Sheer class (1): how the Labour party won the election
The Labour party lost the general election. Why then, for many of us, does it actually feel like we won?
First, I suppose, there is the relief that we didn’t have to bear the sight of Cameron strolling down Downing Street, cheered by his Union Jack-waving faithful, in a 1997 retake. That we were spared that, even if he gets into No.10 by the back door, is a blessing.
Second, and more substantively, there is at least a chance that some of the Tories’ more outrageous plans to batter the poor will be put on hold if they have to form a government dependent on a party which has at least some members who don’t take that kindly to battering the poor like this (even if Clegg is comfortable enough with the idea of such a betrayal of his ‘core’ vote).
But these, important as they are, are not the main reasons why many Labour members feel we actually won on Thursday.
The reason we’re actually pretty happy, and the reason that – unlike the Tories – the Labour party is not beginning its soul searching, is that Labour found its soul on Thursday 6th May.
Labour may have lost the election. We may even be out of government for a while, but on Thursday 6th May New Labour was buried, and a newer Labour may just have been born.
For me, in the working class Liverpool overspill town that is Skelmersdale (Skem) in West Lancashire, I knew something different at around 1.30pm on Wednesday 5th May.
I was at the ‘Connie’, Skem’s shopping centre, blowing up Labour balloons with helium and handing them out to kids and mums and grandmas; we’d just announced with a few flyers that Gordon Brown was on his way, and that he’d be with us in 15 minutes.
The news spread like wildfire. Within minutes there were hundreds and hundreds around the entrance and draped over the escalators trying to get the best view. When the press bus arrived, the excitement mounted.
Minutes later, as Gordon Brown emerged from his black car, there was a lull, perhaps of disbelief that this was he, and that Skem had not just been taken for a ride again. One ‘wag’ shouted ‘Nick Clegg’ and then, quite suddenly, a huge wave of emotion – the like of which I can honestly say I have never witnessed – seem to burst over the crowd.
Some of the scene is picked up in this short video clip from the Telegraph, but it doesn’t really pick up the rawness of what was going on. Polly Toynbee, to her credit, does pick up that it was different from the normal reception:
Today mothers with prams in the Skelmersdale shopping concourse crushed round Brown and several spontaneously called out: “Keep family credits! Keep him out, Gordon!” in a great scrum of unaccustomed adulation. Not party plants but a mob of ordinary people shouting out: “Come on Gordon!”
But it was bigger than that. It wasn’t just a few people shouting out in adulation. There was much more shouting, and there was much more raw emotion than Toynbee can ever get across.
This was not about Gordon Brown. This was about the working class of Skelmersdale in a mass spontaneous moment of class solidarity, and about their reidentifying with Labour, as represented on that day by Gordon Brown, as THEIR party – a party which may have let them down on many occasions, may even have left them alone for a time, but which is still THEIR party, still my party.
This is something that Giles can’t understand, though he is honest enough to ask the question:
What did Labour do to switch momentum from Lib Dems back to Labour? In Islington South, Edinburgh South, the City of Durham, Oxford East and most tragically Hampstead and Kilburn they seemed, somehow, to tell people that the right vote is Labour. How did they win that argument? How on earth did a government this unpopular nevertheless convince voters that they were safer with Labour?
Did they use the immigration scare story? Were there loads of leaflets out there saying “Nick Clegg will flood you with immigrants”?
No, there were no such leaflets. What Giles simply can’t conceive, in his liberal, intelligent individualistic/consumer choice view of the world, is that class solidarity like this happens. For liberals, the working class remains voter fodder for the experts and policy makers, not the conscious body that EP Thompson would still recognise.
But up and down the country, in the areas where it wasn’t expressed quite so clearly as in Skelmersdale because Gordon Brown didn’t get into a scrum (there were neat orderly lines and barricades by the time he got to Blackpool later that day), the same thing was happening; the working class was reclaiming its party, and making sure ‘that snot-nosed bastard’ (I quote from the doorstep) didn’t get in to No. 10 on Friday.
That’s why so many Labour seats in working class constituencies were held, and why in many areas the Lib Dems and Tories were swept away in the accompanying local elections, while areas that don’t (yet) have have that sense of working class solidarity were lost to the Tories.
