The leadership campaign has, so far, been thoroughly uninspiring. The only candidate who has demonstrated any sign of comprehending the scale of the mountain to be climbed, and what it might take to reach the summit, is Lisa Nandy — but, even then, one suspects it doesn’t come from gut. On the issue that, beyond all others, caused the meltdown in the Labour heartlands — Brexit — none of the contenders could claim with sincerity to have placed themselves unequivocally on the side of the 52%.

The most pressing question now is whether the party wishes ever to govern again. I genuinely fear that some activists — particularly those on the dogmatic, infantile far-Left — would be willing to see Labour relegated to being a party of permanent protest. That is, after all, where many of them have spent their lives and is the type of politics with which they are most comfortable.

If, however, it is serious about winning power in the future, Labour must elevate above everything the task of reconnecting with the millions of working-class voters who have abandoned it. These people are the party’s very reason for existing; without them it is nothing.

An attitude of “No compromise with the electorate” would consign Labour to irrelevance. So would attempts to pass off December’s annihilation with excuses about the hostility of the media or the “false consciousness” of workers. We were hammered. And we were hammered because our appeal was far too narrow. We were seen, justifiably, as a party for students, social activists and middle-class liberals in the cities. We had too little to say to everyday folk in post-industrial, small-town and suburban Britain. We ceased to be the “people’s party” and became instead the party of Twitter.

Suggested reading

So did 'idiot voters' get it wrong?

By Tom Chivers

The first step to recovery is accepting this painful reality. Then we need to embark on a journey of transformation. The working-class in the provinces will listen to us again only when we start speaking their language. That’s why a “one more heave” strategy would be fatal. It would make Labour that arrogant English tourist who, when faced with a foreign shop assistant who doesn’t understand him, thinks the solution is to shout a bit louder.

Corbynism was right to demand the end of austerity and articulate an economic alternative to neoliberalism — one built around government intervention, redistribution, investment, public ownership of key industries and services, and tackling regional inequality and boardroom excesses. That approach remains popular, and there is no need for Labour to shift off that ground. But, as the election showed, it isn’t just “the economy, stupid”. Voters want a bit of cultural security, too, and here they saw that Labour had nothing to offer them.

That’s why there needs to be a sharp recalibration of emphasis in Labour priorities. There is, of course, a place for debate about climate change, homelessness, gender identity, universal credit, multiculturalism, and LGBT and migrant rights. But Labour’s disproportionate focus on these things has given voters the impression they are all the party cares about.

For the next five years, Labour must dedicate itself to talking incessantly about issues that hit working-class voters in the solar plexus: certainly the economy, but also work, family, community, law and order, immigration, the nation and suchlike. These are not ‘Tory issues’. These are issues important to voters across the political spectrum, and Labour cannot afford to absent itself from the debate any longer.

But simply to talk about these things wouldn’t be enough. The message needs to be right. And, once again, that would mean a seismic shift in thinking.

The party must start to focus on the value of vocation — rooted in the philosophical concept of the dignity of labour — and not measure success only by how many kids it can ram through university.

It must begin to view the family unit as the bedrock of a civilised society, recognise the overwhelming evidence showing that children brought up in stable homes with two parents have far better outcomes than those who aren’t, and argue that government policy should be geared towards facilitating that end for as many as possible.

suggested reading

Who will speak for today's working class?

By Paul Embery

It should acknowledge the misery that crime and anti-social behaviour bring to working-class communities, stop pretending that the solution lies in a determinist view that sees all wrongdoers as victims, and develop policing and justice systems – including much earlier intervention – around the principle that individuals must take ultimate responsibility for their own actions. Law-abiding citizens living on housing estates blighted by high crime are sick and tired of hearing politicians – especially Labour politicians – attribute the destructive activities of a minority to a lack of youth services.

It must end support for open borders — a crackpot idea once supported only by Trotskyists, anarchists and radical liberals — and understand that rapid and large-scale movements of people have, as with those of capital, the capacity to cause social and economic disruption in hard-pressed working-class communities.

It should promote the nation state as the best form of democratic government at its highest level and, particularly, as a bulwark against the agents of globalisation for whom national borders represent an obstacle to neoliberal priorities. On that theme, it must see patriotism for what it is: a genuine love of country, and not something motivated by xenophobia or a hankering for empire – a misconception that causes Labour politicians and activists to look down at their shoes in embarrassment at any mention of the ‘p’ word or to redefine it in a way so banal as to render it meaningless.

Suggested reading

Is this the end for Labour?

