Some twenty years ago, David Owen’s Social Democratic Party was wound up after the party finished behind the Monster Raving Loony Party in a by-election.
Labour might be spared a similar fate in the European elections only because the MRLP no longer exists, although there are plenty of candidates who are loonies, monsters and ravers. Nevertheless, in the run-up to the elections, it seems reasonable to ask the question: what now is Labour’s future?
As I am a Labour peer, half of me is a partisan in this matter. I look forward to the party bouncing back from the inevitable setback to win the next general election with an increased overall majority.
As an analyst, however, I am not inclined to hold my breath waiting for this outcome, and I note that pretty well every fellow analyst reckons Labour is stuffed. If they are right, a gaze into the crystal ball is in order.
One possibility, of course, is that the party will simply disappear. Its social base has declined with the decline in the working class. Its support is increasingly fickle. Its activist base has already been eroded by the years in government.
It has very little left by way of distinctive ideology. The trade unions, once its bedrock, are no longer the numerical force in the land that they were. Its lifeline is weakened and what it lives for is less than crystal clear.
If, in addition, its parliamentary leadership is decapitated by the electorate, in a fury born of economic disappointment and parliamentary scandal, what of Labour will be left? Remember that the ruling Canadian Conservatives were once reduced to two seats at a general election. As a betting man, and in search of consolation in the event that general election night proves a disaster, I have struck a small bet at generous odds with Messrs Ladbroke that Labour will win fewer than ten seats.
Recovery from there is not impossible — the Liberal Democrats after all stem from the rump of the Liberals who won just six seats in the three general elections between 1951 to 1959. But it is testing, especially given the enormous penalty Britain’sfirst-past-the-post electoral system imposes on minor parties. Will the eager young thrusters who were attracted to Labour during the good years be up for the long struggle? Or will they find other more promising political havens?
More likely than wipeout is a common-or-garden election defeat, such as Labour suffered in 1979. That same electoral system is still loaded in Labour’s favour so that the Tories would need to poll a ten percentage point higher share of the vote just to win an overall majority. So what then would happen to Labour?
Some predict a re-run of 1979. The party will repent of ‘New Labour’ and revert to a twenty-first century Bennism. That of course will be different from the far-Left policies of that time. There is unlikely to be any new Militant Tendency since Marxism and workerism have even less purchase now than they did then. Instead, you might expect a combination of a much more aggressive anti-market philosophy, radical green policies, neo-pacifism, and a kind of thousand-flowers-blooming social liberalism legalising drugs and rejecting the work culture.
It would be an interesting experiment. How the Guardian would exult to see a party that embraced the zany philosophy of many of its columnists. However, the Guardian’s readership is very small compared with the electorate. British politics tends not to embrace extremism, especially extremism of the Left.
On balance, it is unlikely to happen. Trade unions, though weak in society, remain strong in the party’s structure, with 40% of the vote in any leadership election. The activists who remain are, on the whole, enthusiastic people of fairly moderate political views, with a keen sense, imbued by years of Blair and Brown, of which policies are electorally possible and which are not.
Moreover, whichever government is in power is not likely to have a long honeymoon, given the economic situation. However bad Labour’s defeat might be, the prospect that it is a one-off will concentrate minds on the practical tasks of political recovery. The loss of the 2010 general election will not make the loss of the 2015 general election inevitable.
To be sure, the party will turn to a leader who seems less staid than Gordon Brown. God knows who, for only God knows which of the current Cabinet will survive the election — but the party is not short of young and vigorous possibles.
To be sure, it will move a little to the Left, if only because the policies it embraced in government will be perceived as a failure. Other than that, the Labour Party that emerges from a medium-sized defeat is likely to be more like the Labour Party that exists than the Labour Party of the fundamentalists’ dreams.
That makes avoiding wipeout a political goal well worth its supporters fighting for.
David Lipsey is a Labour peer
