Now that the dust has settled, it is possible to examine the landscape left by the earthquake.” This sentence could have been written in the days after the Gorton and Denton by-election. In fact, it is the first line of a remarkable essay, at once coruscating and rallying, by the economic historian and Christian socialist RH Tawney a year after the Labour Party’s wipeout in the 1931 general election.
That year’s defeat was the verdict on Labour’s minority government of 1929-31, the first time it had won the largest number of seats in the House of Commons. Tawney’s postmortem, entitled “The Choice Before the Labour Party”, bears rereading despite being nearly a century old. Tawney lived up to the scholarly injunction to follow where the facts took him. His essay is a passionate, detailed reckoning with the politics, sociology and economics of an epic and wounding failure. It’s a warning, not a fated future.
Today, unlike in Tawney’s time, we are not fighting a Great Depression without a welfare state. Labour is a majority government, not a minority. But structural transformation in economy and society is underway, with multi-party politics following in its wake, and the political dangers of being left behind are real. What counts is how we conceive the task, and how we go about it. It’s about what, not whom.
The key for Labour is not to obsess about election strategy for three years hence, but instead to focus on the essentials of government: define your cause, pile in behind signature policies and explain, explain, explain. This is the job description of politics.
Tawney’s commentary on the death of the 1929-31 government was biting: “Neither murder nor misadventure but pernicious anaemia producing general futility.” His argument was simple: the government did not match the needs of the time, because it did not adapt its mindset and programme to the nature of the problems the country faced. It faced an economic crisis but did not respond with measures in kind. It willed ends but not the means.
Tawney said that blaming individuals was to exaggerate their importance. The problem was more structural: “The finest individuals are nothing till mastered by a cause.” This question of “cause” – what in the 1990s we called “project” – provides direction, coherence, priorities and narrative. It makes the whole greater than the sum of its parts. All who are committed to the progressive renewal of the country have a collective responsibility to figure this out. And all of us need this effort to succeed.
Tawney wrote that the party in government after 1929 was “hesitant in action [and] divided in mind… it does not achieve what it could, because it does not know what it wants”. He lacerated it for lacking “any ordered conception of the task… a scheme of priorities”. This last point, about identifying the task and then knitting together a series of measures to achieve it, is the definition of any strategy in any sector. It is especially important at the moment, in politics and elsewhere, when so much is changing so quickly and therefore so much is uncertain.
From galloping strides in artificial intelligence to the bucking of laws and norms by the Trump administration, gale-force winds are blowing across all governments. In these circumstances, the constraints on action, the reasons not to do things, crowd in. But that is why a clear theory of change – the heart of a good strategy – is so important.
In Britain we cannot afford the luxury of another failed government. The last party leader to win a majority and last a full term was Tony Blair in 2001. That was a quarter of a century ago. The 2001 government was re-elected in 2005 with 35.2 per cent of the vote, despite the disaster in Iraq, because it was both credible and radical.
The message since then from the electorate could not be clearer: get your act together. A failure to do so is all that Reform has.
The current government has set a lot in motion – more than recognised. For example, among the proposals published but not well noted, the industrial strategy committed to eight critical sectors of the economy that will be key to our economic future. The recent ten-year cancer plan is ambitious and clear. There is a strategy for child poverty more wide-ranging than the end of the two-child benefit cap. The new fiscal rules promise growth in public investment. I could have listed another ten initiatives. The danger is confusion of purpose and dilution of impact. Tawney identified this danger too, asking: “Why are Labour programmes less programmes than miscellanies?”
This question of “dosage” is key. It means: how much policy, political, financial and communications effort is being put behind a change. It requires choices about what counts, because money, time and focus are limited. A great aspiration weakly implemented will get nowhere. Ten-year plans without the funds to implement them will not register.
The government’s announcement of a “reset” with the EU is emblematic of the problem. It is trumpeted by the government for the £9bn it will apparently add to the British economy by 2040. But we are already a £3trn economy – £9bn doesn’t make it into the fiscal roundings. The dosage of the so-called reset is too small to make a big difference. It is a hint at what could be achieved, not a motor of what will be achieved.
Now is the time for our leaders to lead. That takes values and vision, but it starts with the truth about the biggest questions. One great benefit of being in government is that the hard truths stare you in the face.
For example, the British economy needs booster rockets if it is to get from 1 per cent growth to anything like 3 per cent. That is a massive project when debt is nearly 100 per cent of GDP and annual borrowing around £150bn a year (5 per cent of GDP). It requires, among other things, an instrumental bargain with footloose capital or it will not come here. It has to be profitable for the private sector and for individuals to start up and stay here.
New Labour was in some ways too hands-off with the market. But we have to choose the right areas and methods for state action. If we are too hands-on with the state in the wrong ways, we will slump further behind the average income of even poor American states, never mind richer European countries.
When the former chief economist at the Bank of England, Andy Haldane, talks about the need to create an “opportunity escalator” for young people in Britain, that requires both strategic investment by government and dynamism from the private sector. Effective government action can “crowd in” the entrepreneurial spirits of the private sector, as the Spanish socialist government has done over the past ten years, but just as surely the wrong kind of action can crowd them out.
