THE BRITISH LABOUR PARTY

In Search of Identity Between Labour and Parliament

BYRON SHELDRICK

The British Labour Party has always held a unique place in the history of social democracy. As the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution, Britain can claim to have witnessed the emergence of the working class. The fact that Marx and Engels did much of their writing in England and based many of their observations on the conditions of the working class in its great industrial cities makes the history and trajectory of working-class politics and, by extension, the Labour Party, particularly significant. The Labour Party itself, however, has a history that, for many, is at best mixed. It has had high hopes yet has frequently failed to deliver (Coates 1996). The party has struggled to establish its identity: Is it a working-class party, a socialist party, or a party for all people? It has struggled to balance the conflicting demands of maintaining both electoral viability and a deep connection to its broader core constituencies.

The inability to resolve these issues of identity has left the party particularly ill-suited to resolve the fundamental and deep contradictions of capitalism in Britain. As a result, despite relative electoral success in recent years, the party continues to be unable to provide a convincing response to economic crisis. Instead, it has retreated to a narrow electoralism based on an understanding of class not as a fundamental organizing principle of society but as a demographic construct for orienting electoral appeals. In part, this tendency reflects the historical origins of the Labour Party and the limits inherent to its structure. Rooted in the twin elements of labourism, on the one hand, and parliamentarianism, on the other, the party has never been able to develop a critical understanding of capitalism or of the limits and contradictions of the British economy. As a result, it has largely understood attempts to embed itself in the working class and to engage in an exercise of collective identity formation as fundamentally irreconcilable with electoral victory.

The limits of labourism and parliamentarianism that inform the Labour Party project have been exacerbated by the British electoral system. The first-past-the-post, winner-take-all nature of British parliamentary elections has given the party a considerable degree of electoral success. In the face of crises of capitalism, the party has been able to operate within fairly narrow policy parameters (those of the postwar consensus throughout much of the twentieth century and neoliberalism since 1997) that permitted both success at the polls and the rhetorical assertion of values of left progressive politics. All the while, the party could ignore the need to address the underpinning class character of British society and the need to redraw class relations. The limits of this electoral strategy have become abundantly clear in the wake of the global financial crisis of 2007 and Labour’s most recent defeat at the polls. The leadership race that culminated in the victory of Ed Miliband (ostensibly the more left-wing candidate) over his brother David (associated with the New Labour project of Tony Blair) demonstrates the fundamental weakness of the party and the extent to which any pretence of being a left-wing party dedicated to even the limited agenda of confronting capitalism through regulation has been largely abandoned.

This chapter is divided into three parts. I begin with an examination of the origins of the Labour Party, detailing how its organizing framework is dominated by the twin principles of labourism and parliamentarianism. In the second section, I explore how these beginnings have affected the party’s overall approach to broad policy questions and, in particular, how they have structured the party’s approach to regulating capitalism and dealing with economic crisis. The limits of that approach have led to unwillingness to open the party to more radical inclinations within either the labour movement or broader social movements. The third section looks at the party’s unpreparedness for the demise of the postwar consensus and how being caught unaware prepared the ground for two decades of Conservative rule. As Colin Leys (1983) argues, the Conservatives under Thatcher were prepared to grapple with the fundamental issue that Labour steadfastly avoided: restructuring class relations in Britain and the class basis of public policy. Subsequently, New Labour under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown accepted the parameters of British politics established under Thatcherism. Under the guise of modernization, they pursued a relentlessly electoral strategy that accepted neoliberalism and market-based politics as a new consensus. I conclude this section with a discussion of Labour’s defeat at the hands of the Conservatives in 2010 and the potential for a Labour resurgence after the conclusion of the recent leadership contest.

THE FOUNDATIONS OF THE BRITISH LABOUR PARTY: LABOURISM AND PARLIAMENTARIANISM

Much has been written on the history of the Labour Party, and it is not my intention to retrace its history in detail. (For that, see Thorpe 2008; Leys 1983; and Panitch and Leys 1997). Nevertheless, it is important to understand the historical context in which the party emerged. Near the end of the nineteenth century, left-wing political parties had limited success in Britain (Leys 1983, 172). The Social Democratic Federation (SDF) and the Independent Labour Party (ILP), founded in 1883 and 1893, respectively, fielded a number of candidates in general elections, all unsuccessfully. This contrasts starkly with the situation in continental Europe, where socialist parties had made significant inroads into both electoral politics and working-class consciousness. In France by 1910, left-wing political parties controlled 42 percent of the seats in the Chapter of Deputies, while in Germany by 1912, the Social Democratic Party was the largest party in the Reichstag (172).

The failure of working-class parties to develop a rich class consciousness in England in the wake of the Industrial Revolution may seem somewhat counterintuitive, particularly given England’s history as the birthplace of the revolution. However, by the end of the nineteenth century, industrialization in both the United States and continental Europe had taken off. Moreover, it had done so on a much more rational and technological basis than in England. Working-class parties therefore organized and mobilized within the working class in order to respond. In Britain, however, while trade unions had developed considerable strength and power within the British economy, they had not felt the need to mobilize politically. With the franchise extended to workers, both the Conservative and Liberal parties actively courted working-class votes. The leadership of the trade unions was overwhelmingly supportive of the Liberal Party and did not see a great need to pursue the independent representation of labour’s interests in Parliament. At most, Liberal and labour parties co-operated to ensure that they did not compete against each other in ridings where to do so might lead to a Conservative victory. This produced a number of “Liberal-Labour” representatives adopted as Liberal parliamentary candidates. In the 1895 election, twenty-four such candidates were selected and nine were elected to Parliament (Leys 1983, chap. 3).

At the same time, British industry had generally not changed its manufacturing processes throughout much of the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Consequently, British labour did not have to confront the same degree of industrial restructuring and technological innovation as its counterparts on the continent. It was not until the economic depression of the 1890s, when British industry attempted to restore profits through cuts in wages and the courts began to strip away various trade union immunities, that British labour sought, in a serious fashion, to establish independent representation in Parliament (Leys 1983, chap. 3).

In 1899 the Trades Union Congress agreed to establish the Labour Representation Committee (LRC), which included representatives of the ILP, the SDF, and the Fabian Society. The LRC immediately began to have an impact on the shape of British politics. In 1906 it successfully returned thirty candidates to Parliament, which, combined with twenty-two Liberal-Labour MPs, formed, for the first time, a party specifically representing labour. After the 1906 election, the LRC and labour MPs became known as the Labour Party and were directly supported by the trade unions. It still took until 1918, however, for the party to establish a membership base, organized through constituency parties at the local level. But that membership base was to complement and not replace the special relationship between the party and its affiliated trade union organizations (Leys 1983, 172).

