Labour's class coalition coming unstuck over Europe

Labour’s pragmatism (or waffle/procrastination) over Brexit, argues writer Nick Cohen, is both psephologically illiterate and ideologically motivated. Of course trying to bridge different interests has a very long tradition in the party. A compromise among Labour’s class and ideological broad church brought majority Labour governments for at least some of the period from 1945-2010. On Europe, Labour has never been enthusiastic, preferring to try on this, as on many other major issues, to manage (or obfuscate) the deep divisions within its electoral and parliamentary coalition.

Gaitskell feigned ‘little Englander’ anger at a prospective ‘end of a thousand years of history,’ while Wilson only tentatively sought to get beyond De Gaulle’s ‘Non’ in response to Macmillan's speculative application. It was Tory PM Heath who forced through the UK’s membership of the then Common Market (with the backing of some dissident Labour MPs) in an exercise in executive chutzpah. Three years later Wilson foreshadowed Cameron by putting political convenience before national interest and held the UK’s first referendum on whether to leave the European project. In the 1950s and early 1960s Jim Callaghan had reflected the Labourite conservatism of the Party’s trade union base in being instinctively unenthusiastic about the Common Market. However, as foreign secretary and then Prime Minister in the 1970s, Callaghan understood that as a middle-ranking post-imperial power, the UK was either in the club or it was irrelevant. 

Labour leader Michael Foot had to swallow many of the ideological stances of a hard left that - as a parliamentary socialist, intellect and pragmatist - he usually had little time for. However Foot tried his best to manage the then intra-party coalition that was rupturing over Europe – and over much else. Kinnock and Smith took Labour back to its broad church position on Europe, defence, and the economy. Blair in turn maintained that traditional Labour pragmatism on Europe. However the desperation of party that, in Austin Mitchell’s famous words, was ‘prepared to eat shit to get a Labour government,’ meant that Blair and Brown could get away with upholding the neo-liberal abdication of national interest they inherited from Margaret Thatcher, even if much of the country baulked at their unprecedentedly supine and ill-considered Iraq policy. Blair was arguably an outlier in Labour’s tradition, although on much social and welfare policy, and on Europe, he was pragmatic. 

Corbyn though is the first ever Labour leader who's not a genuine managerial pragmatist. He’s also the first Labour leader since George Lansbury to have little interest in leading. Corbyn is rooted in the late 1970s and early 1980s hard left Labour ‘activist’ myopia that favoured ideological correctness over class compromise. Back in the day, a half-baked perversion of cod Marxist theory led the polytechnocrats and bourgeois militants of the Bennite left to believe that, from the ashes of the dialectical clash of the differing class interests that have characterised the Party from birth to government, a truly socialist (ruling) class could emerge to finally deliver socialism.

The spectacle of a Labour Party, a Labour Party, run by middle class activists purporting, Leninist-style, to lead the proletariat into the light, didn’t convince many of the working class, then or now. Nor did it attract many of the middle class: the support of sufficient white-collar workers has always been a necessary and important part of Labour’s coalition. 

Today, the ideological heirs of Labour’s early 1980s deviation into political irrelevance are prioritising their own version of the party’s historic pragmatic alliance. In their case however it’s a very unholy union of bourgeois leftist disdain for a ‘capitalist club’ (the EU) with the appeasement of Labour’s disappearing white working class voting base who are angry over immigration and the loss of national sovereignty.  

Labour might now decide that the middle class electoral swing to the pro-EU Lib-Dem centre (and the Green left) is so out-stripping the loss of (white) working class Labour voters to the Brexit Party, that it can no longer maintain the party’s historic fudge on Europe. However a firm Labour embrace of another referendum – because Tories aren’t going to vote for an early electoral Christmas, to paraphrase aspirant Labour Party leader McDonnell – could mean JC jettisoning his misguided version of Labour class pragmatism in favour of a stance that hardly convinces anybody.

Corbyn cannot seek to persuade 'decent moderate Tories' (to paraphrase Baroness Chakrabarti on the ‘Marr’ show) to back another national referendum if he doesn’t make clear how he wants actual or prospective Labour voters to vote. Likewise, he cannot present himself as the nation’s prospective PM in the event of a short-notice general election if he can’t say whether he wants Britain to be in or out of the EU. So, unless Corbyn intends to approach the next fork in the road with the response he’s maintained ever since the last EU referendum, he will be forced to break the Party’s historic class coalition and to prioritise the winning back of liberal middle class voters. However unless they are convinced by Corbyn's 11th hour decisiveness, then Labour might have kissed goodbye to the white working class and to the prospect of ever returning to power.