Of course this is only the start of the renewal of Labour, and I’ll be moving on to what now has to happen in the Labour party if we are to capitalise on what has happened, building on my earlier thesis (July 2009) that the Labour party DOES remain the best place for left activists to be because that is where the working class is, and towards proposals for ways in which the left should be seeking to build class solidarity and action, not just in these more traditional working class areas but in areas where the post-industrial working class is still unsure of its objective class interest.
The opportunities for this, in the context of the coming assault on the working class by the new administration and its allies in the ‘markets’, will be significant, as well as challenging. This will be the early 1980s revisited, but bigger; this time the left can and must be better prepared.
This will be the task that New Labour steered us away from but to which a newer Labour might now return. It is the kind of task good leftwingers like John McDonnell have held to in a post-industrial constituency of the type we need to take in order to retake power nationally. We need more John McDonnells, and we need to build a party that will foster them.
Spot on.
This is a fantastic article, and one that really puts it’s finger on the strange feeling I have been getting since thursday night. Labour really did seem to mobilise the class vote. And against a backdrop of crisis, infighting, mass unemployment and the near monopolisation of press support by their opponents, did not do badly.
Clear red water is for life , not just for election time
Paul,
I’m hovering in that uncertain no-mans-land between agnosticism and disbelief about this post.
I see in today’s Observer the first projection of voting by social class (presumably projected from exit polls or other opinion polls). I know there are all sorts of problems with using the ABC1C2DE categorisation and on another occasion I’d be as happy as any mildly obsessive political animal to discuss them. But let’s just look at the figures themselves for a bit.
A quick Google tells me that, roughly speaking, the categorisation breaks up the electorate this way in terms of %age of the population:
A. Upper Managerial 4%
B Lower Managerial & Professional 25%
C1 Other Non-Manual 22%
C2 Skilled Manual Workers 27%
D Semi-Skilled Manual Workers 16%
E Unskilled Manual Workers 5%
So how does the Observer claim we voted? (remember, these figures will exclude people who didn’t vote, who are usually disproportionately found in the ‘lower’ social classes)
AB: 36% Tory/28% LD/29% Lab/7% other
C1: 42% Tory/26% LD/26% Lab/6% other
C2: 39% Tory/24% Lib Dem/22% Lab/ 15% other
DE: 28% Tory/15% LD/ 44% Lab/13% other
I find these initial figures intriguing – especially the massive Labour weakness amongst the C2s/ Skilled Manual Working Class. I don’t take them as gospel however, and look forward to seeing deeper analyses.
But here’s a very tentative thought: a Lab vote in the AB/C1 segments that was roughly proportionate to its overall national figure combined with a very high Lab vote amongst the unskilled manual workers would be consistent not with ‘the urban working class’ as a whole voting Labour, but with employees of all grades working in the public and voluntary sectors voting Labour.
Just a thought.
I haven’t worked out what this mean politically as yet. I can see how a Third Way/New Labour type might decide such a voting pattern meant ‘reaching out to Middle England’ (sic). But what does it mean for a left which might surely want to find a language and set of policies which appeals to all working people? Does it mean that Labour may be a part of the working class, but not the party ?(I recognise this to sustain this argument one would have to further analyses Green,Plaid and SNP voting patterns as well)
Great piece.
One thing I was not prepared for was the genuine enthusiasm I met on many door steps – it was something I never expected at all. Imagine being out with with a posh bloke in some of the more deprived areas of Stoke and having women shouting “good on yer” in the middle of the streets. I was shocked – in a nice way.
When campaigning in Manchester I was shoked by the mass of support for Labour from ordinary people. It was really encouraging. I think the working class in Manchester, perhaps everywhere in Britain, were scared to death of a tory government and shared a collective view that they were better off under Labour.
The local results could be seen to indicate this feeling.
This is the first election I was able to vote in and it does seem to be a victory of sorts. I wasn’t left in tears like my mum said she was in ’83.
Well said Paul. I refused to watch television or listen to the radio during the election, fearing a complete rout – but it never happened. Every time I enquired after a certain Left MP, or even middle-of-the-road MPs, they’d kept their seats. And people like Charles Clarke and Jacqui Smith got booted out.
