When the left suffers defeat on the scale of the 2019 election, it takes a long time to heal. Think of what happened to Chartism after 1848: its leaders were jailed, disgraced, abandoned politics for spiritualism or swapped revolution for tepid moderation. Four decades had to pass before the left recovered, through the rise of a new audience carrying the banners of new ideas. The millions who had signed the People’s Charter, with their belief in land colonies and demand for annual parliaments, left seemingly no trace.
Mike Phipps, a founding member of the Labour Representation Committee and now editor of the Labour Hub website, is not willing to wait 40 years for the left to recover.
Phipps’ book addresses three main questions, beginning with why Corbyn lost in 2019. Phipps argues that to win elections, a party needs to have a story and an idea of how to win people to it. In 2017, he argues, Labour won the battle of rival narratives, ‘proposing common sense, albeit necessarily radical, solutions to the problems that had accumulated from a decade of austerity’. In 2019, by contrast, ‘Labour’s progressive policies barely got heard’. In addition, as far as most voters were concerned, a ‘central constitutional question’ was still unresolved: how to implement the Brexit vote. The Conservatives had a short, compelling answer to that question, and Labour did not.
The second main theme is the need to look with clear eyes at Keir Starmer’s leadership. Initially sympathetic to Starmer, putting some of his early moves down to naivete or ineptitude, Phipps is not impressed, finding the former lawyer ‘verbose’, ‘anodyne’, ‘unoriginal’, ‘undistinguished’, ‘lacklustre’ and ‘plodding’. While the book was being written, Labour was polling well. The problem is that much or all of this lead was a negative vote against Boris Johnson, while Starmer’s polling is no better: another recent poll found that even after Partygate, more voters wanted Johnson as Prime Minister than Starmer.
The impression Phipps gives of Starmer is as a leader on borrowed time, bereft of natural allies and the victim of increasingly open negative briefing even from his own factional allies. The Labour left may be wounded, Phipps acknowledges, but on the other side of the party’s conflicts, the right does not even have the ideas to sustain itself.
What should the left be doing now? Phipps believes that local government is a vast opportunity for right-to-food campaigners and mutual aid groups. He praises Preston council and its vision of local investment, commends Islington councillors for requiring contractors to pay the living wage, and describes how the influx of Corbyn supporters into Constituency Labour Parties has enabled Labour to compete in former Conservative one-party states like Worthing or Hastings.
He notes the durability of the left vote in elections to Labour’s National Executive Committee. He sees hope in the success of Novara Media, Owen Jones and The World Transformed and quotes many voices on the Labour left, including James Meadway, James Butler, Phil Burton-Cartledge, Nadine Finch and Liz Davies.
In relation to the Labour Party, Phipps’ message is clear: ‘Stay and fight’. But it has been a long time since I believed the left’s problems could be solved by either relocating activists or compelling them to stay where they were, whether that was into or out of the Labour Party, community campaigns, or anywhere else. What matters is not where you are but what you do. In every part of the left, we need people to be principled and effective.
As a result, I do find some parts of Phipps’ argument over-optimistic – for example, his claim that councils are ‘taking centre-stage’ in addressing the climate crisis. But the left is a richer place for having him in it, and if any readers felt as miserable as I did in the aftermath of the 2019 defeat, you too will draw strength from this generous and unsectarian book.
David Renton is a barrister and a professor at SOAS. Mike Phipps’ Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow: The Labour Party After Jeremy Corbyn is out now from OR Books
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