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.