By 1918, then, the broad parameters of the framework that would guide the development of the Labour Party were well in place. First, the party was not intended to be a socialist party and the advancement of a socialist project was not part of its agenda (Leys 1983, 174). Rather, it was explicitly organized as an independent group within Parliament that was to speak for the interests of labour as represented by trade unions. The LRC did not include the achievement of socialism as one of its objectives; indeed, the SDF eventually left the LRC over precisely this issue (174). As Leys points out, this inclination was further supported by the Fabian Society, an organization of middle-class reform-minded intellectuals who gradually shifted support from the Liberals to Labour (173).

The party, then, understood itself as the voice of the trade unions. This was the essence of its labourism. It would be wrong, however, to suggest that the labourist focus of the Labour Party project was completely antithetical to radical alternatives. Indeed, as trade union membership grew and craft-based unions were replaced by industrial unions of largely unskilled workers, an appetite for more radical alternatives developed among workers. Nevertheless, the leadership of the LRC did not feel that workers were ready for socialism; rather they hoped that, over time, socialism might emerge out of a reformist program (Leys 1983, 173). This approach had lasting consequences for the party. Even Clause IV of the party’s constitution, which dedicated the party to “secure for the workers by hand or by brain the full fruits of their industry … upon the basis of the common ownership of the means of the production,” was understood by the party leadership not as a radical call to reshape the means of production but rather as a “Fabian blueprint for a more regulated, more advanced form of capitalism” (Miliband 1973, 62; Leys 1983, 173).

The tendency toward labourism had the effect of limiting the scope of the party’s ambitions. This was reinforced by its parliamentarianism. The notion that the party should be governed by its parliamentary wing and by the overarching goal of securing representatives in Parliament was central to the project from the outset. This tendency had several important consequences. First, it incorporated the view that while the party was to represent the interest of workers, this was to be done through parliamentary action. Consequently, extra-parliamentary activity — in particular, strike action — was frowned upon as undemocratic and as undermining the legitimacy of parliamentary action (Leys 1983, 174–75). This, in turn, meant that the party itself did little to develop a base of support outside of Parliament. It was simply assumed that trade union members would support the party, which would advocate on their behalf through Parliament.

This arrangement led to a conception of the Labour Party in which the parliamentary wing of the party was largely independent from the base. In 1918, however, when the formal constitution of the Labour Party was adopted, trade union membership was rising strongly, and the party had no choice but to take advantage of this increasingly powerful and important base of support. The Labour Party Conference was given formal autonomy, but it was clear that parliamentary members of the party would continue to operate with considerable independence. Effectively, the 1918 constitution “grafted a mass individual-membership, organized ‘Constituency Labour Parties,’ onto the structure of affiliated labour organizations created by the LRC” (Leys 1983, 176). While changes have been made to the party structure, particularly during the modernization phase of New Labour, the essence of this structure has remained in place and has been at the heart of Labour’s identity crisis as it has struggled to respond to the needs of its constituents and the pressure to succeed electorally. Born out of a twin commitment to labourism and parliamentarianism, in many respects, the dye was cast for the British Labour Party. Pressure from the base urging the party to move to the left and to articulate a progressive socialist position has generally been unsuccessful in the face of the widespread perspective — articulated by the membership of the party, the trade unions, and the Labour leadership — that to do so would mean electoral disaster (Panitch and Leys 1997).

LABOUR IN THE POSTWAR PERIOD: OPERATING WITH CONSENSUS

Before moving on, two points must be made. The first is that the British electoral system reinforced the conservative tendencies implicit in both labourism and parliamentarianism. Britain’s single-member plurality system operates on a winner-take-all basis. In many countries, this has militated against the interests of left-wing parties, as such a system tends to reward parties that have concentrations of votes and penalize parties whose support is widespread but not concentrated geographically. The Labour Party sees the effects of this, with its clear areas of strength in industrial areas of the country: the Midlands, the North, and Scotland. In southern England, by contrast, where a great many seats are to be had, Labour has had relatively poor showings. One effect of the first-past-the-post system, however, is to highlight the importance of swing ridings. Indeed, the difference between forming the government or the opposition may, especially in two-party systems, depend on a handful of swing ridings. Parties therefore often tend to focus their appeal on voters in these ridings, but this approach is generally not conducive to the formation of a mass-based movement. The parliamentary party, intent on victory, focuses on the desires and preferences of a narrow range of voters even though this may not accord with the will of the party membership at large.

In Britain, Labour has historically resisted suggestions to reform the electoral system and adopt some version of proportional representation. While this would have the salutory effect on British politics of permitting more ideologically based appeals and would encourage parties to develop deeper roots with their membership (indeed, to invest in developing and cultivating a membership), Labour has generally been opposed. In a two-party system, as Britain has tended to be for much of the period since the end of the Second World War, Labour can count on doing fairly well from the single-member plurality system. Proportional representation might lead to left-wing competition and erode Labour’s comfortable position as the electoral voice of the Left. Arguably, such electoral competition would create a more vibrant left-wing representation in Parliament and force Labour to reconnect with its own base. The party would also have to respond to other voices besides its right wing, which has always claimed a monopoly on the road to electoral victory.

The second point is that the narrow electoral approach solidified Labour’s inability to confront capitalism. Inherent in both labourism and parliamentarianism is the expectation of cross-class collaboration and the acceptance of capitalist social relations. For the Labour Party, this has meant operating within a fairly narrow range of manoeuvre that would satisfy both workers’ demands for better wages and working conditions and industry’s demand that its interests not be threatened. Throughout the postwar period, this meant operating within the constraints of the Keynesian postwar consensus. Essentially, this consensus implied a faith in the regulatory power of the state, a commitment to full employment (primarily through demand management strategies), and a commitment to the welfare state to provide income security for the unemployed, benefits to the elderly and the ill, and as a vehicle for state spending and investment.

While there were some more radical elements to the consensus, including nationalization of industries under the first postwar Labour government of Atlee, even here the radical potential was muted. As Leys (1983, 58) observes, generally only those industries that were failing and/or declining were nationalized. As a result, industrialists were not necessarily unhappy to see them nationalized. Indeed, the management of the nationalized companies was generally turned over to boards of individuals drawn from the private sector. In the long term, therefore, the nationalization project came to be identified with inefficiency and economic mismanagement, and workers themselves became prime targets for state pressure to decrease wages in the face of inflation. The nationalization of industry was therefore not a step toward socialism. Rather, the prevailing nature of employment and the organization of industry remained essentially the same, but it was now under state ownership. It should come as no surprise, therefore, that some of the most significant labour disruptions in Britain during the postwar period occurred in nationalized industries such as coal.

