The 2019 General Election led to a major realignment in national politics that Labour must now resolve by bridging the divisions in the country and rebuilding its national coalition. The biggest class and cultural divide is between those with a degree who have a good chance of having a career in a well-paid profession, and those who do not and who are likely to be in low wage, low skill jobs with few prospects. To win an election Labour needs a politics that brings together these estranged, often antagonistic classes in a common cause.

The crisis of Labour’s politics

In recent years values have become the currency of Labour’s politics. A letter from the Labour Party explains that members are “united by our commitment to equality, compassion and social justice.” Our most lasting achievements – the NHS and National Minimum Wage – were due to the “people of our movement coming together to fight for our shared values.” By renewing our membership, members can continue campaigning for ‘fairness and equality’. Labour politicians and activists call upon ‘Labour values’ and ‘our values’. Values define what a person thinks is important in life, but there is no clear and agreed understanding about what exactly Labour values are.

The importance attached to values is shared across left of centre political parties. In an essay published in Renewal journal, Sebastian Jobelius and Konstantin Vössing argue that the SPD in Germany will only avoid political extinction by formally defining itself as a party of values. And to become a party of values, “social democrats must abandon their current strategy of catering to coalitions of social groups and claiming to build a compromise between them.”

But who is to decide what these values are? And since when has democratic politics been about ‘catering’? These questions touch the heart of Labour’s crisis. The turn to values has come at the expense of doing politics.

A politics of values

The Labour party was formed to represent the interests of organised labour in Parliament. It was a broad coalition of regional and sectoral interests with no shared religious or moral values. What held the movement together was politics – the conciliation of conflicts and differences to achieve common agreements and aims. This kind of democratic practice was sustained so long as there was the sense of a class interest to hold together in unity.

But the organised labour interest began to decline in the 1960s, and the 1970s saw the expansion of a higher educated professional middle class which in the following decade carried its own cultural interests and values-based politics into the Labour Party.

By 1994, with the ascendancy of New Labour the party was following the Clinton Democrats in embracing the liberal global order. As the electoral salience of class declined, values were increasingly becoming the main source of political legitimacy and the means of holding together different social groups and identities. The electoral task was to enmesh Labour values with national values. It was a task Tony Blair described in his 1997 Conference speech.

There are no Old Labour or New Labour values. There are Labour values. They are what make us the Party of compassion; of social justice; of the struggle against poverty and inequality; of liberty; of basic human solidarity; and the day we cease to be those things is the day we keep the name of the Labour Party but lose the reason for its existence. And these are indeed the best of British values too. 

The old collectivist politics was giving way to a more individualistic, values and identity-based politics. By 2015 Jon Cruddas’ independent review into why Labour lost the election that year, revealed a party that was becoming an exclusive cultural brand of social liberalism. As a new class cultural faultline split the country with the rise of populism, Labour was becoming estranged from the majority of voters who were either pragmatists or who held socially conservative views. What and who did Labour stand for? Nobody quite knew.

By 2016 Labour politics was about assembling a coalition around a shared set of values, much as Jobelius and Vössing argue for in their essay. As Jeremy Corbyn asserted in his Conference speech that year, Labour’s pledges to rebuild Britain ‘are rooted in traditional Labour values and objectives shaped to meet the challenges of the 21st century. They are values Labour is united on. They reflect the views and aspirations of the majority of our people. And they are values our country can and will support as soon as they are given the chance.’

Corbyn was repeating Tony Blair’s message, except for a change in tone. Underlying Corbyn’s speech was the belief that the majority of people already shared Labour’s values, they just didn’t know it.  Labour would make sure that they did.

What happens when a Labour politics of values creates in-groups and out-groups? Those with the cultural power to impose their values on public debate employ moral judgmentalism to denigrate less powerful identities. Intolerance grows and a descent into culture wars ensures repeated electoral defeat. Politics is reduced to an intra-elite conflict over status, prestige and influence. When majorities of the electorate don’t share Labour’s progressive values, does the party insist that despite themselves voters do, or does it adopt what it thinks people want to hear?  The membership letter illustrates the confusion about what the Labour party is, who and what Labour stands for and what exactly its purpose is.

New era

In response to this crisis of Labour’s identity, Keir Starmer has begun defining a patriotic Labour politics around national identity, family and security. This change will mean looking again at how Labour does politics in the post-Brexit, post-Covid era.

