Labour Needs To Rediscover Its Roots

Demonstrating that of the three (or four, if you must), Labour is now the best fit for a sympathetic biographer of Patrick Buchanan, Tim Stanley writes:

My mum’s a classic Labour voter: ie she didn’t bother to vote yesterday. I don’t write that in a snobby way – it’s a sad statement of fact. Back when I was a Labour stooge, we had terrible trouble trying to get our people out to the polling booths and we wasted hours conjuring up messages bright and bold enough to motivate them to abandon the sofa and do the decent thing. It was a lesson in the political importance of excitement.

And that’s why Ukip’s rise is such a problem for Ed Miliband. Yes, he won a lot a seats in the local elections and easily held South Shields. But, as Dan Hodges writes, the headlines are all about Ukip and the excitement is entirely on the Right of the political spectrum. For the Left, this situation is counter-intuitive. They thought that the Credit Crunch would ruin the reputation of the free market and revive Keynesianism. But they didn’t realise that while people do broadly despise banksters and the vampiric rich, they have equal contempt for the state and its managerial class. The Credit Crunch bred not socialism but nihilism. We don’t trust anyone anymore.

Ergo, Labour’s drift to social democracy hasn’t helped it. The politics of “nationalise the railways [a hugely popular, and fiscally prudent, policy], school milk and free pottery classes for everyone” is out of date and out of touch. Not only does it overlook how much the ordinary Joe is getting stiffed by taxes and rising prices (don’t live in Britain if you want to smoke or drive a car) but it skirts the issues that really boil the blood: violent crime, the despoiling of the countryside, old people left to die in careless NHS hospitals, and the price tag of mass immigration. Miliband is focusing his attention on the wrong side of the political debate, sewing up a Left-wing vote that is shrinking fast.

Labour cannot afford to dismiss the rise of Ukip as a fratricidal war on the Right: it has to compete for the same level of excitement and public interest. It has to define itself as a responsible alternative to both Cameron and Farage for those seeking substantial change. Most of all, it has to reconnect with the kind of Labour voters who are tempted go Ukip for the sake of protest – and those folks do exist. A great deal of the Ukip vote in the Eastleigh by-election came from C2 working-class voters, as The Guardian’s post-poll interviews showed.

Peter Woodhouse, a train driver: “One of the reasons I voted for Ukip is immigration. I'm worried about the dropping of the barrier in January. I fully expect 2-4 million Bulgarians and Romanians to come over. What's it going to be like? We're a small island.” Geoff Bulleyment, retired solider and cleaner: “The big local issue around here is lack of jobs. We don't seem to be able to find jobs for our younger people … I'm worried about crime as well. Come here on a Friday night, Saturday night, it's terrible when the pubs are turning out.” Sarah Holt, shopworker: “There's going to be more and more foreigners coming in and taking everything from us. It's diabolical. They come and get this and that. We couldn't go to their country.”

It’s tempting to conclude that The Guardian went searching for the most anti-immigration interviewees it could find to bolster the claim that the Ukip vote is a racist vote. But, in fact, all of those complaints are commonly found among voters for all parties. There’s a tangible sense in many working and middle-class communities that the quality of life is in sharp decline, that politicians aren’t putting their own people first, that no one cares about us anymore. Rightly or wrong, consciously or accidentally, Ukip has become their way of getting heard. And Labour needs to listen.

Labour doesn’t have to abandon its progressive ideals, it just needs to reconnect with the people it exists to help. One way would be to revive the Blue Labour project with its twin concerns for patriotism and cultural conservatism. Patriotism might mean recognising that British people should have first dibs on Britain’s dwindling stock of resources. Cultural conservatism means tapping into the religious and communitarian history of the Labour movement – a movement that wasn’t birthed by European Marxism but instead shaped by non-conformism and the trades-unions.

Most of all, Labour needs to rediscover its roots as a protectionist entity (as per Roger Scruton’s definition of it). It should resist homogenisation and globalisation, defend the high street against brand invasion, revel in the beauty of the countryside, define dignity by a right to work as sacrosanct as the right to vote, and speak of Britain not as a rainbow of individuals but as one nation. A little of that spirit was captured at the Olympic Games or even the Diamond Jubilee – events unencumbered by class war or capitalist exploitation that simply stated, “This is what we are and what we will forever be.” A family.

If he fails to hunt where the zeitgeist is, Ed Miliband will find himself further and further alienated from the mood of the British people. That’s bad for him and bad for us, for without a dynamic centre capable of exciting the voters, darker forces will prosper.