The limits of this consensus became increasingly evident as the postwar period unfolded. By the 1960s and 1970s, the persistent weakness of British industry was evident to all. The economy was plunged into repeated crises manifested by balance-of-payments problems and sterling crises. Reliance on borrowing, particularly from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), created additional pressures on Labour governments. In the end, even modest attempts at regulation were quickly abandoned in favour of what was seen as a tried-and-true measure: securing wage restraint from the trade unions in exchange for some degree of concessions on policy. (On the relationship between the Labour Party and British incomes policy, see Panitch 1976.) This was the original labourism of the party made manifest. The contradictions of the postwar consensus — in which state spending on infrastructure and an expanded welfare state to fuel growth was combined with wage restraint as a hedge against inflation — have been well documented (see, for example, Ross and Jenson 1986; Panitch 1986a). In the end, it was unsustainable, and by the 1970s, it was clear that the postwar consensus was no longer manageable. It had consistently failed to provide solutions to the deeper problems of the British economy. Despite this, however, the Labour Party found itself unable to offer any alternative. Indeed, the legacy of labourism and parliamentarianism that had so dominated its approach to managing the consensus left it both unwilling and unable to address the more fundamental issue of the nature of class relations in the United Kingdom. The Conservatives under Thatcher were poised to take their place as the governing party of Britain. Thatcher, however, was definitely prepared to wage an all-out assault on the conventions of both the British economy and British class relations. In doing so, she fundamentally redrew the space within which consensus politics could be played out.

The Labour Party was unable to offer an acceptable alternative to Thatcherism. Colin Leys argued in 1983 that with the collapse of the postwar consensus, the centre of British politics had proven uninhabitable for both the Conservative and Labour parties. It was the Conservatives, however, who were prepared to move drastically to the right and adopt a radical neoliberal ideological approach to governing. Labour, on the other hand, was slow out of the gate and chose to continue to inhabit the centre ground, hoping that the unpopularity of Thatcher’s attack on the institutions of the postwar consensus would be her undoing. Indeed, that might have been the case had Thatcher not been able to ride to victory in 1983 on the back of the Falklands War and a host of other ideological appeals around race, ethnicity, nationalism, and a discourse of family values and individual responsibility that resonated for both the middle class and many workers. In the end, Labour was consigned to eighteen years in the political wilderness.

There are, of course, many reasons why Labour was so fundamentally ill-prepared to meet the challenge of Thatcherism. To do so, the party would have had to articulate a socialist vision to respond to Thatcher’s neoliberalism. As a number of commentators have argued, there were structural reasons why the party was unable to do so (see, for example, Miliband 1973; Minken and Sneyd 1977). Leys (1983, 190–91) summarizes these as follows:

1. The leadership of the party had increasingly become disconnected from and unrepresentative of the working-class roots of the party, largely owing to its parliamentary focus.
2. Parliamentarianism had become so entrenched in the attitudes of the party leadership and the party membership that it had become accepted as an end in itself. Fundamentally the party had grown to believe that it was a natural governing party for the country and as such no longer needed to think about representing its base in the same way. The overarching goal was to win elections.
3. The party had come to accept capitalism as a given, and electoral considerations foreclosed any thought of challenging it for fear that this would lead to disaster at the polls.
4. Holding office over a period of time has a deradicalizing effect. It had led to an acceptance of the status quo and the safeguarding of vested interests. This included those interests to which one should be either hostile or whose intentions should be viewed with skepticism.
5. The trade union leadership, which is probably the most significant extra-parliamentary source of influence over the labour leadership, tended to emphasize short-term interests of their membership. Challenging capitalism in any fundamental way risks destabilizing industry and endangering those interests. Although the membership of unions may be far more militant and radical than union leaders, even the left-most wing of the trade union leaders tended to concur with the leadership of the Labour Party in terms of its desire to support capitalism rather than confront it.

As can be seen, these limits on the Labour Party as a socialist vehicle highlight the significance of labourism and parliamentarianism. The first four points clearly relate to the limits of parliamentarianism and the subordination of party objectives to the goal of winning office. According to Ralph Miliband, this strategy confuses winning the government with winning the state. In his classic work The State in Capitalist Society (1969) he clearly demonstrates the erroneous nature of this strategy. In the absence of a strategy and an analysis that go beyond the limits of parliamentarianism, the party was unable to pose either solutions or alternatives to the problems of the British economy. The party was therefore at the mercy of both British industry and international financial institutions such as the IMF.

The last constraint in the above list reflects the problems of labourism. The Labour Party’s special relationship with the broader trade union movement could have been a source of great strength, but the unwillingness of the party leadership to engage in extra-parliamentary activity meant that the party did not take advantage of the increasing militancy of British workers, nor did it seek to organize or mobilize them. Similarly, throughout the 1960s and 1970s, it did not look to the growing radicalism of progressive social movements as a source of inspiration. While all of these groups, which broadly became identified as the New Left, were to be found within the Labour Party, their voices were generally marginalized and viewed with some disdain by the party leadership.

The Labour Party’s limitations were made manifest during the Thatcher years. Thatcher was prepared to abandon the centre ground of British politics. This meant radically redrawing the contours of the state through privatization, the creation of special operating agencies, the introduction of market principles into education and health care, and a systematic assault on trade unions and their freedoms. State spending was, in theory, restricted, although in many respects it was simply shifted to other priorities. Certainly, however, budget deficits and taxation were cast as twin evils undermining productivity and economic growth. Monetarism replaced demand-management strategies, and economic policy was reduced to managing inflation and creating the conditions for supply-side economics to operate through low taxes and low budget deficits.

In this context, Labour might have moved to pose a left-wing alternative. Indeed, prior to Thatcher’s 1979 victory, efforts had been made to do precisely this. The Labour governments of Harold Wilson (1974–76) and James Callaghan (1976–79) came to power confronted by one of the most severe economic crises Britain had faced in some time. Staggeringly high rates of inflation (26.9 percent in 1975), combined with high unemployment, the ongoing effects of repeated sterling crises in 1975 and 1976, an ongoing balance-of-trade deficit, and persistent underinvestment in British industry had combined to make traditional Keynesian solutions to the economic problem unsustainable. Wage restraint on the part of workers, combined with the deflation of the pound, simply could no longer stimulate growth on the magnitude that was needed to offset the crisis.

The government’s reaction to the depth of the crisis was eventually to abandon any pretence of a Keynesian solution and adopt a monetarist approach, in which cuts to public services and fiscal discipline to restrain inflation were predominant concerns (Panitch and Leys 1997, 128). In June 1976, the government sought a £5 billion loan from the European central banks, the Bank of International Settlements, and the US Treasury and Federal Reserve. This was followed by a £4 billion conditional loan from the IMF. The effect of these bailouts was to discipline the government and force it to unconditionally accept monetarism as its guiding economic policy. Massive cuts to public expenditures were to follow (£1 billion in cuts to expenditures and a £1 billion increase in employees’ National Insurance contributions), as well as a drastic reduction of the money supply through interests rates as high as 15 percent. As Panitch and Leys (1997, 128) astutely observe, in government, “Labour’s parliamentary elite were left with no Keynesian clothes to cover their political ideological nakedness.”

