British Labour Party Faces Identity Crisis in Face of Multiple Threats

Savagely beaten by the left-wing Scottish Nationalist Party in Scotland and the right-wing Conservative Party in England, Labour now faces difficult choices about where the road ahead. As if that were not enough to worry about, the rise of the anti-immigrant, UKIP poses another threat.

Savagely beaten by the left-wing Scottish Nationalist Party in Scotland and the right-wing Conservative Party in England, Labour now faces difficult choices about where the road ahead. As if that were not enough to worry about, the rise of the anti-immigrant, UKIP poses another threat.

The United Kingdom’s General Election of 2015 produced a shock result that has radically withdrawn the electoral map. The right-wing Conservative Party won an electoral majority despite opinion polls predicting a hung parliament until the last minute. The unexpected swing to the Tory Party plunged the centre-left opposition Labour Party into a dark night of the soul. Stunned by the result, many of Labour’s advocates expressed fears about the party’s future. Former policy chief, Jon Cruddas, described the defeat as “arguably the greatest crisis the Labour party has faced since it was created”.

The problem for Labour is reaching a consensus on where they went wrong. Losses on multiple fronts sent out contradictory messages. In the traditional stronghold of Scotland, where the Labour Party faced extinction, it received a lambasting for not being left wing enough. The SNP, which promoted itself as an anti-austerity party well to the left of Labour, won 56 of the 59 seats and Labour lost 40 of the 41 seats it had held in the 2010 election.

The Scottish result was chastening, but it had been widely predicted in the polls. Since the 2014 referendum on Scottish independence, the rise of Scottish nationalism has appeared to be an unstoppable force. More shocking was the scale of Labour’s defeat in England, especially in the more affluent South of the country. Here, the reasons for defeat were the opposite of the ones given in Scotland. Labour was blamed for being too “left-wing” by the Tory-dominated British media. The right-wing Daily Mail, for example, labelled the Labour leader Ed Miliband “Red Ed” and persuaded its readers that he would bring back an extreme form of socialism. The misinformation campaign undoubtedly contributed to Labour’s catastrophic defeats in southern England, where one simple statistic tells the story: Leaving aside London, more people have walked on the moon than the number of Labour MPs elected across the South West, South East and East of England.

Meanwhile, in its heartlands in the North and the Midlands, Labour is facing another emerging threat from the rapid rise of the UK Independence Party (UKIP). UKIP’s anti-immigration anti-EU stance appealed to disaffected working-class voters who no longer feel the Labour Party represents their interests. UKIP won just one seat in the 2015 election because of the nature of the UK’s first-past-the-post system, but it polled 3.8 million votes – up from 919,000 in 2010. If its popularity continues to grow, it threatens to steal Labour seats in the next election.

Following Ed Miliband’s resignation as leader, the Labour Party now faces a prolonged leadership contest. Debate is already raging fiercely about the direction the party should take. Should it move “left” to please the Scots and Northern English? On the other hand, must it move “right” to gain economic credibility in Southern England? Is it simply a question of presentation? Can they find a new, more charismatic leader with mass appeal? 

With the Tories, planning to redraw the UK’s constituency boundaries to make it easier for them to win next time – the new map will gain them an estimated 20 seats – the scale of Labour’s challenge is daunting. The Party’s traumatic defeats in the 1980s and early 1990s sent a clear message about which policies Labour had to ditch and what sort of leader it needed to choose to compete. However, this time the multitude of threats means Labour is assailed on all sides.

Steven Fielding Nottingham University, Professor of Political History and Director of the Centre for British Politics, says the Labour Party has to focus on the English question as it can do little to counter the rise of Scottish nationalism. “They should not try to pander to Scotland. Even if it had won all its seats in Scotland, it would not have won the election. It can’t win many more seats in Wales, so the focus has to be on winning back English seats,” he said.

The first thing to consider is how to address the Conservative’s ‘scare’ tactics.

“The Tories led a very negative campaign and Labour did not do enough to combat it. They relentlessly attacked Ed Miliband personally and painted him out to be a very left wing class warrior. They said his father was a Marxist so he must be one. Although the strategy was successful, it was a total misrepresentation. The truth was he made modest moves in certain directions as a response to the financial crisis. He advocated a bit more banking regulation and some redistributive tax measures to address rising inequality.”

Counteracting Conservative propaganda is difficult for the Labour Party because of the power of the UK’s right-wing media. In the 2015 election, 57.5% of daily newspapers backed the Tories while 11.7 % backed Labour and, on the same metric, 66% of the Sunday national papers urged their readers to vote Conservative.

“Miliband’s platform was very weak and this will be the same for the next Labour leader,” said Professor Fielding. “This was in contrast to Tony Blair, who famously flew halfway around the world in 1995 to speak to Rupert Murdoch and persuaded him that Labour were no threat to his media empire. Murdoch switched his newspapers over to supporting Labour in the next three elections.”

