{"id":9916,"date":"2015-05-12T12:26:10","date_gmt":"2015-05-12T11:26:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.glass-cage.com\/dianas_blog\/?p=9916"},"modified":"2021-01-13T10:42:21","modified_gmt":"2021-01-13T10:42:21","slug":"an-obituary-from-the-year-2025-for-a-labour-party-that-abandoned-its-roots","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/glass-cage.com\/dianas_blog\/2015\/05\/12\/an-obituary-from-the-year-2025-for-a-labour-party-that-abandoned-its-roots\/","title":{"rendered":"An obituary from the year 2025 for a Labour party that abandoned its roots"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><!-- GUARDIAN WATERMARK --><a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/commentisfree\/2015\/may\/11\/obituary-labour-party-roots-2025\"><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/image.guardian.co.uk\/sys-images\/Guardian\/Pix\/pictures\/2010\/03\/01\/poweredbyguardianBLACK.png?resize=140%2C45\" alt=\"Powered by Guardian.co.uk\" width=\"140\" height=\"45\" \/>This article titled &#8220;An obituary from the year 2025 for a Labour party that abandoned its roots&#8221; was written by Aditya Chakrabortty, for The Guardian on Monday 11th May 2015 20.00 UTC<\/a><\/p>\n<p>Throughout its long and volatile life, Labour had heard many predictions of imminent demise. Yet&nbsp;mass shock still greeted the party\u2019s passing away in its sleep early yesterday morning, 9 May 2025, just shy of its 120th birthday. The proximate cause of death given was the trauma suffered after one&nbsp;election defeat too many.<\/p>\n<p>This was a party that had long been accused of harbouring a death wish. Who could forget the epithet hurled at Michael Foot\u2019s 1983 manifesto? \u201c<a href=\"http:\/\/news.bbc.co.uk\/1\/hi\/magazine\/8550425.stm\" title=\"\">The longest suicide note in history.<\/a>\u201d In 2015 \u2013 just weeks before the humiliation of Ed Miliband \u2013 Labour\u2019s roving philosopher, Jon Cruddas, had predicted that his side could simply \u201c<a href=\"http:\/\/www.telegraph.co.uk\/news\/politics\/labour\/11473827\/Miliband-aide-Labour-could-be-extinct-in-a-decade.html\" title=\"\">disintegrate in real time<\/a>\u201d. Back then, he\u2019d been called foolish; only later was he hailed as prescient.<\/p>\n<p>The hindsight of the 2020s is a marvellous thing; at the time, Labour\u2019s steady decline was obscured by its own fidgetiness. It swerved left, then squirmed right. It wanted free markets but controlled immigration; it sought to be business-friendly, to a big business class only interested in ripping off the public. Many circles were apparently squared in that tumultuous quarter-century.Meanwhile, the myth that <a href=\"http:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/politics\/2015\/may\/09\/labour-liam-byrne-apologises-no-money-left-note-general-election\" title=\"\">Gordon Brown had spent all the money<\/a> became unshakeable, shaping the next generation of politics \u2013 just as the jibe about the winter of discontent had reverberated through the 80s and early 90s.<\/p>\n<aside class=\"element element-pullquote\">\n<blockquote><p> Labour&#8217;s roving philosopher, Jon Cruddas, had predicted that his side could simply \u2018disintegrate in real time&#8217;<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/aside>\n<p>Perhaps mirroring the party\u2019s diminishing patience, the people in charge sported ever-shorter names: Tristram, Stella, Dan.Throughout, the diminishing membership displayed their traditional contemptuous loyalty to whoever happened to be in charge. By Labour\u2019s last election of May 2025, its much-trumpeteddifference with the Tory perma-government came down to this: our PPE graduates are smarter than your PPE graduates.<\/p>\n<p>All this provided gallows humour and column fodder. Yet Labour could survive numerous defeats, as Ed Miliband\u2019s <a href=\"http:\/\/www.labour.org.uk\/pages\/what-is-the-labour-party\" title=\"\">own propaganda acknowledged<\/a>: \u201cLabour has only been in government for four short periods of the 20th century.\u201d Even David Cameron\u2019s boundary reform, which holed Labour below the 250-seat watermark, could be endured. What the movement couldn\u2019t afford to let slip, however, was its role as the natural conduit for the discontents of wider society. That was what distinguished it&nbsp;from the natural party of government, the Conservatives. Fatally, that was the&nbsp;part it stopped playing.<\/p>\n<p>From <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nobelprize.org\/nobel_prizes\/peace\/laureates\/1934\/henderson-bio.html\" title=\"\">Arthur Henderson <\/a>onwards, the party\u2019s central demand had always been fair shares. That goal was defined by the father of the NHS, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.bbc.co.uk\/history\/historic_figures\/bevan_aneurin.shtml\" title=\"\">Nye Bevan,<\/a> as \u201cwhere the doctor, the grocer, the butcher and farm labourer all lived on the same street \u2013 the living tapestry of a mixed community\u201d. Some hope of enacting that in today\u2019s property market. In a society growing apart as fast as Britain\u2019s, it was becoming impossible to agree what \u201cfair\u201d meant. Vast inequality had bred political polarisation. Labour, the party of collective politics, now represented a collection of niche electorates.