Sir Harold Wilson and the Adelphi Hotel, Liverpool

We were given a key to the joint entrance to rooms 100 and 101 in Liverpool’s most iconic hotel, The Adelphi. Four years earlier I had only managed to get as far as the plaque outside that very modestly marks the fact that Harold Wilson - the 20^th Century’s most electorally successful party leader - had used the suite as his Constituency Room.

The entrance to the Sir Harold Wilson suite, replete with modest plaque

The dark wooden doors led you into two rooms that are virtually unchanged since the Labour leader had used the hotel to conduct constituency business for his Liverpool seat of Huyton, located close to the city centre where the hotel stands. Opening the door to the sitting room, we were struck by the large dark marble fire place, replete with electric fire that looked vintage 1960s, an original looking dining table and even a fold-out green beige card table. The sofa was decidedly of a different vintage. However the huge windows, subtly painted mock Georgian wall panels, and phenomenal ceiling plaster moulding that would in Harold’s time have sported a chandelier not an electric mock candelabra, made it easy to imagine yourself in a time when the PM needed somewhere very comfortable to, perhaps once a month, conduct meetings with local party officials and trade unionists or to simply be based for a night in advance of a Saturday morning constituency surgery in Huyton.

Harold's sitting room (Room 100)

Room 100 at the Adelphi was handy on election night too (1966) (c/o 'Harold Wilson' by Ben Pimlott, HarperCollins, 1992)

Harold’s bedroom was equally original, minus the bed with its mock leather headboard. The huge, fitted wood and marble washstand cum chest of drawers, replete with deco-looking chrome towel rack, and the large marble fire place were not only in place when Wilson used these rooms but when this incarnation of the famous hotel opened in 1914. 

Harold's washstand

A huge wooden, mirrored, wardrobe had certainly been in the room for more than half a century. It is hard to imagine that a hotel that for several decades has had a funding problem – one not remotely alleviated by its comparatively recent transfer to the ownership of the Britannia chain – would replace anything that wasn’t broken, save for maybe the odd light bulb and, sadly, the original carpet. 

Sir Harold Wilson's bedroom

The bathroom separated the two main rooms; its tasteful frosted glass lattice work door opened to a porcelain furniture set that may not have been 1914 but was probably at least 1950s. Valerie mused on the idea that Sir Harold had used the very same bath as her. From the bathtub you can look out via an enormous window to the rather grand building opposite that in Wilson’s time housed Lewis’ department store. Above the entrance to Lewis’ (now no doubt housing offices or flats) is a slightly odd but no less iconic stone sculpture of a naked male, which was referenced in a famous local tune popularised by a mostly local act, The Spinners. The sculpture almost matches the campness of a much smaller, metallic one depicting a naked young soldier sporting what looks like a Teutonic hard hat, which is located in the Adelphi Hotel ballroom.

The view from Harold's bathroom

When I booked the Sir Harold Wilson suite, I discovered the rather odd fact that it is actually known as Room 101. In fact it isn’t really known as the Sir Harold Wilson suite at all. The scouse-sounding and very helpful guy who took my phone reservation confirmed that he had typed into the booking that the ‘Sir Harry Wilson suite’ i.e. Room 101 had been requested. After successfully checking in to the suite we heard an older person’s voice outside the door informing her husband that Harold Wilson had stayed here, and evincing a disinterested response.

Wilson is mentioned on the Adelphi Hotel’s website, as is his ‘preferred suite’ where we stayed. However the Huddersfield-born man, part schooled in Liverpool, who represented a Liverpool constituency for 33 years, 13 of which as Labour leader and eight of which as prime minister, remains almost an incidental figure in the catalogue of famous people who’ve either made Liverpool their home or who were born and raised there.

