The plight of British Labour...lessons for Australia
A recent visit to Australia by Jon Cruddas, MP for Dagenham, provided an insight into the plight of the Labour Party (LP) in the UK after more than ten years in office. For the Rudd-Gillard government there are clear messages about the failure of the Blair project and the “Third Way” with the LP polling third in recent council and by-elections.
Cruddas is a member of the Compass group established in 2004 inside and outside the British LP and was invited by the policy group Catalyst recently formed in Australia and sponsored by major Left unions. He was speaking at Catalyst’s first public meetings in Sydney and Melbourne on “Engaging with Labor in Power”. Cruddas was an adviser to the PM on union relations and issues in the early years of the government at a time when the Third Way conventional wisdom was to distance itself from the unions and traditional “tax and spend” policies. This was an aspect of the Blair agenda for reforming the LP which was ruthlessly pursued and concentrated all policies on winning swinging voters in key marginal middle class electorates. Policy-making was effectively handed to the polling industry which had around 10,000 people in its sights.
The contrast was drawn between the Blair Government’s early years characterised by “brilliant presentation and a progressive agenda” at its 1997 landslide election with the failure to refresh policy and a focus on “presentation and creeping authoritarianism” in more recent years. Behind all other issues lay the pervasive issue of alienation of voters over the commitment to the invasion of Iraq, contrary to public opinion. The consequence has been the loss of 4.5 million Labour votes to 2005 after the initial landslide was maintained in 2001 but declined to a “durable majority” in 2005. Since then the decline has continued after Brown assumed the leadership with a mandate for change, the debate about a snap election and subsequent failures and crises. This loss of electoral support was due to the “collapse of a wide and deep coalition” which had launched Labour into office after the Thatcher years. Four key groups were alienated by the Blair Government’s policies. These groups were:
- public service workers whose role and jobs suffered under the marketisation of public services,
- the black ethnic minority including many Muslims over Iraq but also the loss of a progressive agenda on identity, race and culture,
- urban intellectuals alienated by the war and topup fees for higher education
- traditional working-class Labour voters on material issues such as labour market regulation and housing.
Compass was formed to intervene in and out of the Labour Party, to do the “heavy lifting” on policy which resulted in the writing of three major policy documents. Now Compass is intervening in LP elections, against the “Progress” group which is the mainstream Blairite faction dominated by corporate interests and Cabinet members. The collapse of the coalition supporting the LP has meant that now the party is showing the worst polling in recent history. Millions of votes have gone to the resurgent Conservatives and to the far-Right leaving British politics in a “brittle” state. Conservative leader Cameron is more “emotionally literate” on black and social issues and is more emotionally attractive to many on the Left. In the policy arena, Compass believes more collective policy remedies are needed to address the slide in Labour’s support, with time before the next election giving it the possibility of turning around the crisis.
When asked about relations with the teacher unions, Jon Cruddas said that the Blair strategy had been to create hostility with the more independent NUT which served the interests of both organisations...the LP could show it was opposed by the union and sections of the union could show they were not beholden to rightwing Labour. When asked where the teacher vote had gone, he said it has sprayed to the Greens, Lib- Dems and the Conservatives.
For more information visit http://www.catalyst.org.au/catalyst/
Source: Australian Options, Issue 54, Spring 2008, p. 36.