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RIDERS ON THE STORM: LABOUR'S STRATEGY IN AN EPOCHAL MOMENT Part : Where the Party seems to be Neal Lawson Published June 2020 by

By Neal Lawson

A note on the author: Which matters, so that the reader can better judge this account of Labour’s strategy.

Neal Lawson is Executive Director of Compass, a platform for a new politics so we can change society – to a good society: one that is much more equal, sustainable and democratic. Crucially for these two essays, he is author of 45° Change, a report that examines the growth of emergent civil society forces and organisations that are increasingly springing up precisely because neither bureaucracies nor free markets allow people to fulfil their human needs in the 21st century. Increasingly, networks, driven by social media, and the collaboration they engender, do. But to thrive, these new participatory ways of deciding and doing need to be accelerated and amplified with the help of the state. The state is on the designed or vertical axis; civil society on the emergent or horizontal side – the diagonal meeting point of the two is the 45° line where transformative change can happen.

He is a member of the Labour Party and has been continuously since 1980, having been a branch and district secretary, an election agent, and an advisor formally and informally to several Labour leaders.

His attitude to the Labour Party now resembles his attitude to religion, he is sceptical it can contribute meaningfully to the transformation of life on earth but is willing to be surprised. Anyway, Labour, he believes, cannot be ignored, it is currently too big and too powerful, but must either change dramatically or get out of the way and allow others who can transform society the space to do so. He has been sceptical about the transformative capacity of Labour under every leader since 1997, the moment he began to focus on the why and how of big change.

The dominant culture of Labourism, which emphasises its own exclusivity and is a product of a late Victorian mechanical mindset, that predates the current era shaped by climate and complexity, will be the Party’s downfall unless it can adapt and do so quickly. But like most organisations, he sees Labour not as a monolith but as a collection of people, practices and values that can either help or hinder the birth of a good society.

In these two essays he sets out first where Labour and its new leader seem to be, in the context of Coronavirus and in the shadow of Corbynism. In the second essay he will suggest the contours of a political strategy that is aligned with both complexity and climate in a post-Covid world. The goal of the essays is to be constructively critical.

By encouraging the Labour party to change, he hopes, it may do so,

2 Where the Party seems to be Labour's Strategy but regardless, some, maybe enough, people in and around the Party will change and will make common cause with others in the pursuit of a good society.

He would like to thank Jeremy Gilbert, Francesca Klug, Laura Parker, Lindsay Thomas, Frances Foley, Remco van der Stoep and for conversations and comments around an early draft of this article. The faults though are all his.

© Compass

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism or review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrievable system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of Compass.

3 Where the Party seems to be Labour's Strategy Please get in touch, join, support and work with us. Write to us at Freepost Compass Email us at [email protected] You can follow us on @CompassOffice To find out more about Compass, please visit our website: www.compassonline.org.uk/join

About Compass Compass is the platform for a good society, a world that is much more equal, sustainable and democratic. We build alliances of ideas, parties and movements to help make systemic change happen. Our strategic focus is to understand, build, support and accelerate new forms of democratic practice and collaborative action that are taking place in civil society and the economy, and to link that up with top-down/state reforms and policy. The question we are trying to help solve, which we explore in the recent document 45 Degree Change, is not just what sort of society we want, but, increasingly, how to make it happen?

4 Where the Party seems to be Labour's Strategy The Tories won’t just let Johnson drive them off an electoral cliff and simply let Labour into government. It won’t happen. They will change and renew.

But even if Labour can win office, on its current course, it will still be far from real power, defined as the ability to transform society. The party needs a political strategy, not just to govern the country but to dramatically change it. Does it have one?

This is an epochal moment. Let’s repeat that. This is an epochal moment. By epochal, it is meant the rare coincidence of new developments and great change that usher in a different social and economic era. There are two big drivers of this new epoch – climate change and technological change.

We live at a moment in which our lifestyles are destroying life while simultaneously networks and social media enable incredibly fast, deep and sometimes shallow communications across the globe and between every community of interest under . Just look at how an incident involving just a handful of people in Minneapolis sweeps the globe in days and portends seismic and welcome cultural shifts.

The symptoms of change are both morbid and marvellous. Some people embrace the complexity of the challenges conjured up by the moment and look to build collaborative and sustainable . Others, those less secure, retreat and seek to regress. Culture, identities, meaning, purpose, the economy and society are all now in flux. This is an incredible moment to shape or be shaped by.

