This is the third article in a series loosely connected to the “Refounding Labour” consultation. Contribute here.

We’ve been here before. Throughout the 1980s Labour found itself in a similar electoral situation to that which confronts it today. Parliamentary representation in that part of the country south of the line from the Severn to The Wash and outside the then to be completed M25 remained a sea of blue with only isolated islands of Labour representation from losing power in 1979 to the New Labour landslide of 1997. At the disaster that was 1983 the Tory deluge wiped out Labour in all but two constituencies in what is a third out the UK(1).

Back then, before the destruction of heavy industry and with it Labour’s phantom armies of affiliated members, the problem was convincing Labour that its problem lay in failing to relate or be relevant to ‘ordinary hard-working people’ in the South. The Party, which in every area where it clung to power, was a product of the mines and the factories, seemed to have no conception that delivering anything to its core vote in the Midlands, North, Wales and Scotland depended on building a coalition that included people in the South. This may now seem obvious, but the conventional wisdom then was that elections turned on the ‘marginals’ concentrated in the English Midlands, as had been the case since 1945. In fact a serious analysis showed that even in 1979 those seats that mattered were those clustered around the outskirts of London and in the small cities locked firmly within the gravitational pull of the metropolis.

Labour, still to defeat entryism, yet to embrace any notion of individual member democracy and constitutionally committed to pre-Bolshevik visions of economic ownership, struggled to come to terms with the changes taking place in Britain. The South increasingly WAS ‘the country’. The rest of England followed the trends emerging in London and the South East(2). In 2011 the same rules apply. The North of England, now largely without heavy and extractive industries has become more like the South. The regenerated city centres, the development of service industries, lower Union membership and private home ownership have created something more akin to the world that southerners had inhabited for more than 30 years. Affiliations to Labour are weaker.

Marginally better and a whole lot worse.

A cursory look at Labour’s current position in the South suggests that the progress made by New Labour has been squandered. However, much of that progress masked a problem of irrelevance that never went away. Currently, of the 74 local authorities in the South East(3) 29 have no Labour representation at all, in 10 more there is only a sole councillor and a further 12 have a Labour group of three or fewer. In the majority of those Labour-free districts the New Labour gang show failed to break through even when riding along on the 1996 crest of the Blair wave. In anything the situation is worse now than it was in the 1980s with Labour’s presence further eroded. The logic of first past the post ensured that even when Labour established good will among the electorate it could not translate that into bums on council seats – it simply could “never win here”. The anti-Tory vote long since gravitated to the Liberal Democrats as the ‘main challengers’ – though in most places they couldn’t win either. In fact this long-term tactical voting reality to some extent masked the breadth of new Labour’s success in 1997.

In many of these no hope territories Labour struggles to maintain any kind of organisation at all. It cannot find or field candidates, it has insufficient members to keep a constituency organisation going, even sending a delegate to the strange ritual that is Annual Conference is beyond them. The possibility of AV gave a faint glimmer of hope to Labour in its ocean of irrelevance. Now that has been firmly extinguished the question remains in the likes of Wokingham and Worthing, Tandridge and Test Valley; what is the point of Labour? Why does it even matter?

The primary purpose of Labour’s organisation is to win elections. Constituency organisations are meant to be, as far as possible, electoral machines. Where winning elections is impossible Labour has never been able to define an alternative purpose or any kind of alternative vision for its members. Calls for individuals to define their politics in terms of activity on behalf of the nearest marginal seat will never extend beyond the hard core of activists. Individuals who care about social issues want to see the relevance of their activity to and within their communities, their own home, their services and the local economies in which they and their families exist. This may seem horribly unreasonable to those running Labour’s machine, but a politics that orients itself entirely around the short-term requirements of around 150 swing seats will not reverse a trend that of decline now been in progress for more than half a century.

There is certainly no magic bullet. There may not even be an answer, but if Labour is to survive as a national political party, let alone is to be taken seriously as a political force in England then it needs to have a healthy presence in the regions of growth. If there is an answer it must lie in developing an organisation that engages in politics as a priority and allows electoral organisation and party process to follow. This would mean enabling Labour supporting people in their support of issue-based groups and broad community coalitions beyond a narrow party political agenda. It could mean members seeing as their priority the development of one or two areas of campaigning based largely on the web and functioning outside of the structure of meetings and processes. It may mean, on occasion, supporting candidates on an ‘independent’ ticket or running Labour people on such a basis – after all, where there is no effective party what else are they? It would almost certainly mean specifically allying with people in other political parties where common ground exists on questions confronting the local community. None of this is comfortable stuff for a top-down Party that increasingly demands unquestioning loyalty from its followers but when nothing else has worked for half a century it is time to look beyond our self-imposed Party boundaries.

Beam Me Up North, Scotty!

Significant though the territories of no hope are, they are by no means the whole of the South. Elsewhere in the region the experience has been very different. Labour went from having no representation to gaining control in several local authorities during the 1990s. In some of those places it now finds itself back to a position of near irrelevance. In other areas still over the same period Labour’s traditional enclaves have been eclipsed and allegiances transferred wholesale to the Liberal Democrats. These territories are hardly classic Toryland: Bracknell, Eastleigh and Portsmouth, teleported to North would profile as marginal or safely Labour constituencies, their estates as grim as anything northern cities have to offer. The 2011 local elections showed little sign of an automatic swing back or wholesale collapse by the Liberal Democrats outside those areas where a Labour vote was an effective option and no other plausible alternatives exist (4).

