Labour and the Identity trap

Labour's strategic and rhetorical problems around identity

Claims that a misuse of identity politics is to blame for Labour’s lack of success in the past decade are frequent, and yet often seem superficial or easily countered. Here I will attempt provide a clear and comprehensive explanation of why and how Labour’s discourse, theory and action in this area has been counterproductive.

Identity refers to what something is, how it is identified, what makes it itself. Human life is inextricable from individual identity, or ‘who I am’, but it is also inextricable from collective identity, or ‘who we are’. It is essential to refer to identity in democratic politics, most importantly how you refer to ‘the people’ that the democracy is supposed to serve. Increasingly in politics and media we are seeing a bridging of these two types of identity through grouping people according to common aspects, or sub-identities, of themselves; their sex, skin colour and so forth.

It should be uncontroversial to suggest that political language must balance appeals to the individual with the collective, and balance these in turn with appeals to specific groups of people. These might be groups that need a specific policy intervention, or who you want to address in order to get their support. Examples range from the announcement in their 1918 manifesto that Labour is ‘the Women’s Party’¹, to the lists of sub-identities (or personal identity categories) given quite frequently in the 2019 manifesto:

“Targeted bursaries will be available to women, BAME people, care leavers, ex-armed forces personnel, and people with disabilities to encourage them to take up climate apprenticeships – the STEM of the future.” (p.18)

“The Conservatives have failed to tackle society’s burning injustices. Instead, they have inflicted injustice after injustice on women, Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) and LGBT+ communities and disabled people.” (p.65)²

Is this ‘identity politics’? The brief description of identity I gave before these paragraphs suggests that identity will always be a salient point in the political arena. If so, this might be identity politics, but it’s not particularly unusual. We might want to define identity politics negatively as the privileging, perhaps even fetishisation, of political focus on specific sub-identities. But the contention of the left is that a privileging of certain sub-identities has been implicitly, quietly happening all along; that heterosexual, white, male etc. identity has always been at play in British politics. The explicit raising of female identity, gay or queer identity, Black or Asian or Muslim identity, simply gives those groups an equal presence as identities in the political arena.

Whether this is true or not, I’m not interested in refuting it here. Therefore Labour will not be criticised here for using ‘identity politics’ – I will assume here that it is, to an extent, inevitable. What I will instead criticise is their political and rhetorical strategy – the way in which Labour mobilise sub-identities, as well as the balance between these and overarching or unifying identity.

Let’s look again at the above ‘identity lists’ in the 2019 manifesto and add one more:

“We will guarantee universal healthcare by ensuring women’s and children’s health services are comprehensive, by protecting the rights of EU workers, other migrants and refugees and by ensuring all our services are made accessible to BAME, LGBT+ and disabled patients. We will end mixed-sex wards.” (p.32)

If we follow the basic account I’ve set forth above, the reason why Labour are presenting these lists of sub-identities is that they represent the groups that need the most help in these areas. Unfortunately however, some of the poorest groups of people in the country are not represented in these lists. The most blatant omission are the poorest groups of white people, especially communities with generational poverty. Have these people not suffered injustice? Do they not need help in accessing healthcare? Meanwhile, the very incongruity of offering them targeted bursaries indicates their real level of hardship.

We are therefore confronted with the possibility of a feeling of exclusion; a feeling in some of the population that Labour does not represent them, is not going to help them specifically, and so on. There are two justifications for the exclusion of this group from specific mentions, neither of them very good.

Firstly, the very existence of such a demographic, i.e. very poor and downtrodden white people, is papered over by the practice of statistically measuring different ethnicities against each other in terms of economic success, educational success and so on. When this is done, a group that is named ‘White British’ can often be seen to be near the top of the list.

It is remarkable that the left, including the Labour party, has neglected to criticise this practice. A list of economic or other performance that includes ‘white people’ must split that group – as well as other groups – according to class, or some measure of poverty. When this is done, as it has been done recently, if superficially, by the Conservatives in for instance the Race Disparity Audit (2017, pages 22 and 35) and the Sewell Report (2021, page 94), we can see that poor whites are often worse off than the poor of other ethnicities. Instead, we have allowed ourselves to imagine monolith-identities which somehow represent the experience of someone of that skin colour.

Secondly, we could believe as I presented above, that ‘dominant’ sub-identities are and have been implicitly catered to and for in politics. The idea that these people have been continually catered for in our system should seem immediately, viscerally ridiculous the moment that we recognise that they need specific help. No more should need to be said for the poorest people, but there are problems with this idea for the rest of the population as well.

While a strong argument can be made that ‘dominant’ sub-identities are and have been implicitly catered for – whether or not segments of these populations have suffered despite this – a strong argument cannot be made that these ‘dominant’ sub-identities, for instance white or male identity, are always, inherently and forever catered for in our political system. At what point therefore does the quiet, ‘implicit’ support for these identities become a silence of nothingness? How do we know when the changeover has happened?