My mood brightened and I’ve been happy and on my knees praying (figuratively) that Cameron can be kept out. I’ve also been absorbing the results of the Far Left, and will have more to say on this. But I still don’t agree with the assertion that New Labour is dead and buried, despite this from you and from other LRC members.
I am ALWAYS honest about my ignorance. That’s the only way I can learn, as I have from this post.
Couple of questions:
Is it true from the doorstepts that Labour were more popular than Brown? So with a new leader ….
For the local council results, were the successes often against other-held councils? LIke Camden, say? because having the advantage of not being the ruling party must help too.
Of course I find automatically voting for a party on class alegiance mightily depressing for democracy. you see I’m a swing voter …
To be fair, what really made it seem like a victory was the constituency boundary issue – something that is a tad more unfair than the FPTP system. Labour constituencies have fewer voters than Tory ones. With a similar share of the vote to the share Cameron actually got, Labour would have had a 90-plus majority.
In 2005 Labour got 35.3% against the Tories 32.3% – which gave them 356 seats against the Tories 198 and an overall majority of 66.
2010 – Tories 36.1%, Labour 29% – which gave the Tories 306 seats and no majority, and Labour 258 – 60 more than the Tories got in 2005 on 3.3% less share of the vote.
Still, it was nice to see those people demonstrating against the unfairness of it all yesterday.
1. The plural of anecdote is not data.
2. How can you tell that those crowding round Brown were not Labour party members instead of genuine general public spontaneity? There have been countless occassions during the election of local members of all the main parties being bussed in to where there leader was turning up.
3. I hardly think the phrase “spontaneous moment of class solidarity” makes any sense. How can people be in solidarity if there actions are spontaneous?
4. While there may not have been any immigration leaflets, there most certainly were scare leaflets from Labour. You can’t have not seen that leaflet about how the Lib Dems were going to give paedophiles the vote, for instance.
JK @1: Thanks, I thought so too.
Reuben @2: I agree, except perhaps with “Labour really did seem to mobilise the class vote.” Perhaps it mobilised itself, and chose Labour.
Charlie @3: These are very interesting numbers, which I hadn’t seen when I wrote to post. Thanks for the link.
However, I don’t think they are necessarily incompatible with what I’m saying.
I think if you were to break down the figures to constituency levels, you’d find that the % of C2 voting Labour in the traditional industrial heartlands, where there is a stronger class consciousness (or at least a folk memory of same) born of collective action etc etc, will be much higher than in the less traditional core voting areas. That doesn’t of course mean that public and vol sector workers also voted Labour in greater numbers is wrong, but my sense, and that of many commenters here and where this is being read elsewhere (Socialist Unity) is thatv the key pattern is as I suggest – Labour voters in the working classes ‘coming home’ and voting Labour in big enough numbers to keep Labour seats Labour in the heartlands (and in London of course).
averyps @4: Yes, it was good, and it certainly grew as the election neared.
George @5: I’m glad you weren’t in tears. And yet, as I say, we lost. Strange times, but something to build on.
Dave @6: Yes, I accept what you say about New Labour not yet being dead, and that I got a little too enthusiastic as I wrote this.
If the senior figures in the PLP have any sense, NL will die, because the reason people came out to vote Labour in the numbers that they did are clear enough. It was about stopping the Tories, and about a class solidarity they thought was a thing of the past. But of course it will be possible to interpret the results as a vindication of the way they played the campaign e.g. toughness on immigration, and if this interpretation becomes dominant NL may rise again, and we’ll all be screwed.
To drive forward our narrative of the working class reclaiming the soul of the Labour party is, therefore, the key challenge for the coming weeks.
FTE @7: Giles, thanks for dropping by. Always nice to engage with a liberal with integrity.
On the Brown vs Labour question, I think Brown was less popular than Labour, but it’s important to stress that this is hardly ever the way in which support is conceived. I never asked for support for Brown; when given the opportunity (a first question is almost always an open one about which party the voter supports) I sought support for my parliamentary candidate, often speaking of very local issues, and for the Labour party in general. I’m not sure that a different leader would have made a huge difference; it was Labour as a generality that had been found wanting, though certainly sometimes that want was expressed in terms of Brown’s personality, and to Labour that the vote returned.
