Finally, an action-packed episode of British politics has drawn to a close. It started roughly at the time of Rishi Sunak and Sajid Javid’s resignations in early July, followed by Boris Johnson’s resignation, a Tory leadership race, a new prime minister, a seismic mini-budget, sterling tanking, a confident performance by the Labour party and inevitably a government U-turn. The outcome has been a dramatic shift in the polls toward Labour. It will be two years before Britons can express their views in a general election, so a question hangs in the air – what now?
In the eyes of progressives the answer is clear: Labour wins, of course, and the Tories head into cold exile. Expectation has morphed into fact and now occupies the space between the present and future. But if a week is a long time in politics, then two years is several lifetimes. There is a risk that, in this moment of opportunity, Labour misses out on making the sort of systemic challenge that could, that should, send this calamitous Tory party into oblivion, and not merely into a corner to regroup.
There are hints that the Labour party is beginning to realise that it can no longer count entirely on being popular by default. That there needs to be an offering not just for those sick of the Tories but also those turned off by the lack of sharp, meaningful contrast between the two. Even some of the most disaffected and alienated members from the left of the party I spoke to after the Labour conference seemed excited and heartened by the new policies proposed, particularly that of a Great British Energy company owned by the public. But this is still not enough of a new vision to capture the nation’s collective imagination. And that is because there has not been enough of a reckoning with the origin of the disasters that have befallen the country over the past three decades – of which Brexit and the country’s unpreparedness for Covid are not episodes, but symptoms.
The party’s strategy is to fix what the Tories have run down, but accept the arrangements and preserve the infrastructure in which that decline has occurred. It is a badly timed timidity; in reality, what is needed is the ejection of the private sector entirely from any realm that provides basic needs such as shelter, care for older people, the energy we need to keep warm and cook our food. Not, as Labour’s deputy leader, Angela Rayner, proposed, merely making sure that public contracts are well executed, as if the Labour party were pitching itself as a better service provider to a British citizen who is above all else a customer.
The party focuses, tellingly, on expanding homeownership rather than social housing. The nation is a marketplace, one that Labour will finesse to better serve its client, the deserving “working people” – a category that is exclusionary at best, and sinister at worst: pushing out those who work unpaid or are unable to work due to sickness, caring or age. Labour’s target is a class that is within sniffing distance of a mortgage, with a regular income, rather than those in gig employment, or lifelong private and social housing renters. A direct line links this precariat to Starmer’s strongest recent theme – that of a rich whose wealth the Tories are accused of protecting. Again, Labour has missed a trick; the question ought not to be how to tax them appropriately, but why they were able to accumulate so much wealth.
On immigration and culture, the party’s top lines and policy look not only like bad politics, but also poor strategy. If your criticism of Tory immigration policy is that it is not deporting people efficiently enough, as the shadow chancellor, Rachel Reeves, argued last week, then the right will thank you for priming voters for their ever-more poisonous and punitive policies. If your patriotism is going to be exclusive and yoked to Britain’s institutions of authority and law and order – the armed forces, the police, the royal family – the picture of that country is always going to be painted more vividly by the right.
Conventional centre-ground wisdom is that making too many ideological moves will scare voters whose understanding of policy is mediated mainly through a rightwing press. Better to bring them along gently and then take off the mask when in power. Yet wear the mask for long enough and it eats into the face.
The outcome is a party constricted in the alternatives it can provide. The real risk is failing to embark on an economic and cultural reshaping of the country when the ground is fertile. The status quo, as defended by those with a vested interest in it, is simply not working. The UK needs to be guided away not just from the right, but from its underwriters; from the supremacy of capital and the supremacy of the native, therefore ensuring that the Conservatives are no longer the party that best reflects the country. That involves an antagonism with the City, the press and, yes, with parts of the electorate.
The danger is not in doing too much, but doing too little. To use a phrase that the new party of fiscal responsibility should appreciate, the Labour party is leaving money on the table. The sort of spontaneous grassroots organising we have seen around the cost of living, Covid and refugee crises shows a nation that outperforms its political outcomes.
There is a voter coalition that can be created, not merely totted up from swing voters and the return of the “red wall”, but of a disparate number of groups and ages around notions of solidarity and inclusion. This coalition would make up a majority, as large and as galvanised as those who voted for Brexit populism. “The principal problem with the notion of electability”, the former Guardian columnist Gary Younge once observed, is that it “suggests the way people see the world at any given moment cannot be changed through argument and activism and instead erects borders for what is permissible discussion.”
As long as we stay within those borders, darkness lurks, no matter the polls. I can’t help but think of the film Fallen, in which a fallen angel possesses the bodies of humans, moving through them to wreak havoc on Earth. Confident in the power of its immortality, the spirit taunts humans trying to vanquish it by singing the chorus to an Irma Thomas song: “Time is on my side, yes it is.” The forces of the Tory right can reside in the body of Labour, can even draw energy from it, unless they are rejected entirely. Until then, time is on their side, yes it is.
Nesrine Malik is a Guardian columnist
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