I was 16 when I delivered my much-replayed speech to the Conservative Conference of 1977, telling the delegates that half of them would not be there in 30 or 40 years’ time. Amazingly enough, some of them are still there, even though I have had a long political career and finished with it in the meantime.
One of the reasons I was a devout Tory at such an early age was that I grew up in South Yorkshire, living a few miles from Arthur Scargill and in the constituency with the largest Labour majority in the country. When I became chairman of the area’s Young Conservatives, the local paper said it would “be like heading the Liberal Party in Shanghai”, which was not far off the mark. The Labour activists there knew what they stood for: The representation of industrial workers and their families. This meant strong trade unions, nationalised industries, big local authority housing schemes and good state pensions with early retirement ages. They supported pragmatic Labour leaders who got them into power, and were carefully responsible in their attitudes to foreign affairs, largely in favour of nuclear weapons and the West.
Their views offered little hope for the future of the country and the effect of seeing so many people employed and housed exclusively by the state, when the state clearly could not sustain them, triggered my own teenage rebellion. But such people undoubtedly gave the Labour Party a solidity, a bedrock, and a mutual loyalty that it has now lost. In the Eighties Margaret Thatcher broke the organisational grip of Labour on the people of South Yorkshire.
The most powerful union, the mineworkers’, was humbled at her hands, the industries returned to private ownership and the houses sold to their occupants. And she was merely the forerunner of a great change in the world, in which new technologies and competition decimated the massed ranks of the industrial workers who had been Labour’s core, and brought a wave of flexible working patterns, small businesses and mobile employment. The writhing agony of Labour today is the direct result of the loss of that core, and the removal of the original purpose of their party’s existence: The representation of those lost workers. The first attempt to redefine the party’s purpose was made by former prime minister Tony Blair — to be electable at any cost, to compete with the Conservatives as a party of aspiration and to embrace modernity. This failed, not only because the expectations it aroused were not fulfilled, but also because it did not amount to a new governing philosophy.
Attempts to define a new “Third Way”, somewhere between capitalism and socialism, ended in vacuous seminars and intellectual embarrassment. So Jeremy Corbyn is not the cause of Labour’s deep confusion and lack of direction today: He is a symptom of it. The moderates have quite simply come to the end of what they stood for. They are not Conservatives, and, in case anyone is dreaming of a new centre party, they hate Liberals. They are not Marxists. But what are they? Why are they going into politics?
The most revealing illustration of this is that the Owen Smith challenge to Corbyn is not based on moderation at all. Smith’s pitch to Labour’s members is that he is almost as Left wing as the leader he is trying to overthrow, except on defence. His speeches are either commonplace — such as this week’s calling for jobs in creative industries and green energy, which have been booming under the Tories — or vying to show he could raise taxes and spending just as much as his opponent. While nominally a challenge to the hard Left, his campaign is philosophically a capitulation to them.
Smith is even more likely to be defeated by Corbyn if the courts continue to rule that large numbers of fresh Labour members can vote after all. If that happens, his vanquished campaign will not have provided the platform or ideas for a new party to split off from Labour. There is no point telling the voters, as they assess over the next few years the bid by Theresa May to keep the centre ground of domestic politics, that Labour is now so far Left that a new party is being formed to be near-far Left. Neither would gain power.
Splitting Labour to form what we might call “Independent Labour” is only worthwhile if it has something distinctive to stand for and if large numbers of people might be persuaded to agree with it. Otherwise it will stand little chance against an official Labour Party that keeps the membership, the organisation, the union links and the name. It would mean ditching the views not only of Corbyn but of Smith, which is why Labour’s sensible moderates have made a considerable mistake by backing him. Such a party could make a great virtue of its independence, from both unions and corporate influence. It would need to compete directly with the Conservatives, rather than chasing Corbyn leftward. To do that, it would have to learn from Blair’s electoral success, but also from what used to win it the mass loyalty of millions in an earlier industrial age. Independent Labour could be based on helping mobile workers protect themselves against hardship and unfairness in the rapidly-changing world of 21st-century employment. It would think about how to give bargaining power to Uber drivers rather than coal miners. It would concentrate intensely on education, particularly on developing lifelong learning for adults and the ability of children to think, not just learn. It would steal good Tory ideas like the Northern Powerhouse and work out better ways of doing them, and it would ruthlessly break new ground on integrating all communities into British society and identity. It would abandon penalising success. A party that stood for such things could at least claim to be relevant, up-to-date and unifying, and would have a social democratic emphasis on redressing inequality. Yes, Conservatives might take all such ground — if we are clever we will — but an opposition has to fight for it to have a chance. The old workers have gone, along with the South Yorkshire of my youth. The Left needs to stand for the new workers if it is to compete as it did then. It’s only worth splitting Labour if the moderates can find the voice, the ideas and the leader to do so.
— The Telegraph Group Limited, London, 2016
William Hague is a former leader of the Conservative party.
