Geoffrey Wheatcroft
by Geoffrey Wheatcroft
As political spectator sport, the verbal fisticuffs among Ed Miliband, Len McCluskey, Tom Watson and now John Prescott have been enjoyable enough. But their antics illuminate a more important story. Does Labour have any real purpose any more? Or does politics?
More significant than disputes between parties, or within them, are larger historical currents. The erosion of left and right means there is quite obviously far less to choose between Miliband and David Cameron than there was between Attlee and Churchill 60 years ago, or between Foot and Thatcher 30 years ago, which in turn explains the precipitous fall in voting turnout. Labour’s latest, rather desperate, idea is to lower the voting age to 16. But will sixth-formers actually vote, and will they have anything to vote about?
How Labour did or didn’t select a parliamentary candidate for Falkirk, with Watson and Miliband’s amusingly different version of events, is less important than what the episode says about the widening rift between “the industrial and the political wings of the movement”, in the once hallowed phrase, or between unions and party.
Miliband would plainly like to distance the two even more, if he could find another source of finance. And yet the problem is deeper. As Watson said in an interview on Saturday, he shares McCluskey’s view that Unite, his union, gives much more to Labour than it gets back.
“There is not a great deal of logic to unions giving this huge amount of money to Labour if they feel they’re not even participating in the party they founded,” Watson says. McCluskey adds sharply that the people who pay £120 a year to belong to Unite outnumber all the members put together of the political parties represented in parliament.
Although Miliband has had a rotten few weeks, he still enjoys certain advantages over Cameron. Labour might yet win the most seats at the next election by default, thanks to rotten boroughs in Scotland and the north. The distortion means that the Tories need a six-point lead in the popular vote to win mere equality of seats with Labour; that, and the fact that Labour doesn’t face a challenge on its flanks of the kind that Cameron does from Ukip.
That’s a dispiriting prospect for the leader of a radical party, and Miliband still has a larger problem — Labour’s identity crisis.
Thirty years ago the party nearly tore itself to pieces trying to decide whether it should be a party about this or a party about that, until the question was answered by Blair, who decided it should be a party about nothing in particular, or nothing at all.
In the deathless definition of the Tory defector Shaun Woodward on the night of the 2001 election, New Labour was “a party for everyone, not of any particular class or any particular view”.
No doubt Miliband sincerely wishes to appeal to “people of a particular view”. But the most ominous turn of all for him is the continuing depoliticisation of society. The Hansard Society has reported a poll in which only 42 percent of people say they are interested in politics, the lowest figure ever recorded. In the longer term, that is worse news for Labour than the Tories. And it does not look like a trend that can easily be reversed. THE GUARDIAN
by Geoffrey Wheatcroft
As political spectator sport, the verbal fisticuffs among Ed Miliband, Len McCluskey, Tom Watson and now John Prescott have been enjoyable enough. But their antics illuminate a more important story. Does Labour have any real purpose any more? Or does politics?
More significant than disputes between parties, or within them, are larger historical currents. The erosion of left and right means there is quite obviously far less to choose between Miliband and David Cameron than there was between Attlee and Churchill 60 years ago, or between Foot and Thatcher 30 years ago, which in turn explains the precipitous fall in voting turnout. Labour’s latest, rather desperate, idea is to lower the voting age to 16. But will sixth-formers actually vote, and will they have anything to vote about?
How Labour did or didn’t select a parliamentary candidate for Falkirk, with Watson and Miliband’s amusingly different version of events, is less important than what the episode says about the widening rift between “the industrial and the political wings of the movement”, in the once hallowed phrase, or between unions and party.
Miliband would plainly like to distance the two even more, if he could find another source of finance. And yet the problem is deeper. As Watson said in an interview on Saturday, he shares McCluskey’s view that Unite, his union, gives much more to Labour than it gets back.
“There is not a great deal of logic to unions giving this huge amount of money to Labour if they feel they’re not even participating in the party they founded,” Watson says. McCluskey adds sharply that the people who pay £120 a year to belong to Unite outnumber all the members put together of the political parties represented in parliament.
Although Miliband has had a rotten few weeks, he still enjoys certain advantages over Cameron. Labour might yet win the most seats at the next election by default, thanks to rotten boroughs in Scotland and the north. The distortion means that the Tories need a six-point lead in the popular vote to win mere equality of seats with Labour; that, and the fact that Labour doesn’t face a challenge on its flanks of the kind that Cameron does from Ukip.
That’s a dispiriting prospect for the leader of a radical party, and Miliband still has a larger problem — Labour’s identity crisis.
Thirty years ago the party nearly tore itself to pieces trying to decide whether it should be a party about this or a party about that, until the question was answered by Blair, who decided it should be a party about nothing in particular, or nothing at all.
In the deathless definition of the Tory defector Shaun Woodward on the night of the 2001 election, New Labour was “a party for everyone, not of any particular class or any particular view”.
No doubt Miliband sincerely wishes to appeal to “people of a particular view”. But the most ominous turn of all for him is the continuing depoliticisation of society. The Hansard Society has reported a poll in which only 42 percent of people say they are interested in politics, the lowest figure ever recorded. In the longer term, that is worse news for Labour than the Tories. And it does not look like a trend that can easily be reversed. THE GUARDIAN
