‘How to Stop Labour’s Autumn of Discontent Turning Into Farage’s Winter of Despair’

History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme.  We look back to make sense of complex and bewildering moments.  As we face exactly such a time now, my mind keeps drifting back to the late 1970s and the foreboding gloom that something still opaque, still nascent was starting to cast its dark shadow over our lives and our country.  Back then, what was to become known as Thatcherism, was still ill-formed, the old was not yet dead but was dying, the new had not been born but was gestating. And all around were morbid symptoms, not least Labour’s Winter of Discontent. 

Today it is Labour’s Autumn of Discontent. It isn’t just that they languish in the polls even slipping behind the Greens in fourth place in one, that the Prime Minister is the most unpopular on record, that tens of thousands have left the party, or that they face wipeout in their heartland of Wales following the Caerphilly by-election last week. It’s that they have no plan to change any of this, no inspiring vision for the country, no alternative economic model, no way of running public services, no culture that creates the necessary alliances and networks for big change.  The tragedy is that they actively reject the very ideas and the culture that will get them out of the dead end that they have decided to drive themselves into.   

Instead, what we get is a Government on its knees to the shrine of growth, a goal over which they have little if any short or medium term influence and end up not with a mantra of long term investment in people and places, but desperate attempts to kick start an economy with tried, tested and failed remedies like “cutting business red tape”, while repeating the economically illiterate mantra of the right that governments can’t spend more or it will ‘max out on its credit card’. We have been here before. We know where all this ends.

Having tried to blame the Conservatives for the doom and gloom, which was valid because of the economic inheritance they bestowed on Labour, but without any real narrative of hope, the Government is now starting to blame Brexit for its woes.  And of course, Brexit was and is economically damaging. But we left the European Union before Keir Starmer became Prime Minister and they therefore knew about its economic consequences before they were elected. The case for rejoining the EU will grow stronger, but that will only be achieved on the basis of a consistent approach, not as a mere excuse for why this government is failing to lift people’s living standards. 

After little more than a year and with a huge majority, this is a Government that is now in survive the day mode and they will be shameless in pulling any rabbit, like the sudden announcement on ID cards, from any hat, to get them through the next 24 hours. Virtually none of it will be thought through or strategic and will reinforce the same self-defeating behaviour. The Government is in a nosedive of its own making.

Whether the Deputy Leadership election changes any of this remains to be seen. Lucy Powell now has her own independent mandate from the membership which she can use as radically as she decides.  Given the existential crisis of the party, as the new Deputy Leader the onus is on her to push not just for reforms of the party but policies that first stop the haemorrhaging of support which has seen membership fall from over 500,000 to reportedly little more than 200,000, before credibility can be rebuilt.  If she doesn’t push sufficiently then what currently feels ominous can become inevitable and history will start to rhyme once more.     

James Callaghan, Labour’s Prime Minister in the late 1970s, famously remarked “You know there are times, perhaps once every thirty years, when there is a sea-change in politics. It then does not matter what you say or what you do. There is a shift in what the public wants and what it approves of. I suspect there is now such a sea-change, and it is for Mrs Thatcher.”

Is this such a sea-change moment? Is it a moment for Mr Farage. Well, we can’t say we weren’t warned, or we didn’t know.  The contours of Thatcherism were there to be seen as they are with Farageism. The same talk of deregulation and kitchen table economics still espoused by Rachel Reeves but now tinged with both economic populism around public ownership of utilities like water, but also the populist nativism on immigration.  

Back then we couldn’t see how far Thatcher would go, the determination to crush the miners and the trade unions, to actively deindustrialise and to let the City of London fill its boots, to sell off all the family silver to pay for tax cuts and not social investment and to carry off her greatest self-proclaimed achievement, namely “Tony Blair and New Labour. We forced our opponents to change their minds”.

If elected to office, we don’t know how far Nigel Farage might go. Farage himself claims to be a bulwark against the far right, with the warning that if he doesn’t succeed far worse people will. Maybe. Or more likely it could be a leap through the looking glass to a world in which our democratic and civil liberties are crushed and we see a permanent shift towards a post-democratic authoritarian state. It’s not a chance we should take. 

Back in the 70s the big switch was away from government intervention.  Again, Callaghan led the charge to the right from the left when he said “We used to think that you could spend your way out of a recession and increase employment by cutting taxes and boosting government spending. I tell you in all candour that that option no longer exists, and in so far as it ever did exist”.

This was a repudiation of the fundamental and timeless truth of Keynesian economics that “If we can do it, we can afford it”. By that Keynes meant that if we have the land, the labour and the raw materials we can do what we want with them, and much better for growth if they are used productively and not left idle. 

The destiny of Farage and this country are not a given.  There is nothing inevitable about his victory. He must never be underestimated as the most influential political leader since Thatcher. But his personality, his party and his project are brittle. And his success is almost totally reliant on the failure of progressives to govern effectively.  Therefore, his premiership will only become more inevitable unless this government can be reset dramatically. All the ideas we need to rebuild our economy and society already exist, from what we do about the bond market, to how we can tax wealth, build affordable social houses and make utility’s public again.   

The energy around Zack Polanski and the Green Party, the hope, despite poor leadership, for Your Party, the rise of Plaid Cymru, the fact that Ed Miliband keeps topping the polls among Labour members on who is the best member of the Cabinet, the interest in Andy Burnham and the launch of Mainstream in Labour show the appetite for the progressive change. 

So far Labour’s leadership has kept on doing the same thing, while expecting a different outcome. In all this, Keir Starmer rather resembles James Callaghan, a directionless and somewhat hapless Prime Minister who paved the way to a dark era for our country. That was then, this is now. It’s time to start writing our own future.