Freedland and the Blame Game: What Centrists are getting wrong about Labour’s electoral collapse
An Opinium poll from September 2019 conducted just over two months before the 2019 general election, suggested that the climate crisis would influence how the majority of the public would vote in the next general election. Two-thirds of people felt the climate emergency “was the biggest issue facing humankind”, 63% supported a Green New Deal, and 81% supported tree planting measures. Yet, despite all this, an election that could and should have been about the policies to help to tackle climate change (and reinvigorate industry) or even about saving the NHS (which we know has widespread public support), ended up being defined by the main parties’ policies on Brexit.
The climate emergency was in the public consciousness, but by the time the election campaigning had drawn in, it had — if it ever had been given much attention—been completely replaced as a priority issue by the media (even despite Channel 4 News’ Climate Debate). Whilst the NHS remained and grew into an important talking point in the election, it had been too heavily drowned out in the overall public consciousness by Brexit. This avalanche of Brexit coverage and prioritisation by the media, not just during the election campaign, caused two main things:
1. Rightly or wrongly, a lot of people were thoroughly fed up with it. They just wanted to “Get Brexit done” – this was also the view of many people I spoke to.
2. Brexit was etched into their heads as something more important than the climate emergency and the NHS; or, at the very least, the climate emergency and NHS have been treated within the media as much more peripheral issues than they deserve to be.
So the main reason why Labour lost so badly? Brexit. Yet, try telling critics like Jonathan Freedland who dismisses this theory immediately in his indignant post-election column in the Guardian. In his article, Freedland tells us we can skip grief. It’s about anger and blame. It was always about Corbyn’s leadership. Corbyn wasn’t trusted. Anyone but Corbyn could have beaten the Tories. And so on.
There is no doubt that Corbyn whilst being very popular with particular groups, was unpopular with the general public. There is no doubt that this was unfortunately a big factor in Labour’s electoral defeat. However, journalists who are keen to point out Corbyn’s unpopularity are less keen to accept their role in the constant character assassination, vilification and media bias which played such a significant role in losing him (or stopping him from gaining) support from the public.
Freedland and his newspaper, along with many other outlets, continually propped up the myth that Labour had/has an anti-Semitism problem; that Corbyn has one; that he nor the party had done enough about anti-semitism; that Corbyn and the party have been too tolerant of anti-semitism; that Corbyn hasn’t been contrite enough around anti-semitism; that Corbyn was not listening to the ‘Jewish community’ (a phrase that often treats Jewish people as a homogenous whole). There was no room for fairly questioning — let alone answering — whether some people, Freedland included, might be weaponising anti-semitism for political reasons.
Now, after being one of the architects of a Corbyn crisis in confidence as leader, Freedland then has the temerity to say, “I told you so all along”, as if he should shoulder no responsibility whatsoever for it.
On Brexit, Freedland, like much of the centrists now commenting upon events with frenzied anger, doesn’t take any responsibility for his role in hyping it up and giving it disproportionate focus in the first place (over, for example, fundamental issues that can plausibly wipeout much of human civilisation if enough action isn’t taken, and taken quickly) and refuses to accept that Brexit was the main reason for Labour’s downfall.
But Freedland is supposedly angry because of what this means for the more vulnerable sectors of our society; what it means for our poorer populations. Maybe he deeply cares about these issues, but it’s notable though that he has directly mentioned ‘poverty’ in his own tweets, since 2009, just eleven times, and ‘austerity’ only eleven times. He has directly mentioned ‘climate change’ only nine times, ‘global warming’ only once, ‘climate crisis’ twice, and ‘environment’ only four times (and only two of which actually about the environment – e.g. pollution, ecology, climate change). He has though, mentioned ‘IHRA’ seventeen times, and ‘Brexit’ 390 times. Food for thought.
Despite Corbyn’s unpopularity, it was actually Labour’s Brexit position which was the key reason for the crushing electoral defeat. And Labour’s policy to back a second referendum came partly as yet another concession to the more centrist and soft-left forces of the party, and, importantly, the centrist forces of the ‘liberal’ political commentariat, like Freedland, who, even as recently as Dec 6th said, “I cling to the view that Labour could have stuck to a remain stance and still retained the support of leavers”.
The Labour party moving its Brexit position from one that honoured the referendum, to one that pretended to honour it, to one that practically gave up all pretence that Brexit was ever going to happen, proved to be its downfall.
Yet the journalists and centrists, like Freedland, who were so supportive of the People’s Vote or simply remaining in the EU and ignoring the referendum result completely, seem totally unwilling to accept that they might have got it wrong and completely misread large parts of the country and its population. Even if remaining in the EU was technically the right thing to do in many, many respects (which I believe it was), the change in Labour policy to what was a far more pro-remain position has allowed for at least five more years of Tory rule and enabled a hard Brexit.
On this topic, I must admit that I also got the Labour Party’s Brexit position terribly wrong too. I thought that Labour’s position would be far better for the general public, especially on important issues like the climate emergency and general cost of living. And it likely would have been better for the public, if only the votes (especially in our FPTP system) were there to back the policy. Instead, it pushed people away in droves and felt like a kick in the teeth to those Labour voters who had already voted in the EU referendum to leave (even under false pretences and misinformation).
