Labour's hegemonic paradox: which is the party of working people?

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It's easy to forget now, but during the last election, Miliband had the Tories worried. Fearing the Labour leaders slight move toward populism, putting inequality and the Tory millionaire government on the agenda, they did a clever bit of reframing. They started calling themselves the party of working people. This was a radical shift in language. It seemed to work. I talked to a number of working class voters - mostly men - in recent weeks who voted Tory in the election. More or less, they did so for perceived economic self interest. The economy appeared to be doing well, and they didn't want to risk a change to Labour. Traditional loyalty among working class voters to Labour no longer exists, each vote has to be won on merit.
Since Blair, a conventional wisdom has it that Labour must overtly and explicitly appeal to middle class southern voters, even at the cost of alienating some core working class supporters, in order to win elections. This appeared to work for Tony Blair, although at a cost - 4 million votes lost between 1997 and 2005. More were lost in 2010, when Brown went down to defeat on 29 percent of the vote.
Even more seriously, the strategy opened the way for the SNP to defeat and supplant Labour as the leading left-of-centre party in Scotland, while in England UKIP has picked up millions of votes from Labour. The Greens have also benefited from this centrist strategy.
The problem with first past the post is it encourages the main parties to imitate each other in order to woo swing voters. This auction for the centre denies the electorate a real choice. The Tories' new 'party of working people' presents a challenge to Labour, but also clearly shows that the political discourse has changed since the great crash of 2008. While previously issues of inequality and excess wealth concentration had been off the agenda, they were back with a vengeance. The Tories had to respond and they did.
But the Labour answer can't be to become the party of millionaires. Labour was born as the party of labour, the trade unions and the working class. It used to have clause four - the goal of common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange.
In the past, it was possible for Labour to represent its base of working class voters, with a sizeable chunk of the middle class, including teachers and others in the public sector, toward a common goal of a democratic socialist society achieved by electoral means.
However, in the last three decades, de-industrialisation, the decline of organised labour, the end of communism and fragmentation of politics has made this a tougher proposition.
There was, of course, always a sizeable part of the working class who voted Tory and supported the established social hierarchy, the monarchy and the empire. This was because the Tory party, in Gramscian terms, had ideological hegemony over the nation. To paraphrase Marx's words, the ideas of the ruling class become the ruling ideas of a society, and those ideas are Tory.
After the fourth Labour defeat in 1992, Tony Blair decided to shift Labour to the centre ground - stop trying to shift Britain leftwards, and instead move to the pro-business 'centre'. That consensus held until the 2008 crash once again put capitalism's failings into bold relief - rising inequality, boom and bust, the destruction of well paying jobs.
The Blairites and their supporters in the media have attempted to turn the 2015 defeat into a call for a return to new Labour, but clearly this is a false solution, and will lead to a dead end. Without rehearsing all the reasons Labour lost, it is clear both the candidate and the offer were not strong enough to convince the majority of voters to change course so soon into a recovery from such a deep recession.
But most important of all, Labour wholly failed to effectively challenge the Tory narrative of the recession and deficit. They effectively blamed Labour for both, and avoided the taint that Tories too supported deregulation of banks that caused the crisis. Labour did not have the courage to admit that it was responsible for the neoliberal catastrophe of allowing the financial sector to become too big to fail.
Claiming that it was a 'global financial crisis' was, and is a cop out. Brown and Blair bought wholly into the idea of a 'new economy' based on financial services and free flow of capital with light touch regulation. Labour should admit this was a disaster - and propose a new financial system, using the publicly owned banks as German-style industrial banks, that support small and medium businesses, while moving to curb the behaviour of the financiers who asset strip great companies and will, inevitably, lead us into another crisis at some point in the near future.
An economy based on debt is one that will inevitably crash. Labour should relentlessly point to the record level of private debt in the economy and move the argument away from the government deficit - which is a red herring. It's the debt, stupid, not the deficit. The Tory chancellor has failed to rebalance the economy, and with Help to Buy and stamp duty reductions is preparing the ground for the next crisis. Labour need to understand this, stop following the media and Tory narrative on the deficit and start attacking this economic model built on low wages, too big to fail finance and ever increasing debt.
Unfortunately Balls and Miliband were timidly only tinkering with this model, and perversely relying on the economy not recovering to delivery them the keys to Numbers 10 and 11. This is a doomed strategy - if you need the economy to be tanking in order to win, you are in a kind of desperate doomsday scenario. The misery strategy failed. Capitalism always recovers - boom and bust - remember that Ed Balls as you nurse your coco.
What Labour lacks is a hegemonic strategy - in the sense understood by Italian communist Antonio Gramsci - a framing narrative that shows it can be the party for the vast majority, changing the values of the country to its values. The SNP has such a strategy in buckets, claiming for it the mantle of the cross-class progressive majority in Scotland.
Such a strategy is a tougher challenge in the Tory heartlands of southern England, but Labour has no choice but to try. It should push aggressively for a return to a low inequality, mixed economy, where monopolies like rail and energy - and even banks - are commonly owned, not in an old fashioned centralised way, but as modern socially responsible companies. Take the battle to the Tories, change the narrative, get out of this fatal, defensive, self-flaggelating mode.
Labour does best when working people are confident, as they were relatively in the 1940s, 1960s and 1970s. Conversely the party has found it harder in periods of recession and austerity, like the 1930s and 1980s.
Of course, if Labour can't find such a strategy and solve its hegemonic paradox - if they remain in thrall to the rightwing media and Tory framing of the debate, they will go into decline, and new political forces will seize that role.

