Two tribes go to war: making sense of the battle for Labour

Piece for Medium

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 Two tribes go to war: making sense of the battle for Labour

In 2013, commenting on the downward spiral of his party, Republican consultant Mike Murphy observed:

“There seem to be two schools of thought in GOP. One group, the Mathematicians, look at the GOP’s losing streak and the changing demography of the country and say the party needs to make real changes to attract voters beyond the old Republican base of white guys. Not just mechanics, but also policy. They want to modernize conservatism and change some of the old dogma on big issues like same sex marriage. I’m one of them. The other group, the Priests, say the problem is we don’t have enough ideological purity. We must have faith, be pure and nominate “real conservatives” (whatever that means; the Priests are a bit slippery about their definitions) who will fight without compromise against liberalism. The Priests are mostly focused on the sins we are against; they say our problem is a lack of intensity; if we are passionate and loud enough, we will alert and win over the rest of the country. The Mathematicians hear all this and think the Priests are totally in a… echo chamber of their own creation and disconnected from the reality of today’s electorate…The Priests hear the Mathematicians and think they are all sell-outs.”

This is the debate that is defining all kinds of political upheaval across the Western world today. It is not a simple matter of left vs right, establishment vs grass roots or the centre against the fringe. In fact it’s happening between and within movements and organisations of all kinds — political and civil society — all across the political spectrum.

It is though at it’s most obvious in the UK in the fight going on within the Labour party, where the priestly disposition of the influx of new members is at odds with the party apparatus and longer standing members. What makes this so intractable, and gives it the feeling of a culture war, is that is is not a pitched battle over policy per se — the differences between the two sides are over stated. It’s really a fight between two different modes of activism; one that have at their core two different and largely incompatible theories of persuasion, and how you win people over to your side.

The mathematicians, such as we are, start from a position that most people — voters, members of the public — disagree with us, and need to be won round. Our model of persuasion is one built on compromise; hold the same objective but meet the person you’re trying to win over half way, give a little on mood music or detail if you need to; half a loaf is better than no loaf. At it’s worst it can feel transactional but it is also rooted in a sort of humility and pragmatism. Out of this approach falls the more professionalised approach to campaigns associated with New Labour, and an approach to communications (that I outlined here) focused on earning the right to be heard.

The priests, on the other hand, start from the position that people already agree with them — they just don’t know it yet; in some way they have had their consciousness obscured. In so far as they even think about ordinary people that disagree with them, they will often explain things in terms of the message not being properly heard. Perhaps it’s being distorted by a lack of conviction, some third party or ne’er-do-wells in the media. Or, when the cognitive dissonance becomes too much, faith is held in the idea of a large hitherto unengaged mass, just waiting out there, desperate to be inspired. Either way, the remedy is almost always to shout louder and shout better.

Their approach to persuasion was captured quite amusingly in a recent LRB piece, covering a Momentum event in the swing seat of Nuneaton:

“I had checked the local branch’s Facebook page on the train: 35 people were confirmed as attending and someone had recently posted an article entitled ‘1983: The Biggest Myth in Labour Party History’. As I approached a woman was bellowing ‘Vote Labour! Save yourselves! The Tories will destroy you!’ to no one in particular….The speeches were similar to those I’d heard elsewhere…Only a handful of passers-by stopped to listen…”

This is a creed best imbued in Tony Benn’s famous quote about sign posts v.s weathervanes. If you hold your ground and your line you will be there to reap the benefits when the tide of history turns your way. This has the virtue we commonly ascribe to ‘sticking to one’s principles’. It also tends to give rise more easily to things like paranoia, conspiracy and self-pity.

Again, this is not a simple matter of left or right. For example, I think Owen Jones’ estrangement from Corbynism, such as it is, is probably based on this divide. Though formidable in the pulpit he has a genuine interest in how you win people over by starting from where they are. He is a mathematician amid a movement of priests.

Even the likes of Paul Mason or Aaron Bastani in their better moments have at times shown flashes of realism over winning over UKIP or Tory voters.

But the Corbynite backlash against Mason’s proposed pragmatism on free movement is instructive. He is fundamentally misunderstanding the social movement he has ridden in on. If nothing else it is a movement built on a total rejection of any compromise, in either detail or framing and communications. Any attempts to professionalise it is doomed to fail.

