May is on a roll as Labour toils to make a mark
With opposition parties in decline, the Tories are having a free run in power
On Thursday, a storm lashed Britain with ferocious winds and driving snow. That same day, England’s main opposition parties faced a battering almost as fierce. Two special elections for the Westminster Parliament took place, one in a Midlands constituency named Stoke-on-Trent Central, the other in Copeland in Cumbria, near the Scottish border. In Stoke, the Labour Party held on to its seat, just. In Copeland, Labour lost to the Conservatives. It was a shattering defeat, only the fourth time since 1945 that a governing party has taken a seat from the opposition in a special election.
Stoke-on-Trent and Copeland are both historically rock-solid Labour districts. In both cases, Labour had won every election since the districts were created (Copeland in 1983; Stoke in 1950). It was said that you could put a red rosette, the Labour emblem, on a donkey, and it would walk to victory.
But these are not normal times. British politics is still feeling the aftershocks of last year’s referendum vote to leave the European Union. Across the Western world, insurgent parties and politicians have rocked the political establishment. Against this background, what was striking about the two special elections was, first, the crumbling of the opposition parties, both Labour and the UK Independence Party (UKIP), which likes to portray itself as Britain’s populist upstart, and second, the resilience of the Conservatives, the party of government.
This should be Labour’s moment. The referendum deeply divided the Tories. It led to the resignation of Prime Minister David Cameron. The government of the new Prime Minister, Theresa May, has faced ridicule for disarray over its plans to carry out Brexit. There is deep public resentment over continuing cuts in public spending, particularly for the National Health Service.
Yet it is Labour, not the Conservatives, that now faces an existential crisis. It has plummeted in national opinion polls, trailing the Conservatives by as much as 16 percentage points. In both elections, Labour’s share of the vote fell.
Many see Labour’s problems as deriving from just one person: the party leader, Jeremy Corbyn. Two years ago, this maverick left winger unexpectedly won the leadership contest, propelled by a surge of new party members who had joined just to vote for him. Many claimed that a Corbyn-led Labour Party could surf to power on a wave of left-wing populism.
As party leader, Corbyn has been a disaster. He is opposed by a majority of Labour members of Parliament, and has signally failed to win popular support outside the party’s base. Yet party’s problem goes much deeper than its leadership. At the heart of its crisis lies the question: What is the Labour Party for?
Labour lost its status as the party of the working class long ago. A recent opinion poll on party popularity found that among working-class voters, Labour had fallen far below the Conservatives and even into third place behind UKIP. Over the past 30 years, Labour, like many social-democratic parties, has transformed itself into a party appealing primarily to the metropolitan middle class, a large proportion of which voted to remain in the EU. In the wake of the referendum, many such supporters are switching allegiance to the Liberal Democrats, the most pro-European of British political parties. One poll suggests, the Liberal Democrats could overtake Labour at the general election.
The trouble with Labour is that the party simply no longer works. It is neither a social-democratic nor a liberal party, neither a plausible alternative government nor an effective opposition. It is difficult to know how it could find a role in today’s Britain.
The UK Independence Party is also facing a crisis. Eight months ago, the Brexit vote seemed an unalloyed triumph for a party founded for the single purpose of campaigning for Britain’s withdrawal from the EU. More recently, UKIP has tried to remake itself as a party for the disenfranchised working class, hostile to globalisation and immigration.
Stoke-on-Trent seemed an ideal constituency in which to pursue such a strategy. An old manufacturing town, built on pottery and coal, it has experienced steep economic decline — a living embodiment of a town “left behind.” Of residents who voted in the referendum last year, almost 70 per cent chose
The trouble with Labour is that the party simply no longer works. It is neither a social-democratic nor a liberal party, neither a plausible alternative government nor an effective opposition. It is difficult to know how it could find a role in today’s Britain.
Leave. So certain was he of victory that UKIP’s new leader, Paul Nuttall, made himself the party’s candidate. He ran a disastrous campaign called out for a series of falsehoods. But, as with Labour, UKIP’s travails run deeper than its leader’s failures.
As in much of the Western world, the political fault lines in Britain have transformed. The key division is not between left and right, but between those who embrace the new globalised, technocratic world, and those who feel dispossessed and voiceless. In other countries, this new fault line has found institutional form through the rise of populist parties and leaders, from Marine Le Pen to Donald J. Trump. In Britain, it was clearly visible in the Brexit result. In parliamentary elections, however, the old mold has yet to be fully broken. Instead, what we see is disaffection with all the parties, insurgent or not.
The irony of such disenchantment with mainstream politics is that, in the absence of a good alternative, it is the most mainstream, establishment party of all, the Tories, that has gained the most. Kenan Malik is the author, most recently, of “The Quest for a Moral Compass: A Global History of Ethics” and a contributing opinion writer.
— NYT Syndicate