When Labour lost the 2019 General Election it upset a lot of conventional wisdom. What was supposed to be Labour’s loyal base deserted them and handed the win to Boris Johnson’s Conservatives by electing Tories in a swathe of traditional Labour-voting working-class seats in the North of England. So comprehensively was the political map redrawn that Labour’s “Red Wall” was smashed and you can now walk across England from Redcar to Workington without having to set foot in a Labour-held constituency.
What is equally remarkable is who voted for whom: the Tories won by a larger margin among people in social grade DE (unskilled and unemployed) than among those in social grade AB (managerial and professional), and among those earning less than £20,000 than among those earning over £70,000. So much for “the party of the rich.”
So, what is responsible for this political earthquake? Brexit played a role, so did the Corbyn/McDonnell leadership, but a large part of the explanation is to be found in the new axis that divides the political factions: the traditional left-right division over economics has been replaced by a culture war. And that has dramatically changed the political game and made it much more polarised.
Finding consensual middle-ground in economics has historically been proven to be a manageable balancing act, which has laid the ground for the social democratic hegemony that dominates 1st world politics today. All western democracies have some degree of what is known as “mixed” economies: a blend of capitalism and central planning that sees the private sector as the engine of production and economic growth but overlays it with heavy government oversight, regulation and taxes. And while power has been held by both centre-left and centre-right parties, the consensus around this economic and political model has ensured general continuity in government.
But with the election of Jeremy Corbyn as leader of the Labour party consensus politics was thrown to the curb. Today’s Labour party isn’t dominated by Blairite consensus seekers but by a motley crew of traditional trade unionists, Marxist intellectuals and young social justice warriors, all set on changing Britain by injecting it with a serious dose of 21st century socialism. But despite their class war politics, Labour isn’t a workers’ party anymore. The working man was emancipated decades ago, as the demise of the unions bear testament to; workers live comfortable middle-class lives and are not looking for a revolution. In order to invigorate the class war in the absence of real economic hardship, the left – not just in the UK, but globally – has invented new battlegrounds: they project their “oppressor vs. oppressed” world view on to social issues such as gender and race, and the modern left is very much build on this perceived social, rather than economic, struggle.
By many measures it’s been an effective strategy: political correctness pervades modern society and dominates the narrative in politics, business and media. But with its success in setting the identity politics agenda the left may, perversely, have engineered their own downfall. There are two problems:
The first is that the social justice war is not a broad political movement, but a phenomenon that owes its prominence to a small, but very vocal, minority who dominate public discourse. Universities, media and big business are falling over themselves to adhere to the politically correct doctrine, but the population at large don’t care about gender-neutral bathrooms and they are at odds with the elites on many issues, immigration most prominently. When universities cover up busts of British heroes because they owned a slave or Jeremy Corbyn talks of reparations for imperialism it doesn’t resonate with the people. Calling Boris Johnson a racist may work in Shadow-Foreign Secretary Emily Thornberry’s Islington South constituency but it isn’t a vote-winner in Sedgefield or Bolsover.
And that leads us to the second problem: it is much harder to find compromise over culture than it is over economics. In small, traditional, rural communities one mosque or Polish butcher is one too many; you either preserve your culture or you don’t. Outside the metropolitan liberal bubble people are proudly British and wish to remain so, and the battle for British culture and identity isn’t going to be settled by consensus. This is an existential problem for the left, because their entire raison d’être is to be on the side of the “little man” and if they cannot mobilise large parts of the population to fight the battle for some perceived injustice against the “oppressed” then there is no need for them.
So Labour is at a crossroads: does it continue to pander to the metropolitan elites or go back to representing working class values? There is existential danger in both. It’s of course way too early to predict the demise of the left as an influential political movement, but it does feel like something profound happened in Britain in December 2019. The US election is the next battleground, where far-left, identity politics-obsessed candidates are the frontrunners in the Democratic primary contest. If Donald Trump wins another term against Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders it will confirm that there is indeed a serious identity crisis on the left.