Indeed, at it’s core Corbynism’s sole interest is not policy or elections but process — namely, defeating the mathematicians’ mode of party politics and activism, which they associate with capitulation. This currently travels under more pleasant talk of ‘letting members decide policy’, ‘party democracy’, ‘wrestling back control from elites’ and so on, but it should be seen for what it is. Much more than anything else, it is what makes it so urgent that it must be defeated.

We on the other side have to understand it as a challenge to our entire philosophy of politics, and learn to fight on those terms.

There are a number of reasons for this.

Firstly, for what it’s worth, every shred of evidence around voter psychology suggests you can persuade voters — but only if you make the argument with a value frame they have some kind of sympathy with. So you can move people to a progressive place on immigration or welfare, for instance, but you have to talk about things like contribution or patriotism — things many left activists feel instinctively uncomfortable with. Banging on about open borders or entitlement may feel good but it will always bounce off people.

In more cynical moments, you suspect many of the ‘priests’ know this — they just don’t care. From this perspective their mode of politics seems much more about expression than anything else; it is about what they want to say, not what the unpersuaded need to hear. We have a habit of saying this is ‘naive’ or ‘idealistic’ but narcissistic might be a better word.

Dangerous may be another. Whether it knows it or not, this expressive, populist form of electoral activism de facto gives up on building cross-class, cross-societal voter coalitions. In its place is a purer form of identity politics that instead doubles down on reinforcing the virtue and prejudices of the already converted. Other than being electorally suicidal, it begets a political culture rife with bitterness, sanctimony and righteous anger; a country where cultural divides are doubled down on rather than reached across and mediated. It’s end game is a society where ever tinier, cordoned off cantons — the liberal cosmopolitans in the big cities, the communitarians in the suburbs and provinces — are in constant conflict with each other, rather than part of a wider movement.

This, one imagines, is also why so many Corbyn allies favour proportional representation — it lessens the need to reach outside of those enclaves.

It is this form of individualised boisterous identity politics that is tearing apart broad church movements and institutions across the Western world, from the Republicans in the US, to the British Union and social democracy across Europe.

It is this understanding which should frame the moderate counter argument.

Too often we portray our mode of politics as cold instrumentalism or about necessary evils to gain power (I appreciate the framing of ‘mathematicians’ is unhelpful here).

But it’s not. At its heart it is about reaching out; building broad alliances and solidarity. It’s easy to sneer at the more professionalised techniques we might employ — focus groups, polling, messaging — but it could just be calledlistening. Empathising with people and building bridges. Genuine movement building. This is not just a route to power but a good in itself, adding to the sum of solidarity and togetherness in a country we love and want to improve. Done properly, if it moves us just one single step closer to our shared goals, it is more than worth most compromises it might entail. It is a form of politics and togetherness far more beautiful than listening to another sulphurous speech against neo-liberalism in a run down town hall in Lambeth.

But at present that argument is being lost across Western democracies, and most acutely within the Labour party. Until that fact is acknowledged as a root cause, and until that argument is renewed, made again and made better — in a way that resonates with those sceptical of it — and people are recruited on that basis, Corbyn will continue to advance. A better, kinder politics will be defeated. The priests will inherit the earth.

For New Statesman

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To win again, Labour must learn a lesson from Alex Salmond's grandfather

"If you're going to say something radical, make sure you wear a suit". This is the solitary piece of advice Alex Salmond's grandfather is said to have sent him packing with as he started his career in politics thirty years ago.

As party conference season draws to an end, it's this advice which separates the two main parties in British politics, and defines their current trajectory. One side gets it, the other ignores it.

It isn't really, of course, a line about what constitutes proper dress - or at least not just. What Salmond's grandfather meant was simple: if people can pigeonhole you, they will – so don't let them. Confound expectations.

It remains as relevant as ever. Unpack why and you get to three truths that most pollsters will tell you define the ways voters engage with politics: they consume it in very small quantities, largely through TV and newspapers; they make their mind up quickly; and, most crucial of all, they filter what they see back through the lens of what they already think. If you sound and look how people expect you to, they will box you in as that, even if what you're saying is eminently sensible. So much is not about what is being said, but who is saying it.

This is difficult to absorb when most political discussion is still wedded to the idea of a rational-actor electorate. But the reality is most normal people respond to signals not details (and abnormal people in fact: most of those who read this article and tweet me furiously about it will only have bothered reading the headline and top line).

