The Twitter account @newdawn1997 is tweeting 1997 news as though it is happening in real time. It was the year of Dolly the Sheep, the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, the launch of Teletubbies, Cool Britannia Britpop on the cover of Vogue, the BBC launching its first full-time online news service and Labour’s landslide General Election victory under Tony Blair. It was also the year that I turned nine. A lot can change in twenty years.
Labour, has traditionally been the party of ‘real, hard working people’, champagne socialists, actual socialists, the middle class intelligentsia and the young because, as the political maxim goes, ‘if you are not a liberal at 25, you have no heart. If you are not a conservative at 35 you have no brain.’ Also, let’s face it, it’s never been cool to be Conservative. Never. If I had a pound for the number young middle class men’s rooms I’ve been in with non-ironic Che Guevara/Leon Trotsky/Stalin/Hammer & Sickle memorabilia that I’ve ever set foot in, I’d be rich (maybe not, more like be able to buy a very fancy lunch today), but that’s another article entirely. Of course, cultural capital is more important than social justice but, let’s be real, it was a contributing factor in the 1997 Cool Britannia Blair landslide.
Today, though, the parliamentary Labour Party finds itself in a perpetual identity crisis, in fact, just all-out crisis. Caught between a rock and a hard place (as recent polls show) the party can’t face being decimated by UKIP on this side of the Scottish border as they were by the SNP following the Scottish referendum, but must also appeal to their traditional voter base and try to entice new voters.
It’s tempting to say it’s all because of Brexit (arguably the most tragicomic and calamitous political crisis of the twenty years), which caused resignation after resignation from Jeremy Corbyn’s cabinet, in reality, the rot set in long before Ed Miliband lost the general election.
Corbyn supposedly won Labour’s leadership, in part on a wave of support from the party’s so-called ‘network youth’ membership, to the young he was said to signify a ‘fresh start’ and a ‘new way of doing politics’. And yet, after the EU Referendum in which younger generations overwhelmingly voted to remain in the EU millennial voters are increasingly describing their party politics as ‘none of the above’, finding themselves in a political no man’s land.
Stacey is a nurse who loves her job even though ‘it’s increasingly hard to do it as well’ as she would like, she’s 29 years old and has lived in Stoke all her life. Stoke, where a by-election looms after Labour MP Tristram Hunt stepped down earlier this year to become head of the V&A Museum, is traditional Labour heartland and UKIP are circling overhead, with new leader Paul Nuttall vying to be Hunt’s replacement. Stacey voted remain, although Stoke as a whole voted to leave. So far in her life, she has been a Labour voter, but not party member. Of the forthcoming byelection she says 'there's a UKIP politician in the town centre with some awful policies and I'm avoiding him like the plague. The other candidates don't do a lot...but I didn't realise UKIP was so popular, lots of people are protesting against them and they got egged this week when they came into the city centre.'
‘People in Stoke have suffered a lot over the past few decades’ Stacey tells me, ‘we lost our local industry with not help from the government’. She’s talking about the potteries which, by and large, is now a museum and shopping district that you might stop off at on your way to Alton Towers if you’re a southener.
When I ask Stacey whether she feels like a particular political party represents her or her friends right now she says, ‘not particularly…I’d say the best of a bad bunch was the Labour Party. They at least seem to understand some of what normal people have to face every day but the leadership isn’t amazing.’ Does she mean Corbyn specifically? Why? He ‘always appears to not really understand what’s happening around him’ she explains, ‘he doesn’t seem very vocal about Brexit or the issues that affect young people’.
With the upcoming by-election, does Stacey worry about the current state of politics? ‘I’m worried about the future of everything’ she says, ‘lots of people my age are worrying about the same thing…cost of living is going up, is hard to find decent housing privately because we’re continually pushed out of the housing market and I haven’t had a cost of living pay rise for years, yet my bills go up every year.’
For different reasons, Melissa*, 28 and originally from Newcastle, is also unsure whether Labour, a party of which she is a member, represents her. She is typical of Labour’s membership who, according to the New Statesman, are 75% ABC1s and 57% degree holders. ‘I’ve always voted Labour’ she tells me, ‘I did vote for Corbyn twice because I’m quite left of Labour but I feel like he’s been so weak on Brexit, it feels like a lot of it has been his own agenda’.
For a young remain voter and Labour member, like Melissa, the party she has always voted for no longer seems to represent her interests. ‘I think Corbyn should have said to his MPs “vote the way your constituents voted” on Article 50’ she says, ‘I can’t believe he put a three-line whip on trying to get everyone to vote. I do feel very betrayed by them.’
Nick Clegg has spoken a lot in support of young people, 73% of whom voted for a different outcome to the referendum and of the 16 million people overall who voted to remain. Could Melissa ever vote Lib Dem? ‘I know that the Lib Dems have been really hot on this but I’m just not sure I could vote [for them] after the coalition with the Tories. I really do feel like there just isn’t a good party. If I was in Scotland I would vote SNP but I’m not…’ So what will she do? ‘I haven’t cut up my membership yet, but I just don’t know’. Is the issue Corbyn? ‘I think he was a reaction against New Labour, but is Jeremy Corbyn going to be able to swing people who voted leave and are on the fence between voting Tory and UKIP or people who voted remain and are on the fence between Labour and Lib Dem? People forget that the referendum margin was actually very small.’