By Paul Embery

On matters of defence and national security, it must leave voters in no doubt that, while operating an ethical foreign policy, a Labour government would keep them safe.

Some of this stuff will be anathema to many inside Labour, but if they want the party to remain relevant, they had better start understanding it. In fact, those activists doubtful that such a programme would be in keeping with the Labour tradition would do well to read up on the history of their own party. For much of its existence, Labour was a deeply patriotic, socially-conservative party, entirely in step with the values of working-class Britain – values that chunks of today’s party, chiefly the soixante-huitards and their political descendants, would dismiss as ‘nativist’ and ‘reactionary’.

Labour must become that patriotic, communitarian, proudly working-class, one-nation party once more. The woke liberals and toytown revolutionaries responsible for leading us to electoral oblivion — and ushering in potentially a decade of Tory rule — must be brave enough to admit they got it spectacularly wrong. If their hearts and minds cannot be won, they must be vanquished. They cannot be allowed to drive a once-great party into the abyss.

The MP is, of course, Jeremy Corbyn.

Rebecca Long Bailey has rightly been pilloried for awarding him 10/10 for his leadership, despite his leading the party to its worst defeat since 1935. But I’d bet my mortage on her being far from alone. Mr Corbyn remains as popular as ever with members.

Jeremy Corbyn will stop being leader in April. But he won’t stop being Jeremy Corbyn — the Jeremy Corbyn, that is, who spent decades campaigning and speaking about his political passions, and who will be given a new freedom when he steps down. That’s why Labour is going to find it impossible to escape from his shadow in 2020 — and beyond.

Just look at what happened after the election. Twitter, effectively a Left-wing echo chamber, was filled with Labour members tweeting that they want Mr Corbyn to stay on. They regard the result not as an indictment of his leadership — but of the voters. Labour, they believe, would have won were it not for the distorting effect of Brexit.

I write this not just to expose the self-delusion of so many Labour members. It is, rather, to understand the implications. Because whoever is chosen to succeed him as leader will, by definition, be second best. This matters not because of the members but because of Mr Corbyn.

Anyone who thinks that even after leading Labour to such a catastrophic defeat, Mr Corbyn will simply retire to his allotment, clearly hasn’t paid attention to his first 32 years as an MP, before he became leader in 2015.

As a backbencher — and indeed long before he was first elected in 1983 — pretty much all he did was campaign and speak about the various causes that motivated him. These were the same causes which have remained with him all his adult life and which haunted him as leader — such as his hero worship of dictators such as Castro and Chavez, his support for terrorists like Hamas and the IRA and his hatred of the West and regard for our enemies, such as Iran and Russia.

Consider his behaviour since losing the election. He refused to step down immediately, despite the urgings of colleagues. He has posted a series of bizarre videos on social media, behaving as if he had led Labour to some kind of triumph. As 2019 ended, he described it as “quite the year for…our Labour movement”. That’s one way of putting it.

And then, yesterday, he began the first of his ‘living dead’ Prime Minister’s Questions sessions, a humiliated and discredited figure nonetheless insisting on his right to ask the Prime Minister six questions every week.

The idea of him going silent when he stops being leader — even as a courtesy to the new leader — is preposterous. For Mr Corbyn, loyalty has only ever been a one-way street. As leader, he demanded loyalty from his MPs — but when he was a backbencher, he never once accepted the idea that he should respect the party leader or stop campaigning for his causes. Famously, when Labour was in government between 1997 and 2010, he voted against the party whip 428 times, far more than any other Labour MP.

Mr Corbyn is typical of a strand of the Left that believes its conscience gives it licence to behave as it sees fit. This was part of what made him such a terrible leader, since he has always been convinced of his own rectitude. Anyone who disagreed with or questioned him was therefore, by definition, immoral.
This will not stop when he returns to the backbenches. He will not suddenly lose the arrogance that has fuelled him as leader. Rather, he will revert to his previous behaviour, offering vigorous support to his favourite causes. And he will do so freed from the pressures of leadership.

We can expect to see him re-joining the Stop the War Coalition, the Trotskyite group he used to chair which campaigns against the West and supports dictators such as Bashar al-Assad in Syria.

We can expect to see him speaking at the numerous fringe protests against the West which occupy the weekends of the hard Left. And we can expect to see him lending his support to other extremist campaigns and supporting Russia and Iran.
But there is a big difference from such behaviour before he became leader. Back then, he was a minor backbencher — a figure of no significance other than among his fellow Trotskyites. No one else paid him the least attention when he droned on. Now, however, he is the former leader of the Labour Party.

