of Labour leaving its historic working-class moorings behind and sailing into a new world, depending on new people, new classes and new places. It’s a story that begins with Labour, centred in Britain, but which holds lessons for its left-wing sister parties and students of politics around the wider world. It’s a story that asks how Labour came so close to death only to be rescued, in the end, by forces not of its own making.
I feel I’m in a decent place to evaluate all this: I’ve been following what has happened ever since the 2015 general election. I’ve interviewed Jeremy Corbyn and nearly every single senior Labour figure. I’ve spent more hours than I care to remember travelling the length and breadth of the country speaking to Labour clubs, voters and members in all four corners of the kingdom.
Yet it’s more than that; I was born into a working-class Labour family but doing the thing that they wanted most of all – getting educated, moving away, going to Oxford, leaving the familiar and making anew. In doing so, in lots of ways, I feel removed from my family and our old way of life, in which I was happy. But on the other, I don’t entirely feel at home with the new world that has taken its stead, nor with the new Labour Party that has been created which looks, feels and sounds so much like the new rarefied world I’ve entered. Perhaps then, as a journalist, I’m in the right place, not as I used to think as a politically obsessed kid as a participant in the arena, but as a passionate observer.
In the interest of full disclosure, I should say at the outset that I joined the Labour Party when I was 15 years old, as soon as I was able. There’s no point in not being up front about that. I was a very political young man – I still am. For me, as a 15-year-old, I felt my sense of class very deeply. Labour was for kids like me and families like mine. It was the simplest and most basic lesson of politics. I wanted to change my life and that of those around me and joining Labour, my eyes dazzled by the New Labour politics of the age, seemed natural. I sat in dusty leisure centres and school halls on Thursday evenings, debating motions and resolutions, and gave up my teenage Sundays to leaflet in the drizzle. It felt right. Today – with the bonds between Labour and the sort of kid I was frayed – I don’t know whether the 15-year-old me, now, would do the same. This is why I tell you this. Certainly, as a reader you deserve that honesty. You might argue that such history (and such openness) is incompatible with my job as a political correspondent. I would emphatically reject that. I have long left any party affiliation behind me. Every political journalist has a past and often a political one – indeed, given our borderline obsession with all things politics, it would be peculiar if we didn’t. Other journalists’ past (or present) political predilections are well known. But straightforwardness is not the only reason. Most importantly, I talk of my past here because it is directly relevant to the story I propose to tell. I was born into the automatic Labourism of my class and birth. As I have changed, moved on and grown up, so in a peculiar way has Labour. These pages tell the story of the evolution of the party I knew. I hope to tell the story of that evolution as fairly and dispassionately as I can. But it is nonetheless also a personal one.
The only living remains of the Rover factory today is the Austin Social Club, where I spent so many of those childhood Christmas Eves and my dad a fair bit of his wage. It’s a lingering remnant of what was: a workers’ club for a workplace long gone.
Around the new precinct, through the rapidly descending December fog, I noticed what appeared to be two road signs outside the shops. On closer inspection, I could see they weren’t road signs but instead each carried a phrase. They stopped me dead: on the left ‘WE SLEPT TO THE SOUND OF HAMMERS’ and on the right ‘IT WASN’T ABOUT CARS, IT WAS ABOUT PEOPLE’. Many of my friends find the notion of working in industry almost quaint. To us, it wasn’t just a way of life, it was a reason to be. It was under those hammers, and those like them up and down the country, that the Labour movement was forged. And now they’ve ceased to sound, the old movement has withered. But out of its shed skin something else has emerged, something new. It feels, with the 2017 general election result, that the new is half-formed. The old is not quite dead. But its new party is not yet quite born. Perhaps, like me, Labour is betwixt and between two worlds.
* He survived through a combination of Grandad’s munificence and a bit of light form-fiddling.
† I didn’t know it, but looking back, I’d stumbled upon Keynesian economics without realising.
Chapter 1
What Went Before: New Labour and the Left
I assessed that there were three types of Labour: old-fashioned Labour, which could never win; modernised Labour, which could win and keep winning, which was my ambition from the outset; and plain Labour, which could win once, but essentially as a reaction to an unpopular Conservative government.
Tony Blair, A Journey
If she wants a PR war, then she can have a PR war … I’ll Mandelson her. Nobody wanted New Labour, Jeremy. But we all know how it works.
Mark Corrigan, Peep Show, 2008
What we want to know is what kind of society this government is trying to create.
Barbara Castle, 1998
I’m a New Labour kid. That’s not to say anything about my politics especially; rather it’s a matter of my pedigree. The earliest political memory I have is John Major giving way to Tony Blair. I was seven years old, nearly eight, and had some dim conception of this grey man in big glasses being in charge. Mum had previously explained to me that, contrary to my assumptions, the Queen was not in fact the leader of the country. This struck me as being very peculiar: the Queen, after all, had a crown. No, Mum insisted, it wasn’t anything to do with the crown, power was actually exercised by this drab man in a suit rather than the old lady in the jewels. Put right, I forgot about it and focused on something else, like Lego.
But I remember the morning of the 1997 election, watching it on TV. This younger man driving up in front of a black door. Mum explained to me there had been a vote and a change. I was captivated by the idea. That the leader could change just because people willed it.* I asked Mum – worriedly – if she might change if there were a vote and be replaced. No, she laughed, that wouldn’t happen. I was relieved.
But I kept on watching. And watching and watching and watching. I can’t tell you why I’m interested in politics. I just am. In the same way that some people can’t explain why they’re interested in football, or cooking or butterflies, I am just fascinated by politics. I am addicted. There hasn’t been a day since I was about ten or eleven years old when I haven’t thought about it to some degree or other. The drama of it, the importance and scope of it, the power and vitality of it. I can’t understand why anyone wouldn’t be.
My political ‘education’, if you can call it that, started quite early, thanks to one man – my grandad. I used to spend every Easter, summer and half-term with my grandparents on the North Wales coast. Grandad, having been made redundant when the Birmingham mint closed, opened a small souvenir shop in the coastal town of Towyn, near Rhyl. Every day I’d work behind the counter, and there, or in his van, on our way to top up his stock, I would pepper him with questions: ‘What does the prime minister do?’ ‘What were the names of the old prime ministers?’ ‘What were they famous for?’ ‘Do you remember them?’ ‘Which one did you like best?’ ‘Did you like Harold Wilson?’ ‘Why didn’t you like Margaret Thatcher?’ ‘How often is an election?’ ‘Grandad, I’ve read about the miners’ strike – what was that?’ ‘How big is this Chief Whip I’ve read about?’ I must have done his head in but he never once expressed the slightest irritation or impatience, he just chuckled, took another puff