Thus a huge part of electoral politics is challenging prejudices people have about you. In this contest advantage accrues to those who can do unexpected things; the counter-intuitive. So, for instance, only a party that can convincingly present as moderate earns the right to govern as radical.

This is ultimately the fatal mistake made by the many people – including myself – who wrongly thought Ed Miliband had a shot at Number 10. Because he never ruthlessly and publicly dealt with Labour's weaknesses, particularly spending and welfare, his broader agenda never got a hearing. James Morrisargues Miliband's early years spent talking about “too far too fast”, however economically justified, just hardened for voters their own pre-existing prejudices: that Labour wanted to spend more and can't be trusted with tough decisions. Later, Miliband just switched the subject. As a result, BritainThinks found that even when he said things that polled well, voters simply asked “yes but where's the money coming from?” in a way they never did of the Conservatives.

Which brings us back to this year's party conferences.

The Conservatives spent most of their time in Manchester, as they have since May, playing to their strengths while happily, ruthlessly and publicly attempting to deal with their weaknesses among undecided voters. For “party of the rich”, see the living wage and overtures on “the workers party”; for “the nasty party” see Cameron's paeans to equality. How substantial this in practice is irrelevant, in the short term at least. It was all clipped for the news for the same reason it will have cut through with floating voters: because it's counter-intuitive. It buys them cover to be quietly radical and, in many areas, push a traditional free-market agenda Michael Howard would never have got away with.

Labour badly needs to learn this skill: presenting as moderate, governing as radical. At the moment it is adept at precisely the opposite. Windy socialist rhetoric is cranked up only to be accompanied by fairly conventional social democratic ideas. An economic policy largely the same as Ed Balls’ sent the conference hall into raptures because it was wrapped in the crotchety language of anti-austerity.

This is the surest sign of a movement in love with the sound of its own voice. Everything it did will have entrenched voters’ prejudices about them, wittingly or not. To be fair, most damningly of all, it seemed designed precisely for that purpose. Every signal was aimed at pleasing the already converted and reaffirming their virtue. If there was any talk of persuasion, it only showed through in a desire to lecture the public: “busting myths”, “nailing the lie” and so on. Not an ounce of self-reflection, or an understanding that these rights have to be earned.

To be fair, the frenzy among activists was been whipped up largely in response to a half justified grievance: that New Labour managed to be seen as moderate but didn't exploit it by governing radically enough, as the Conservatives are now, particularly when it came to political economy.

But the fact remains: Labour will not get the chance to change the country again unless it re-learns what Alex Salmond's grandfather taught him. It will not even get a hearing until it is willing to confound perceptions of it among Conservative voters in particular, as the Tories have learnt to do. Why does it deserve one?

The reason this hasn't been done is that it's not easy. It doesn't mean aping every last detail of Conservative policy – but it does mean moving closer to the small-c conservative values that run through the population of this country outside its big cities: prudence, fairness as opportunity not just outcome, quiet patriotism, contribution. At the moment the party is a world away: obsessed with an arid Keynsianism, infatuated with ideas of entitlement and embarrassed about national identity.

The change here has to run deep; it has to be more than finding the most temperate words in a thesaurus. The challenge is to renew the party's politics in a way that intrinsically deals with its weaknesses, but leaves it with a prospectus bold enough to change the country. It has to look, over and over again, like it genuinely cares about things voters don't expect it to: the deficit, waste, unfairness in the welfare system; the middle as well as the bottom, as well as being comfortable with technology and innovation. Otherwise it will never be able to broach a conversation about inequality, reforming the economy so it works in the interests of the many, or tackling vested interests. And British politics will remain what it is today: a non-competitive sport. 

One year on from Brown’s Citizens UK speech

Gordon Browns’ eve-of-election speech in May 2010 to Citizens UK was easily the best of his premiership, and must rank among the best in his career. Fiery, crusading and sincere it was a brief glimpse of the brilliance that the faithful always told us disbelievers was there. Had the preceding years not been so different and so the election result quite as catastrophic, it would easily be seen as one of the defining political speeches of recent times. As it was, its one year anniversary passed by completely unnoticed last week. In fact, the speech doesn’t even feature in Steve Richard’s totemic history of Brown, Whatever It Takes. But I think it’s worth taking a look at again, as it suggests a few things: about Brown, his party – yes, but also centre-left government in general.

