The Labour party’s 125-year anniversary is two years away. By then, it will have held power for just 33 of those years. The ambition to build a socialist commonwealth – a new Jerusalem – has not been realised, nor is there any prospect of such an outcome in the next 125 years. Tory England – its riches, its schools, its social influence, its press, the inequalities over which it presides, its stranglehold over what is considered political common sense – remains as powerful as it was under prime minister Lord Salisbury in 1900. As an exercise in political futility, there is little to match it. It is often said that the Conservatives are one of the most longstanding and successful parties in the world. What is less said is that it has been given a free pass for more than a century by its opponents.
For a leader of the Labour party named after its founder, this is not only galling – it cannot be allowed to continue. For Britain does have a great progressive tradition independent of socialism, largely rooted in the best of “new liberalism”, common law and our early embrace of democracy. Moreover, our core values – fairness, tolerance, kindness, openness, admiration for those who dare, championing the underdog – are also fundamentally progressive. The political problem for the liberal left is that it has never marshalled these forces successfully into a sustained political project or party. Instead of uniting in the manner of US Democrats, British progressivism has been fatally divided between a largely workers’ party committed to utopian socialism, at least in its rhetoric, and a middle-class party that so hankers after Conservative acceptance it has only a weak progressive spine. Throw in a first-past-the-post voting system and the past 125 years is explained.