Post-Miliband meltdown, the Blairites are back

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Charles Clarke, Alan Johnson, all the Blairites are hitting the airwaves saying Miliband's 'left wing' platform is what lost it for Labour and saying they need to go back to 'aspirational' new Labour. Who can argue with aspiration? Everyone wants a good life, obviously. But aspiration under Blair and Cameron is code for a false either-or - that solidarity (collectively ensuring everyone has access to the essential elements of a good life - education, healthcare, a home) is anathema to economic success. You can't have both. We've been told that for 35 years and looking at the electoral map today, it appears that most of England agrees.
But really, was that it? It could simply be that Miliband comes over like a north London policy wonk with no connection to the real world - and he fatally refused the hand of the only ally who could have helped him into Downing St - Nicola Sturgeon. Labour was arrogant enough to think it could win alone - and have nothing to do with the other progressive parties.
Miliband's narrative was feeble and unclear for so long - even the Mansion Tax was a Lib Dem policy, not exactly nationalisation of the commanding heights. In fact if he had come out for rail and energy nationalisation, rather than the feeble price freeze, he might have sounded like he had a coherent policy for returning to a mixed economy and breaking with neoliberalism.
It's obvious that aside from Brighton, left wing voters are no more than 10% of the country (or 5% if you exclude SNP Scots). Left-wing candidates scored almost nothing.
But a lot of how you win people over to more social-democratic policies is framing. In Scotland, SNP speaks the language of social democracy and won 50% of the vote.
Saying you will build social housing and regulate private rents is not incompatible with 'aspiration' - it's for aspiration (not to hand all your money over to rapacious landlords), for everyone, not just the middle class. It's saying that everyone should have the elements of a decent life. After all, the Tories have no problem subsidising the rich: housing benefit is a massive taxpayer subsidy to landlords, as is low wages and zero hours - its 'taxpayers' subsidising big business.
Miliband (or whoever replaces him) could have said it's time to stop wasting billions of 'your hard earned money' on subsidies to business and landlords and instead bring in a living wage and fix the housing market - and cut those rich people benefits. Flip the Tory welfare scrounger language on its head. He never articulated that because Labour is forever terrified of being portrayed as 'left wing.' The Blairite view is based on four Labour election defeats from 1979-92: they concluded that you can't change the right-wing narrative, so you must mirror it and sneak in your policies under the radar. But that policy has major drawbacks - it ultimately feeds right-wing ideological domination (as well as leaving the economic model mostly untouched, which came a cropper in 2008 with the financial crash). It's tough accepting that you live in a right-wing country, but if an opposition can link personal interests with a wider narrative of social solidarity, it can win millions of votes - just look at Scotland. May be the Labour party should throw the leadership election wide open - come on Nicola!

The QT election debate - Poor Ed's final trip

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Poor Ed Miliband, being harangued and bullied by some pretty unpleasant members of a 'representative' audience. He stood there, slightly rabbit in headlights, before launching into his creepy crawly 'what's your name' I'm-a-man-of-the-people routine.
Come on, Ed. This American style coaching - looking mad-eyed into the TV camera, walking up close to the audience like a preacher in the Deep South, rather than a British politician in dire need of some likability.
I felt sorry for him. I don't like bullying. Minutes before a confident, smooth-talking David Cameron was able to hammer home the Tory message of cutting the deficit and making sure all you hard-faced hard-working voters don't let those horrible scroungers get any more of your hard-earned cash. They lapped it up.

Miliband didn't do himself any favours. When it came to coalition talk, he just claimed that he would not negotiate on his manifesto and never do a deal with the SNP. The audience weren't buying it. One guy said, "have you thought how much more respect you would get from this audience if you were honest about what deals you will make after the election?' Miliband just carried on lying regardless.

It was as if he was saying to Scottish voters, I dare you to vote SNP. Go on. To English voters, he desperately wanted them to believe he was as much an English nationalist as any of them. The art of politics seems to come down to who can lie with a straight face. The more Miliband-Balls say they won't truck with the nationalists, the more it feels like the loser in Monopoly kicking over the table. If you're going to take all the money (votes), I won't give you the pleasure of winning. They seem to think that the SNP will simply be forced to back a Labour government - a minority, weak government, on current polling - from the sidelines. They could, as others have said, just abstain and watch Labour crumble.
But as one audience member in QT said, what about the voters? If voters don't want to give either party a majority, that means you should listen to them. They don't want a single party dictatorship. Listen to them. They've had tweedledum tweedledee for decades. They want something new. Just holding your hands over your ears and going 'la la la la la' is not going to change that.
At the end of Miliband's 28 minutes, we were none the wiser. He made a few noises about standing up for working people against non-doms and big corporations, but it rang a bit hollow. You can't just declare class war if there is no one standing behind you (although at least he does now have his new mate Russell Brand backing him), nothing in your armoury.
The small businesswoman didn't look that impressed. He should have just been a lot tougher on these critics - voters can be wrong, and they can just be deep down, rightwing Tories and there is little point in trying to win them over - just demolish them so your supporters can see that you know how to fight. But Miliband doesn't have the killer instinct. He doesn't even seem to have all the arguments.
He should remind people that zero hours contracts, low wages and sky-high rents are all subsidised by taxpayers to the tune of tens of billions of pounds. That's ordinary people's money being funnelled to business and landlords because they are exploiting people with low wages and high rents.
After getting a couple of laughs - more than Cameron - at the end Miliband tripped as he left the stage. What a symbolic exit. I felt sorry for him but more than anything I felt like the election was already over. I'm going to hold out for some small victories - the decapitation of Nick Clegg, a thumping majority for Caroline Lucas. But when I looked at that "representative audience" it felt like they wanted something right-wing, hard, Tory-like. And as they say, the people get the government they deserve. And the Scots will just have to wait for the next referendum to leave us to it.