Within this context, Tony Benn, as Industry minister, had been advocating an Alternative Economic Strategy. (For a full discussion of Bennism and its significance, see Panitch 1988.) Despite his persistent advocacy for the strategy, however, he was unable to gain any traction with the party’s leadership. The essence of the strategy was for the government to fully explain the reasons for the economic crisis, including the failure of British capitalism to invest in the country and the effects of the worldwide economic downturn. In other words, the strategy was to reverse the tendency to blame the problem on excessive government spending and wage settlements that were too high. In addition, the strategy would have seen import restrictions and the imposition of controls on capital outflows, as well as controls placed on banks and other financial institutions. Of course, such a strategy would have required a rethinking of Britain’s participation in the European Common Market and would have resulted in a direct confrontation with the finance capitalists of the City. Nevertheless, although it was the only proposal for a different course within the government, it was essentially stillborn. The government had no stomach for taking on these battles, and indeed, once the IMF loans had been secured, it also had no capacity to do so.

The failure of the Alternative Economic Strategy to gain acceptance must also be understood within the context of the New Left’s campaign to reform the party and make it more democratic. In 1973, the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy (CLPD) was established by a group of rank-and-file activists. The motivating factor was the record of Labour governments throughout the 1960s and their tendency to simply ignore conference resolutions and party policy as established by the annual conference. The precipitating event, however, was Harold Wilson’s outright rejection in 1973 of the Labour Conference’s call for the nationalization of twenty-five of the largest manufacturing companies in Britain (Panitch 1988, 351). This highlighted one of the constraints on the Labour Party: even though the party membership had throughout the 1970s become increasingly radical, the parliamentary leadership did not feel itself bound by policies adopted by the Labour Conference. The starkness of Wilson’s rejection of the conference resolution on nationalization was seen as a blatant assertion of the dominance of the parliamentary leadership over the party.

The CLPD campaigned for democratizing the party, with the explicit intention of making the parliamentary leadership accountable and answerable to the party membership (Panitch and Leys 1997, 135–38). Underpinning this was a commitment to the New Left values espoused by Tony Benn and expressed in documents like the Alternative Economic Strategy. Despite this, however, the CLPD explicitly rejected campaigning on any specific substantive policy, rather confining itself to constitutional issues within the party. To this extent, it did have some important successes, including the establishment of mandatory reselection of sitting MPs. The theory, of course, was that this requirement would put MPs under increased pressure to carry out conference policies. The difficulty was that in the absence of a political mobilization of constituency members, there was no reason to think that local constituency parties would be any more likely to choose left-wing over right-wing candidates. Indeed, members of the party’s right wing seemed to have little difficulty meeting the requirements of reselection. After all, they had passed the test of electability.

The difficulty of the CLPD position was that it reflected a certain constitutionalism that was perfectly consistent with the party’s roots in a parliamentary orientation (Panitch and Leys 1997, 158; for a discussion of the constitutional debates during this period, see Rustin 1981). Proponents of the position felt that if only the party would adopt the correct program, mass support would be forthcoming. They did not fully understand that insufficient attention had been paid to building the groundwork for such support, both inside and outside the party. Rather, the CLPD underestimated the difficulty of “generating broad support for socialist policies, as opposed to getting people to vote for a Labour government” (158).

Despite this, the CLPD did push ahead with other reforms, including the reform of the mechanism for choosing the party leader. In 1981 the system of Labour MPs choosing the party leader (an obvious example of parliamentarianism) was replaced with a system of electoral colleges. Three electoral colleges were established representing trade unions, MPs, and constituency parties. Each would vote for the leader in a reasonably complex electoral system. Later, the CLPD would press for reforms to give Labour women and visible minorities greater representation. This was particularly evident in the reforms that would require significant representation for women on party shortlists.

Generally, the democratic reforms advocated by the CLPD were fairly minimal in their overarching scope. Nevertheless, achieving them demanded considerable time, resources, and strategic manoeuvring within the party (Panitch and Leys 1997, chap. 7). They also prompted considerable reaction and a counter-assault by the party’s right wing (145–52). While CLPD did not campaign specifically on substantive issues, the campaign to democratize the party was generally identified as a left-wing initiative. Consequently, at the same time that Benn and others on the left were increasingly being criticized for being impractical and unrealistic, the intra-party constitutional debate took on a definite left-right complexion. It is beyond the scope of this chapter to trace the details of those struggles, but to the extent that the election manifesto of 1979 was seen as having reflected too much of a left-wing influence, the defeat at the hands of Thatcher clinched victory for those who would assert the need for electoral viability and “practicality” above all else.

Indeed, after the 1979 general election, a full-scale assault on the left of the party began. Initially led by Michael Foot and Dennis Healey and supported by the Trade Unions for Labour Victory, the challenge of establishing party unity at the cost of party democracy fell to Neil Kinnock after Thatcher’s second victory in 1983. New Left members of party committees, and particularly the National Executive, were removed and the right wing of both the party and the trade unions came to dominate the party’s operation. Radicals such as the Militant Tendency were expelled from the party as the executive moved to establish a register of non-affiliated organizations as a vehicle for weeding out groups with explicitly Marxist or socialist credentials (Leys 1996, 9–14). At the same time, Kinnock, relying increasingly on electoral strategists and professional marketing and advertising specialists, moved to professionalize the party and to centralize and control communications through the establishment of a Campaigns and Communications Directorate headed by Peter Mandelson. (For a discussion of this professionalization, see Leys 1996; Webb 1992.) The policy capacity of the party conference was increasingly subverted as the parliamentary party developed its own capacity to appeal directly to the public and to plan and implement policy directions.

These tendencies were informed by the firm belief that electoral victory could only be reclaimed by adopting practical and reasonable centrist policies and that this could only be achieved by containing the left wing of the party and purging its most radical elements. To be sure, huge external pressures on the party were pushing it in precisely this direction. The press in Britain routinely savaged the ideas of the New Left, congratulating Kinnock and his party for their attacks on both the left and trade union activism and mocking Tony Benn (Panitch 1988, 349; Panitch and Leys 1997, 131). The experience of Tony Benn, more than anything else, had shown that any attempt to move the party to the left would be met with ridicule and an assault by the right-wing press.

