Recent history
demonstrates that in the future the Labour party is probably going to have to
choose between being slightly economically right of centre and having a chance
at winning an election again, or reverting back to its left wing roots and
never winning an election again.
You have to consider why
this is probably true. Labour has not won an election majority since the 1970s,
except for when the slightly right of centre Tony Blair led them on three
successive occasions. Even more so than anyone expected, Ed Miliband's shift to
the left away from Blair's New Labour made them unelectable again. The upshot
is, left wing parties don't win UK
majorities anymore (the SNP exception to this in Scotland is too meagre in numbers to have
any real bearing on the UK
What about Labour's
response then? Recently I suggested that people even further to the left than
Ed Miliband would probably end up splitting off into another group, as it's
clear from recent events that back to the centre-right is where this next
Labour is heading under either Andy Burnham, Liz Kendall or Yvette Cooper.
This is a shame. While far
left is very far from my position economically, the working classes won't have
any proper representation under Burnham, Kendall or Cooper, because their job
is not to make Labour socialist again, it is make them electorally popular
again - and the only way they can do this is by vying for the centre-right
ground.
That's why I predict a
left wing split at some point in the near future - the socialist faction is
going to demand some better representation, and short of moving to Scotland
If there is a Labour
split, then the party will surely gravitate towards a political void, just as
the Liberal party did in the 1930s, leaving a very fractionated opposition to
the Conservatives that is unlikely to budge them for decades to come.
The 19th century Liberal party
rose to the fore due in no small part to the dynamic and forceful rise of
industry against conservative land owners, and the 20th century Labour party rose
to the fore due in no small part to the dynamic and forceful rise of the unions
against what they saw as the capitalist pig.
But with so many more people
educated about the extent to which the free market has been the biggest driver
of human progression in the past two centuries, and how private enterprise is
more efficient and innovative than public ownership, it seems to be the case
that, apart from the relatively small number of socialists chomping at the bit,
there is currently far less to grumble about, which, as recent history has
shown, makes it nigh-on impossible to be a successful left wing opposition
party. Incidentally, polls also suggest that less than 15% of the UK
The other thing to realise
on the back of this is that, as is evidenced by London's success, most future
prosperity will not come about through the hard sweat of manual labour, it will
come through skills like those found in science, technology, financial and
other service based industries, which continue to make Britain far more prosperous
than in days gone by - perhaps explaining why so many people now feel like they belong
in the middle classes.
That's even more reason to
suspect that the divide will narrow, as people's absolute gains become ever
more important than the relative inequalities. For that reason the age-old
class conflicts of rich vs. poor and capitalists vs. the workers are
gradually sliding into oblivion. Not wholly so - and not yet of course, as
there are still plenty of societal wrongs to be put right, and still many
people struggling on a daily basis - but I'm pretty certain that as we carry on
my prediction will come to pass and we will see the end of the Labour party as
we know it.