No matter who succeeds him, Mr Corbyn will revert to type. He is incapable of doing otherwise. That will be annoying enough for a new leader from his own hard Left wing of the party. But imagine if the new leader is someone such as Sir Keir Starmer or Jess Phillips, who will be genuinely seeking to distance themselves in the eyes of the public from Mr Corbyn. There he will be, campaigning and vocal. And there, too, will be the members, who regard him as their political hero.

Labour’s Nightmare on Corbyn Street is far from over.

I guess if I were still a member of the Labour Party (which I was technically until 31 December 2019, having finally got round to cancelling my annual direct debit earlier in the year), I would vote for Lisa Nandy as the next leader. Judging by her UnHerd interview from last summer, she is vaguely communitarian in outlook and does not think social conservatism is a disease (for which she has been criticised by the Twitter Left).

But, oh dear. Thank goodness I no longer have a dog in that fight. For much of the rest of the interview she displays the familiar intellectual and moral confusion of much of the modern left. Nandy in two respects is almost indistinguishable from your average Momentum activist.

First, the inability to see your political opponents as they are, not as your hateful, polarising caricature paints them. Nandy, in the UnHerd interview, accuses Dominic Cummings of being hostile to minority rights. Admittedly she does this via accusing him of wanting to smash liberal democracy (“which protects the rights of minorities”) and being “completely at odds” with the liberal democratic settlement. Cummings is evidently a radical who thinks Britain could work a lot better than it does but to paint him as an angry authoritarian happily stamping on minority rights is just laughable.

Second, Nandy indulges a moral sleight of hand in her conflation of working-class community spirit with a universalist ethos that is distrustful of any limit on the spirit of solidarity (surely close to the opposite of communitarianism).

More from this author

Can the Tories accommodate populism?

By David Goodhart

She tells the story of how around 100 young male African asylum seekers were unexpectedly housed in a hotel in a small former pit village in her Wigan constituency. When this, unsurprisingly, caused a bit of a commotion she called a community meeting and told local people that Wigan had already taken more than its share of asylum seekers and that the council had some powers to refuse to house this latest intake. But she then seems to have shamed the locals into not asking for the Africans to be housed somewhere else.

Freddie Sayers, the interviewer, asks what if they had not accepted the asylum seekers. Would that have been OK too in the name of community empowerment? Nandy sidesteps the question and talks about the working-class tradition of strong community and sticking up for people who are having a hard time.

But we live in a world in which, notwithstanding recent improvements in the living standards of the poor, the vast majority of people on the planet are still “having a hard time” compared with the average citizen of Wigan (and most of the asylum seekers were almost certainly economic migrants, judging by recent refusal rates for asylum).

The whole point of a real community is that it is not a random collection of individuals and it does not encompass the whole world, it must by definition be bounded and should be relatively stable over time (not completely closed) allowing relationships of familiarity and reciprocity to thrive.

Suggested reading

Who cares about immigration?

By Eric Kaufmann

It may well be that the 100 young men did not stay that long and were, in any case, easily absorbed for a period by a good-spirited neighbourhood. But to imply that saying no to a substantial disruption to a small community would have somehow been antithetical to the spirit of working-class community is turning logic and the meaning of community on its head.

Nandy assumes that if you trust people and take their concerns seriously they will take the “right” decision. But I would like her to consider the possibility that saying “no” would have been equally acceptable in this case, particularly given Wigan’s disproportionate asylum burden to date. And most important, it would not primarily have been driven, as so many people on the metropolitan Left assume, by xenophobia and racism (notwithstanding some extreme-right grumbling) but by a legitimate spirit of community protection. She might at least have encouraged her constituents to negotiate for something in return for the disturbance.

There is plenty of evidence from social psychology that having a strong “in-group” identity does not translate into hostility to outsiders; if anything, it correlates with a more welcoming attitude. The desire for a reduction in immigration in general in places such as Wigan is based less on hostility to outsiders and more on a feeling that the needs of newcomers are taken more seriously by London (and the Labour Party) than the needs of locals. Immigration has also become an emblem for too-rapid social change that is not in the interests of places like Wigan.

There seem to be two Lisa Nandys. The communitarian sounding champion of the neglected people of Wigan, and the academic universalist who thinks we have equal obligations to all fellow humans, and who seems indifferent to a world of constant churn and high mobility. I would have voted for the first against the second, but it seems that both of them are standing to lead the Labour Party.