Additionally, the Labour Party was feeling threatened by the defection from its ranks of a number of MPs to form the Social Democratic Party (SDP), created in 1981 by Roy Jenkins, David Owens, Bill Rodgers, and Shirley Williams. They had all been leading moderates within the Labour Party and part of the Manifesto Group, which had opposed what they perceived to be a leftward shift in Labour policy, including the prominence of Tony Benn and the New Left and the involvement of trade unions in choosing the party leader. (On the ideological basis of the SDP, see Leys 1983, 98–99; Bochel and Denver 1984.) They had also opposed the creation of the electoral college, which effectively took control of the leadership away from the parliamentary party. Eventually, twenty-eight Labour MPs defected to the SDP. In the 1983 general election, the SDP formed an alliance with the Liberal Party and won more than 25 percent of the popular vote, only slightly behind Labour, which won 28 percent. The Conservatives, soaring on the back of the Falklands War, secured a second majority with 44 percent of the vote. For Labour, the defection of prominent MPs from the right wing of the party represented both a shock and a threat. Party disunity and internal ideological divisions had led to what was seen as a challenge to the very future of the party. Only the vagaries of the first-past-the-post electoral system had prevented an even greater electoral disaster: this certainly meant that any consideration of electoral reform was off the table. For Kinnock, in particular, continued discussion of New Left ideas would simply enhance the stock of the SDP at Labour’s expense. As Panitch (1988, 357) observed, Kinnock’s attack on the left of the party represented an assertion that the task of “winning the next electioin had to stand as an ‘unavoidable and total precondition’ over any other condition.”

FINDING A NEW CONSENSUS: MODERNIZATION AND THE POLITICS OF NEW LABOUR

By the 1980s, then, the consensus under which the Labour Party and Labour governments had operated throughout the postwar period was in tatters. Keynesianism no longer worked. Labour governments under Wilson and Callaghan had virtually abandoned any pretence of maintaining the traditional Labour goal of full employment. The New Left within the party did seek to push a more radical left agenda in the face of the crisis, but in the absence of the party having established deeper connections to the broader movements of civil society, this attempt to reshape the party from within could not overcome its parliamentary impulses. This is not to say that there was not a mass of radical political movements on which the party might have relied for such a purpose. Thatcherism gave rise to tremendous political unrest and considerable mobilizing and organizing by her opponents. The Greater London Council under Ken Livingston and the Militant Tendency’s success in local elections in Liverpool illustrate that the party was perhaps a bit quick to dismiss and reject more radical approaches. Ultimately, discontent with Thatcher would culminate in the Anti-Poll Tax Federation, whose mobilization efforts saw 200,000 people gather at Trafalgar Square on 31 March 1990 to demonstrate against the tax. Nevertheless, without a national voice to structure this dissent into a coherent radical program, such indications of discontent were mere annoyances to Thatcher, who was quite prepared to use the power of the state in an authoritarian fashion to deal with them, as was witnessed in the police response to poll-tax demonstrators and the elimination of the Greater London Council.

The party, then, was in search of a new consensus within which the twin objectives of labourism and parliamentarianism could be practiced. A more radical left-wing alternative had been rejected. It fell upon Tony Blair and New Labour, under the watchword of modernization, to establish a right-wing consensus that was, if anything, more narrowly electoral than ever before. Blair came to the leadership of the party in 1994 after the untimely death of John Smith and quickly moved to consolidate the control and dominance of the parliamentary leadership over the broader party.

With Blair at the helm, the party was rebranded as New Labour. Policy development was quickly consolidated in the hands of the leader’s office, and the role of the National Executive and Conference were diminished. Blair also moved to decrease the significance of the unions’ block votes, tightened control over communication, eliminated Clause IV of the party constitution (which Harold Wilson had once called the bible of the party), and generally cracked down on dissent and any semblance of a left-wing agenda. (On the centralization of control by Blair, see Panitch and Leys 1997, 236–39). By now, the press had come to accept that the leader of the party was the source of authoritative policy and that the decisions of the conference no longer had the significance that they once did. In terms of policy, the party moved clearly to the right. Monetarism was accepted wholeheartedly and all policy decisions were subordinated to the overarching goal of winning the next election. Intellectually, the “new consensus” articulated by New Labour was encapsulated within the concept of the “Third Way” (Giddens 1998). For the leadership of the party, this meant rejecting the dichotomies of left and right and embracing a middle road of supporting capitalism while expanding opportunities for social justice.

In effect, this meant accepting many of the reforms of the Thatcher period. The extent of this became evident when Blair won the 1997 general election and formed the first Labour government in eighteen years. He was able to continue consolidating power in the hands of the Prime Minister’s Office, centralizing control of communications and ensuring that all ministerial statements were “on message.” Economic policy was clearly monetarist, with Gordon Brown as chancellor committing the government to a fight against inflation over and above anything else (Wood 2010). The government quickly decided that it would adhere to the spending targets of the Conservatives, would not run budget deficits, would not increase taxes (the image of the party as willing to impose new taxation was considered a primary electoral obstacle to be overcome), and would continue to cut state spending. This agenda included a continuation of the process of marketization and privatization, which was particularly apparent in the areas of health care, communications, and utilities (Leys 2001; Wood 2010). The Bank of England was given exclusive control over interest rates, thereby limiting the ability of the state to engage in economic planning.

In terms of more specific policies, Blair’s New Labour government essentially maintained the restructured and highly restrictive labour relations regime that had been introduced under Thatcher. Indeed, during the 1997 election campaign, Blair boasted that Labour’s proposed changes to the labour relations system would “leave British law the most restrictive on trade unions in the Western world” (quoted in Panitch and Leys 1997, 254; on the relationship between Labour and trade unions more generally, see Howell 2000, 2001). While certainly some concessions to the trade unions were made after the 1997 election victory, the election promises were significantly watered down once the party came into office. Most importantly, support for the right to strike for public sector workers was withdrawn, the commitment to require the reinstatement of workers dismissed during a strike was reduced to the right to have their case heard by a tribunal, and the commitment to a minimum wage was diluted — the specific amount of any minimum wage would be set only after referral to a commission that would include business representation.

The refusal to be categorical on the question of a minimum wage foreshadowed developments on the broader social welfare state. Here, income security benefits were recast through the development of workfare requirements as a tool for developing global competitiveness (Sheldrick 2000; Marqusee 1997). Unemployment was recast from a structural economic problem into a problem of the individual’s “will to work.” Welfare, the government announced, needed to involve active labour market policies to restore that willingness. Structural problems in the British economy, including the scarcity of well-paying full-time jobs and the shift to increasingly insecure part-time employment, were ignored. Similarly, the question of how welfare recipients would qualify for high-tech jobs in the knowledge economy without significant investment in retraining and education was left unanswered. The failure to deliver on a minimum wage because of opposition from business groups became all the more ironic as the government began subsidizing low-wage businesses through its new workfare programs (Sheldrick 2000). The major beneficiaries of these programs were low-wage employers, particularly in the hotel and restaurant sectors, who took advantage of the schemes to rotate employees in and out while using government programs to subsidize their wage bill.

