It’s almost 40 years since I briefly locked my father in the house to prevent him voting SDP rather than Labour in the 1983 general election. Given the certainty of an overwhelming Conservative majority in the Harrogate and Knaresborough constituency, this was, in hindsight, a supremely futile act of sectarian intolerance. In fairness, I did let him out towards tea time and he made it to the polling station in the end.
Dad died seven years ago this week, and the polarised politics that have unfolded since his death have made me re-examine the choices he made at the ballot box. He voted for Harold Macmillan in 1959 and for Edward Heath in 1970, but also for Harold Wilson in 74 and Jim Callaghan in 79. Quintessentially, he was a defender of what was known as the postwar consensus – a “mixed economy” with a strong, pro-active role for the state and a place for public ownership, a seat at the top tables of decision-making for trade unions alongside government and employers, and a properly funded welfare state.
The societal arrangements, in short, which were to be swept away by Margaret Thatcher, but which had been broadly supported by both the Conservatives and Labour until the oil crisis struck in 1973. Horrified by the social cost of Thatcher’s pursuit of class warfare from the right, but perceiving Labour to have drifted too far towards doing the same from the left, Dad voted SDP because he saw the breakaway party as a lifeboat for a politics that brokered social conflict rather than fuelled it. It sank, scuppering Labour’s prospects as well and 14 more years of Tory rule ensued.
Today my father would certainly recoil at the ersatz Thatcherism offered by Liz Truss and her tax cuts. But neither would he find in Keir Starmer the politics of the old centre ground that he sought to preserve. Starmer’s model is Tony Blair, not Harold Wilson. New Labour more or less accepted the terms of the Thatcherite settlement. It softened the sharp edges to considerable effect through policies such as the introduction of the minimum wage and Sure Start. But it did not fundamentally challenge the economic liberalism of an age in which countervailing powers to capital were systematically wiped out, and individual aspiration, competition and choice became political mantras. The social democratic virtues of striking a balance between plural interests in society, which had created a notably more equal society by the 1970s, were submerged in the recesses of Labour’s memory – discredited in perpetuity by the trauma of the winter of discontent.
Following the Corbyn interlude, Starmer has taken Labour back within these Blairite guardrails for progressive politics. He has backtracked from public ownership pledges and banned frontbenchers from visiting union picket lines. Labour’s left accuses Starmer of betrayal; loyalists approve his caution on the grounds that Labour only wins elections when not summoning up ghosts of the socialist past. David Miliband summed up a certain kind of exasperation with Starmer’s critics when telling Times Radio: “John McDonnell said, ‘Look even Labour MPs went on picket lines in the 1970s. Even Shirley Williams went on a picket line!’ But of course it didn’t end very well. It ended in the winter of discontent and it ended in four Tory governments and it ended in 3 million unemployed.”
Labour does need to move on, but not in the manner Miliband implies. If it is to read the signs of these times, rather than those of half a century ago, it needs to move away from the fearful politics that uses a version of the 1970s as justification for debilitating timidity now. The scandal of our water companies, whose executives trousered bonuses up by 20% last year, despite failing to meet sewage pollution targets, was not made in the 1970s; it is an indictment of the failed privatisation model that followed. Economic decline in post-industrial regions, problems with supply chains and over-dependence on China cannot be blamed on militant trade unions; they are the result of blind subservience to flawed theories of globalisation.
The crisis in social care is not the result of a failing public sector; it is the result of the penetration of our care homes by private capital, which continues to seek high returns at the expense of abysmally paid carers. Public ownership has not created the current chaos on the railways and the absence of a strategic vision for their future; it is down to a dysfunctional franchising model which has seen the privately run Avanti West Coast line stripped back to a skeleton service while the government-run east coast line operates smoothly.
The current “omnicrisis” was incubated in the Thatcherite response to the problems of the 70s. Labour thus has an enormous opportunity. The public is ready to hear the case made for a new way of doing things. After the experience of the pandemic, it is ready to listen to arguments for a better balance between public and private, between capital and labour and between London and the rest of the country. It is ready for something warmer, fairer and more convivial than Liz Truss’s offer of libertarianism, tax cuts for the better-off and an “aspiration nation”. The favourable response to Labour’s proposed energy price freeze among Conservative voters reflected this.
Following the 2019 election, a minority of influential Conservatives such as Michael Gove understood this change in the political weather. The levelling up agenda was an attempted response, but that vision has died a death with Boris Johnson’s premiership. Labour has the field to itself. There are some encouraging signs that it will play on it. Lisa Nandy has talked of the need to “rebalance” power between capital and labour, cities and towns, the asset-poor and the asset-rich. Angela Rayner and Rachel Reeves’s proposal for a national living wage partly addresses the first of those imbalances, but Labour could go further in terms of workplace democracy and the role of unions.
The burden of taxation should move away from work to consumption and unearned wealth. The case for public ownership in strategic sectors should be made. Devolution proposals should be radical, giving real power back to local government and communities. British manufacturing, run-down and undervalued since the 1980s, should be revived with the challenge of net zero becoming the catalyst for its renaissance.
As it maintains a steady rather than remarkable lead in the polls, Labour’s modern caution is understandable. Its defeats since the 1970s have been traumatic, and it was a take-no-chances strategy that informed its greatest triumph in 1997. But hinge-points in political history do come along. This could be one, if Labour is bold enough to seize the moment. After four decades in which it has been on the back foot, the party has the chance to take charge of a reset in British politics. Rightwing fatuities concerning the 1970s should be ignored. This moment is about taking on and dismantling the excesses, inefficiencies and injustices of the era that followed. A truly social democratic politics that my father would recognise and vote for can win the day.
Julian Coman is a Guardian associate editor
