Labour’s emotional illiteracy: the party need to abandon the language of hellfire and damnation

Only Labour. Only Labour can defend the NHS, protect the poor, return the economy to sustained growth. Without a Labour government, pity the poor and vulnerable. If you vote Conservative, the people who need us will suffer. To us, in the Labour movement, this rhetoric of moral purity and worldly suffering seem appropriate displays of our passion and commitment, a way of showing to each other and the country that we care and should govern. To the rest of the country, it illustrates our emotional illiteracy.

There’s been a lot of talk in the last few days about the need for the party to reconnect with the British electorate. Ed Miliband’s style of leadership has been attacked, implicitly and explicitly, for its dry abstraction and unemotional style, its reliance on political philosophers and use of arcane phrases like ‘predistribution’. Labour types suddenly seem to understand that politics is about emotion as much as ideas. What I’m not sure they get is what that means in practice.

To be honest, I’m not sure there is any kind of prescription for how politicians emotionally connect, particularly when confronted by the extraordinary pressures of life in the public gaze I can only imagine. We could start though by not alienating people. At that moment, that’s what a lot of our language does.

Take ‘only Labour’. It, obviously, is a message addressed to people who are not sure whether they will support us or not. But if someone is doubtful, the last thing that will bring them on side is to castigate their alternative choice as bad or immoral. Clearly – Britain is a democracy – the choice is not ‘only Labour’.

The viciously anti-Conservative rhetoric that Labour too often indulges in is emotionally illiterate. I’m not against attacks against narrowly defined targets (policies, particular individuals). That is the essential stuff of politics. But to challenge the fundamental existence of a rival party, to call the Tories evil and immoral, is to attack the previous choices of people whose support we want to gain.

We lose elections for only one reason, because people whose support we need to vote Labour support another party, in the last election usually the Conservatives but sometimes UKIP. To win in 2015 we needed the support of (and I’m no psephologist) of at least half a million people who voted Conservative in 2010. To tell them their previous decisions weren’t merely ill-judged but immoral and stupid leads to political ruin.

‘Only Labour’ alienates whilst offering an unrealistic idea of how you get things done in Britain. Labour is not the only force capable of improving life for most people in Britain. Political parties, particularly in this age of anxious leaders and nervous soundbites, can only do so much, and when they do they do it with other people. Our argument is that improvement requires collective action. But there are many ways people do good things in groups, in churches and mosques, trade unions and businesses, campaigning organisations large and small. If we truly believe that ‘we achieve more by the strength of our common endeavour than we do alone’, we should be encouraging a proliferation of collective action, not telling people that ‘only Labour’ is any good.

I’m not making an argument against passion or against radicalism. Labour can never win without both. Nor am I saying that Labour recently tacked too far to the left. Our problem has been a mismatch between the emotional intensity of our language, and the scale of our practical commitments. ‘Only Labour’ can save the British economy; yet the public promise was only to abolish zero-hours contracts. We offer a viscerally hostile critique of Conservative ‘austerity’ yet (rightly I think) propose massive cuts ourselves. People understand that politics is the art of compromise, so when they hear us talking stridently they just think we’re hypocrites.

I suspect our hostile rhetoric has deep roots, coming out of the radical protestant tradition while so powerfully shaped the early life of our party. After all, the first party branches were modelled on chapel congregations. The language of radical Protestantism didn’t only attack the forces of injustice, it challenged the corruption of its audience’s souls. We are all sinners; we need to be confronted with our basic depravity in order to be saved by Christ.

This kind of rhetoric may work to save souls. It might have effectively motivated parts of the Labour movement in days gone by. But its insistence on sharp moral polarities, and its denunciation of the virtue of those listening make its translation into politics a catastrophe.

My point is that our kind of radical politics needs to have an appropriate emotional style. The mood of aggression and fiery denunciation needs to go. Red leaflets need to be replaced by softer colours. The language of sacrifice and suffering should be discarded for one of possibility and hope. From our ward meetings to the leader of the opposition, we need to start thinking like everyone else, and stop thinking Labour is the only path to salvation. If we carry on thinking ‘only Labour’, we’ll like a tiny religious sect, insisting that our path to heaven is the right one but left doing things on our own.