Despite these disappointments, there was a sense that the Labour Party was refashioning Britain. Spending on infrastructure, particularly schools and hospitals, did increase, and public sector spending was restored in some areas although it was often focused, as in the case of income support, in ways that enhanced an ongoing neoliberal agenda. Constitutional reform — particularly Scottish and Welsh devolution, the ending of life peers, and the incorporation of the European Convention on Human Rights into domestic law — gave the appearance of reforming the crusty institutions of British politics.

Overall, though, the Labour Party had been recast as a fairly traditional brokerage political party (Bradford 2002; Sheldrick 2002). Its main focus was on securing electoral success, and its policies and ideas were dictated by perceptions of voter appeal. The Labour Party had long ago stopped trying to fashion public opinion by forming a movement of supporters. New Labour acknowledged and applauded this shift. The process of modernization ensured that the party apparatus was brought into line with what the parliamentary party had, for some time, seen as the only way forward. In this alignment, however, those elements that defined it as a “labour” party became increasingly diminished. As Naomi Klein, writing in the Toronto Star, said, “Clearly, Labour is about ‘labor’ the way … Listermint mouthwash is about ‘letting your voice be heard.’ Blair’s is not a labor party, but a labor-brand party, a sort of labor-scented party, with the appearance of egalitarian principles little more than a brand asset” (quoted in Panitch and Leys 1997, 329n49).

Of course, one of the consequences of being a brokerage party is that voter support cannot be taken for granted. That support is not based on deep connections with a party and therefore shifts easily in response to specific issues of the day. Labour discovered this as Blair became more deeply identified with George Bush’s war in Iraq and with the scandal of weapons of mass destruction that had never existed. By the time Blair left the leadership of the party, the fortunes of Labour were in decline. Gordon Brown inherited a project that was already in trouble, but domestic scandals around MP expense accounts, combined with the complete failure of the government to either foresee or deal with the economic collapse of 2007, sealed the government’s fate.

Indeed, the economic crisis demonstrated the emptiness of the consensus in which Labour had been operating and the limits of monetarism and neoliberalism to deal with the global economy. The government quickly retreated into spending as way out of the immediate crisis, but neoliberalism had by this point become so accepted as the mantle of truth for all parties that after the defeat of Brown’s government, the major pressing question in the election of 2010 was how quickly the growing deficit could be eliminated and how deep the cuts would have to be to achieve that objective. In 2010, the budget deficit reached over £170 billion, outstripping EU rules requiring budget deficits to remain under 3 percent of GDP. The UK’s budget deficit had reached nearly 12 percent of GDP, and Alistair Darling, Gordon Brown’s chancellor, had planned in his final budget to reduce the deficit to 4.7 percent of GDP by 2015. This rate of decrease was less than the targets established by EU finance ministers in 2009. The Conservatives argued that budget cuts should be deeper and the pace of deficit reduction faster in order to safeguard the economic recovery.

The 2010 election resulted in a hung Parliament, with the Conservatives taking power in a coalition alliance with the Liberal Democrats. The new coalition government immediately announced deep cuts in government spending, with ministers asked to draw up plans for up to 40 percent cuts in departmental budgets. Following Labour’s defeat, Brown resigned his leadership and the Labour Party was plunged into a search for a new leader. The leadership contest itself demonstrated the degree to which the modernization project of Blair and Brown had succeeded in turning the party into a thoroughly parliamentary and electorally driven party. The party contest was considered by many to be a riveting family drama, with brothers Ed and David Miliband competing against each other for the leadership. (The irony of Ralph Miliband’s sons competing to lead the party that had so abandoned socialism could not go unnoticed.) David Miliband was widely expected to win the race, primarily upon what was seen as his electability, but he was also seen as more closely tied to the New Labour project of Tony Blair, having risen through the ranks quickly during the Blair years. Ed Miliband, on the other hand, had only entered politics after Blair’s departure and was seen as more closely allied with the Gordon Brown camp, although not tainted by it.

Although the campaign between the brothers was fairly civil, toward the end a greater degree of animosity between the Miliband camps became evident. Ed, who was pejoratively referred to as “Forrest Gump” by his brother’s team, managed to eke out an extremely narrow victory at the party conference in September 2010, winning 50.65 percent of the total vote compared to his brother’s 49.35 percent. Ed Miliband had generally campaigned on the basis of a more left-leaning platform. He had called for an end to New Labour and generally argued against what he saw as a drift to a “brutish US-style capitalism.” He had successfully positioned himself to the left of his brother, distancing himself from the Blair-Brown years and calling for a return to core Labour Party values.

The leadership result, however, has potentially left the party deeply divided. As noted above, Ed Miliband won by the narrowest of margins. More importantly, however, he failed to win all of the electoral colleges. Among MPs and MEPs, David Miliband won 53.4 percent of the vote, while Ed captured only 46.5 percent. Among individual party members, David Miliband’s lead was slightly greater: he won 54.3 percent compared to Ed’s 45.6 percent. Unlike the close results in both of these electoral colleges, however, in the Union and Affiliates electoral college, Ed Miliband’s call for a return to the Labour Party’s roots resonated more profoundly. Here, Ed won 59.7 percent of the vote while his brother captured only 40.2 percent. This tipped the balance in Ed Miliband’s favour. For a moment, it appeared that labourism had trumped parliamentarianism.

There are in David Miliband’s leadership campaign a couple of points worth noting. First, David had called for the party to re-engage with the process of organizing communities. He pledged to train a thousand Labour Party members as community organizers through his “movement for change campaign.” The campaign was modelled after Barak Obama’s approach to organizing and in some ways is reminiscent of how Tony Blair also looked to the American Democratic party for inspiration. Despite this, David’s vision overall had a distinctly electoral focus. In one campaign document, he argued that the party was defeated in 2010 because its vote had collapsed across social classes. He elaborated an understanding of class based on census demographics:

Labour lost over a million votes in each of the C1, C2 and DE social class groups between 1997 and 2010 — and we need to fight equally hard to win them back.

We also lost about half million votes at the top of society. The 1.6 million low income voters who deserted labour in social classes D and E since the 1997 high water mark are a clear target.

But so must the 2.8 million skilled and middle class voters (so called C1s and C2s) who have left us.…

Those on lower incomes, the C2 and DE’s, make up about 44% of the voting population. You just can’t craft an election majority out of a minority.

It is dangerous to pretend that we don’t need the middle classes — just as it would be to suggest Labour does not need to win back the hope and trust of working class voters. (Miliband 2010b)

One can hardly imagine a less inspiring way to describe the task of rebuilding the class basis of a party. In an article in The New Statesman, David Miliband (2010a) wrote that the party had ignored the interests of middle England and needed to win back support in England by rediscovering the symbols and icons of English nationalism.