It comes together in the form of the Covid-19 crisis. Through it our relationship to nature has become fully exposed. In just weeks, a dominant economic orthodoxy is revealed as mere self-interested fabrication. Governments, apparently, can print money and pay us to stay at home and to fend off mass . We see the return of the state as the lender and employer of last resort. More tellingly, as Anthony Barnett dissects, people have been placed ahead of profit across the entire globe – precisely because pandemics can no longer be swept under the carpet in new era in which we all see the same things.

Unless you were alive during the war, nothing like this, on a society-wide basis has happened in our lifetimes. The moment challenges everything in good ways and bad.

It is within this incredible moment that Labour’s strategy should be judged and changed.

Labour, back in the game?

Just as an independent report is published on why Labour lost the

5 Where the Party seems to be Labour's Strategy last election so badly, it is suddenly looking electorally competitive. This is a surprise. But almost everything in politics is now a surprise. Against the backdrop of a historic defeat at the end of last year, many had written Labour off for even the next election, which would make it the fifth defeat in a row. Now though, it looks like it’s game on. In a matter of just months Keir Starmer’s obvious competence and forensic questioning skills, combined with the Government’s mishandling of the crisis, have closed what was a huge polling gap of over 20%.

So, why raise questions about Labour’s strategy so soon when things are going so well, and Labour has only just installed a new leader? ‘He is only two months in, give him a chance’.

These thoughts are offered to encourage and help for the long and winding road ahead.

And because right now matters. The public mood is being made malleable by the crisis – a rare moment when the Overton Window can be shifted to , or it will be shifted further to the right. And strategy, or more likely the deep underlying presumptions and habits of leaders and parties, get baked in very early, usually more by accident than design. The very presence of early success naturally encourages what could turn out to be a false sense of hope in Labour’s prospects; the already forming assumption that Tory incompetence plus Covid-19 does Labour’s work for it. So ‘just sit tight’, rely on ‘Opposition by cross examination’ and all will be well’.

But this is a dangerous. First, because if politics is now entirely unpredictable, no one knows what’s going to happen next. From Cleggmania, to Corbyn’s election in 2015, to and Trump in 2016, the failure of the Tories in 2017 and then their big success in 2019, through to the Covid-19 crisis and now the sudden and welcome return of the state, few saw much if any of this coming. In these turbulent times, the only way for any political project to survive is to be based on deep intellectual and cultural foundations, alongside dense connecting networks which permit agility and values to be combined. Such foundations and networks do not guarantee the party will survive the storm - but does give it the chance not just to ride it out, but to bend arc to progress.

And anyway, determinism of any stripe is risky. Capitalism won’t simply die under the weight of its own contradictions; technology won’t necessarily save us or destroy us. Labour felt like it adopted an overly deterministic approach from 2010 to 2015, as if EU debate and the split between UKIP and the Tory vote would do the party’s work for it. Labour had a 35% strategy. It failed. Then Corbynism relied on its manifesto and to get it over the line. That failed too. Now virus determinism, if the party falls for it, could equally backfire.

It’s always true that ‘we make history but not in conditions of our

6 Where the Party seems to be Labour's Strategy choosing’. We are subject to events, and events like Covid-19, which with all it entails about the common good, public health over profit and the return of the state, might put the wind in Labour’s sails. But it’s the first part of Marx’s famous dictum that all progressives should focus on: ‘that we make history’. The moment, whatever it is, will be fiercely contested. Politics is about winning the war of saying and doing in the moment – the conjuncture – in which we find ourselves. It’s not just about guessing what’s ‘inevitable’ and waiting for that to happen.

In this, the idea that the Tories will simply give up and let Labour back in is fanciful. ‘One more heave’, the sense that all Labour needs to do is offer the right leadership and programme and victory is sure to follow, has always had a grip on the Party’s psyche. The Tories, so it goes, are bound to drop the ball, Labour just has to be ready to catch it. But will the Tories simply drop the ball, and will Labour know what to do with it even if they do manage to catch it?

The reality is that the Tories have a rock-solid majority and aren’t going anywhere until they think they can win, or eventually run out of four years of road. Labour too often and too readily writes off the Tories as being cruel and incompetent and expect the public to look at ‘the facts’ and simply agree with them. Occasionally, like in 1997, they do, but not often.

