Strangely, Labour is looking upbeat. With an earnest leadership campaign and some worrying tensions in the coalition, there are signs of new shoots
After Labour’s election drubbing, you would expect the party’s mood at Westminster to be gloomy. Labour has specialised over the years in turning one election defeat into two or three by its reaction to losing. It usually made a sharp turn to the Left when what was needed was a mild tilt to the Right.
Not this time. To say the Parliamentary Labour Party was buoyant would be an exaggeration. However, as Parliament rose for the summer recess this week, the party has settled into a reasonably vigorous opposition as if there was not too much to worry about.
Partly, this is because the May election result is unique among past defeats. There is a decent chance that the new government will not last a full term. That might sound implausible right now, but there were signs of what is to come with headlines last week proclaiming a terrible week for the coalition. It is hard to be sure if the bigger threat comes from the Conservative Right, or the Liberal Democrat Left, or an explosive mix of the two. But six months internal quarrelling and six months of a corresponding press, and nerves will be jangling.
Fast forward to a plausible scenario for next June. The economy is jolted back into recession by the government’s cuts; constitutional reform is in retreat after a failure to carry the Alternative Vote; LibDem councillors have been massacred by the electorate in the local elections; and LibDem activists are joining Ed Miliband’s idealistic new Labour Party in droves. In that situation, the LibDem Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg and his allies would no doubt try to cling on, hoping that something will turn up. His parliamentary party, and still more grassroots LibDems, might however refuse and force him into an election while he still has some sort of platform to stand on. In those conditions, a return to office for Labour, either on its own or in coalition with the LibDem rump, is a likely enough outcome.
That is not the only explanation for Labour’s relatively good spirits. Do not forget what Labour frontbenchers have lived through. They served in a government under the worst prime minister since the Earl of Rosebery in the nineteenth-century, though they lacked the guts to dispose of Gordon Brown. Not only was Brown incapable of communicating, he was also capable of unequalled nastiness. Nor was he the only one of that ilk in power, as Peter Mandelson’s memoirs make clear. To serve in such a government – especially one whose electoral defeat is inevitable – is no pleasure. And so elements of the current mood reflect the fact that opposition is less beastly than was government before it.
Labour’s leadership contest is contributing to good spirits too. The press is complaining that it is boring. That is good news for the party. It is boring because four of the five candidates are clearly both serious and sensible (Diane Abbott is the sole exception). Any one would make a perfectly plausible leader.
If anything, the candidates are too eager to defend the record of the previous government. Whichever of the four serious candidates had said the Iraq War was a mistake would have been a shoo-in, but the saintly four, bless them, have resisted.
So far so good for Labour, but this Panglossian spirit might yet not serve it well. The party has to accept that it managed its equal-worst postwar electoral performance. Its membership is decimated, its finances are dodgy, its place in the community is insecure and its philosophical base has yet to be established.
Above all, Labour has to answer the fundamental question: what is the Party for? Is it truly an egalitarian party, or is it egalitarian only in a Cameron sense of equality of opportunity? Does it believe in an essentially free market economy, or does it want Mandelsonian tinkering with that economy? Does it want to spend and, if it does, is it prepared to tax? Is its attitude to civil liberties more Hampstead or Dagenham?
We will not know the answer to any of these questions until the new leader is announced at Labour’s September party conference. Many observers cannot help but wonder if they will get their answer even then.
David Lipsey is a Labour peer