This analytical approach to class as a demographic and electoral category represents a continuing problem with the Labour Party’s approach to the concept of class. The impact of parliamentarianism has led to an understanding of class as a sociological and demographic characteristic of people rather than as a social relationship. The party, therefore, accepts individuals as they are and sees polling and market research as the tools to determine what different demographic classes want. The party’s job, in a traditional brokerage model, is to put out a product that will have appeal. People are accepted as a given in terms of their beliefs, preferences, and attitudes, and if those opinions and attitudes are to be shaped, it is only for the short-term goal of obtaining their vote. It is for this reason that one would appeal to England on the basis of nationalist icons and symbols. There is no understanding of the need for a socialist party to reshape class attitudes and opinions. The job of the party, in this conception, is not to educate, radicalize, or mobilize.

The implications of this approach were evident in the wake of Ed Miliband’s victory. The Tory press immediately seized on his reliance on the trade union vote to secure his victory. Labour Party supporters and media commentators quickly argued that he needed to distance himself from his image as “Red Ed,” while the Conservatives just as quickly tried to make sure that the moniker stuck. Alan Johnson (2010), former home secretary and supporter of David Miliband, published a letter to the new leader in The Independent, in which he urged Ed Miliband not to take the party back to its “comfort zone” on the left in order to enjoy the “ideological purity of opposition.” Johnson also advised Miliband not to “adopt a ‘core vote strategy’ for winning the election. We do need to restore trust with our traditional supporters, but we also need to win back the middle-class voters who switched to the Lib Dems.” He noted that because Labour was almost “wiped out” in the southeast outside of London, the party needed to focus on “appealing to people who voted Conservative in 2010 and 2005.” He urged Miliband not to move the party to the left: “We know elections are won on the centre ground of politics. We learned that the hard way in the Eighties. … Recognize also that the Tories, not the Lib Dems, are the target. This is a Tory government with the Lib Dems strapped on as ballast.” In a similar vein, Alistair Darling, the outgoing shadow chancellor, warned the new leader not to backslide on the party’s commitment to halve the budget deficit in four years and to have realistic and credible plans to cut government borrowing if voters were to take him seriously (Elliott 2010). The tone and message sounded all too familiar.

It quickly became evident that Ed Miliband would not move the party to the left. He was more than willing to take Alan Johnson’s advice, immediately pronouncing himself his own man and asserting that he would not be a leader for the unions. In his first full speech to the Labour Party Conference, he clearly tried to claim the centre ground in classic New Labour fashion, while at the same time declaring the end of New Labour (Freedland 2010). He distanced himself from the Iraq War, insisted on the need to regulate the City, and criticized the culture of New Labour, which he said had become a new form of “establishment.” At the same time, however, the speech balanced right and left at every turn. Trade unions were lauded as critical in the fight against exploitation, but he also warned that he would have “no truck” with irresponsible strikes. The high salaries of bankers were criticized, but welfare claimants were told they had a responsibility to work if they could. The bankers would rest easier having learned that Miliband’s plans to rein in salaries involved the establishment of a High Pay Commission, another classic New Labour strategy for dealing with such issues. In a BBC Radio interview, Miliband was asked directly if the socialist aims of his father could be achieved through the parliamentary route. His answer was telling: “Yes, but it is not his form of socialism. … It is my form of socialism which is a more fair, more just, more equal society. And that is the path that I will want to take our party on” (quoted in Winnett and Hough 2010). Again, this is very similar to the rhetoric that dominated New Labour discourse. No longer termed the Third Way, the party’s approach had simply been redefined as socialist without the adoption of a socialist analytical frame.

There were several tests for Ed Miliband in the days ahead, and these serve to illustrate the degree to which the party has stayed within its comfort zone of parliamentarianism. The first was the ongoing issue of the economy and the current coalition government’s intentions to cut government spending. It appears that Miliband will not lead the party in a different direction than was established under Gordon Brown’s leadership. Of all the leadership candidates, Ed Balls was the only one who was prepared to argue that the party should not accept Alistair Darling’s deficit-reduction plans but should instead continue spending in order to offset the possibility of a slide back into recession. While not particularly radical, it was a nod to old-style Keynesianism in the face of economic crisis. Balls was the strongest candidate for Shadow Chancellor, especially after David Miliband decided to leave frontline politics following his defeat. Instead, Ed Miliband opted to appoint Alan Johnson, whose advice to the leader we have already seen. Johnson was widely viewed as lacking the economic expertise necessary to be Shadow Chancellor. Miliband’s choice reflected a desire to shore up party unity, as Johnson had been a prominent supporter of his brother. Appointing Johnson, however, was also a clear indication that there would be no move — or at most, a very limited move — to the left.

Alan Johnson was not to enjoy a long tenure as Shadow Chancellor. Dogged by the persistent view that his economic credentials were inadequate to allow him to be an effective voice on the economy, combined with an unfortunate personal scandal, he resigned in January 2011. Miliband then appointed Ed Balls to the position, and many expected a more aggressive approach from the new Shadow Chancellor in opposing coalition economic policy and cutbacks (Toynbee 2011a). Generally, those hopes have not been realized. The Labour opposition continued to be relatively meek, preoccupied with living down its own legacy in power rather than with developing an alternative vision for the country. At the 2011 Labour Party convention Balls set out a weak five-point plan for economic recovery, the centrepiece of which was a reduction in the rate of VAT and a national insurance tax holiday for small businesses. Tellingly, Balls insisted that he could not promise to reverse all of the Tory spending cuts and, in a marked departure from his leadership campaign, insisted that the party must remain tough on the issue of the deficit to regain economic credibility (Wintour 2011).

If there was a highlight at the 2011 Labour Conference, it was Ed Miliband’s speech. If there was to be any indication that Miliband was prepared to lead the party in a more radical direction, it would come at the first conference since his election as leader. In a speech characterized as the “most radical delivered by a labour leader in a generation,” he certainly took a harder, more critical rhetorical line, particularly on the economy (Milne 2011). He promised to rip up decades of irresponsible “fast buck” capitalism and declared that he was a person willing to “break consensus rather than succumb to it.” He promised to recast a new capitalism built around British values that would reward hard work and producers rather than “asset-stripping predators.” But the speech took a moral tone, calling for business to operate in a fashion consistent with British values and ideals, rather than offering any sort of critique of capitalism as such. Predictably, Miliband’s speech, while well received by the party, came under intense scrutiny and criticism from business leaders. He was criticized for adopting an anti-business stance, and his speech was called divisive and “kick in the teeth for business” (Armitstead and Ebrahimi 2011).