If that’s true of Liverpool, it’s much more so nationally. In 2006, a decade after his death, a metal sculpture of Wilson was unveiled in Huyton by the then Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair (the only Labour leader to serve more years as PM than Wilson). Blair is reported as saying that his fondness for Wilson was because he was the first ‘modern British prime minister’, more or less code for the fact that he was (more or less) working class. Wilson was a ‘modern prime minister’ because unlike every predecessor save Lloyd George, and patently unlike Blair (or his successor but one, Cameron), he wasn’t privileged. Wilson’s immediate predecessor as Labour leader, Hugh Gaitskell, was, according to Wilson's biographer Ben Pimlott, superiorly conscious of the huge class gulf between them, while some of the upmarket press mocked Wilson for being a philistine. Yet he had a first class brain, got a first class degree from Oxford, and founded the Open University – the only Wilson policy legacy that Blair noted. Only a year before Blair unveiled the sculpture, he gave a speech to the Labour conference in which he attacked the Wilson-led Labour governments of the 1960s for being responsible for Thatcherism by failing to understand the depth of economic and social change. Ironically, just prior to entering No 10 for the first time Wilson urged change on both sides of industry in his famous ‘White Heat of Technology’ speech. As prime minister Harold Wilson would be weakened by often senseless industrial action; his successor and close colleague Callaghan was destroyed by it. However Mr Blair’s simplistic attack on, in effect, Wilson’s legacy was rich coming from the man ultimately responsible for fiscal mistakes that subsequently helped undermine the Brown Government amidst global economic meltdown. In supposedly praising Wilson, Blair failed to mention the neo-colonial American war that he kept British troops out of (Vietnam), in marked contrast to the one Blair sent British troops to fight in (Iraq). If, as the comment attributed to Churchill has it, ‘to govern is to decide’, then Wilson’s decision to in effect break with Washington (and for which the UK economy was punished by the US) was very much about governing - and doing so in the national interest.

Perhaps you don’t get remembered or properly respected as a British prime minister for the wisdom of what you didn’t do – as opposed to the damage caused by much of what you did (Margaret Thatcher). However Wilson did much in general to expand higher education and its availability to people of his background. A BBC story written in 2009 about long abandoned car production in the Merseyside town of Speke begins with a reference to what it calls ‘the dark days of the 1970s’. While there was much industrial action, there was also much less inequality pre-1979, and, for all the faults of Wilson’s public housing and welfare programmes, far less homelessness. As we walked around the centre of Liverpool the number of very visible homeless people on the streets was shocking. No doubt they congregated in the centre to try to tap visitors coming out of pubs, but their plight in the middle of winter was, and is, very real.

Corbyn threatens to unleash activists on elected Labour MPs

If I was remotely waivering about NOT voting for Jeremy Corbyn as Labour Party leader, the latest pronouncement of the man has clinched it for me. Corbyn is threatening to discipline elected representatives of the people (i.e. MPs) with the pressure of un-elected activists if Labour MPs don't back him as leader. 

If this sounds familiar it is partly what the neo-Blairites thought they could achieve by setting up the registered supporters scheme a couple of years ago. It is absolutely what Benn unleashed in the 1970s and '80s. 

Remember "extra-parliamentary action"? Benn used it, and the force of his acolytes and Troskiyite fellow-travellers in the Party, to try and force his way into the leadership of the party against the wishes of many elected Labour MPs and of the then party leader Jim Callaghan and then Michael Foot (both far greater men than JC could ever dream of being). 

It was Foot who, as leader, told the Party Conference in 1981 that "Labour Party democracy" has to be a marriage of what the members want and what the Parliamentary Labour Party wants. Foot knew his history - Labour history and British democratic history. The semi-Burkean in him didn't believe that MPs were elected by the public to be told what to do by party activists accountable to no one but themselves.

The Destruction of the UK State: Betrayed by Ignorance and Miscalculation

The seeds were sown in 1978 when the SNP and Welsh Nats blackmailed Jim Callaghan and his minority Labour government to hold a referendum on devolution. Those in favour couldn't muster 40% of registered voters in Scotland, so it fell by the wayside. Devolution was clearly rejected in Wales. The SNP's representation collapsed in the May 1979 UK General Election, but the idea of home rule for Scotland was there.