Equally, the truth is that we cannot afford to have the public services we want, the defence investment we need, plus the commitments to pensioner and welfare benefits, and the promise of a functioning social care system on the current tax base. The problem is exacerbated because we can’t afford to have one million under-25s and 3.5 million 50-64s out of work, not just because, with immigration reduced, an ageing society is an unforgiving consumer of resources, but also because of the personal costs of premature dole.
To square these circles and others, the public sector will need as much reform and modernisation as the private sector. We will need to switch spending and get a lot more for what we invest. A state that covers a lot, from industrial policy to social care, needs to control a lot less from the centre. Reform of government to make it more responsive, local, effective and efficient is fundamental. Living in America, you can see what happens when a political system becomes an object of derision: anything goes.
On the international front, the actions and priorities of the Trump administration are a convulsive shock to the global system in general and UK security assumptions in particular. We should not divorce the US, not least because, as Mark Carney said in Davos, our interdependence can be weaponised against us. But we need to create options for ourselves, to strengthen our position in discussions with the US and to secure our position in the event of further negative moves on their part. That takes real engagement with our vulnerabilities as well as our strengths.
This all needs explanation because the first job of leadership, the job the best leaders do best, is to be “educator in chief”. When John F Kennedy promised in his inaugural address to “bear any burden to assure the survival and the success of liberty”, it was his argument that was his enduring legacy.
The world has changed in such a way that a manifesto written in 2024 constrains more than it enables. The government’s approach to this has been contradictory. What we promised not to do has taken precedence over what we said we would do.
On the one hand, the government has held tight to the manifesto in ways that have been challenged by changed reality, for instance on tax and Europe. It has spurned opportunities to say “the world has changed and we must too”, such as after the imposition of American tariffs last April, or after the agreement to raise defence spending. It has left itself vulnerable to the allegation that the world has changed but it hasn’t. On the other hand, the government has jettisoned the five “missions” that were the strategic political backbone of its promise to the electorate. The confusion about the government’s purpose, the complaints about its lack of direction, comes back to this decision.
Tawney’s essay says something relevant to this. He wrote that the 1929 government “demanded too little and offered too much”. He counselled: “The function of the party is not to offer the largest possible number of carrots to the largest possible number of donkeys.”
The missions were for the country, not just the government, and were in recognition that you cannot raise the growth rate or transform youth opportunities through cabinet committees. You need to mobilise every part of society. That is the start of a compelling theory of change, that summons people to a cause, led by government, but empowering communities to make change in their lives. The recent announcements on special education give a hint of this, in their aspiration for provision that is inclusive and diverse.
This way of thinking eschews two approaches that commentators love but leave voters cold. It deliberately does not start from a fixed position on the Labour ideological spectrum. This would produce the antithesis of the creativity that is needed. Nor does it try to slice and dice the voting blocs in search of different policies for different groups. This never works. A national party needs a national appeal. It is precisely when Labour appeals across class lines, for example, that it wins elections and changes the country.
The right thing to do is to start from the condition of the country and ambitions for the country, and have the policies that emerge in service of our values define the political identity, rather than vice versa. That is how successful governments have broken ground and created a new and distinctive politics.
That is what gave New Labour political and ideological energy in the 1990s. It was the openness on means that created the best, most radical and sustained progress towards progressive ends – from education reform to Bank of England independence, gay rights to welfare, to work, social inclusion and the Belfast Agreement. The culture came before the policies. And it was when the culture became closed that the policy innovation dried up and the electorate had enough.
I have not been in government for more than 15 years, nor in politics for 13. There is no doubt that it is tougher than ever – tougher in the policy choices, tougher in the international environment, tougher in the online madness. But the prerequisites for a successful political project have not been upended. The government should learn from its war footing on Ukraine. It needs the same willingness to lead, to champion new ways of working and to embrace new coalitions on the domestic front.
Labour won the last election with the dividing line of change vs no change. That is always an attractive formula. It will be the foundation of Reform’s effort next time. For Labour, as the incumbent party, the dividing line needs to be good change vs bad change. That is in our power to establish.
Tawney got this right, too. He wrote that Labour serves the public by “clarifying its own principles and acting in accordance with them”. These discussions of principle and strategy are not a diversion from the business of government. They are core. Tawney’s advice was good then and is essential now.
[Further reading: Inside the Greens’ “seismic” Gorton and Denton win]
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This article appears in the 04 Mar 2026 issue of the New Statesman, Trump's global terror
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Subscribe here to commentIt is a great pity David lost out to his brother in the leadership contest in 2010 and, in doing so left Labour rudderless for five years and provided the groundwork that enabled Momentum to impose Corbyn on the Party for another five years. It is time he returned to Britain and reentered Parliament. There is a sorry need for some original thought in the Cabinet room.
Wondering why David does not come back and re-enter UK political scene. He appears to be much more intelligent than his brother. What is the benefit to us of his pontificating from afar?
David would always have been a better leader than his brother. Hard to forgive the unions for their betrayal of that.
There are lots of good ideas floating in this article. The core one to me would be the ‘explain, explain, explain’ where I see the Labour party achieving much more than their predecessors but failing to put over to the public what there is beneath a welter of negative headlines.
If this was a personal statement – when can you start!