I am at least pleased to say that I was not a great supporter of the People’s Vote movement, mainly because of the disingenuous nature of the campaign when everyone behind it wanted to remain in the EU but lacked the moral clout to simply just campaign for that, and, instead, demanded a referendum on terms that the Tory Government would be extremely unlikely to ever accept. I was also against the movement because so many of the people behind it were motivated entirely out of self-interest. This was the first time that many had attended a march in their life. They had never, for example, protested or marched about workers’ rights, refugees, or war. Instead, they demanded that their imported wine and cheese should remain cheap and their eight completely unsustainable city breaks into Europe every year should continue unabated without complication.
For those that don’t believe Brexit was the most decisive factor in Labour’s loss, Hackney Council’s Cllr Jon Burke puts the case very clearly:
So what next? Does Labour’s loss mean that they must resort to centrism in order to win an election?
The 2019 Labour Manifesto was an imperfect but nevertheless bold and ambitious vision of a better society with climate and social justice at the forefront, and a type of internationalism that understood past wrongs and sought to put them right, and honoured human rights and international law. It was unapologetically anti-war (despite the Trident concessions). It was about bringing jobs back and just transitions, especially to former areas of industry decimated by Thatcher and forgotten by New Labour. It was also far more economically literate than the Conservative manifesto, which offered little in the way of ambition and much in the way of simple promises to leave the EU.
But one of the reasons why some critics feel that Labour might need to resort to centrism is to win back former heartlands. This is less than convincing when you consider centrism’s role, in New Labour, in bringing about such a disenfranchised electorate in those places in the first place. If New Labour type policies helped to foment the collapse in votes of those historic strongholds, how does it make sense to back to a New Labour vision of policies?
The argument that Labour needs to go back to centrism to bring back the working-class vote might also be an appealing one, but should be viewed with great caution and we should be careful in our analysis of class. Yes, it’s deeply worrying and important that a significant portion of older, historically Labour voting working-class voters defected to the Tories and/or the Brexit party, but this isn’t evidence in total of Labour losing the working-class vote. Class doesn’t remain fixed or static. The working class today is now disproportionately young and disproportionately BAME, and the young and BAME overwhelmingly voted for the Labour Party compared to any other party.
As Economist, James Meadway, says:
The argument that Labour will not win an election unless they revert back to centrism, particularly in policies is also particularly weak because we know that much of the Labour manifesto policies are popular with the public.
There is, however, probably some truth to the claim that because Labour were offering so many manifesto promises, it made some people feel that they were unachievable. It is an unfortunate and depressing side-effect of Thatcherism and then centrism, that over the last few decades, there has been such a distinct lack of ambition offered from the two major political parties in the UK — and it says a lot about how disenfranchised we are as a country that when a party actually dares to put forward a bold vision (albeit not perfect, but far better than anything we’ve seen in that time) of a profoundly fairer, more sustainable society, it is met with distrust.
But does that really explain a need to compromise on ambitions and policy? Of far more significance was the fact that the electorate knew very little about any Labour policies at all.
This is, undoubtedly, partly because the media and the political commentariat do so little to actually properly inform people or discuss policy constructively and with context. Frequently, when policy is discussed it is often completely misrepresented. The other factor that regularly took policy out of the limelight was the concocted anti-Semitism crisis being given so much attention in the press and media, so much so that that Labour did not get to put their vision across fairly to the electorate, either before or during the election. A recent example of this is Andrew Neil’s BBC election interview with Corbyn in which a third of it was spent discussing anti-semitism, instead of Labour’s main manifesto promises. Additionally, as the election drew nearer, the disinformation machines of the gutter press and Tory advertisements were in full swing.
There are major hurdles that need to be overcome in order to communicate Labour policies to the general electorate, many of whom, wouldn’t have been able to accurately describe even one policy off the top of their heads. I am not attempting to denigrate plenty of fine and decent people, but from my own experience of campaigning and even discussing the election with friends and colleagues, when you could get to talk about policy, much of it was spent correcting people about what Labour policies actually were.
All of this does not mean that the Labour Party needs centrist policies in order to win votes to actually implement any meaningful change. We only have to look at Trump’s election victory in 2016 as a caution to advocating centrism against right-wing nationalist populism. What, in my view, it does mean, is that the Labour Party needs to get better as a movement at informing people about policy. Why, for example, does Labour only really focus on canvassing during an election period? Can we not harness the passion, energy, and numbers within the party much better outside of election periods? Labour is the biggest party in Europe, why not be doing regular sessions, focussing on non-members and non-voters about these issues and engaging with them humanely on topics of such importance?
We also need to get better as a movement at countering disinformation and we need to get better, as a movement, of not continuing to placate smears. And we need to stand up to bullies like Jonathan Freedland.
It’s telling that Freedland’s post-election disdain is not just reserved for Corbyn and other politicians who backed him. It’s for anyone who believed in ‘Corbynism’ at all and dared to fight for it. It’s for people like me — maybe people like you reading this.
I was one of the many people who saw and believed in an opportunity to fundamentally improve society. I believed in the manifesto and policies that Labour was offering. It felt like a brighter, fairer future might — just might — be in grasp. I and many others took time off work and gave up our free time to pound the streets in the cold and rain to try to achieve the ultimate aim of building a much brighter, fairer future for all (well, probably all except the 1%!).
Whether we were misguided or not, we had altruism at the heart of why we did it. That’s just one of the many reasons why the anger, indignation, and repulsion Freedland shows to us is, ultimately, far more of a marker of his own moral standing than ours. He can keep banging away at his keyboard all he likes, but he, as an immoral merchant of misleading articles, smears, and appalling journalistic integrity, is one of the last people the Left should take any lessons from.