On the local election issue, yes local issues may well have had a good deal of traction and brought a greater Labour vote via that route not just in the council elections but also in the general; there is a tendency to think that the local election choice on the ballot will simply follow the general one, and this is probably the case most of the time, but I think in some cases it may be reversed. Certainly our campaign here in Lancashire focused significantly on the Tory council’s abundant failings.
Yes, I know you find class allegiance depressing. Perhaps you’d find it less depressing if you broke down what class allegiance is into its constituent processes, because therein lie some important but oft overlooked bits about material interest and discursive power. Keep breaking down class allegiance, and you end up not too far from the ‘vote by pure reason’ that you aspire to, but which ignores the reality of class power. I really should write something about this.
Laban @8: What’s not factored into your, or Power 2010′s calculations on the Labour bias you say is inherent in the FPTP system is that, in general a greater percentage of people in Labour held constituencies are disenfrancised from the electoral process in the first place by the material circumstances imposed upon them by a system much unfairer in terms of life opportunities that FPTP will ever be. Again, I’ll write more about this when I’ve done the maths with this election’s turn out figures, but my view is that PR, while welcome in itself, a convenient excuse for a liberal elite not to deal with the real issues of material injustice and inequality.
So there.
Alex @9:
Your points in order;
1. I know data and anecdote are different things. I also know there is nothing inherently invalid with an impressionistic narrative about what I saw and experienced, which as you can see from the comments above has struck a chord with other experiences.
2. I know they were not party members because I know pretty well every member in West Lancashire Labour party, and they were different people. They were people who had gathered to see what was going on, people who had come to do their shopping. I can’t give you evidence that people were not something, clearly, and of course you may wish to disbelieve both me and Polly Toynbee, but I’ll still be right.
3. Perhaps a better wording might have been a ‘spontaneous expression of class soldiarity’. I’m saying that that solidaristic feeling towards Labour was latent enough for it to come out in one big gush. I can’t see how that’s self-contradictory.
4. Yes, I’m aware of that scare leaflet from Birmingham somewhere. It was a disgrace. In any event, you know as well as I do that only a small % of people read campaign literature anyway. In West Lancashire, we had no leaflets about immigration, I can confirm. The swing to Labour wasn’t about the LibDems. It was about Labour. Again, you may choose not to believe me, perhaps because you think I am different from the person I am.
Paul,
Well, I’m in South London not West Lancs and I too sensed a rallying of the Labour vote in the last few days of the campaign. But C2s are relatively thin on the ground round here. Nationally the Observer suggested that the number of C2s voting Labour had dropped by eighteen percentage points compared to 2005. That is huge. So even if they were flocking out to vote Labour round your way this must have been far from universally true.
I’m not nailing my colours to the flimsy mast of one set of unexplained figures in one newspaper. Any comment any of us make at this point is obvious subject to further information on voting breakdown emerging.
But if this apparent collapsed C2 vote is any way true I think the Left needs to think a bit more carefully about the results of the election. Yes, the feared complete meltdown didn’t happen.(Even here, though, I think you have to recognise that New Labour will claim that the relative hardening of the vote is a demonstration of loyalty to them, not class politics per se). The question of quite why so many C2 voters deserted Labour remains however – and given basic demographic facts it may be the key to attempting to rebuild any kind of majority.
in general a greater percentage of people in Labour held constituencies are disenfrancised from the electoral process in the first place by the material circumstances imposed upon them by a system much unfairer in terms of life opportunities that FPTP will ever be
Do I hear the tinkle of the bell on the Cycle of Deprivation ? It does make you wonder how we ever stopped living in caves or learned to walk upright.
In what way are the people of Skem disenfranchised exactly ? (I can think of some, but I’d like to know your views)
You know I’ve been a Labour Party supporter for a lot of years and in that time watched as the right wing systematically tried to tear the party apart. It’s hard to say when I first saw it start – probably from the time I joined to be honest – but in all that time they have never been completely successful in silencing good socialists. Wilson tried, so did Kinnock – he was more successful and pushed out good members like Dave Nellist and other readers of the Militant. Then Blair brought the New Labour project and we lost Clause IV.
It was good to see comrades here critically analysing where we go from here and with your vigour (and I suspect youth) we will endure.
None of this killed off the left. We kept on battling away.