New Labour had some of its greatest successes in the South East, winning 22 seats in the Region in 1997, holding the lot in 2001 and dropping only three in 2005. It is hard to see what kind of future a party purporting to represent ‘ordinary working people’ offers if it can’t carry these ordinary working places. These are places where ‘white van man’ is more common than ‘factory man’, where worklessness exists but in isolated pockets, where massive wealth is a near neighbour, where the property value gains from the Thatcher era were greatest and where now the housing ladder is harder than ever to grip, where households of multiple earners and multiple car owners have dominated, and where spending 15 hours a week just getting to and from work is not uncommon.

Wherever these people sit on an objective analysis of their socio-economic position, they see themselves as being largely in the centre ground, middle class, middle income, middle England. What they aspire to is not ‘corporate greed’, though they don’t mind the notion of owning or sharing in a business, it is to make something better for themselves and their children. Their experiences of collective provision are limited to the NHS and their local school, but they see nothing wrong in going private if they can afford it. They pay their taxes grudgingly but they what something demonstrably decent back in return. Some were born here, many weren’t and even fewer of their parents. They came from Aberdare and Aberdeen, Gateshead and Glasgow, Preston and the Punjab, Bermondsey and Bangladesh, West Ham and Warsaw. And they still come to make a better life – aspiration transcends race, colour and creed. These trends are not unique to the South – it is merely where they are most pronounced.

What went right?

New Labour won ground in the South because it addressed the southern experience and spoke to southern aspiration. New Labour held its ground in the South while it held true to that message and the economy held good, though the attrition of its base in local government and of its membership left it unable to defend in 2010 beyond a few redoubts once economic fortune turned and political rhetoric deserted aspiration for the defence of a diminishing core vote based largely elsewhere. During that period New Labour both delivered significant and lasting social change and renewed investment in the UK’s social fabric. But, blown off course by events, New Labour failed to solidify its coalition, trying to please too many people. Despite its rhetoric, New Labour allowed the state to become steadily more intrusive, falling back into that mistaken belief that the state must be the primary vehicle for delivering a better world – or ‘socialism’, if you prefer. Simultaneously it found itself out of step with the aspirations of Middle England on that most totemic of issues – the ‘right’ to a ‘free’ education. New Labour, possibly because of the misplaced faith of many of its key adherents in state provision, also missed a key opportunity to reform the power structures of the state in favour of the people by extending and renewing a democratic process that was in disrepair even before MPs were caught with their hands in the till.

The “Refounding Labour” consultation document makes great play of the organisational defence that saved Labour seats at the margin in 2010. The unintended implication that constructing a more effective organisation will return the Party to success is a dangerous illusion. Sure, improving organisation can’t hurt, but the understanding that the defeat of 2010 was a political defeat is a prerequisite of any recovery.

While the organisational challenge for Labour is to be where the people are, politically it has a choice. If it wishes to be a party of the majority then it must speak and appeal to a social coalition where addressing aspiration as well as need will remain a pre-requisite of success. That this course requires persuading and leading as well as listening and reflecting should go without saying. Otherwise Labour can seek to be an element in an alternative political coalition, narrowing its interests to the environmental left and its public service constituency and explicitly seeking alliances with other parties to contribute to government. In a political environment other than first-past the post this might be an option but electoral reform is firmly off the agenda.

The real challenge is to square the circle of appealing to aspiration and liberty with rational arguments for collective solutions and a leg up for those who need it – or redistribution, if you prefer. There is no other ‘majority’ to construct, if this conundrum is impossible, within the current term of engagement with the electorate, there is truly no longer a point to Labour.

(1)    In 1983 Labour retained Bristol South in South West England and Ipswich in Eastern England. South East England returned no Labour MPs with seats in Slough and Southampton Itchen lost to the Conservatives.

(2)    The South East in this context is the South East and Eastern England regions less Norfolk and the northern part of Suffolk, with London accounting for just under 20 million people – around one third of the UK population.

(3)    In this case I refer to the South East England Region: i.e. Berkshire, Buckinghamshire, Hampshire, Isle of Wight, Kent, Oxfordshire, Surrey and Sussex. The region had 8 million people at the 2001 census, 13.6% of the UK total, equivalent to the combined populations of Scotland and Wales. In European terms that’s about the size of Austria. The other regions of the South – South West England and Eastern England exhibit similar electoral trends and levels of Labour representation, the South East, however, drives the trend. I concentrate on this area as I have a greater knowledge of its geography and electoral maths.

(4) The region contains 74 local authorities, four of which had Labour majority control in May 2011 – Oxford, Slough, Gravesham and Hastings. Labour was the largest party in Reading with the Council leadership on the casting vote of the Mayor. There is no overall control in a further five councils, Liberal Democrats control three and the Conservatives the remaining 61 including all seven counties and seven of the twelve unitary authorities. Labour holds 344 (9.6%) of the 3581 seats in the region. The Conservatives hold 2430 (68%). Labour’s parliamentary seats are in Oxford East, Slough, Southampton Itchen and Southampton Test.