In the first two articles in this series, I looked at the break-up of Labour’s voter coalition between 2017 and 2019, and at the successes and failures of Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership. In this third contribution, I want to ask a question about the way in which Labour made its case to the nation. With or without a different style of leadership, was there anything that Labour could have done differently in this campaign, or the two years leading to it, that would have made it possible to hold together its fractious and fracturing coalition?
Naturally, I’m going to suggest that there was: Labour could have offered a bold, coherent narrative that promised a decisive break with 40 years of British neoliberalism.
Against ‘Austerity’
I’ve made that case many times: here, in other publications and in personal discussions with senior Labour figures. But here goes again. Labour’s rhetorical focus on ‘austerity’, as the name for thing that we would end, was always a mistake. ‘Austerity’ names the programme of public-sector contraction that has been implemented by successive governments since 2010 in response to the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. So it refers to a set of circumstances that have had the most immediately deleterious effects on social groups who felt that they were largely doing well until 2010. This does not speak at all to those who feel that their communities in fact never recovered from the devastation of the 1980s. It implies no critique whatsoever of the long period during which New Labour spent lavishly on public services, while implementing a wholly neoliberal policy agenda (semi-privatising services, introducing and maintaining punitive welfare regimes, enforcing competition and hierarchy in the models of service-delivery, etc.), and failing to implement anything like an effective industrial policy.
