About a month ago, Neal Lawson, a member of Labour since the late 70s, got a letter from the party’s governance and legal unit, inviting him to defend himself over a two-year-old tweet. His apparent offence? He had praised an example of cooperation between the Lib Dems and the Green party, saying: “This is what grown-up politics looks like.” If this was deemed to be an incitement to vote for a party other than Labour, he was warned, he would be in breach of party rules and expelled.
“Whether I’m a member of the Labour party or not is inconsequential,” Lawson insists, when I meet him in his south London offices. But it was quite a slap in the face for a man who has been so intimately involved with the party. He has spent 20 years as the head of the membership organisation Compass. Today, it focuses on the progressive alliance – how parties with shared values can cooperate to beat the Conservatives, rather than splitting the vote. But when he founded Compass in 2003, it was conceived as a critical friend to Labour, a sort of Cassandra-chorus of the soft left, to remind the government what its values were. Over the years, it has campaigned on issues such as high executive pay and loan sharks.
I’ve been talking to Lawson about a progressive alliance for years, ever since we were debating whether to call it a “rebel alliance” or a “coalition of the losers”. He looks the same as he always has – energetic, tanned, a bit restless. Now 60, and also working as a consultant with Jericho Chambers, which advises corporations on pro-social behaviour (fair wages, green policies, workplace rights), he grew up in Bexleyheath, south-east London. His father was a printer; his mother worked in a shoe shop. “My dad was father of the chapel on Fleet Street,” he says, “so we were like Labour aristocracy, completely blue collar. My name was on the list to get a job in printing.” That’s how it worked in the 80s: you put your son’s name down and then when they were 16, they would be in. When it came to it, though, he went to Trent Polytechnic (now university) instead – “which they’ve made me a doctor of”. This made him the first member of his family to enter tertiary education and the first to join Labour Students, with whom he had 80s skirmishes with the Militant tendency. After that, he joined the Transport and General Workers’ Union, before working for Gordon Brown as an adviser and speechwriter in the run-up to Labour’s 1997 landslide victory. “That’s not a bad Labour history, is it?” he asks, rhetorically, knowing full well that this is more than not-bad – a Russian spy, trained from birth to pass as part of Labour’s bloodstream, wouldn’t have done anything differently.
In 1992, he co-founded Renewal, Labour’s journal of ideas. The party was reeling, humiliated by defeat to John Major. “It was a solar plexus blow: it destroyed everyone’s confidence. We all felt it so keenly, we just had to start winning.” By early 1997, in that whatever-it-takes spirit, Tony Blair and Paddy Ashdown were communicating closely, brokered by Roy Jenkins. “I set the meeting up, in the Goring hotel, where the whole electoral deal was done,” Lawson recalls, with vim. Peter Mandelson and Chris Rennard, election campaign directors for Labour and the Lib Dems respectively, “swapped their target seat lists, which the Mirror then printed: ‘If you live here and want the Tories out, vote for that.’ I’m the person who did that, and they want to throw me out of the party? Fuck them.”
I tell him I can take swearing out if it is used adjectivally, but not if he’s going to use it as a verb. This is a journalistic rule I’ve made up on the spot. “We need emotion in politics,” he says, nonchalantly.
It’s a bit of a “you-ok-hun?” moment for the Labour party. If this disciplinary move sounds bizarre, it has previous, just not so far with such a high-profile centrist dad. There were a lot of expulsions in the drive to root out antisemitism in the party, which was widely accepted as necessary; this segued into a more general ejection of Corbynistas, which was more contentious, but they often went without a fight, having lost their enthusiasm under the new leader anyway. Where members did appeal, so far none has been successful.
But Labour has also been keeping candidates off shortlists for councillors, mayors and prospective parliamentary candidates, and that process is a much more black box affair, where the National Executive Committee holds a hearing and hands down a decision, with no appeal possible. There’s so little transparency that often you’ll only notice it has happened when it’s to someone who already had a profile. I was really surprised, for instance, when Emma Dent Coad was kept off the shortlist for the Kensington seat, in October last year, for “concerning social media activity”. No question, she had a scratchy relationship with the leadership, and was at the left edge of the party, but she also had rock-solid credentials as a local councillor and was the only Labour MP to win this seat since its creation in the 70s. Residents’ associations in Tory wards wrote to Keir Starmer to complain.
Others were more surprised when Jamie Driscoll, the North of Tyne mayor, was barred from standing for the new north-east mayoralty. (He has since resigned from the party to run as an independent candidate.) That winnowing-out of candidates who don’t match the leaders’ vision has “always gone on to some extent”, Lawson concurs, “but nowhere near to the industrial level that this is, right down to council seats they can’t win. They’re making sure that no one on the left has got a platform. They’re playing whack-a-mole everywhere.”
This must feel like an age-old Labour story. Lawson remembers the militant purges of the 80s, “the Kinnock years, policy renewal – I was involved with all of that”. Blair, of course, marked the high point of the command-and-control atmosphere.
It was always rumoured that he banned beards from the shadow cabinet, for looking too leftwing. And sure, I haven’t forgotten that he did actually win.