As the UK leaves the EU for a more Hobbesian world in which the strong dominate the weak, the future will demand from both major political parties a very different kind of politics and leadership. The Labour Party’s progressive politics is the product of the rules-based liberal order which over a period of decades ended up suppressing the political realm and favoured resolving political conflict through legal, technocratic and managerial means. Cultural and moral values became a proxy for class interests. Populist politics re-energised democracy and disrupted this order but could never establish a new political settlement.

Labour Together’s report into Labour’s 2019 defeat indicates the path Labour must now take if it wants to shape the political settlement of the new era. It centres around a ‘big change economic agenda’ rooted in people’s lives and communities. Alongside and incorporated in this agenda is a story of ‘community and national pride’, capable of bridging social and cultural divisions. Labour’s national story must include the theme of change to appeal to the younger middle classes while at the same time speaking about family, place and community to connect with former ‘leave-minded’ Labour voters.

The values-based approach to politics recommended by Jobelius and Vössing is not suited to this strategy of bridge building across sharp cultural divisions. Labour will need to build coalitions with people and groups who have a more conservative disposition and who do not share its progressive values. It needs to revive its own traditions of brokering broad coalitions around shared interests and common goals.

A democratic politics of the common good

An example of this kind of democratic politics of the common good can be found in a recent book, Lessons Learned, by the veteran organiser Arnie Graf. He draws on his practice, honed over a lifetime, working with the Industrial Areas Foundation.

Arnie Graf offers five principles for a democratic politics. The first is the reality and importance of power. If you don’t have power you change nothing. Power is the means of achieving purpose, so you organise to create power. The second principle is self-interest which he divides into two parts. The first part of self-interest is about having the necessities of life: a decent paying job, a decent place to live, security and enough to eat. The second part is about the good life, the desire to relate, to be recognised by your fellows, to have self-esteem and to derive meaning and self-fulfilment out of life. A politics of change doesn’t work if material want is ignored, nor does it work if the desire for meaning and belonging is excluded. 

The third principle is a commitment to organise ‘relational power’. Successful politics begins with making relationships – having conversations and getting to know people and their interests and that way building trust. A transactional approach to politics which relies on technocratic policy offers, state administration or legal codification will quickly fall apart under pressure. The dominance of this apolitical approach over the last few decades led to the reaction of populism on both left and right and to a polarisation of political thinking based on stereotyping, ideology and prejudice. Labour found out to its cost, that these limit an organisation’s prospects of success. 

The fourth principle is to distinguish between what Arnie Graf defines as a problem and an issue. A problem, for example ending capitalism, is both too large and too abstract to act upon successfully. In contrast an issue is an immediate and specific injustice around which a campaign is capable of organising and winning. A politics organised around problems creates protest, an activity which is filled with energy and anger but which is often little more than a demonstration of powerlessness. In contrast a politics organised around issues is based on action and on Arnie Graf’s fifth principle of organising which is to use public action to get a reaction. A reaction to action is necessary for an organisation to gain recognition from its opponent. Without recognition it does not exist in the eyes of its opponents and so cannot negotiate.

Arnie Graf’s book is not an answer to Labour’s crisis of identity. It comes out of a very different experience of political action by community organisations. Nevertheless, it offers a highly instructive guide to what the political theorist Bernard Crick describes as “the activity by which differing interests within a given unit of rule are conciliated by giving them a share of power” (In Defence of Politics 1993). The chapter on how the Greater Boston Interfaith Organisation overcame its internal division caused by the legal acceptance of same-sex marriage is a case study for Labour in how politics can overcome culture war. Instead of degenerating into acrimonious conflict with each side trying to impose its values on the other, a common agreement to differ was established, based on the trust and relationships that had been built up over time.

Arnie Graf’s books is about a politics which recognises that conflicts around power and the distribution of goods will always be present.  In politics, issues get decided through the negotiation and compromise of democratic decision-making. Power and interest matter, so do relationships. Consensus has to be worked for and political decisions are always revisable, they are never permanent. This kind of organising is part of Labour’s tradition but it has been neglected by its focus on a values-based politics.

Creating a democratic politics to build bridges between majority and minority communities (on race but other culture and identity issues too) and between the liberal middle classes and working classes is critical for Labour to create a broad national coalition and win an election. It is also essential for repairing the social fabric of the UK. In 2010 Arnie Graf was invited over to work with the Labour Party. After one of his journeys through England talking to hundreds of people, he summed up what he had been told mattered to them most. It was their work and wages, their families and the local places they lived in. Build a Labour politics around these issues, he advised. And we should.