If the Labour Gov't ('74-'79) had given two fingers to the petit tribalists of the British Isles (including trying to please both Ulster Unionist and SDLP MPs at the same time) and gone to the country in 1978, they would have won with a workable majority. We all know what happened next. Perhaps the decline of the post war UK political, economic and social order, and specifically of subsidised Scottish steel mills and coal mines, was inevitable, and would have fed deep frustrations north of the border. However the personality and ideology of Margaret Thatcher, and limited Scottish support for the Conservatives under her, helped bolster the SNP. Then comes wise Mr Blair and devolution for Scotland and Wales, arrogantly thinking that a semi- federal arrangement eternally steered by Labour politicians on the ground, buoyed by grateful celtic clients, would keep the UK settlement intact.

In 24 hours a bunch of kids and some older political illiterates will probably break up the UK state. A tribal war has been successfully waged, as if Westminster was the headquarters of the English Colonial Administration. Westminster is so loathed - by all quarters of the UK - that the fact that its MPs were elected by us, including Scottish residents, seems somehow to not be understood. A "democratic deficit" is one of Salmond's rallying cries, yet every UK subject determines who forms the UK Government. Unless they can't be arsed. 

The trouble is that if there is a narrow "No" vote tomorrow then a belated attempt to fire up enthusiasm for the political process in all parts of the UK will see devolution across its countries and regions. Scotland's nationalists may not be satisfied. The English rejected regional governments in the late 1990s (except in London). If they're offered their own national parliament then they will probably secede from the Union themselves, after the UK (possibly minus Scottish votes) comes out of the EU in 2017. We're doomed...

Tony Benn - messiah or devil?

Ed Miliband said that Tony Benn was a champion of the powerless, a conviction politician, and somebody of deep principle. In other words all the things that Ed isn’t.

I am sad at Mr Benn’s death. He was the reason why, in 1981, at just 17 years of age, I joined the Labour Party. I was electrified when I heard him speak alongside the open-shirted dockers’ leader, and communist, Jack Dash at the National Museum of Labour Party History.

I also heard him at a Tribune fringe meeting in Brighton shortly after he lost the deputy Labour leadership contest to Dennis Healey. A Bennite sitting two rows behind us shouted “Judas” at Neil Kinnock who had voted for Healey. “Is Benn Christ then?” responded a guy sitting right behind me. That was the atmosphere of the time. He was for some a messianic figure, and if you were young and idealistic this was especially beguiling. For others he was the devil incarnate. I remember a Daily Express cartoon depicting him in a Gestapo uniform. This was a man who served during the war as an RAF pilot. This was not something he ever particularly emphasised, but not because he was ashamed of it. He was a patriot but of a different kind. His pride in British parliamentary democracy made him opposed to the EU, NATO and the influence of the US over UK foreign policy. Like Benn said of the Labour Party, he was "more Methodist than Marxist." 

He had begun his political life as a fan of the then Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell, who, whilst a socialist to my mind, was subsequently seen by the hard left as the Tony Blair of his day. Benn’s commitment to democratic socialism hardened in office in the 1970s under Harold Wilson and Jim Callaghan. He never resigned his cabinet post. After 1979 he wielded the knife against the government in which he had just served, and intoned about the great betrayal he had apparently witnessed from the inside.

His followers would demonise anyone insufficiently left-wing and would fellow travel with the enemies of democratic socialism. He does have some responsibility for the departure from the Labour Party of some very able politicians (and Gaitskellites) who founded the SDP in 1981, and especially for the 1983 election manifesto. Despite that devastating electoral defeat, the strength of the Labour left, of whom he remained the unofficial leader, made it hard for Kinnock to criticise what had to be criticised about violence and intimidation in the 1984-5 miners’ strike. After the loss of the 1987 general election, Benn largely became irrelevant to the party’s fortunes.

He could though still be powerful critic of the realism that so many of us went along with. I met him in February 1998 on the eve of an aborted US/UK military build up in the Gulf aimed at Iraq. I muttered what I thought was a relatively inoffensive comment about how the Blair Government was just helping to "shore up" containment. Benn rebuked me sharply with a statement about the moral bankruptcy of what then had been seven years of containment.

Harold Wilson once said that Tony Benn immatured as he grew older. As Benn’s socialism became more and more unfashionable, he ironically became something of a national treasure. However Benn’s radical opposition to the anti-democratic whims of the free market and his criticism of the closeness of some UK governments to Washington have arguably more relevance than ever.