Has the Labour party outlived its usefulness?

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/may/24/has-labour-party-outlived-its-usefulness

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Does it matter if the Labour party survives its current crisis? History suggests not. Labour, and the British left, has been massively defeated. However, in broad historical terms, one might argue that this defeat didn’t happen on 7 May 2015 but in the late 1960s and 1970s. Labour’s era may now be over and perhaps it is time for something new.

Its heyday was in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Clement Attlee’s Labour party was the party of the welfare state and full employment, with trade unions fully incorporated into national bargaining because they represented a massive section of the workforce. The party had concrete policies that spoke to people’s needs and desires – from which the current operation could learn .

In the late 1960s, this consensus broke apart. Foreign competition and the assertive, but reasonable demands of young workers for more say over the way their industries were managed led certain big businesses to organise into the Confederation of British Industries (CBI) and demand the reduction of workers’ rights.

Barbara Castle’s white paper, In Place of Strife, began talking of strikers and trade unionists as separate from, rather than representative of, “the public”. Edward Heath’s Conservative administrations and the succeeding Labour government took this policy further. In 1976, Labour accepted that an economic downturn should be remedied by accepting International Monetary Fund aid, conditional on massive public spending cuts.

The following year, a huge strike for trade union recognition by Asian women at the Grunwick film processing plant was crushed by police with the full support of the Labour government and the Conservative opposition. The rest, as they say, is history, including the national Labour leadership’s failure to support the 1984-85 miners’ strike.

The Labour movement, it could be argued, is still living with defeat. While that’s a long time when you are living through it, it is brief in historical terms. After the French Revolution, the left on both sides of the Channel suffered brutal repression for decades. After each defeat, there was a need to regroup and reorganise.

That is not simply because organisations are weakened or crushed, but defeats tend to follow victories, the legacies of which are never entirely wiped out by the repression that follows. These, in turn, lead to social transformations requiring new forms of political organisation. It would be historically unprecedented for the Labour party to re-emerge once more as a popular force for leftwing change.

Over time, as people’s experiences change, so do their aims and their methods of organising. In the 1900s, most trade union members were skilled men. Most labour leaders believed it was impossible to unionise casual workers, the unskilled or women, just as many people despair of rebuilding the left these days, when part-time and casual work is so prevalent.

But in the 1930s, women organised themselves when thousands of them left domestic service for the factories and once there demanded the same rights their fathers and brothers had already won for themselves. The Transport and General Workers Union, quick to seize this opportunity, signed them up in large numbers and by the end of the 1930s was Britain’s largest trade union. Thirty years earlier, no one would have predicted this.

Unlike the TGWU of then, today’s Labour party seems unable to grasp the zeitgeist. There are some portents of new kinds of organisation, Occupy and the growing feminist movement among them. Anyone who was in Scotland immediately before the 2014 referendum will testify that the powerful movement for independence did not look solely to the SNP for leadership. Those who called themselves Radical Indy shared a belief in redistributing economic and political power and were galvanised by an inchoate, yet powerful feeling that a yes vote would precipitate further changes that, while unpredictable, could not be worse than the status quo.

Journalists and politicians south of the border dismissed their lack of a coherent programme for government, but in such a spirit are revolutions made and they are rarely made overnight. Radical movements have unintended consequences and long legacies. The no vote did not result in a return to normal, but instead galvanised a political debate about Scotland’s future. The spirit in Scotland was for a politics bigger than party and more active than simply placing a cross in a ballot box every five years.

Can people really find a new form of politics? Some will feel that there is no alternative, especially those who reckon that the world is being plundered by governments committed to economic growth rather than redistribution. In this context, one can see how remaking the world becomes a far more important question than whether to save the Labour party.

Dr Selina Todd is fellow in modern history and vice principal of St Hilda’s College, Oxford