Miliband’s popularity rose towards the end of the 2015 campaign when live TV debates allowed him to make his case. After the election, however, the Conservative Party made the implausible claim that the BBC had shown bias towards Labour and there were rumours in the media of an imminent “war” with BBC and even the abolishment of the licence fee that funds the state broadcaster. 

Away from the influence of the media, most of Miliband’s allegedly “socialist” policies scored highly in public polls. Around 68% of voters supported his 50p top tax rate while almost 50% favoured a rate 10p higher. Even most Tory voters felt the rich should pay more tax. Around 69% of voters backed Miliband’s promise to introduce a mansion tax on property values above £2 million. Other left-leaning policies, such as his commitment to workers’ rights and a pledge to freeze energy prices, also had widespread support. Ironically, on many issues, the electorate stood to the left of Labour.

Yes, despite the popularity of these policies and reports of widespread suffering under the Tory austerity agenda, including a dramatic rise in people visiting food banks, the Conservatives succeeded in undermining Labour’s record on the economy. The influential American economist Paul Krugman was incredulous that the Labour Party did so little to refute the Tories’ “economic nonsense” about their handling of the economy. According to the Tory mythology, Labour’s profligate spending until 2010 caused the economic crisis of 2008-09. Finding no money in the till, the Tories had “no choice” but to impose austerity policies.

However, Krugman wrote in the New York Times, “Every piece of this story is demonstrably, ludicrously wrong. Pre-crisis Britain was not fiscally profligate. Debt and deficits were low, and at the time, everyone expected them to stay that way; big deficits only arose because of the crisis. Runaway banks and private debt, not government deficits, drove the crisis, which was a global phenomenon. There was no urgency about austerity: financial markets never showed any concern about British solvency. And Britain, which returned to growth only after a pause in the austerity drive, has made up none of the ground it lost during the coalition’s first two years.”

Professor Fielding agrees with Krugman’s analysis.

“One of Miliband’s greatest failings was not to blame the banks for the banking crisis right from the start of his leadership. But most people’s economic illiteracy is staggering and though the prism of the media the Tories managed to convince enough people that Labour was to blame for the crash,” he said.

In spite of Miliband’s poor personal approval ratings, Labour went into the election tied in the polls. Oddly enough, the pollsters’ predictions may have been part of the problem for Labour and may help to explain the last-minute swing to the right. The prospect of a hung parliament allowed the Conservatives to scare the public about the prospect of a “dangerous” socialist coalition between the SNP and the Labour Party.

“Their crude scaremongering tactics about how ‘potentially catastrophic’ such an alliance would be were effective when backed up by the right-wing media,” said Professor Fielding. “But it wasn’t the only reason for the defeat. The scare only worked because of Labour’s inadequate election campaign. Paranoia about the SNP brought back all the concerns about Miliband’s ‘weak’ character and his ‘Red Ed’ neo-Marxist anti-business policies, and Labour’s ‘disastrous’ economic legacy.”

To win next time, he says, Labour has to run a much smarter campaign. This might mean borrowing some lessons about the importance of strategic positioning from Tony Blair’s New Labour Party, which won three consecutive elections in 1997, 2001 and 2005.

“Right at the start, Blair and his team announced ‘you know all those things about the Labour Party you hated, such as the fact we were in the pockets of the unions, we accept we were wrong.  I do not know how many of them believed it at the time, but it does not matter. They saw what the opinion polls were saying about Labour and wiped the slate clean.”

“This is a strategy that the next Labour leader has to take. It may mean admitting some ‘mistakes’ around economic policy and showing how Labour has changed. What it should not mean is a move all the way back to New Labour, which is what Tony Blair has been advocating since the election result. That would be a regressive step and even Blair admits that rising inequality was a major failure of his politics and that Miliband was right to focus on it.”

Despite the scale of Labour’s challenges, Professor Fielding does not believe the task is insurmountable.

“There are things they can do little about such as how the SNP gets on in Parliament and the implacable opposition of the media. But Labour should remember that the Tories got back in on the back of a highly negative campaign. Many people voted Tory not because of the merits of their case but because they were scared.”

“One thing Labour will hope is that David Cameron’s promise of an EU referendum will split the Tory Party in two, whereas Labour will be united in being in favour of staying in the EU. They will argue that their support for the EU makes them the true party of business and it could be one way of clawing back some credibility on the economy.”

The selection of a more charismatic and popular leader will also put Labour in a more competitive position next time around.

“But the leader will have to realise that the whole movement towards a more oppositional, radical labour party – tentatively done under Ed Miliband – has come to an end. Neither should they row back all the way to New Labour and its enthusiasm for low taxes and the free market. It will not appeal to UKIP voters, or in Scotland. What’s required of the new Labour leader is a more tempered and nuanced response,” he said.