On a purely technical level the speech is pretty exemplary. It builds momentum and a sense of urgency with rhetorical tricks such as triple repetition (a la Thatcher’s "No, No, No" or Blair’s "weak, weak, weak"): "When people say…when people say…when people say"; "you will always find in me a friend, a partner, a brother" and so on. The quick but consistent pace at which it moves means the past (civil rights, anti-apartheid), the present (living wage, Obama) and the personal (Brown’s family) are effortlessly woven together where it’s so easy to get it wrong and look crass or opportunist – ask Ed Miliband after his TUC address.

These are all age-old devices, but the reason they work for Brown is because the delivery feels so genuine and passionate - confident but not choreographed or staggered in the way so many political speeches are these day, no inbuilt pauses for applause or for focused grouped soundbites to sink in. Brown subsequently achieves what most modern politicians can only dream of: to appear ‘on our side’, to be inspiring, even poetic - to deliver a political sermon in a very secular age. It’s a testament in my view to Brown’s status as the most fascinating, complicated politician of his generation that this all came from the mouth of the same clunky, emotionally constipated bloke-on-the-telly everyone became used to; "an analogue politician in a digital age" as Cameron once chided him.

But it’s the politics of it which are most interesting to me. Look at the actual words he constantly uses – "fight", "march", "movement", "community". These are all phrases that would give ‘Third Wayers’ and triangulaters a heart attack. They’re also the diametric opposite of the a-political, ‘father of the nation’ image he had been determined to maintain through his premiership. Where previously Brown tried to meet the Tories inheritance tax cut half-way, here he clearly denounces it and builds that opposition into his own world view. For proof, compare the different word clouds (I know I should leave the house more) below of this speech and his conference speech just eight months prior, which is instead dominated by the more recognisable and vacuous New Labour touchstones of "change", "new", "choice", a sense of empowerment and place substituted for the more expressionless "country", "Britain", "world" and so on. Both rhetorically and politically, Brown had let go.

Now I know he was very much preaching to the converted with Citizens UK, but I’m not convinced it would put ‘swing voters’ off in the way many may claim – or certainly no more than he already had done so. I think most British people can countenance a bit of aggression and tub-thumping as long as it’s perceived as owing to passion rather than pantomime (think PMQs). Nothing Brown said was too abstract and its underlying moral convictions would be shared by most, I think.

In exact policy terms the speech may have reflected the rather tired nature of Labour’s manifesto, but the section from 6:00-6:49 does have the beginning of a decent narrative on public services: one that goes beyond being transactive/technocratic but also rejects Cameron’s false dichotomy between state and society, by placing government investment and community alongside one another where they belong ("building together, investing…"; "your hospitals, your schools, your children’s centres upon which communities are built").

Finally, there’s a whole generation who came of political consciousness during the fag end of the Blair years who – if, like me, they weren’t born into a Labour family – came to see Labour as the establishment party. Daft I know, but they certainly looked, acted and sounded like it to us at the time. This is just a faint echo of what a new study shows is the biggest problem social democratic parties in Europe face: people simply do not trust them to challenge invested interests anymore. Above all else the success of Brown’s speech, with its insurgent tone on inequality and poverty, shows centre-left parties that just because you’re in government doesn’t mean you have to become synonymous with the establishment, or even make peace with it. You can still be constantly at war with the status quo and constantly campaigning against the forces which make it up – you can still be part of a movement, essentially ("Let’s march, together")*.

Rescuing the standing of social democracy may be the only bigger task than rescuing that of Brown’s – at least we can be pretty sure Brown’s decline has bottomed out. But whatever exact form centre-left renewal ends up taking, it must surely start by trying to resuscitate what briefly sparked into life on that Monday night in South London last May.

Gordon Brown speech to Citizens UK, May 2010












Gordon Brown speech to Labour party conference, September 2009













*Incidentally it’s been noted before that some of Obama’s problems up until recently came from ignoring this: he never defined himself against Wall Street, for instance, even though public opinion permitted him to, he never harnessed his unprecedented campaign resources (and ethos) in government and so on. Anyone more tuned in to US politics than I am these days got any thoughts on this?