This question lies alongside a powerful concept in 19th and 20th century left-wing movements, that is increasingly being taken up instead by the right: the idea that the modern world, whether understood through the mechanisms of capitalism, scientific rationalism, bio-technological control or post-modern deconstruction, is a fundamentally alienating experience for individuals and communities. In a social environment in which social support and community structure have been seriously weakened, any deterioration in the implicit mythological or discursive support for ‘dominant’ sub-identities would threaten to throw many of that population into the doubt and alienation that everybody else experiences.

As an aside, we should note that this is in my opinion an inevitable result of the purposeful cultural revolution in representation in media. If media becomes an arena in which sub-identity (racial, sexual, gender etc.) is represented purposefully, explicitly and ‘evenly’, it is thus no longer an arena in which some sub-identities are implicitly privileged. Fine, but then political and media actors cannot rely on the unspoken confidence in their identity that those who were implicitly privileged had. Those people would now need the explicit support in political discourse and practice that everyone else gets; their sub-identities become salient to them, and they will feel politically affiliated to those who provide a narrative that speaks to and about them.

Thus Labour are presented, simply, with the problem that people will not feel that the party represents them unless they are specifically included and mentioned, as they specifically include and mention other groups. This is the ‘identity trap’ – that as some sub-identities are more explicitly made a part of political discourse, every sub-identity starts to require the same inclusion.

The question of working-class identity

Whether we are thinking of the exclusion of some of the poorest sectors of society or a more general sense of alienation, many readers will have identified the solution; a unifying class identity. This has been the response to criticism of much of the thinking left in real-life discourse for a long while; that ‘identity politics’ that tends to focus on sub-identity should be subsumed into class politics and class identity. This possibility has seen a surge of enthusiasm due to recent strike action, headed by the powerful media presence of Mick Lynch and Eddie Dempsey, leaders of the RMT Union. For Lynch,

“Labour’s problem is they can’t get working people on-side, and they can’t get them to vote for them in traditional working-class areas. And one of the reasons for that is they’re not identifying with working-class people who have problems created by low-paid precarious work... So what Kier Starmer and his team need to do, is come up with some policies and ideas that connect with working people.”³

‘Identifying with working people’ is something that most successful Labour election campaigns have done. But actively mobilising a working class identity is a very different question. If we restrict our sources to the manifestos, they suggest that the Labour party has not done this since 1920 (although of course individual politicians have done so at different times with different degrees of success). While Labour may sometimes have ‘identified with the working class’, the mobilisation of this identity was consistently judged to be unhelpful in the broad campaign, even in the radical manifesto of 1950.

Mobilising working-class identity as a unifier wouldn’t make any electoral sense, firstly because a large sector of Britain has never identified with the working class (i.e. large numbers identify with the middle class instead), and secondly because the British working class has often registered fairly significant support for the Conservatives. Lynch himself has commented on the particularly severe contemporary lack of identification; the working class in his words is not “bought into”, people do not generally “respond with alignment and identification with a struggle that’s going on”.⁴

It is the task of Lynch to create a new, broad working-class identity. This is parallel to the more revolutionary task of contemporary Marxist-influenced movements. For both, this identity should transcend the sub-identities we initially mentioned. This shouldn’t necessarily be dismissed as anachronistic; perhaps the conditions for creating such an identity, such a class-consciousness, whether under the name ‘the working class’ or under a more general name like ‘the 99%’, are better now than they were in the past.

I personally doubt that these political projects will succeed with the tools that they are currently using, but best of luck to them. Whether they succeed or not, the fact is that the Labour party cannot be the ‘vanguard’ of such projects. Such a broad identity change would have to penetrate the culture first, before the Labour party could base political strategy upon it. Therefore, class identity cannot be used by Labour to ‘escape’ from the identity trap that I described in the first part of this article, at least at the moment.

The People – collective identity

If a working class identity is not powerful enough to transcend individual identity, or sub-identity groupings, the obvious alternative is to invoke a more general collective identity: ‘the people’. Jeremy Corbyn’s introduction to the 2019 manifesto uses a variety of different terms to appeal to the voter – “all of us”, “the majority”, “most people”, “everyone”.

The first thing to say about this invocation of ‘everyone’ is that it’s easy, and vague. Which ‘everyone’ is he referring to? Is he referring to everyone in the world, everyone in the nation, or everyone in Labour’s political constituency, as ‘the majority’ suggests?

This ambiguity is strange, because other uses of ‘the people’ are powerful. The winning 1945 manifesto for instance:

“Victory is assured for us and our allies in the European war. The war in the East goes the same way. ... The people will have won both struggles. The gallant men and women in the Fighting Services, in the Merchant Navy, Home Guard and Civil Defence, in the factories and in the bombed areas - they deserve and must be assured a happier future than faced so many of them after the last war. Labour regards their welfare as a sacred trust.”⁵

This “the people” is full and powerful; Attlee knows to whom he is talking, and the people know that he is talking to them. A “the people” at a different time could be empty and meaningless. Unfortunately, Corbyn’s invocation of collective identity is just that.