<\/p>\n<p>That one fact glared out of the results of the 2015 election. Multicultural London became more Labour, even while university towns and Guardianista strongholds began flirting with the Greens\u2013 a trend which was only to continue over the next two general elections. Meanwhile, across the de-industrialised north, Nigel Farage robbed votes from Miliband. \u201cIt suddenly became clear that Labour no longer had just one enemy \u2013 the Tories,\u201d remembers Glen O\u2019Hara, professor of history at Oxford Brookes university. \u201cIt had a whole kaleidoscope of enemies \u2013 from UKIP to the SNP.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Economics commentators had long warned that the very idea of a national economy had become untenable. London was now a city-state for bankers and hipsters, supported by immigrant service workers the guff sold to the north and Wales about becoming a knowledge economy was just lies.<\/p>\n<aside class=\"element element-pullquote\">\n<blockquote><p> No party can speak three languages at the same time, especially not one out of the habit of listening to its own base<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/aside>\n<p>Now Ed Balls and other Labour big beasts were discovering what that meant for them: wipe-out. Economic and political polarisation were to be the central facts of the 2020s. Labour had faced this problem before in the 1930s \u2013 this time, however, it had neither electoral hiding place nor the regular inflow of political talent.<\/p>\n<p>No political party can speak three different languages at the same time, especially not one that has got out of the habit of listening to its own base. Faced with an impossible task, the elite that now ruled the people\u2019s party \u2013 the Kinnocks and Goulds and Straws \u2013 crumbled. While the Tories were also reduced to a regional party, its voter base was, at least, in largely one place. Now that Nicola Sturgeon had won Scotland, Cameron and George Osborne were much better than their Labour opposite numbers at playing the English vote. Not only that, the Tories used their decade alone in power to tame any dissenting parts of civil society. The BBC, the non-governmental organisations, the universities: all saw their funding regimes tightened up and responded by buttoning up on any&nbsp;unhelpful criticisms.<\/p>\n<p>Labourism had emerged from an industrial culture: you could be born in&nbsp;a co-op hospital and be buried by the co-op funeral service. Most of those civil institutions had collapsed after Margaret Thatcher. Tony Blair and Gordon Brown\u2019s response had been to create a new client base of public sector workers across de-industrialised Britain. By 2020 Cameron and Osborne had put paid to that. What they left instead was an insider-outsider economy: those on a good wage with a house might still be tempted to vote Labour, those struggling on three temporary jobs a day had no such line to the movement.<\/p>\n<p>Labour leaves behind an estimable legacy. As prime minister, George Osborne is still able to rely on those private finance initiative &nbsp;schools and hospitals, while Brown\u2019s knot of tax credits proved impossible to cut while maintaining a low-wage workforce. The party is succeeded by two offspring. First is Fabian and Fabian, a small publishing house producing glossy proposals for ever more taxes. Then there is WWP, short for the White Working-Class party: a grouplet of cultural studies graduates who hold regular tours of defunct factories and monthly meat raffles.<\/p>\n<p>guardian.co.uk &#169; Guardian News &amp; Media Limited 2010<\/p>\n<p>Published via the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.guardian.co.uk\/open-platform\/news-feed-wordpress-plugin\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Guardian plugin page\" rel=\"noopener\">Guardian News Feed<\/a> <a href=\"http:\/\/wordpress.org\/extend\/plugins\/the-guardian-news-feed\/\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Wordress plugin page\" rel=\"noopener\">plugin<\/a> for WordPress.<\/p>\n<p><!-- END GUARDIAN WATERMARK --><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The party could withstand election defeats. But now it\u2019s clear that neglecting the people who needed it most was fatal<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":true,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[3],"tags":[197,59,48,164,138,163,44,51,281,45,53,46],"class_list":["post-9916","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-musings","tag-aditya-chakrabortty","tag-article","tag-comment","tag-ed-miliband","tag-editorials-reply","tag-general-election-2015","tag-labour","tag-main-section","tag-opinion","tag-politics","tag-the-guardian","tag-uk-news"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6NRDR-2zW","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":134227,"url":"https:\/\/glass-cage.com\/dianas_blog\/2018\/12\/31\/there-is-a-path-to-a-second-referendum-and-only-labour-can-win-it\/","url_meta":{"origin":9916,"position":0},"title":"There is a path to a second referendum \u2013 and only Labour can win it","author":"diana Stone","date":"December 31, 2018","format":false,"excerpt":"As the political class returns to Westminster, this could be the time that, through the Brexit process, Labour finds its path to power","rel":"","context":"In &quot;Musings&quot;","block_context":{"text":"Musings","link":"https:\/\/glass-cage.com\/dianas_blog\/category\/musings\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"Powered by Guardian.co.uk","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/image.guardian.co.uk\/sys-images\/Guardian\/Pix\/pictures\/2010\/03\/01\/poweredbyguardianBLACK.png?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":152735,"url":"https:\/\/glass-cage.com\/dianas_blog\/2019\/12\/02\/jewish-people-and-the-labour-party\/","url_meta":{"origin":9916,"position":1},"title":"Jewish people and the Labour party","author":"diana Stone","date":"December 2, 2019","format":false,"excerpt":"Michael Rosen writes: \"1. I've met people who think that there are no Jews left in the Labour Party. 2. I've met people who think that the Chief Rabbi is in some way or another in charge of, or a representative of all Jews in Britain. Neither of these statements\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;Musings&quot;","block_context":{"text":"Musings","link":"https:\/\/glass-cage.com\/dianas_blog\/category\/musings\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":26628,"url":"https:\/\/glass-cage.com\/dianas_blog\/2015\/12\/04\/the-guardian-view-on-labours-byelection-win-not-such-a-bad-week-after-all\/","url_meta":{"origin":9916,"position":2},"title":"The Guardian view on Labour\u2019s byelection win: not such a bad week after all","author":"diana Stone","date":"December 4, 2015","format":false,"excerpt":"Don\u2019t overstate what it all means \u2013 but Jeremy Corbyn was backed by most of his MPs over Syria and his party has now won an important byelection","rel":"","context":"In &quot;Musings&quot;","block_context":{"text":"Musings","link":"https:\/\/glass-cage.com\/dianas_blog\/category\/musings\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"Powered by Guardian.co.uk","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/image.guardian.co.uk\/sys-images\/Guardian\/Pix\/pictures\/2010\/03\/01\/poweredbyguardianBLACK.png?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":9150,"url":"https:\/\/glass-cage.com\/dianas_blog\/2015\/05\/01\/the-guardian-view-britain-needs-a-new-direction-britain-needs-labour\/","url_meta":{"origin":9916,"position":3},"title":"The Guardian view: Britain needs a new direction, Britain needs Labour","author":"diana Stone","date":"May 1, 2015","format":false,"excerpt":"Election 2015 poses some profound questions for this country. Ed Miliband has better answers than his rivals, and so deserves a chance to govern","rel":"","context":"In &quot;Musings&quot;","block_context":{"text":"Musings","link":"https:\/\/glass-cage.com\/dianas_blog\/category\/musings\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"Powered by Guardian.co.uk","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/image.guardian.co.uk\/sys-images\/Guardian\/Pix\/pictures\/2010\/03\/01\/poweredbyguardianBLACK.png?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":9419,"url":"https:\/\/glass-cage.com\/dianas_blog\/2015\/05\/05\/meet-the-invisibles-the-wealthy-and-powerful-at-the-heart-of-the-tory-party\/","url_meta":{"origin":9916,"position":4},"title":"Meet the invisibles \u2013 the wealthy and powerful at the heart of the Tory party","author":"diana Stone","date":"May 5, 2015","format":false,"excerpt":"In the City I came face to face with the reclusive influencers within Cameron\u2019s world. The experience showed me how profoundly divided our nation has become","rel":"","context":"In &quot;Musings&quot;","block_context":{"text":"Musings","link":"https:\/\/glass-cage.com\/dianas_blog\/category\/musings\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"Powered by Guardian.co.uk","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/image.guardian.co.uk\/sys-images\/Guardian\/Pix\/pictures\/2010\/03\/01\/poweredbyguardianBLACK.png?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":37075,"url":"https:\/\/glass-cage.com\/dianas_blog\/2016\/03\/28\/two-tribes-go-to-war-and-neither-the-red-nor-the-blue-chief-is-safe\/","url_meta":{"origin":9916,"position":5},"title":"Two tribes go to war and neither the red nor the blue chief is safe","author":"diana Stone","date":"March 28, 2016","format":false,"excerpt":"It is conceivable that before year\u2019s end there will be attempts within both major parties to oust their leaders","rel":"","context":"In &quot;Musings&quot;","block_context":{"text":"Musings","link":"https:\/\/glass-cage.com\/dianas_blog\/category\/musings\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"Powered by Guardian.co.uk","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/image.guardian.co.uk\/sys-images\/Guardian\/Pix\/pictures\/2010\/03\/01\/poweredbyguardianBLACK.png?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]}],"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/glass-cage.com\/dianas_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9916","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/glass-cage.com\/dianas_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/glass-cage.com\/dianas_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glass-cage.com\/dianas_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glass-cage.com\/dianas_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9916"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/glass-cage.com\/dianas_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9916\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/glass-cage.com\/dianas_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9916"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glass-cage.com\/dianas_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9916"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glass-cage.com\/dianas_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9916"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}