Gabrielle, 20 and from South Shields, is studying and in part-time work. She voted remain but is not a member of a political party she, too, feels like no political party represents her. ‘I feel like the Labour party has the right [principals] but they struggle to act upon what they’re saying. I feel like the Conservatives have got more done even though I don’t agree with them. It all seems like a big mess. It’s just mixed messages everywhere you go. It’s upsetting really, I wanted to stay in the EU and [Labour] could have done more but they’re still not doing anything.’ How does she feel about the future of politics? ‘I’m definitely worried, I feel like there’s no clear definition between the parties.’
Francesca* 28, is a Labour member from the South East. ‘I voted for Corbyn first time around’ she tells me, ‘second time I voted for Owen Smith but, to be honest, both times I was disappointed by all of the options. I thought perhaps, Corbyn might present some kind of change in the short term but he’s been shitter than I could ever have imagined.’ Why does she feel this way? ‘I actually think he’s right about Article 50. My main issue is this echo chamber thing…where the party is just constantly talking to itself and I think it’s a huge problem.’ Francesca has always voted Labour and is hardly a floating voter but she passionately feels that her party ‘is completely out of touch with the general public’ She explains, ‘some of the things they say might resonate with me but I’m a member, I’m not the person they have to persuade. Sometimes it might be nice to have our views echoed back at us but often the people who enjoy that are relatively well off. There are people having a great time right now…talking about which dead Russian politician they feel closest to in terms of their personal beliefs, but the reality is that there are people who don’t have adequate housing, people who aren’t getting their disability benefits, people who are using food banks and they don’t care about whether someone is a Trotskyite or a Leninist…they need a government that’s going to look out for them.’
Elsewhere in the South East Grace, a 23-year-old complaints officer for a housing association is someone who is less aligned with a particular party. She says she would struggle to decide who to vote for if a general election were to be called. ‘I think if I was going to pick one then Conservative would be the best of a bad bunch’ she tells me after a long, pregnant pause, ‘partly because of recent policy changes but mainly because every time I see anything about Labour I’m not feeling at all.’ What exactly is it that she’s not feeling? ‘I think it’s the cult of Corbyn’ she says, ‘I don’t feel like Labour are particularly interested in the things that affect me.’
Voices who responded to my call out for people who consider themselves to be ‘none of the above’ voters but don’t appear in this piece, and are notable by their (albeit very understandable) absence, are Labour councillors who are frustrated by ‘Oxbridge groupthink’ and unhappy that ‘aspiration has been abandoned’ but unwilling to be interviewed for fear of identification by what they call ‘Corbynistas’.
You might argue that this country was closer than ever to being a truly centrist nation before the referendum. If that is the case then our political spectrum has been blown wide open, how it recalibrates remains to be seen.
I ask Lewis Goodall, Sky News political correspondent and author of a forthcoming book about the future of the Labour Party called Left Behind, whether he thinks Labour will come back from this? ‘I don’t think the referendum is the end of Labour’ he tells The Debrief, ‘but, in a hundred years’ time, if history students are looking back and the essay question is “what caused the end of the Labour party” part of the answer will be “the referendum”. Why? Because the referendum crystallised British politics in a way that the Scottish referendum crystallised Scottish politics. Having said that, you’ve seen the decline of the left and social democratic parties in America and Europe and they haven’t had a referendum…so it’s clearly not the only factor but it is a factor.’
It was Tony Blair (or his speech writer) who coined the term ‘new dawn’ in 1997. In his first addressing after winning the election he declared ‘a new dawn has broken’. In order for the sun to rise, for dawn to break in one place, it needs to set somewhere else. As much as Labour ‘rose to power’ in 1997 their landslide, like all phenomena, was caused by external forces. Catalysts for literal landslides include earthquakes and heavy rain, for metaphorical political landslides, it’s the implosion of another party or a rapid retreat in support (as with the Conservatives in 1997 because of Black Wednesday, multiple sex scandals, Maastricht and uninspiring leadership).
With Theresa May’s approval rating currently much higher than Corbyn’s despite Brexit and a very real NHS crisis, it doesn’t look as though Labour’s next ‘new dawn’ is going to break anytime soon. ‘As someone once said, you should never let a good crisis go to waste and, potentially, with all of these new powers coming back [from the EU] it could be an opportunity to solidify its old coalition and reach out to new voters’ but, he adds, ‘that would require a lot of new thinking and bravery and I don’t see any real evidence of that at the moment.’
While there are young people who did vote to leave the European Union last summer, the majority of those who voted wanted to remain. Dylan, 23, from Northampton has voted Green Party in the past but has now ‘learnt about the ramifications of third party voting the hard way.’ She says, ‘I worry that the left will be frowned out by negativity…the majority of young people I know are left-minded…and the state of things is disheartening.’
Back to Stacey in Stoke. The byelection will take place on February 23rd and the stakes are high. In an area which overwhelmingly voted to leave in last year's referendum a loss for Labour could very well mean a win for UKIP. That said, if UKIP loses, unable once again to secure a seat in parliament, then perhaps they will begin to fade into the background and be remebered as a pressure group that never managed to become a fully fledged political party. ‘It’s hard to get on and have a life around here’ says Stacey, ‘people struggle to feel they have an identity and want someone to hear what they are saying. They want the old fashioned idea of ‘Britain’ and blame immigration for a lot of the issues.’
**some names have been changed to protect anonymity *
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.