A view from 2020 – how David Cameron and George Osborne systematically destroyed the Labour party

It is the year 2020. Five years since the Conservative party’s unexpected victory at the ballot box. Now they sit on a majority of 42. How did they do it?

Perhaps the greatest mistake the Labour party ever made was to underestimate the ruthlessness of the Conservative party. For all the jibes about pigs’ heads, public schoolboys and toffs-on-the-make, the truth is that the Conservative party is an organisation dedicated to winning and maintaining power. Over 300 years, it has proved to be very successful at it, winning elections against the odds in all circumstances.

Mostly, the current players do not seek power for their own advancement. It is hard to think of a cabinet minister who could not be earning more, or wielding more influence, outside of government. No, they seek power on behalf of their own narrow stratum of society, in order to protect property from democracy, as Aneurin Bevan put it.

As the Labour party begins to look back over this parliament, the route map of its own destruction laid behind it will become clear, like the vapour trail from a jumbo jet. Having strangled the Liberal Democrats half to death, and having scrambled over the barely twitching body, the Tories dedicated themselves to the destruction of the Labour party. David Cameron and George Osborne viewed their narrow election victory in 2015 as the platform for a bigger win in 2020, and in turn further victory in 2025. Like Margaret Thatcher, they viewed politics not as a game, but as open warfare.

Their primary manoeuvre was to paint the Labour party as extreme, out of touch and a risk to security. Labour decided not to resist the charge of extremism, but instead to attempt to reframe the argument about what is, and is not, extreme. They tried to open the Overton Window, the space in which political ideas are judged acceptable to the mainstream.

It failed, as many warned it would. The Overton Window widened, and Labour’s poll ratings fell out. No amount of demos and pickets could shift the public’s aversion to republicanism, state control of telecoms, higher taxes or support for a ‘United Ireland’ So, like Michael Foot in 1983, Neil Kinnock in 1987, and even Ramsay MacDonald in 1924, Labour’s leadership fought in 2020 with the albatross of extremism around their necks.

Throughout the parliament, Osborne sprang budget traps and planted shiny political landmines, and time and time again the Labour frontbench stepped in with both feet. The fiscal charter in 2015 was just the start. Over five years, the Tory government successfully boxed Labour in on spending and taxation, driving home the perception that all Labour wanted was to put its hand in your pocket and spend your money on benefits for others.

But underpinning this grand narrative were the Tories’ more venal attempts to sabotage Labour’s prospects. Here, they enacted laws which, taken individually, might be seen as reasonable or fair, but which, when aggregated, amounted to a concerted attack on the Labour party’s ability to function. The Tories attacked Labour’s funding, disenfranchised its voters, and abolished its seats, all in the name of democracy.

Even the changes to social housing, with the sell-off of housing association properties, forced sale of council homes, cuts to social rents hitting investment in construction, and invidious ‘pay to stay’ rules, changed the voting patterns in many towns and cities, tilting wards in favour of the Tories just as right to buy did in the 1980s.

The move to individual registration for voters meant that it was harder to register to vote. Naturally, many millions of people fell off the register. Despite voter registration campaigns, the total electorate comprised fewer voters in 2020 than in 2015, and, by their nature, many of those disenfranchised were potential Labour voters. These reduced figures provided the basis of the boundary review in 2018.

The boundary review meant that the 2020 election was fought over 50 fewer seats. Once the dust had settled on the bitter boundary reviews, Labour had lost 40 seats without a vote being cast.

One group of voters did see their number increase: expats. The Votes for Life Act allowed tens of thousands of voters living abroad to vote in British elections, regardless of how long they had been away. The Daily Mail-reading denizens of southern Spain, with their folk-memory of the Winter of Discontent and Red Robbo, were handed a vote for a country many had not lived in for decades. Unsurprisingly, they tended to vote Conservative.

The Trade Union Act handcuffed the trade unions and reduced their ability to conduct lawful industrial action, while empowering employers to bus in blackleg workers. But it also reduced the amount of money workers could give to Labour via their unions, thus reducing Labour’s war-chest by many millions of pounds. As the high tide of new members in 2015 receded by 2020, with over 150,000 failing to renew their memberships, the coffers were further reduced. By 2019, the full effects were felt, as Labour could not maintain its network of regional staff and constituency agents.

Starved of funds, cut off from its natural supporters, and forced onto the political fringe, the Labour party is facing a threat as large as any in its history. And history is what Cameron and Osborne want to make of Labour.

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Photo: 10 Downing Street