The Tories are nearly always a serious, ambitious and ruthless political project, proving again and again their ability to adapt and shapeshift. Interestingly, the only time they were an electoral mess was when took away their incentive to be competitive by parking a very big tent on their lawn. The cost of which was to dilute the Labour offer and store up problems that now weaken the Party. But otherwise the Tories never take losing lying down. They are already intervening deeply, Keynes style, in the economy. They will probably love-bomb the NHS and even social care. Dominic Cummings still has plans to radically reshape Whitehall, witness the merger of the FCO and DFID. They could easily get rid themselves of Johnson and replace him and look fresh and new again, just in time for the next election. Look how people like Jeremy Hunt are sitting out this government, perhaps knowing that Johnson was always going to self-destruct. Meanwhile, boundary changes and electoral registration rules will weigh the next election in their favour.

As does the continuing dominance of the SNP north of the border, who could further cement their dominant position in the Holyrood elections next year. Timing wise, independence can’t take place before the next general election, so the SNP will again be standing to win Westminster seats. It's almost impossible to imagine a Labour victory based on votes in England and alone, that means it can only happen if Labour can challenge the SNP’s hegemony in . That’s not all. Many are predicting a surge in support for the Greens, who are already and understandably taking a more robust position against Labour

7 Where the Party seems to be Labour's Strategy especially for its refusal to ever budge on electoral reform or electoral collaboration. Meanwhile, the Liberal Democrats, under whoever their new leader is, look like they are shifting to more radical positions to challenge Labour on policy ideas like basic income. The electoral maths of all this bode badly for Starmer.

The moment for strategy is now

The second reason for the danger of creeping complacency and determinism is that for a successful strategy to work, it needs to be adopted early and deeply. Of course, in the middle of the biggest crisis we have ever seen and after just three months, it’s unreasonable to expect Labour to have anything like a fully-fledged strategy. But the elements of a strategy should be clear. This is because strategies emerge over a long period of time, from deep and sustained thinking and action. And once in place they are difficult if not impossible to change – especially within the confines of one electoral cycle and all the media attention focused on leaders and parties. By the time a party realises it has the wrong strategy, it is usually too late to act anyway. It’s all over.

And the formation of a political project, the early days, is the only moment when everything is possible. The leader has a fresh mandate, goodwill, time and space. That moment never returns. Events and habits take hold. Freedom for manoeuvre is closed down. This then is a golden moment for Labour to take risks in line with the epochal opportunities being opened up by the crisis, to dig deep intellectually, culturally and organisationally, so it can eventually build high.

It is this ability to dig deep, intellectually and culturally, that has to be constructively challenged. Because strategy doesn’t come out of thin air. There is no blank sheet of paper on which a new strategy can be written down. People and parties come with baggage – good and bad. So, what about Keir Starmer’s strategy and the context it will be formed in?

Starmerism?

The truth is we don’t know that much about Keir Starmer and can only guess at his strategy. Keir is so new to frontline politics and most of that time was spent on the issue of Brexit. The upside of him is that he has been a successful and carried out high-profile public jobs. The downside is that he hasn’t spent those years building a philosophical view of the world, developing a theory of change and establishing the networks to bring it all together.

Starmer won the leadership election at a canter. He won it before the gun for the campaign was even fired. He won it because he wasn’t going

8 Where the Party seems to be Labour's Strategy to trash Corbynism and because he looked like a PM in waiting. He won it because he was professional, decent and hard-working. His campaign, understandably and inevitably, was all safety first. The classic task of carrying the priceless Ming vase across the slippery floor. No tricks, nothing flash, just get to the other side of the room. Only once did he break out and make a major unprompted intervention – on the politics of well-being. This issue matters and was well delivered. But it was one well-directed bit of firework in an otherwise uneventful campaign that shone little light towards the future.

Again, inevitably and understandably, this experience will shape the mood behind any emergent strategy he and his team have. Winning by one means, in this case caution, is hard to shake off. Habits are reinforced. It worked once. Safety first, diligence, competence and forensic focus. It can work again. Why change?