In response, Miliband quickly tried to reassure the City that he was not anti-business. In interviews the next day, he insisted that “Labour would not lurch to the left” and that it would be “firmly in the middle ground.” He also insisted that it was not a left-wing idea that those at the top of the society should behave responsibly. His reference to predators was recast as a preference for good business practices rather than bad ones, thus reasserting the moral tone of the speech (BBC News 2011). This theme of individual responsibility has become the touchstone of Miliband’s approach. He used the same rhetoric, a failure of individual responsibility, to explain and contextualize the London riots of 2011.

The central problem facing Labour, reflected in their inability to develop an alternative discourse on the economy, is the party’s continued failure to find a role for itself in what is taking place outside of Parliament. As elsewhere in the world, the economic problems facing Britain have produced a series of protest movements and have exploded into the realm of public consciousness. The Occupy Wall Street movement has spread throughout the world, and Occupy London has certainly posed a challenge for Labour. This could have been an opportunity for Labour to participate and lead a movement of people seeking to establish an alternative discourse around class, inequality, and the implications of capitalism for social justice and fairness. Certainly one would hope that any social democratic party would have something to contribute to such a movement. Clearly, however, Ed Miliband has no such plans for the British Labour Party. In late October, during the height of the Occupy London demonstrations, Miliband was joined by Shadow Chancellor Ed Balls and former London mayor Ken Livingstone for a meeting with business leaders and unemployed youth in Camden. Miliband told the young people looking for work that they should “keep hope and determination” but insisted that he did not agree with the premise of the Occupy London demonstrations, stating, “I am not in favour of that — I’m in favour of democracy, showing that democracy can work and that it can change things” (quoted in Osley 2011).

Ken Livingstone, seeking to reclaim the position the mayor from the right-wing Boris Johnson, echoed these sentiments, clearly articulating the dilemma facing Labour and its inclination to stay within a narrow parliamentary perspective. “I wouldn’t occupy the streets,” he said. “It’s not something I would do. … I’ve been frustrated by government policies all my life but it’s more important to get changes in the government.” He added that the way to achieve this goal was to get involved and join the Labour Party: “You could occupy the London Stock Exchange for the next four years but if you don’t get a Labour government nothing is going to change.” Livingstone also warned the unemployed young people: “What you must never do is start watching daytime TV. You can’t have two years of no work or no training. You must keep on at it until the tide turns” (quoted in Osley 2011).

The message from Labour, then, is to join the party, accept the system, operate within it, and wait for the economy to improve. Ironically, Ken Livingstone’s advice to young unemployed had much in common with the recommendations of Jonathan Isaby, the political director of the right-wing Taxpayers’ Alliance, who, in a debate with The Guardian’s Polly Toynbee on Sky News, recommended that it would be more useful for young people to get a job than to protest (Toynbee 2011b).

This attitude — that the important politics around the global financial crisis takes place within the corridors of Westminster and Whitehall — demonstrates that the Labour Party leadership does not view its relationship to social movements, and to civil society more broadly, in anything other than an electoral context. The current protests and demonstrations, which cross so many social dimensions, provide an opportunity for Labour to lead, not as a party in the House of Commons but as a party embedded in its constituency, one that seeks to achieve social change rather than just a change in government. However, it is increasingly clear that this is not an agenda that the Labour Party is prepared to take on.

This failure is also reflected in the Labour party’s approach to the question of electoral reform. The Liberal Democrats made electoral reform a condition for joining the Conservatives in a coalition government. As a result, a referendum on whether Britain should adopt an Alternative Vote (AV) system was held on 5 May 2011. While Miliband personally supported the referendum, the Labour Party itself took no official position. The party was consequently divided on the issue. Many in the party saw electoral reform as little more than a way for Nick Clegg and the Liberal Democrats to stay in government and were determined to oppose the referendum to punish the Liberal Democrats. In the end, the referendum was defeated, with 67.9 percent of voters opting to retain the first-past-the-post system, and only 32.1 supporting reform.

The electoral reform question highlights the fact that since the Second World War, voting turnout in virtually all advanced industrial countries has been declining. This is certainly true in the UK, where turnout has dropped considerably over the past decade. Although the Labour Party formed the government for thirteen years under Blair and Brown, voting records clearly demonstrate the very narrow margins upon which those victories depended (Watkins 2004). The narrow electoral approach, given this context, tends to increasingly focus on winning a few swing ridings and appealing to ever-narrower ranges of the voting public. It ignores those who don’t vote — that is, those who are precisely the vulnerable individuals that a Labour Party should seek to protect and represent. As many on the left who supported the referendum observed, electoral reform raised the possibility of forging a new alliance of progressive forces on the left, and it would also require parties to work harder for their votes. In effect, this would mean having to spend more time cultivating relationships between parties and civil society and nurturing a left political community. Electoral reform has the potential to create new spaces for the articulation of left politics, and this, in turn, might require the Labour Party to move away somewhat from its narrow parliamentarianism to articulate (or at the very least debate) an ideological stance (Kettle 2011; Lawson 2011; Compass 2010).

CONCLUSION

The victory of Ed Miliband seems unlikely to shift the party to the left or to steer it in a fundamentally new direction. In short, too much water has passed under the bridge of New Labour. As Colin Leys argues in his an analysis of the party’s failure to seriously oppose coalition plans for the restructuring of the National Health Service, Labour suffers from a pathology to conform. The party fears being dubbed “unrealistic, out of touch, radical, ideological, leftist, or Old Labour” (Leys 2011). In many ways, this is the legacy of the modernization of Labour. There is now, he observes, a “prevaling unwillingness to challenge the dominant discourse and the forces that underpin it. … So many professional leaders and managers, and many ordinary rank and file too, seem more afraid of being seen as out of step with the establishment than as having failed to stand up for what they believe in or what their constituents want.” There is, he concludes, a “profound lack of confidence and independence.”

Leo Panitch recently argued that if the Left in Britain is to have a voice, it will need to split from the Labour Party and establish a new, independent left-wing party (Panitch 2010). In many respects, this logic is irrefutable. At the moment, with a hung Parliament, the party system in Britain is under considerable strain. The old two-party system is in a state of crisis, leaving room for a fourth party to establish a foothold and even potentially influence electoral results. Without electoral reform, however, it is difficult to imagine how a new left-wing party would even begin to register on the map of British politics. Of course, its prime task would be to start the process of establishing a progressive alliance within civil society rather than winning seats in the House of Commons. Yet — and this is the fundamental contradiction of left-wing electoral politics — winning seats must at some point be an objective of any political party. In the absence of that possibility, the party remains on the margins of politics. Electoral reform offers the opportunity to compete electorally and gain representation for leftist ideas within the mainstream institutions of the state, while at the same time allowing for (and even demanding) the mobilization of a broader constituency. It may, perhaps, be the greatest failure of Labour that, while dedicating itself almost exclusively to electoralism, it has chosen to ignore these possibilities.