The long revolution: why the left needs a strategic and long-term perspective

For Labour to succeed it needs an awareness of the underlying causes of its defeats and its potential resources for change.
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For a political party to suffer a defeat as catastrophic as that which befell the Labour Party in December 2019 clearly presents its leaders and members with serious problems. How are they to understand the causes of their defeat? What degree and kind of rethinking of political assumptions does it call for? What actions and strategies should follow from it, to achieve recovery and recuperation? With no constitutional requirement for a further general election until December 2024, and a Tory majority easily large enough to sustain a government until near that date, these problems are serious. What does a party that is devoted, in its dominant mode of functioning, to winning a Parliamentary majority and forming an elected government actually do when this prospect may well be denied to them for five years?

One response to this situation is to accept that, in reality, in the short term, nothing much can be done at all. If a previous leadership has lost public confidence, one can after all replace it, and seek to establish the credibility of a newly elected leader. This has happened with Keir Starmer's election, and he has spent his first year in this role in seeking to demonstrate his leadership capabilities, mainly by deploying his lawyerly skills in weekly confrontations at Parliamentary Questions with Boris Johnson. This has brought some limited benefit measured in terms of polling figures, though not enough to overtake the Tory lead. One can also seek to assign blame, covertly or otherwise, for the political defeat that has occurred, and displace from prominence and influence those who can be held responsible for it. This has happened (as with other superseded leaders in the past) in the repudiation of Corbyn's period of leadership, both in Starmer's insistence that the Labour Party is now under new management, and in the exploitation of the marginal but highly contentious presence of anti-Semitism in the Labour Party, first to suspend Corbyn's party membership, and then to exclude him indefinitely from the Parliamentary Labour Party. There has at the same time been a thorough make-over of the Labour Front Bench, a decisive step being the removal from it of Rebecca Long-Bailey; though this was on the grounds of her ill-considered endorsement of a Twitter article which referred to Israel, this served to obscure its larger political meaning and effect.

Starmer had been a member of Corbyn's Shadow Cabinet, as had some of his present Front Bench colleagues. The overwhelming support he received in his leadership election was no doubt partly founded in the hope that he would maintain some continuity with positive aspects of Corbyn's leadership, while signifying a departure from it in others. Corbyn's first general election campaign, in 2017, had been unexpectedly successful, through its adoption of a programme that had rejected the austerity politics of the Coalition government, and proposed a return to mainstream social-democratic beliefs about how Britain should be governed.

That campaign gave an indication that a resistance could be mounted to the long march of neoliberalism that has been taking place since the victories of Thatcher and Reagan in 1979 and 1980. It was remarkable that Corbyn brought this off even after the vote of no confidence in his leadership by Labour's own MPs in the previous year. But, notwithstanding the continuing and substantial support of Momentum and other grassroots movements on the left, the impetus of this challenge to the dominant assumptions of the system was not sustained in the following three years. From 2015, the wider mobilisations on the right - Trump's presidential campaign and the rise of UKIP - had been overwhelming such progressive movements as had just begun to appear. It was indeed Brexit that destroyed Labour in the period leading up to the election of 2019 - and Brexit was the immediate expression of a deep reconfiguration of political forces in Britain and...