The argument for something different and more radical is that whilst entirely necessary, competent professionalism is far from sufficient in this epochal moment. At least it’s not sufficient if electoral victory is seen as just a means to an end, that end being the transformation of the country. For too many in the party, now and in the past, the purpose of strategy is almost entirely focussed on electoral victory. The goal being simply to change the people at the top of the system – and not change the system itself. This speaks to an abiding myth deep in Labour’s soul, that democratic is entirely contingent on the selection and then election of the right Labour leadership to pull the levers of the state in the correct order. Here we come back to the choke hold Labourism has on the Party.

A reliance on pure electoralism and statism bears little historic scrutiny

In 1945, Labour did not transform the country just because and his team looked like a government in waiting and won a big majority, though both were necessary. They changed society because of the deep ideas and forces at play: Keynes and Beveridge supplied the intellectual policy heft (note that both were Liberals), the working class and the unions the troops. But even deeper forces were at work. The collective experience of the war and the memories of the depression that went before it created the #BuildBackBetter mood of that era. But as much as anything it was both the Fordist systems of administration that ran the factories, Whitehall and armed forces and the threat to capitalism from the which sealed the post-war settlement. Combined they gave Labour a form of governance and statecraft and forced the owners of capital to compromise with the demands of the working class. Even then Labour was out of office in only six years.

In 1979, Thatcher didn’t win and transform the country simply because

9 Where the Party seems to be Labour's Strategy she was a convincing and Saatchi’s ran a good campaign after the . In the shadow of a post-war settlement in decline, she was guided by the ideas of Friedrich Hayek and an inter- national network of right-wing think tanks. But it was the emergence of international finance, the breakdown of managed capitalism, the rise of both post-Fordism and the consumer society that powered her govern- ment into being a transformative project. These were the deep forces she bent to her values.

Let’s consider two more recent Labour projects – both examples of partial success and failure. New Labour emerged in the benign circum- stances of a long economic boom, and was the product of frenetic work by Tony Blair, and a highly talented team, whatever you think of their politics, throughout the late eighties and early nineties. It had its own intellectual heft in figures like Anthony Giddens and Ju- lian Le Grand. Right or wrong, it had a sense of political economy based on supply-side reforms and a theory of public service delivery: the new public management. It revolutionised political communications in the UK. But it failed in terms of vision and wider political forces – who were its social and political shock troops and where was it taking us? It ac- cepted neoliberalism and tried to tame it, not realising or ignoring the fact that this was impossible. It was nevertheless a formidable project that did a lot of good (as well as too much harm).

And then Corbynism. In terms of leadership it was almost the mirror image of ‘Starmerism’. It paid little attention to the rituals of Oppo- sition and the demands of professional leadership that come with it, but it did come with ideas and new thinking flourished around it. It also came with troops, the young precariat and the political movements of the age: Stop the War, UK Uncut, Climate Camp, etc. It also had reach into culture through Grime and Acid Corbynism. And of course, it had Momentum, The World Transformed and eventually a revitalised Party of over 500,000 members. Even with all this, it failed too.

The question then is: where are Starmer’s ideas and where are the forc- es that will drive his project? What is its theory of change and its re- placement for the market, the bureaucracy or new public management to decide and do things effectively in a networked society? And what is its vison of a good society? There are clearly big holes in the project. The party’s new leadership have to both recognise them and facilitate the help filling them.

Time is of the essence

Already, attitudes and assumptions about Starmer are starting to harden and polarise. Some on the more orthodox left are writing him off as just another incarnation of . They want Starmer to fail so that Corbynism looks good. This approach is no better than those who wanted Corbynism to fail to make Blairism look good. It is a poli-

10 Where the Party seems to be Labour's Strategy tics fuelled by the easy excuse of betrayal; the idea that if it wasn’t for those pesky centrists/leftists the good society would be nigh. Some on this orthodox left are busy painting themselves into a corner, willing the ‘witch-hunt’ against them to start and prove their analysis of Starmer and the world is right.

This is self-fulling and dangerous. It is impossible to look into anyone’s heart to determine what amount of good or bad resides there. But Starmer is clearly (to the author at least) driven by a desire for a more equal and just world. And the last thing he wakes up thinking about is how to destroy the left – a left, in its broadest sense, he feels he be- longs to1.