But those Labour years between 1992 and 1997 – for all the fighting – were also a “really rich intellectual environment”, Lawson says. He reels off a list of thinkers – Anthony Giddens, Charlie Leadbetter, Will Hutton – and thinktanks: “Demos took off, the Institute for Public Policy Research found its feet again, we had all these seminars, and then when we got into Downing Street, more seminars, exploring the third way until I eventually realised it was a wild goose chase. The real difference was, Blair and Brown engaged in debate, right? They tried to defend their position and argue for it.” This is true to a weird degree: I remember one Labour apparatchik taking me for a drink to persuade me that public-private partnerships were good, actually. This was 1998, and I was writing listings for the Evening Standard.
Blair’s people, Lawson continues, were “hegemonic: their attitude was: ‘We want everyone to be part of this thing.’ It may have been clever co-option on their part” – quelling dissent by drawing in everyone – “but whatever it was, it was a damn sight more intriguing and inquiring and interesting than this silence … This lot, there’s no intellectual conversation to be had.”
Unarguably, whatever conversations are happening at the highest level of the Labour party, the left and, in Lawson’s case at least, the soft-to-centre, are no longer involved, but it would be unfair to conclude that no conversations are happening. However, it is hard to get to the bottom of what the vision actually is. Dominant figures such as Morgan McSweeney, the founder of Labour Together, and Luke Akehurst, the secretary of Labour First, are keenly focused on unity in the party, but I don’t think I’m speaking out of turn when I say that nobody outside their clique knows what they want to unify around. Lawson thinks they have only one project: “To seal the tomb of the left in Labour, to make sure there’s no alternative, not even the soft left, because the soft left is the gateway drug to the hard left. They nearly lost control of the party [to Corbyn and, arguably, to Ed Miliband], and they were lucky to get back in again. I think it is absolutely industrial, cynical, determined and it’s never going to stop. They need to get rid of the seedbed, anything that might produce people who could support Lisa Nandy or Andy Burnham or someone we don’t yet know of, in the future”.
If it is as cut and dried as that, Starmer’s leadership campaign – very much of the sensible left, with a list of pledges around Labour classics such as renationalisation, and the overall intimation that he’d be Corbyn-without-the-cranks – has panned out quite surprisingly. Lawson is only slightly surprised: “I smelled a rat when Keir was campaigning, but not as bad as this.” Recent leaks from the shadow cabinet are that big ideas on green industrial strategy are sidelined to focus on “fiscal credibility”, and Starmer wants to steer away from hopes and dreams and hates tree huggers. Someone on Twitter said: “Labour: tough on hope, tough on the causes of hope.” The risks of play-it-safe Labour politics unfolded precisely in last week’s three by-elections: you might win (Selby); you might cede to a campaign that is simply more crunchy than your own (Uxbridge); and if you think you can wish away Lib Dem support, rather than working with it, you’re dreaming (Somerton and Frome). I say all this in solid critical-friend spirit: I’ll be voting Labour come what may.
Which, again, approximates what many Labour voters felt before the 1997 landslide, but then, Lawson says: “’97, pretty talented group of people, quite a rich political project, in the most benign circumstances, no distributional tensions whatsoever”. What does distributional tension mean? “Well, there was loads of money. All you had to do was keep top-skimming the City and plough back into schools, Sure Start. There were no strikes. The question then was: ‘How do you spend all of this money?’ That’s what we’re comparing and contrasting. I keep looking at what we have now, going: ‘This ain’t gonna fly.’ Most political projects end up in a bunker; this one’s starting in a bunker. What culture does this take into government? If they’re like this now, they’re going to be like this in government, with stilts on.”
Lawson thinks it’s complacent to assume that people will vote Labour whatever happens; he wonders how many people will vote Green or abstain. But more than that, he says, getting elected is only the beginning: if a Labour government comes in and underperforms, fails to deliver meaningful improvements to the millions of lives that have been assailed by crises both caused by Conservatives and beyond them, “that opens up the trapdoor to the far right” for the election after next. “That’s how big this is. The only thing that stops the authoritarian right is a new politics, and Labour are currently a million miles away from that.”
Obligatorily, then, we end on proportional representation, the change to the system all Labour members agree with, the one the party will never really countenance, not even at its most radical (“John McDonnell supported PR but he didn’t support it enough to make it a red line, did he?”), the only change that would ever see this country’s progressive electoral majority reflected in its parliament. “There’s a great convergence: XR, the Tax Justice Network, the Fairness Foundation, they’re all coming over to the fact that democracy is a first-order issue,” Lawson says. (The Greens and the Lib Dems are, of course, long-term proponents.) Democratic renewal doesn’t end with PR – Lawson talks about quadratic voting, where each person has a number of votes and distributes them according to where they prioritise issues, and liquid democracy, where you can rescind and reallocate your support more often than once every five years, and, like all “deeper democracy, ever deeper democracy” programmes, it sounds like really hard work. But “less democracy, always less democracy”, such as we’ve experienced post-Brexit, has hardly been a walk in the park.
I don’t think Lawson will be expelled from the Labour party although, to be fair, in talking about it, he’s now breached the rules of the letter he got about the other rules, so it’s not beyond the realms of possibility. And precisely because I’ve seen the Labour party at war with itself for as long as I’ve been alive, and for a load of different reasons that are often the same reasons, I cannot believe the current animus is insurmountable, or final. I want to screen Lyndon B Johnson’s 1964 election video at some big Labour meeting, perhaps conference. It’s only 60 seconds: we must either love each other, or we must die. Those are the stakes.