Of course, Corbyn doesn’t need to precisely define which ‘everyone’ he’s talking about, because this collective identity is implicit. However, this usage then depends on the strength of this implicit collective identity. If people’s sense of themselves as a collective is strong, whether it’s as a nation or some other collective identity, they might not feel confused or left out of Corbyn’s vague nods to ‘everyone’.

Unfortunately, there is doubt around identity – collective, group and individual. British national identity specifically is threatened by devolution, as well as a general sense of power shifting away from the nation; generally through globalism and international organisations, or specifically in the sense that Britain is less powerful than it was. The EU was, of course, made into an embodiment of this threat to national identity, rightly or wrongly.

An insecure collective identity can still be spoken to, but requires serious work in terms of shaping a narrative that makes the identity less insecure. During the years of Brexit controversy, Labour did not present a coherent narrative of collective identity; worse, they avoided the issue, concentrating on the economic issues linked to leaving the EU.

I would be surprised if readers were not already familiar with the idea that Labour (and Remain) failed to mould a narrative and image of collective identity during the time of Brexit. My point is that this failure, and the ongoing task itself, is intimately related to questions of ‘identity politics’, i.e. to political questions regarding groups named according to sub-identity.

This is because it should be the inevitable unifier after making all of these sub-divisions. If this unifier works, it doesn’t matter if I’ve been left out of being specifically named as an important part of the country, or someone that needs help. It doesn’t matter that I’m a miner and Attlee left my specific group out of his list; I know that when he talks about the people, he’s talking about me. The invocation of a cohesive collective identity is therefore the insurance against the penalties of identifying sub-divisions in the population (as once you make sub-divisions, you’re always going to exclude some people from them).

And these are the final walls of the trap. ‘Identity politics’ in the sense of a concentration on sub-identity groups now looks terrifying. The Conservatives are doing ‘better’ in terms of ‘minority representation’, Labour were hoisted by their own anti-racism petard over anti-semitism, and the ‘missing identities’ from the lists we covered earlier are coming to seem more and more like an elephant in the room. Identity politics may be the future, but it’s not a future of simple moralistic DEI ideas that sound like they come from an HR department, that Labour can trot out to score political points. It’s a future of, for instance, confronting and resolving serious ethnic violence and conflict between different minority groups, as the UK saw in September 2022. It’s a future of acknowledging and grappling with white identity – this can’t be simply silent or assumed forever. It’s a future of resolving the splits over trans identity. And of course it’s a future of confronting racism as it’s more conventionally understood.

These tasks will require political bravery and creativity to accomplish, and they don’t appear to be on the cards for Labour at the moment. Collective identity must instead be relied upon to shore up the sense of belonging that the party can invoke. Working class identity is not enough. An internationalist identity, although some would say it has barely been tried, is perceived to have failed.

British identity is all that is left, and Labour have made definite moves towards it – the singing of God Save the King at the Labour party conference, the move towards British branding on policies; as Aaron Bastani has remarked,

And here, Labour simply find themselves at a disadvantage. The Conservatives will always be at an advantage when mobilising a simple ‘British’ identity, one that relies on the flag and the anthem. Thus in the identity game that Labour have at times seemed so keen to play, they’re stuck with a losing hand. Making these signals towards British identity is better than nothing however, and is probably all Labour needs to win the next election in the context of the current disastrous Conservative government.

This may not be enough for the future, though. I hypothesise that Labour’s potential in overriding the power of the Conservative mobilisation of British identity has been in synergising with and capturing the nation’s mood and contemporary, living identity. They did this in 1945 as the British people decided on, created and entered a truly new era; in the 1960s as the West moved on from the dreariness of the post-war period. They achieved it in the 1990s as New Labour captured and signified the liberal shift among the bulk of the population. They can do it again, but this embodying of a fresh, living identity is not just miraculous or accidental; it requires work, creativity and courage.

To conclude however, I again hypothesise that it becomes less and less easy to intuitively grasp and reflect this ‘contemporary, living identity’ that is more than just the British flag, as you map reality more and more specifically in terms of sub-identities. At the same time, this practice makes the communication of a collective identity more and more necessary, to provide the sense of belonging to those who will be inevitably excluded from the sub-identity map. Thus the further Labour goes into the identity trap, the harder it will be to get out.

1. http://www.labour-party.org.uk/manifestos/1918/1918-labour-manifesto.shtml

2. https://labour.org.uk/manifesto-2019/

3. From an interview with Good Morning Britain; youtube.com/watch?v=QB4M4ugvaVg

4. From a conversation with PoliticsJOE; youtube.com/watch?v=IyGjs_bBMBA

5. http://www.labour-party.org.uk/manifestos/1945/1945-labour-manifesto.shtml