I had a sudden flash of insight in the small hours of Friday morning. Laura Parker, the national coordinator of Momentum, was being interviewed on the BBC about Labour’s failure to take control in Wandsworth, one of the London crown jewels that it had hubristically vowed to win.
It was pointed out to Parker that Labour had thrown absolutely everything into its fight for this borough, sending in platoons of tireless volunteers and senior party figures to knock on doors sometimes four or five times in a day. Why had all that effort come to nothing? She was utterly undaunted by this apparent humiliation. On the contrary, she was quite ecstatic about what she called their “fantastic, energetic campaign” which had been such a marvellous experience for all the people who had participated in it.
That’s when it hit me. For a Jeremy Corbyn-led Labour, activism itself is the whole point of politics — at least in the first transformational phase of one’s journey into a new form of consciousness. It reminds me of the Left back in the 1960s and 1970s, when this sort of thing was being said all the time. What had to be accomplished in the first instance was your own personal self-realisation. This is, you will appreciate, an entirely different understanding of the function of democratic politics from the one held by most people — especially in Britain. It is, perhaps, the ultimate explanation for Labour’s popularity hitting a wall.
So far as most of the electorate is concerned, politics exists to solve practical problems. Moral principle and social vision certainly come into it, but their greatest importance lies in the way that they underlie, and give coherence to, concrete policy decisions. The proportion of the population which is prepared to dedicate most — or all — of its waking time and mental energy to achieving ideological purity and the propagation of the True Faith will always be small, and most of them will eventually grow out of it.
So Labour’s difficulty is much more fundamental than its immediate problem with anti-Semitism or its alarming ambivalence over Russia. Militant activism, you might say, is a way of life for the few not the many. Those few can make a lot of noise and attract a disproportionate amount of media interest (as the New Left did in the 1960s), but they have the effect, in the end, of alienating the great mass of the population who (correctly) come to see them as propagating a coercive cult. The British tend to be suspicious of all forms of fundamentalism, particularly when it has a nasty intolerant edge. Unsurprisingly, they have come down in favour of reasonableness and against extremism.
So what about the Conservatives? They held their ground and even saw a small swing in their favour outside of London. But as the BBC kept pointing out, they benefited considerably from the collapse of the Ukip vote. Are they now the official party of Leave — and thus utterly dependent for any future electoral success on being able to achieve a credible Brexit?
Actually, I doubt it. For one thing, the arguments around Brexit have become so arcane and heavily semantic that most ordinary people are simply tuning out, having given up somewhere between “the Customs Union” as opposed to “a Customs Union”. The one impression that has really stuck in their minds is of a peculiarly unpleasant team of European Union (EU) negotiators whose remorseless vindictiveness contrasts visibly with Prime Minister Theresa May’s British civility. I have been very struck by the number of real people who have told me in recent weeks how much sympathy they have for May’s position, which seems to them to be attracting gratuitous attacks from all directions — including from within her own party. Again, they are inclined to reward reasonableness and to reject intransigence, especially when it seems to be personally spiteful. My own guess is that the Leave constituency in the country may be adamant about Brexit, but they are not theological purists: they will probably be inclined to accept any plausible version which the Government eventually achieves, if only because the detail has become so depressingly exhausting, providing that the party does not blow itself up in the process.
On the matter of disheartening detail, it is worth pointing out that public exasperation with the obstacles that keep appearing, apparently from nowhere, is not unfounded. Of course, the wailing and gnashing now arising from those bodies whose responsibility it will be to resolve arrangements for trade and borders is not completely groundless. Far too little — which is to say, virtually no — thought was given before the referendum as to how all this might work on the ground. Former prime minister David Cameron specifically forbade any such planning because he was afraid it would make a Leave vote too tenable. We are indeed starting from scratch in our planning, which is daunting. And yet, and yet ...
How vividly I remember what life was like in the public sector, where I worked for 20 years. The people now protesting that it would be impossible to establish a new customs system, or a technical solution for border crossings in Ireland in the time available, sound so like the officials I encountered every day: administrators and bureaucrats are excessively fond of the word “impossible” when faced with any request that is new or unprecedented.
Can we make a change in practice that would be more effective, or more efficient, or cheaper? No, we’ve never done it that way, we’ve always done it this way. Ergo: it’s impossible. The fate of the Conservatives may indeed depend on proving that reasonableness and civility can make almost anything possible.
— The Telegraph Group Limited, London, 2018
Janet Daley is a political columnist and author. Her two novels are All Good Men and Honourable Friends.
