Labour's crisis: Cameron's fault

It’s widely agreed, and also true, that the Labour party is in crisis in part because of bad leadership. What’s not sufficiently appreciated, however, is that the bad leadership is not just Corbyn’s. It’s also Cameron’s. Labour is paying the price of his failed policies.

I mean this in two related ways. One is that fiscal austerity contributed to stagnant living standards. And stagnation, as Ben Freidman has shown, breeds intolerance. This has contributed not only to harsher anti-immigration sentiment, but also to immigration becoming a more salient issue. And Labour is regarded as weak on this.

Secondly, it was Cameron who gave us Brexit, not least because his austerity policies increased support for the Leave cause. This has hurt Labour in three ways:

 - It has created a perceived division within the party between its young, metropolitan outward-looking supporters on the one hand and more socially conservative working class Leavers on the other. Granted, this division is exaggerated: as John Curtice points out, most Labour supporters even in the party’s “heartland” voted Remain. But the sense of a divide is real.

 - It has allowed May and the Tory right to claim to embody the “will of the people”. This has left Labour looking out of touch. And it’s created a dilemma of how the party can claim to be on the side of the people when it opposed a policy they favour.

 - Brexit has diverted attention from policy areas where Labour might be stronger. Imagine it hadn’t happened. What would today’s big issues be? Chances are, they’d be the NHS and social care – issues on which voters better trust Labour.

Now, I don’t say all this to complain about an injustice. Westminster politics has little to do with fairness or meritocracy.

Nor do I say so to exculpate Corbyn: the fact that he's been dealt a bad hand doesn't justify him playing it badly.

Instead, I do so to point out that social affairs are complex and unpredictable. Even those of us who have long opposed austerity did not foresee that it would be Labour, more than the Tories, are paying the price of its ill-effects.

We tend to think that bad government policies will boost support for the opposition. It ain’t necessarily so.

Which brings me to my worry. Nick Cohen says that when voters realize that Brexit is a “godawful mess” they’ll turn against the “superliars” who are imposing it upon us.  This might be too optimistic. Instead, I fear there’s a danger of a backfire effect which will see even greater hostility to immigrants and experts.

It’s not just truth that does not prevail in politics. Nor, often, does justice.

Comments

[Luis Enrique]

I hate your posts with horribly convincing scary final paras

[Dave Timoney]

Another way of looking at it is that it was Nick Clegg's fault. The decision to enter coalition with the Tories not only committed the country to austerity but collapsed the LibDem vote in 2015, thereby handing the Tories a majority that in turn led to Cameron ceding the EU referendum to placate his right-wing.

[Sparks]

A further way of looking at it, is that this is blowback of the financial crisis.

Mark Baum (in The Big Short): "I have a feeling, in a few years people are going to be doing what they always do when the economy tanks. They will be blaming immigrants and poor people".

What I simply don't understand is: what is the motivation of the Brexit leaders. My best assumption is that - most seem to be libertarians - and they feel that the only way they can recreate Galt's Gulch is by removing the UK from the EU's suppossedly collectivist clutches. My worse suspicion is that the proejct is entirely one of ego and insecurity on the part of its leaders - desperately seeking their day in the Sun.

[rogerh]

Labour's revival will have to wait for Brexit to screw up. But I suspect our problems are a bit deeper than whether Corbyn is any good or not. I reckon our problem is of an over-developed society in which those on the upper side of the income bracket are either scarcely productive at all or their work is productive but takes employment away from those on the lower side of the income bracket. By over developed I mean too many people working as advisers, agents, approvers, lobbyists and professional committee attenders. This is I think a bigger problem than a political party can fix.

[Bob]

"Nor do I say so to exculpate Corbyn: the fact that he's been dealt a bad hand doesn't justify him playing it badly."

Corbyn could have used Brexit to call for a JG and use the new freedoms. Blame Simon-Wren Lewis.

[Andrew]

I have the feeling JC is not trying to win the next election.
He is much happier talking to people who agree with him, and not having to make messy compromises.

[Dave Hansell]

Given the consistent behaviour of the managerialists from the Blair cult within the Labour Party - which really does not require a Janet and John listing as anyone not comatose and in possession of even only half a brain cell will be aware of - the evidence points to the exact opposite.

As with any power elite within an organisation faced with an internal challange to their power, status etc ( and there exists plenty of material from the organisational behaviour field on this), the right wing infiltrators and entryists of those in and around the self styled 'Progress' would rather the Labour Party collapse completely and never ever win a single election again than offer a genuine choice to the Thatcher light ideology they have committed their psyche's and ego's to.

Indeed, barely a day goes by without someone from that failed tendency shouting the odds in the media that this is their position and going on to back up their words with behaviour designed to undermine their own party and candidates.

On the matter of the EU blue collar vote their exists a contradiction at the heart of this simplistic conclusion. On the one hand 63% of Labour supporters voted Remain, on the other hand a majority in many seats held by Labour in the former industrial North and Midlands voted to leave. Attempting to claim that both of this represent Labour voters ignores the fact that just because many of those areas are Parliamentary seats held by the Labour Party in a first past the post system does not mean there are not actually a majority of non Labour voters in those ares supporting other Parties or none.