All Over The Shop

Ben Wildsmith

As a recovering Labour voter, I’ve had to take a full audit of the poor decision-making and self-deception that led to my lowest moments.

It’s no good just renouncing the party and thinking everything will be okay. That’s what therapists call being a ‘Dry Blairite’. If you wish to build a sustainable life in which you don’t relapse and endorse speculative warfare or cruelty to the poor, then you must examine the ideological fundamentals of your previous condition.

In 1992, I shook Neil Kinnock’s hand. I can talk about this now, my life is in a far better place than it was as a lost 19-year-old, busking on the streets of Birmingham to afford a pair of winklepicker boots with three buckles and a zip up the middle from Oasis next to the Virgin Megastore.

When the Labour leader came campaigning at a factory down my road in the run-up to that year’s election, I was excited to see him.

‘The Kingdom of Bevan is Nye!’ I told him as he death-gripped my innocent hand in his sweaty, treacherous mauler.

‘There’s breeding!’ he exclaimed.

We all know what came next. Well, anybody but the tragically naïve already knew.

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Disappearing act

Labour’s disappearing act during the miners’ strike revealed the unsettling void where its heart ought to be. From here on, its defining trait was negative. It no longer mattered what the party stood for, only that it wasn’t the Tories.

Declaring the ideological battle lost, Kinnock’s Labour became an exercise in branding. Peter Mandelson swapped out the red flag for a rose and demanded a middle-class aesthetic from anyone with a public role.

By the time that Tony Blair fulfilled Mandelsonian prophecy, the party was content to parade John Prescott around as a sort of comic mascot who represented its vulgar beginnings.

As international finance was ushered into every area of our lives, from the NHS to the bins; as industrial towns were asset-stripped into dereliction; as death rained down on the Middle East, Labour’s corporate schtick held firm. We are the centre; we are sensible…

And here we are again. Having voted for the Not the Tories Party last year, the nation finds itself being governed by a Labour Party that remains ideologically all over the shop, whilst lacking the charisma or presentation skills to cover it up.

Peering through a telescope from the Rhondda to an agreeable North London kitchen, I spied Lord Kinnock holding forth once again this week in an interview with Prospect Magazine.

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‘Paralytic caution’

Observing Keir Starmer’s party stumbling ever further to the right in pursuit of Nigel Farage fanatics, the grandee’s grandee diagnosed ‘paralytic caution’ in the government and urged it to be brave, tax the rich and invest.

This is the absolute nub of why Labour has lost its way straight from the horse’s mouth.

For Kinnock, it is cautious to under-tax society and allow our social fabric to unravel further with each budget. To address structural problems in society is something that he considers brave. In his world, allowing free rein to the markets and rewarding profiteering is the default route.

Taxing in line with most of Europe, on the other hand, so that the fundamentals of civic society work properly is somehow thrillingly audacious. The technical terminology for this sort of thinking is ‘arse about tit’.

Quite how Kinnock, and Labour, became persuaded that extremist, destructive, Thatcherite economics were somehow the unassailable status quo is a mystery to me. I’ll take a guess, though, that after the 1987 election loss, the party saw Thatcher’s appeal to the electorate becoming permanent.

Giving way on the fundamentals began to look like the only way to counter an existential threat. Perhaps it was intended to be temporary at first, a bridgehead into power so that the party could drag the UK back towards the centre.

Entrenched

Elsewhere in the interview Kinnock discusses Starmer’s Powellite immigration rhetoric. He worries that Labour might lose its identity if it fights Reform UK on Farage’s preferred pitch.

If his own legacy yields a lesson, it is that shifts like this tend to become permanent, as those in the party who have profited from them become entrenched in its hierarchy.

Someone with no interest in political history would look at Labour and see a market-led capitalist party of austerity that is anti-immigration, opposed to protest, and given to military solutions in foreign affairs.

Take away its banners and songs, and that’s what you’re left with.

‘We’re alright!’ Kinnock roared to a Sheffield rally, the week after I met him. Well, yes, I guess you have been, Neil.