Can Labour come up with Britain’s Joe Biden?
It still hasn’t really been appreciated how historic Joe Biden’s election victory was last year. The oldest presidential candidate ever became only the fifth in the past century to unseat a sitting president. He did so having barely left his Wilmington home during the campaign, and despite the sitting president both increasing his support and winning literally every bellwether county bar one (Clallam County, Washington).
Instead, Biden’s victory has been treated like “Whig history”, an inevitability, the logical conclusion to the aberration of the Trump presidency and the restoration of the liberal democratic order (much like the end of the Cold War being greeted as “the end of history” in the 1990s).
And yet, Biden’s victory was anything but inevitable. Trump, unlike Biden, sailed through primaries and, until Covid-19 struck, boasted soaring economic growth, record unemployment and his highest approval ratings to date. His handling of the pandemic cost him dearly, particularly with the introduction of mass postal voting, but if he had clung on to only 42,000 votes in a selection of key states, he would still be President.
So how did Biden do it? It is now widely accepted that social democratic parties across the western world are in something of an existential crisis. The former Labour Prime Minister, Tony Blair, highlights as much in a piece in the New Statesman today. And yet Biden managed to coalesce a winning majority for the Democratic Party: young and old, black and white, rich and poor, progressive and conservative.
Certainly, were it not for the pandemic and the deep hostility to his opponent among many (and powerful) groups, Biden might well not have been able to do it. But it also true that Biden himself, with his experience, empathetic nature and folksy charm, was probably the only Democrat candidate who could do it.
Following the Labour Party’s worst general election defeat since 1935 in 2019, and yet another poor performance in last week’s elections, Biden is a role model for a party which is now widely seen as a metropolitan clique that has lost touch with its traditional heartlands. Indeed, Labour’s task of winning back the Red Wall is not dissimilar to Joe Biden’s task in 2020: winning back the Democrats’ Blue Wall from Donald Trump.
Likewise, progressives of all stripes look admiringly at Biden’s unexpectedly radical and, thus far, popular Administration. Of course, with creeping inflation, gas shortages and last month’s surprise rise in unemployment spooking the markets and depreciating the dollar, the jury is still out. Biden likes to portray himself as the heir to Franklin D Roosevelt, but an energy crisis and stagflation will only encourage further comparisons to Jimmy Carter.
Still, his election victory alone – as Labour should know – is an achievement in itself. Once upon a time, it was Biden who looked to the Labour Party for inspiration, having famously plagiarised Neil Kinnock during the 1988 presidential race. Now the roles have been reversed and the question is not who can be the Democrats’ Kinnock, but who can be Labour’s Biden?
In a literal sense, one immediately thinks of veteran social democrats like Frank Field, David Owen and the late Shirley Williams. But the latter died last month and it seems unlikely that two elderly peers who have left the Labour Party will ride to its rescue.
Following last week’s elections, two Labour figures from the north of England, Angela Rayner and Andy Burnham, have become odds-on favourites to become the next Labour leader. But if the results proved anything, it is that Labour’s chief problem is not that its present leader, Sir Keir Starmer, bears little resemblance to its traditional voter base. After all, the Red Wall seems to have taken quite well to an Old Etonian.
Of course, in being elected, Biden has proven that neither age nor establishment credentials are obstacles and, therefore, two figures who come to mind are Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. As was widely highlighted (especially by Lord Mandelson) after the Hartlepool by-election, Labour’s recent electoral record is defeat, defeat, defeat, defeat, Blair, Blair, Blair, defeat, defeat, defeat, defeat. And as I argued in TheArticle recently, a Blair comeback is not out of the question.
Equally, Brown, with his less polished, more heartfelt style, is perhaps a better comparison to Biden. When asked by Piers Morgan earlier this year whether he would consider a return, he replied jokingly (or not): “Joe Biden is 78, Nancy Pelosi is 80, so let’s vaccinate the over 70s and over 80s to make sure they are ready for the positions of power”.
Many, of course, would not like a return to the TBGB years and the likelihood of a Blair or Brown comeback also seems unlikely. And while there are plenty of likeminded figures in the party, there doesn’t seem to be anyone else with the name recognition or popular touch required – one of Starmer’s drawbacks in last week’s elections, of course, was that many voters didn’t even know who he is.
Last week, Lord Adonis even suggested that the next Labour leader need not be an MP, opening up the possibility that a peer (such as himself), or a non-politician, could lead Labour in the future. Could Marcus Rashford or Alan Sugar launch a Trump-style takeover?
And yet, whoever Labour’s Biden may be – and it may well be that no such figure exists – is secondary to its existential crisis. Unlike the Republicans and Democrats in America, who have both dominated US politics since the mid-nineteenth century, British politics has seen a variety of opposition parties come and go: the Whigs in the eighteenth century, the Liberals in the nineteenth and Labour in the twentieth. If anything, Nicola Sturgeon and the SNP are the opposition today.
It might well be the case that the party founded by Keir Hardie is facing extinction under Keir Starmer and heading the way of the French Socialists, who are currently polling at 11 per cent. