Business as usual no longer an option for Labour

Having been a Labour Party activist since 1966, like many others, I’ve certainly had my ups and downs. We have enjoyed the moments of triumph and known the disappointment of defeat. 

Many of us, sadly a diminishing number, saw our support for the Labour Party as part of our Christian commitment. We believed there could be an ethical, even spiritual, connection between our support for a secular political party, and our faith. We also knew our history and were well aware that the cliché “The Labour Party owes more to Methodism than to Marx”, had more than a grain of truth to it. 

Those of us who campaigned during 2019, knew that the results of the December General Election would be bad for Labour. Hopes of a “late surge” or a hung Parliament were always wishful thinking.

Sometime in the last two years a large section of the public had decided that Labour was not for them. They did not want a Labour government. Nor did they want Jeremy Corbyn as Prime Minister. Most alarming, it felt as if “our own people”, those from traditional working-class backgrounds had turned against us. And they had.

Just thirty years ago it would have been unthinkable that areas such as Stoke-on-Trent or the Black Country would be returning Conservative MPs. Even during the Thatcher dominance of the 1980s such areas stood with Labour.  Where Labour did hang on in 2019, we have to thank the Black and minority ethnic communities, who, with some exceptions stood with us.

What took me, and I suspect others, by surprise, was the sheer anger directed at Labour. It was generally summed up in one word: “Corbyn”. This word was used sum up a portfolio of grievances which included Brexit (both remain and leave), the perception of Labour’s world view that too easily could be interpreted as unpatriotic, concerns about anti-Semitism (which in my experience has some foundation), and a manifesto that was too easily dismissed as a wish-list.

Labour’s separation from our working-class base certainly didn’t start with the election of Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader in 2015. Too little attention has been paid to the landslide win for the Scottish Nationalist Party north of the border in that year. In some respects, it feels as if the 2019 result was a continuation of that wipe out, but in England and Wales.

Labour’s roots were once deep in the communities we served. Whole towns and villages would be dependent on just one or two major employers or trades. Together with their non-conformist chapels, trade unions, friendly societies, and retail cooperatives, there was a distinctive working class culture of decency, solidarity, an eagerness for education, a demand for stability in family and community life, and a concern for the underdog. These were the roots of the British Labour movement. 

Many on the far left despised that working-class culture. Marx and Engels dismissed its political formulation, Christian Socialism, as “the holy water with which the priest consecrates the heart-burnings of the aristocrat.” Nor were they comfortable with the most impoverished section of the working class describing them as the “dangerous class [lumpenproletariat] the social scum, that passively rotting mass”. 

The British Labour Party has, until now, managed these contradictory strains by being a “broad church” which could accommodate both the ideological and the practical. 

However, that has changed. West Bromwich, for example, used to be a centre of the UK’s scale making industry. Firms like Salters would employ 2000 skilled workers, some of whom set up the football team that eventually found fame as West Bromwich Albion.

The local high street was known as the “golden mile”, the town was so prosperous. The Methodist churches and chapels alone, could seat a quarter of the West Bromwich’s population at the same time.  

The town’s trade unions were very much involved with the foundation of the Labour Party, jumping at the chance to field a successful Labour candidate with the arrival of universal manhood and limited women’s suffrage in 1918. With the exception of 1931, but quickly reversed in 1935, they returned Labour MPs for the next century. The ideology was more “Labourist”,  than socialist: focussing on getting things done. 

Today the non-conformist churches in West Bromwich are struggling. The working-class culture that sustained the trades unions has evaporated. I noticed that the Salters scales bought as a Christmas present, had been made in China. Last December Labour lost both West Bromwich seats.

Those working-class communities and its distinctive culture, which gave birth to the Labour Party no longer exist. The news that thousands of people are being crushed by changes in the benefits system or are living off hand-outs from foodbanks is met with a shrug rather than solidarity.

The Labour Party has an enormous challenge ahead. We can’t afford to turn our backs on a changing working class which is embracing a new culture and new values very different to those we have cherished. Our conservative and nationalist opponents better understand what is happening than we do. 

The answer is not to hark back to a previous age: we don’t want a world war that produced the landslide of 1945, nor do we want a return to the hubris and cynicism of the Blair era. 

We know there is a strain of idealism which could to be nurtured and channelled into a new movement that works in every community. 

We need to develop a renewed sense of commitment, solidarity and empowerment. Labour must radically review how we can reconnect with a changing world. The alternative is that we remain a feeble opposition or are overtaken by other, more sinister, forces. 

After the defeat of 2019, business as usual is not an option.

David Hallam is a Methodist local preacher in the Birmingham (West) and Oldbury Circuit and former Member of the European Parliament for Shropshire, Herefordshire and Wyre Forest.