That the Labour Party is in danger of becoming a regional party, almost non-existent outside its heartlands, such as Scotland, the North, south Wales and London, has been much remarked upon. However, another danger, less obvious, is that it also seems to me in danger of becoming, and indeed to a degree already has become, in a sense contrary to its founding spirit, a sectional party dominated by cultural leftism and identity politics. Let me explain.
The Labour Party went through a process under Tony Blair whereby, in his banal attempts to soft-soap the middle classes, it came to retreat from its core commitment to the twin views that socio-economic class is the basic source of exploitation in society, and that the elimination, or at least amelioration, of the privilege and disadvantage attendant on untrammelled capitalism and class division is the historic mission of the left. With the changing social structure of Britain, the decline of post-war class loyalties and consciousness, and the cultural revolution unleashed by Thatcherism, Labour arrived at the self-perception that it was no longer possible to secure election on platforms underpinned by this basic analysis. Not only that, but in an effort to make a virtue of perceived-necessity, Blair and some of his more zealous disciples seemed to come to truly believe that class division and privilege was no longer important.
An unintended and unfortunate consequence of this was that many elements in the Labour Party began, in an act of displacement, to focus more heavily in their analysis of British society on other sources of exploitation and disadvantage, such as homophobia, sexism, and racism. If being poor is not the most important and all-pervading handicap in British society, they seemed to reason, then it must be being gay! Or being a woman! Or being a transsexual! And so on and so forth with myriad other identity tags and labels.
Now, clearly racism, sexism and homophobia, etc, are senseless and do act as sources of disadvantage and discrimination. However, the Labour Party’s cultural leftist wing (exemplified by Harriet Harman) has shown a tendency to elevate these problems unduly. Cultural leftism is, so far as I see it, the idea that certain demographic groups, defined by some inborn or culturally constructed characteristic – being a woman, being gay etc - are more oppressed than others and deserve special favours, with a particular proviso; that being poor no longer counts as a valid identity tag of oppression, or is certainly a less important one.
The brute fact, however, is this. Class is far more important than any other source of disadvantage. Undoubtedly, discrimination against women, and gay people, and black people, and so on, does exist, and is despicable, and of course Labour should oppose sexism, racism and homophobia (a role we have performed honourably since the 60s). However, no amount of quibbling can disguise the fundamental fact that being poor is far more of a handicap than belonging to any of these other identity groups. Many people who are female, or black, or gay live fulfilling lives largely free of obvious oppression and disadvantage in modern British society. Why? Largely, because they are affluent enough to be in a position where they have the resources and opportunities to do what they want to do and realise themselves. Being black or female or gay is not as alienating, restricting or oppressive as simply being poor, and indeed generally the injustices suffered by people on the basis of their race or sexual orientation or gender are intensified by poverty.
This is not really recognised sufficiently in the modern Labour Party, with its obsession with non-class based sectional demographic interest groups – the LGBT movement, feminism, the BAME movement, and so on, manifested in such things as all-women shortlists, and a preoccupation with the number of black or Asian representatives we have, for example. Part of me thinks that this is because we are dominated by middle-class Fabians who, having had little experience of being poor, tend to fall too readily into assuming equivalence between class, and race, sexuality and gender. Whatever the reason, internal hacks or MPs are always mithering about the lack of female or black representation in the Labour Party, and we obsess over identity politics to an inordinate degree, but what about the lack of working class representation in parliament? I do not necessarily mean that we should have ‘all working class shortlists’ (such devices seem to me to be, more than anything, a way of imposing central control on local CLPS, and defining who is or is not working class would be fraught with difficulty), or even that questions of personnel are necessarily all that important, but that the interests of working class people need forceful representation in parliament, and that their interests deserve predominance over questions of identity politics. After all, these interests have, in many ways, been neglected sorely in parliament over the past 30 years, in a way that, for example, the interests of gay people (thanks to the last Labour government) have not.
So we come to a situation whereby there is a perception amongst certain elements of the working class, particularly the white working class, which is not entirely unjustified, that the Labour Party stands for gay people, immigrants, and women, but not so much for them. Now, this does not mean that we should abandon our liberalism on issues of race, gender and sexuality, but that we should divert our focus from that liberalism and concentrate instead on what is to my mind the fundamental founding mission of the Labour Party – to ameliorate the causes and consequences of socio-economic inequality and class division.
This is a difficult task, however, because class divisions are far more nuanced and subtle, and more difficult to solve, than other forms of division. Class-war politics is not really feasible, and we no longer have an homogenous industrial working class base. However, a focus on the bread-and-butter issues that shape the contours of class and inequality in Britain, such as housing, public services, education, the welfare state, rights at work, and so on, formulated in such a way as to take account of the economic anxieties of the middle class (who have lost out hugely in relative terms to a small elite at the top in recent years, and in that sense are, relatively, victims of class division too), is feasible, and it is politically viable. What’s more, if accompanied with a toning down of our apparent obsession with gender, sexuality and race, it would reconnect us with our working class supporters and unite us without forsaking our admirably liberal attitudes.
