ASKED to name her greatest political achievement, Margaret Thatcher accurately said that it was nudging Labour to the right. Her rigid free-enterprise stance (which actually requires enormous state aid) shrank the political arena so that only devout market enthusiasts, like Tony Blair and his still influential acolytes in Labour, could play in it. For the ebullient elites, the UK remained in their hands no matter which party won. When Blair entered 10 Downing Street in 1997, he ruled out restoring wealth taxes, ditched party advocacy of nationalisation, embraced deregulation, cosied up to reactionary media barons, introduced the first university tuition fees, peddled costly public-private partnerships and pandered to slick city financiers. His ‘New Labour’ also abandoned what it derided in private as an obsolete working class that had nowhere else to go.
Boris Johnson is prime minister today as a result of that miscalculation, and the irony is that Blairites are more to blame for this than Jeremy Corbyn, whom they lacerated and sabotaged for the last four years. After a brief ‘cool Britannia’ period, Blair’s ‘pragmatic policies’ ended in a colossal financial crash and a pair of unjustified wars. An upward redistribution of wealth continued apace and the Tories slipped back into power in 2010. Yet nothing is better calculated to make Blairites recoil than the spectre of a return of the ‘bad old days’ of the ’70s when the UK was being ruined by rapacious labour unions. Except the story wasn’t remotely true.
The UK and its people (ie, all strata below the top 10 per cent) did far better in the ’70s than at any time after, a time in which prosperity was shared below the upper middle class — which is why Conservatives hate it so much. Industrial jobs supporting decent lifestyles for (especially) northern working-class Labour voters shrank from seven million in 1979 to 2.5m by 2000, and continue to do so. The EU, whatever its benefits, undeniably opened labour markets so that hard-hit northerners watched immigrants pour in. Lacking help from unconcerned Tory and New Labour governments to reverse their falling living standards, many angry working-class voters grasped Brexit as an all-purpose remedy.
The rise of old New Labour politics sank Corbyn’s prospects.
New Labour — opportunistic middle-class technocrats and managers — looked no more sympathetic to working-class voters than the Tories who, however, promised to honour the Brexit referendum. Since Thatcher, both parties presided over an upward hoovering of wealth, dragging the UK back towards a less-than-quaint Upstairs, Downstairs condition. The result is a capital city where no one with an average wage can afford to live decently, a National Health Service steadily and stealthily dismantled, and a generation of youth who haven’t a chance of paying off their university debt, if they can afford to go at all. The bottom 50pc of the population hold only 9pc of the wealth, and their incomes are falling. Despite or more likely because of that, the British media (including the BBC) ferociously attack those promising to spread the wealth. Hence, Corbyn’s social democratic policies drew unceasing opprobrium since he became Labour Party leader.
Preposterous charges of anti-Semitism in Labour did damage, as Conservatives (rife with racism and class entitlement) calculated. A Tory candidate proposed dispatching ‘troublesome’ public-housing tenants to labour camps. Johnson long ago ridiculed ‘feckless’ working-class voters, which was duly forgotten. The Tories ran a skewed economy where inequality intensified, homelessness doubled, growth slowed, over 800 libraries closed — yet Boris & Co were depicted as sober stewards of the common good. In 2017, Corbyn shocked the Tories by denying them a majority when he showed that with unfiltered media access he could win voters. There was hope in December as the Tory margin diminished to single digits days before the election, but Corbyn was ensnared in a Brexit dilemma no leader could wriggle out of.
A majority of Labour are Remainers who, like Leavers, are implacable. The euro-sceptic Corbyn finally and fatally mollified his deluded Remain wing with a second referendum. In that moment, he became just another betrayer. Leavers bridled against Remainers’ class contempt, and switched to whatever chancer would deliver Brexit. The Tory vote increased 6pc on average in Leave constituencies. Brexit inflated into a vision of salvation for the deeply embittered. Today, Remainers blame Corbyn for an outcome they were most culpable for. The turning point was not Corbyn’s programme but his concession to Remainers. Every UK newscast now consists of overpaid anchors blaming Corbyn alone, whose programme their bosses want to rub out. The elite Johnson is appointed saviour of the working class. Calling this dispiriting election result a ‘BBC production’ wouldn’t be far wrong.
The writers are the authors of No Clean Hands and Parables of Permanent War.
Published in Dawn, December 25th, 2019
