When the second Labour government fell apart in the summer of 1931, the party shattered in all directions. Some went with Oswald Mosley, in a split destined to create a fascist party. Others, like the North Lanarkshire MP Jennie Lee, wanted the Independent Labour Party to disaffiliate from Labour and launch a new, left wing force.
In response, pacing around Lee’s flat in Bloomsbury, the left wing firebrand Nye Bevan delivered a tirade that, in the light of where we are, seems relevant today. Your epitaph, he told her, will be “pure, but impotent… You will not influence the course of British politics by so much as a hair’s breadth.
“I tell you it is the Labour Party or nothing. I know all its faults, all its dangers. But it is the party that we have taught millions of working people to look to and regard as their own. We can’t undo what we have done. And I am by no means convinced that something cannot yet be made of it.”
Bevan would go on to found the NHS, Lee the Open University. Yet these two giants of the Labour tradition were constantly at odds with their own party, achieving progress more by friction than persuasion.
In this election week, with the Labour Party resurgent, I feel the same friction everywhere around Labour politics. Sure, after a door-knocking session, everybody smiles for the selfie. We’ve learned to be happy warriors on Instagram and TikTok.
Yet according to the polls, the salient feature of the election campaign on the left is that the Greens and certain independents have eaten into Labour’s vote, leaving Labour activists, including myself, mounting a defensive campaign in up to eight seats.
The narrative that Labour is somehow “centre right”, not left; that Starmer is no different from Sunak; that Labour has no offer on climate, and will pursue austerity – though it is fairly absent from the mainstream media – is well embedded in the social media networks of young people. Anecdotally, it is driving pledges to abstain, just as much as support for the Greens.
As for the impact of Gaza, a YouGov poll last week showed that while 72% of Black Britons will support Labour, only 44% of Pakistanis and Bangladeshis will, with 29% of this group saying they will vote Green.
To me, as for Nye Bevan, this looks like luxury politics. I understand why young people, environmentalists and some Muslims might feel disconnected from the language of the Labour front bench. I know how frustrated some feel over Labour’s refusal to go toe-to-toe with the right over the culture wars.
But five minutes on the doorstep in any seat where Reform is gaining traction should be enough to reframe the problem.
If the polls are right, we could see anything between three and 18 Reform MPs elected. If the Tories bomb, and go through their own fragmentation trauma, we could see the emergence in the commons of an openly Islamophobic, far right party, taking aim at reproductive rights and refugees for the next five years. Aided by Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin and the French far right, that will change the dynamics of British politics for the worse.
Faced with that, only Labour has taken the political fight to Reform. In fact, the entire Labour strategy after Keir Starmer took over was focused on providing bread-and-butter alternatives to the conservative nationalism that is flourishing in the so-called Red Wall.
Labour has done so by turning the green transition into an issue of jobs, transport and inward investment. It has refused to resurrect demands to rejoin the European Union. It has – after a chaotic start – successfully disengaged from the war between trans rights activists and their radical feminist opponents.
It has, in short, refused the culture wars, while aligning its positions on crime, migration and defence with those of its voters in small towns, not university campuses.
By doing so it has created an electoral coalition that, if handled deftly, can keep the far right on the fringes and the Tories out of power for as long as they let their agenda be dictated by Trump and Nigel Farage.
As I tramped the streets of Birmingham Northfield during the 2019 election, I was uncertain whether we could ever achieve victory again, let alone the one that’s promised. Former Longbridge workers, down on our clipboards as lifelong Labour, were so alienated by the Corbyn brand that they politely slammed the door.
In the end, Starmer looks poised for victory because those around him understand what Bevan understood: Labour is the product of the working class; they want to “regard it as their own”.
Give it a half-decent, plausible programme on the economy and public services, and return it to the Labour mainstream over crime, migration and defence, and – despite the millions of pounds poured into right wing disinformation projects – they will come back.
And that position wasn’t just created by the work of the last four years. It was created by the work of Keir Hardie, Nye Bevan and Tony Benn. It was created by the mild, reformist class consciousness of the generations who fought two world wars and lived through the Depression.
What I say to my friends who are promising to abstain, or to back Green attempts to take down Labour shadow ministers, is this: Labour is building the defences of our democracy. The space for luxury politics only exists because generations of Labour-voting workers have created it.
So when I walk into the polling booth, I’ll do so not just to give the rising generation the chance of a just, net zero future. I’ll do it metaphorically with two coal miners by my side: my dad and grandad. And with my grandma, who made mortar shells in the war, and with my great-grandfather, who ran a branch of the Co-op when that was still a political act.
If the result’s anything like what the polling predicts, it will be as much their achievement as ours.
