New Labour leader has a ‘mighty mountain’ to climb, warns Hain
THE old politics is over and Labour’s new leader will have to offer a credible alternative to the neoliberal policies that have damaged Britain’s communities, says former Welsh Secretary Peter Hain.
In an article for the online Labour magazine Progress, Lord Hain said the party needed to come to terms with the challenges it faces and whose roots go back to long before Jeremy Corbyn took over as leader in 2015.
As the party prepares to reveal its new leader on Saturday, the former Neath MP states: “The sad truth is that our party – the party created to find a new way towards the goal of a socially just society, a way that acknowledged a proper role for all – handed the current Government the keys to No.10 last year by our own, self-indulgent battle between ideologies that ran out of steam half a century ago.
“As we await the announcement of our new leader, we all have a duty to seriously re-examine our part in creating this current state of affairs. That begins with an honest assessment of where we have gone wrong generally over the past decade, and specifically in the ill-advised 2019 general election.”
Criticising both Mr Corbyn and the former Liberal Democrat leader Jo Swinson, Mr Hain writes: “It is still hard to fathom the turkeys-voting-for-Christmas behaviour by the Labour and Liberal Democrat leaderships that gave Boris Johnson the election he wanted on the Brexit agenda he wanted at the time he wanted.
“Both leaders seemed to have had the delusional belief they could be prime minister. Instead our new leader has been left having to climb a mighty mountain to win the next general election.
“The party’s defeat last December was stark. Labour’s 32% share of the vote was one of its lowest ever, with 203 MPs the lowest since 1935.
“By the 2019 election, Labour’s voting base had become overwhelmingly metropolitan – city-based, middle-class, young, multi-ethnic and post-school educated. We are nowhere in towns we once dominated and we are nowhere in rural areas. Altogether, we are trailing badly in the majority of the UK.
“We hung on in Neath, the former coal-mining and manufacturing constituency I represented for a quarter of a century and where I still live. But that was more out of intergenerational loyalty than any strong allegiance. My majority in 1997 was 27,000, my successor Christina Rees’ last December was 6,000; in a predominantly working-class so-called Labour stronghold, the Tory vote surged.
“In common with parties of the parliamentary left across Western Europe, the link between Labour and our working-class base has been dissolving under our feet.
“With deindustrialisation, dwindling trade union membership, and the closure of clubs and pubs by the thousand, the solidarity and community reflecting Labour’s values in of all these institutions has faded away and been further undermined by neoliberal job insecurity and exploitation, leaving migrants as convenient scapegoats.”
To regain the support it has lost, argues Lord Hain, Labour must offer a policy agenda that provides an alternative: “That means an unashamedly modern Keynesian economic agenda.
“To be fair to him, that is what shadow chancellor John McDonnell advocated, making an admirable break from the Miliband-Balls triangulation that meant nobody knew what we stood for, except maybe an unappealing ‘smaller cuts.’
“But heartland voters, who long stopped listening to McDonnell and Corbyn, were incredulous when the two added mega-billion bills in promising to renationalise electricity and water. The real priority should have been using vital public resources to build houses, not pay off private shareholders. What little credibility Corbyn had was further eroded by a pile of last-minute uncosted commitments.
“So our new leader should prioritise a pro-growth, investment-driven zero-carbon economic agenda that delivers fair shares in the recovery. And what better time to do it?
“By announcing extra billions and subventions for employers, employees and the self-employed to deal with the dire consequences of the coronavirus – and with the door left open for even more investment if and when needed – Britain’s new Chancellor Rishi Sunak has blown a hole in all the dogma of the last 10 years of Tory austerity. The small
government cheerleaders for Boris Johnson have been forced to concede that urgent action to stave off disaster demands big decisions that only government can take because only the state can provide the resources required in a national emergency.
“Which is why Chancellor Sunak was right to reject 10 years of Osborne austerity and to throw the power of the state at the gravest crisis Britain has faced for 80 years. It has been an unexpected learning experience for him and his party – and it has been 10 years overdue.
“If his sudden and monumental fiscal offerings to beat the coronavirus pandemic can be produced like a rabbit out of a hat, then the question is why appropriate extra public spending was not found from the very start of Tory rule in 2010 to deal with the aftermath of the global financial crisis?
“Why instead was the country plunged into 10 years of savage cuts – driven by neoliberal dogma, not necessity – which have gravely damaged the country’s capacity, including our ability to fight this terrifying pandemic?
“If our new leader makes that case, then we can start winning the economic argument again – and that’s an essential prerequisite to winning back the millions of voters we have lost.”