. Labour hasn’t won an election since 2007 and the vote from 2010 to 2015, whilst staying broadly at the same level from a national percentage perspective, had shifted to Labours new core; London and the big cities.
Like in the US and in many European countries, politics is increasingly not divided between left and right and rich or poor, but between areas of population density. As Lisa Nandy, Caroline Flint and many others have stated, Labour has forgotten how to speak to small town Britain. Worse then that, it has forgotten how to speak to small city Britain. Labour is becoming a party of large, liberal, often highly educated, diverse metropolitan areas; London, Manchester, Leeds, Liverpool, Bristol, Brighton and is dying in small town Britain in regions which voted in swathes for Leave in the Brexit referendum.
So what is to be done? Here most people who have agreed on the above analysis diverge starkly. For one thing a policy focused on fair migration and integration is one thing; it should not be about pointing fingers at what is wrong currently, but stepping back and agreeing on what a perfect, fair system would look like and then setting about reforming the current system in its image and making it clearly understandable to the public. Questions to focus on should be how to get the best skills to the areas they are most needed; how to ensure proper integration and contact between diverse communities in a context, often filled with a mix of both suspicion, fuelled by misinformed right wing hysteria, and a defensive, equally hysterical left, that often refuses to look constructively at issues voters may raise.
Another would clearly be a more realistic, articulate leader with a record of accomplishments. My own preference would be Caroline Flint, though I realise many will disagree strongly. Her record on the back benches has been impressive, including a tax transparency amendement requiring multinationals to publish information concerning where and how much tax they pay, a cross party initiative to support the children of alcoholics and now a cross party initiative to force Theresa May to apply the same transparency regulations from mainland UK to the UKs offshore tax havens.
In addition I believe she is more articulate then most within the party and speaks from a common sense perspective which would go down much better in Labours strongholds then our current leadership. She has a singular focus on how to get results by focusing on what is actually achievable. In addition her record as a minister and a shadow minister is noteworthy; you can tell a lot about a minister by how often they are the ones defending the party, both on the good days and the shit storm ones.
Another is I believe how she neutralises any supposed UKIP threat. On numerous occasions now she has gone against Nuttall, Farage and Carswell on TV and rarely has she come off worse.
Regardless, after Thursday Labour needs to decide whether to risk evisceration on its current long term trajectory or do something sharp and bold and end the slow motion car crash it has been on for months.
Now, back to my work.