The question mark around Starmer is not whether he has the right values or his professionalism, the question is whether he has a politi- cal strategy beyond those necessary but insufficient competences. A political strategy that enables him to lead a new national debate, not just hold the current government to account. A political strategy that enables him to build the alliances and collaborative with others for transformative change. The necessary skills for leadership in the 21st century are outlined by Sue Goss and Ruth Lister here.

In all this Starmer echoes the politics of his self-proclaimed favourite Labour leader – . Wilson was a figure of the left who, to some degree, succeeded electorally and who to his credit did allow the law to push radical new cultural norms around issues like gay rights. But Wilson failed politically and economically in terms of building a robust movement and programme to defend the post war settlement from the rising forces of neoliberalism. Starmerism also feels eerily similar to the era, another leader who undoubtedly wanted to do the right thing but who also lacked a strategy to make the desirable feasible.

The radical left

The role of the radical left, inside and outside of Labour, is going to be critical but not easy. A purely destructive relationship with Starmer’s Labour has to be avoided. Instead, its role is to help Labour develop a strategy without being naïve about the prospects. The radical left must continue to build the ideas, culture and organisation of green, egalitari- an and deeply democratic politics capable of shaping the 21st century – whether Labour is ready to be part of that new world or not. This is the politics of showing not telling and at the very least, if all else fails, will plant the seeds of what comes next.

The question shaping up is whether there is a pitch to enough cen- tre-right voters reassured by Starmer’s classic appearance, decency and competence that can be allied to a radical left agenda and wider emergent social forces that combine to fashion a new common sense in a post-Covid world? And will this offer benefit from the three big con-

11 Where the Party seems to be Labour's Strategy textual forces of the era: the need of capital for state support in the new economic wasteland and therefore the possibility of a new more progressive class settlement; the climate emergency; and the increas- ing dominance of networks, social media and collaboration as the new cultural system of deciding and doing things in the economy and society – replacing the dominance of the bureaucracy and the market?

Transformation requires vision and capacity

To date, when radical ideas have been presented, like basic income, the response from Labour has been ‘now is not the time’ - in that particu- lar case, to reinvent the welfare system. But this is exactly the time for reinvention. There is no better time. What if Nye Bevan had said in 1944, ‘now is not the time for a free at the point of need’?

Of course, the Labour leadership are busy and distracted, but back in the early 1940s Labour were actually governing the country, helping to win the war and were planning for the peace all at the same time. This was possible because of a broad and deep movement of forces and ideas. It is this capacity to think and do the leadership must build. The crisis is exactly the moment to go big or go home. Look how New Zea- land is going for a 4-day week and pushing a society based on well-being, and how Spain is going for a version of basic income.

Some in Labour, such as , shadowing Communities and Local Government, do seem to understand the need for the redistribution of power, and Ed Miliband looks more radical and determined to defend, for instance, a transformative Green New Deal. and are deep and nuanced thinkers. Others around Starmer, such as his Chief of Staff Morgan McSweeney and his Head of Policy Claire Ainsley, offer further hope.

But too little about Labour so far has been anywhere near big enough. Where is the speech, article or book setting out the overarching vison or the creative, ambitious ideas which adequately respond to this ep- ochal moment? You cannot cross examine your way to a good society.

Successful leaders have always been those who combined a strong vi- sion with an acute and insightful understanding of the current moment and context. What is needed now? How is now different from before? And how does that fit with the vision of the world we want to bring about? Explaining, or better still showing, all this is what visionary lead- ers have always done.

Another one more heave, which, if the Tory government loses the elec- tion, could be enough to secure office – will not win real power. It will just provide another temporary interlude to the long years of Tory mis- rule. More likely a failure to address the structural weaknesses of the

12 Where the Party seems to be Labour's Strategy left, with Labour trying to make out it, and it alone, can be the one Big Tent and contain the whole of the ‘’ will lead to yet another defeat. Avoiding this fate is a dual responsibility. Keir Starmer needs to build a politics of capacity and pluralism. And progressive forc- es in and around Labour need to engage critically and constructively, but not naively, to shape a politics that can win office and deliver trans- formative capability.

In Labour’s Strategy in an Epochal Moment, Part 2 the author will examine the ideas and forces that could help Labour become a trans- formative force.

Endnotes

1. This is the subjective view of the author based on what he has seen and read, and experienced from talking to Starmer on a couple of occa- sions and the people the author knows who know Starmer much better than he does.

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14 Where the Party seems to be Labour's Strategy