‘The tectonic plates appear to be moving.” Nobody was quite sure what John Prescott meant 11 years ago when the then deputy prime minister made his Delphic announcement. Did it foreshadow the handover by Tony Blair to Gordon Brown? Or did the oracle of Hull East speak deeper truths than any of us knew?
For Mr Brown proved only the beginning. Jeremy Corbyn may prove the continuation. In the end, those ancient continents we call political parties, so permanent through most of the 20th century, may split, drift and regroup according to a different map. The convulsions now shaking the Labour party could be the start of something much bigger: something that may pull apart the Conservative party, too.
The old must be broken beyond repair before the new can be born. Let’s face it, Mr Corbyn is not the problem. One toot on the trumpet by this crumpled, ageing, earnest fool should not be able to bring down the walls of Labour’s Jericho unless the whole city is rotten. Ask yourself what must be missing in a great political party still able to confine the Tories to a narrow victory — a party that within living memory produced Attlee, Bevan, Morrison, Cripps, Gaitskell, Crossman, Castle, Foot, Benn, Jenkins and Healey — and yet in 2015 finds itself unable to offer any serious contender beyond Andy Burnham and Yvette Cooper. Something has been weakening under the surface since before Andy and Yvette were born.
Scotland was just an early warning. In England too (and even more in Wales) Labour has been hollowing beneath a hard crust for more than 40 years. It ran out of big political ideas in about 1973. Tony Blair’s audacious bid to steal the Conservative argument and peddle it under the Labour brand was a sign not of new thinking but of Labour’s failure to think of anything new. The desperate land-grab depended on the Tories going mad and Mr Blair staying sane. Both failed to oblige.
What, then, is the subterranean rot I diagnose? Historically, the Labour party has been a victim of its own great success. It was formed for two linked purposes: to raise the condition of the poor and to restructure the British economy along socialist lines. In that second purpose Labour did not succeed. Nationalisation failed consumers and failed to invigorate industry or the economy. Even before Margaret Thatcher, Labour was losing its 1945 socialist nerve. Quite simply, the party had embraced a dud ideology and, along with most of the rest of the world, has largely come to understand that. Though the Marxist analysis is valuable, the prescription has been a catastrophe.
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But in the first purpose — raising the condition of the poor — 20th-century Labour must be counted one of the most successful modern parties in western history. Nothing like the NHS or the welfare state as we know it would exist today without Labour governments and Labour support for Liberal ones.
The emancipation of women, the state pension, employment protection, conditions at work, the minimum wage, universal access to university — the story of economic and social progress among what Labour used to call the working class and we now call “ordinary people” is hugely to the credit of that party. Enlightened Tories have helped too, but it would be fanciful to suppose Labour (or Tory fear of Labour) was not overwhelmingly the driving force.
It follows from that success that there exists today no great mass of weak and impoverished citizens in need of their own political party to advance their interests. The working class that Labour was founded to protect does not exist in the sense it did then: they helped to abolish it.
So who is the party for? As the numbers of “the poor” have shrunk, Labour’s political focus has narrowed with them. Severely disadvantaged groups still exist, but they no longer constitute the masses. Sweatshop workers, deprived immigrant groups, the disabled, the able-bodied but (supposedly) workshy, the dysfunctional so-called “underclass” — these have become, in a benevolent sense, Labour’s 21st-century clients. But they are a sort of residue: the minority that a healthy economy is still failing.
A party which started on the side of the proletariat has ended up championing the poor-letariat. Like a voracious snacker presented with a full bowl of pistachio nuts, Labour has ended up with the nuts that won’t open at the bottom of the bowl: a party for the nation’s casualties. The political problem with this is that the poorletariat are neither numerous enough nor politically aware enough to vote Labour into government; and some of them are not popular with the rest of Britain. This shouldn’t make them of no concern to politicians, but it ought, years ago, to have alerted Labour to the need to enlarge and move its focus.
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To where? To making private enterprise (of which the Tories are an inconstant friend) work better for the whole nation and in particular for consumers. But that would require Labour to show convincing enthusiasm for the theory of competition, for profit, and for the whole idea of market economics — and the problem is that few of the party’s leading parliamentarians, still fewer of its backbench MPs and fewer yet of its national activists, honestly feel this enthusiasm. The voters can tell.
Labour, as a cobbling together of serious socialists, half-hearted capitalists and genuine progressive capitalists, is probably doomed. Jeremy Corbyn could be the man to trigger the crystallisation of this truth. He could prove a tremendously clarifying force. Mr Burnham or Ms Cooper, whose whole instinct would be to muddy and fudge, would only help the party limp on into chronic electoral failure.
Monolithic Labour needs a shattering big bang. Smashed, its shards would regroup, perhaps into a proper party of the left, a proper socially progressive and economically liberal party such as the SDP narrowly failed to get airborne, and a flight of high-value refugees into the Conservative and Liberal Democrat parties.
As I’ve written here before, the Tories’ ugly and neuralgic internal truces would be unlikely to survive the disappearance of our old, sweet enemy: old Labour. Potential Tory divisions are just as great as the actual Labour ones.
It’s time we all started again. Labour’s chaos and despair is a good thing. Like some mad harbinger of a new order that in the end he will never lead, Jeremy Corbyn is a good thing. So two cheers for creative destruction. It begins this summer. Where it will end we cannot know.