Labour’s crisis comes from the huge gap between politics and people
In some parts of Birmingham, around one in seven people are currently out of work. There are areas of the city in which child poverty is about 50%. And like so much of this country, it is a place now full of empty spaces: pubs, shopping centres – and, atop the redeveloped New Street station, a vast and newly vacant branch of John Lewis.
When the store opened, John Lewis’s managing director was Andy Street. Two years later, against plenty of expectations, he became the Conservative mayor of the West Midlands region. On Saturday, it was confirmed that Street had beaten his Labour adversary, Liam Byrne, and been elected for the second time. Here was proof, as in Hartlepool, that hard times are no barrier to success for the Tories. But his success was also a symbol of something even more significant: a crisis for Labour and the left that goes far beyond the so-called red wall and deep into the past.
Clearly the story of working-class disconnection and realignment that first reared its head in Scotland and then during the Brexit referendum is about huge, historic forces. The fact that Labour’s decline echoes the fate of social-democratic parties across Europe only confirms that we are talking about something genuinely eradefining. But this country’s political discourse cannot really cope with such momentous stuff: as evidenced by three days of hot air about the personal qualities of Keir Starmer and whether Labour ought to quickly tilt right or left, the biggest questions tend to be largely ignored.
So, back to a few political basics. Between people and power lie insti
tutions and organisations that fuse together to create the political weather. As the party of the establishment, the Conservatives have huge sources of strength, from a largely supportive press to the elements of a market economy that endlessly reinforce rightwing values. Labour and the left, by contrast, have always been faced with the necessity of finding and building their own political foundations. And though some islands of collectivism and common interest still exist, the old bases of the party’s clout – factories, coalmines and shipyards; mass trade unionism; the nonconformist church – have long since dwindled away. In their absence, things may still occasionally align in Labour’s favour, as happened in the Tony Blair years and, perhaps, at the election of 2017. But in too many places, Labour is dangerously close to being a 20th-century party adrift in the 21st.
Birmingham and the West Midlands are full of everyday examples of all this. In the largely Asian area of Alum Rock – a bustling, dazzling neighbourhood centred on a mile-long stretch of shops and small businesses – communities based around faith and a shared history of immigration still have such a tight bond with Labour that voting Conservative seems all but unthinkable. In a very different sense, the university students I spoke to in Birmingham city centre seemed also to base their affinity with the party on shared interests and common institutions – in the way that higher education and the experience of undergraduate life tends to either introduce people to a liberal-left mindset, or firm up that view of the world.
But elsewhere, things often seemed to be in freefall. We all know the stereotype of the older voter who once supported Labour and had at least a memory of the party’s industrial-era heyday, but who stepped away around the time of Brexit, still winces at the mention of Jeremy Corbyn, and has tentatively embraced the Tories. But the left should also worry about much younger people, at the sharp end of all kinds of injustices but completely cut off from politics. In the Birmingham suburb of Kingstanding, for example, I had a long conversation with an 18year-old who passionately wanted the minimum wage increased, but did not know either what Labour stood for or what a trade union was. The further I got from the centre of the city, in fact, the more I got the sense of a vacuum and the political turnabouts that have filled it – from Birmingham’s narrow vote for Brexit to the arrival of Conservative MPs in such traditional Labour redoubts as Dudley, West Bromwich, Walsall and Wolverhampton.
Are such places now permanently lost? Since the 2016 referendum, there has been an increasingly judgmental, all-or-nothing aspect to the politics of the left. This has lately manifested in suggestions that it might be time to simply write off so-called left-behind places, and somehow build an alternative coalition of support focused on the liberal middle class, Labour’s new bedrock of minority-ethnic voters and the educated and insecure under-30s. But to do that would not only invite electoral disaster but also risk ignoring places where many of the economic inequalities and unfairnesses the left professes to oppose are vividly present – places in which some people live their collectivism as a matter of everyday experience.
Whenever we are on the road for the Guardian’s video series Anywhere but Westminster, we now make a point of focusing on the sources of hope we have found in places as diverse as Grimsby, Walsall, Stoke-on-Trent and inner-city Edinburgh: the kind of local initiatives and projects that sit apart from the state, and are often run by energised, inspirational women. As romantic as it may sound, these things look to me like the modern equivalents of the miners’ institutes, friendly societies and working-class self-help organisations that were the wellspring of the early labour movement and the party it eventually spawned.
To attempt to bring them anywhere near formal politics would be a difficult business, made even harder by the fact that many of the people involved, understandably, have little interest in such things. But in five days in and around Birmingham, the most hopeful thing I found was not in a manifesto, but at the heart of a trailblazing local institution called the Witton Lodge Community Association. This is about to convert a huge disused swimming pool in Erdington into an incubator for small businesses, along with an event space, creche and cafe, which will all sit at the core of local life. As a vision of one small part of a better society, it spoke for itself.
The fact that creative, rooted, determinedly localist Labour councils in such places as Wigan, Preston and Salford bucked last Thursday’s trends is part of the same picture. The predicament of the left in England will not be resolved by reshuffles, policy reviews and the usual political theatre; it needs to be truly refounded, and that will happen only when it reconnects with the wonders of ordinary life. In that sense, the most damning indictment of Starmer and his people is not mishandling the day-doday Westminster game, but an apparent inability to think long-term about how to start refilling the gap between politics and people; tellingly, rather than develop his party’s Corbyn-era Community Organising unit, he simply scrapped it. Labour’s tragedy, indeed, is that its leadership feels not just remote but almost blank: one more vacant space in a country where emptiness is close to becoming the national condition.
John Harris is a Guardian columnist