I don’t want to go back to the 80s

The comedy of Stewart Lee, who I went to see last night, works for me on several levels. One is that the comedy comes with a running commentary from the comedian. Each joke is assessed, explained, and dissected, which appeals to the little Derrida in all of us. Another level is that Lee is the same age as me, and much of his act reflects the concerns and collective memory of men in their early 40s: death, children’s television, failure, Thatcher and getting fat. Most of all I like Lee because he revels in the delicious irony of attempting political ‘alternative’ comedy with a contemporary post-modern audience. Like me, he remembers the 1980s like it was yesterday, and looks bemused when his 20-something audience fails to split their sides at the jokes about Tory cuts, privatisation, and Lord McAlpine.

In his act, he bemoans the fact that in the 1980s you could slag off the Tories, and get a round of applause. An alternative comedy audience in 1989 at the Comedy Store, upstairs at De Hems, or the Balham Banana, when Lee arrived in London, comprised almost exclusively of Labour voters. People like me, in fact. Last night, most of the audience would have voted Tory, Green or Lib Dem, or nothing. One of the biggest laughs was a joke about Ed Miliband, which I won’t repeat. Back in the 1980s, it was simple. If you liked alternative comedy, you hated Thatcher and liked the Labour Party.

The lesson my generation of Labour supporters learned was that sitting in a room with 80 like-minded comedy fans, laughing at jokes about Norman Tebbit or Cecil Parkinson, wasn’t the same as winning elections. Red Wedge, which I loved of course, made the same tactical error. It appealed to lefties who were going to support Labour anyway, but did nothing to reach the people listening to Dire Straits and Madonna. This latter point was made by a young Tony Blair to a young Billy Bragg, a conversation I wish I’d heard.

Politics, we learned from bitter defeats, wasn’t simple at all. Thatcher closed down factories, stigmatised single parents, alienated young people and put their parents on the dole, and still got elected. More trade unionists voted Tory than Labour. Then they got rid of her, and put in a grey, unassuming man whose idea of reform was a phone-line to report rogue traffic cones, and they still won.

Instead of trying to understand why people were voting Tory despite three million people unemployed, record house repossessions, urban riots and collapsing public services, many on the left started to blame the electorate. Working class Tories, buying their own homes, were denounced as racists or idiots or suffering from ‘false consciousness’. Middle class Tories, profiting from utility shares and building society demutualisations, were called selfish, or acquisitive or greedy. For some in the Labour Party the reason for four defeats over 13 years was purely the ignorance and stupidity of the voters. Bastards.

My fear is that I’m starting to hear the same nonsense come round again. The communist playwright Bertold Brecht is said to have written something along the lines of ‘if we can’t get a new government, we must get a new electorate’. This has echoes in what some people on the left are starting to say today about Labour’s strategy. Of course, a progressive political party has a duty to lead public opinion on social issues. New Labour’s championing of gay rights is a good example. But a party which sets a course distinct from public sentiment, sets out a policy programme which jars with majority opinion, and which fails to reflect public values, is doomed. That’s what happened to the Liberal Party. It’s what Labour tried in 1983, and was slaughtered at the polls. No party has an automatic right to exist, never mind govern. It has to be earned.

Labour in opposition cannot hope to shape a new electorate from whose eyes the scales will fall, on the way to forming an orderly queue at the polling stations. Our task is not to change the voters, but to change ourselves.

That starts by understanding why people who had voted Labour stopped voting Labour, and what might make them vote Labour again. The problem is that so many different groups and chunks of social classes ceased voting Labour, that anyone can project on to them their own desires. Some point to working class voters who deserted Labour, and so demand a traditional collectivist message, like Labour in the 1940s. No, says others, it was the aspirational C2s who broke away, so we need reheated New Labour as in the 1990s. On Radio 4 last weekend I debated Lord Hennessy who longed for Labour to come up with a 1945-style manifesto, promising a new welfare state. Ultimately, politics is a question of numbers. To win a majority, Labour needs to win seats currently held with small majorities by Conservative MPs. Those seats are not working class industrial areas or inner cities. They are towns and suburbs, with ABC1 and C2 voters, mainly in the south and Midlands. They live in places such as Norwich, Swindon, Reading, Thurrock, Brighton and Hastings. So we need a platform which chimes with these people. It’s a question of maths as much as politics.

Anyone who thought a flat-lining economy, growing unemployment, public sector strikes and isolation in Europe would benefit the Labour Party has failed to learn anything at all from our history. This week’s polls suggest a narrow Tory lead. In times of such uncertainty, people tend to cling to nurse for fear of something worse.  With dwindling public resources and a harsh economic climate, people become harder, more self-interested, and less inclined to altruism. They become, in short, less inclined to vote for a Labour Party offering to put their taxes up and expand state services.

The real threat to Labour is not just not winning the next election; it is doing worse than in 2010. The Lib Dem collapse will benefit the Tories. Tory MPs with small majorities may use their incumbency to boost their majority next time. On this scenario, similar to the period 1951-64, or 1979-97, Labour may not return to office until the mid 2020s. This is the reality that should wake us up like a bucket of cold water. Some, such as those around the In the Black pamphlet, or Alex Smith et al and their policies for business, sound like they realise this. Others, with talk of a return to red-blooded socialism, plainly don’t.

I paid my £20 to Stewart Lee to make me laugh last night. Instead, he reminded me of the 1980s, and I don’t want to go back.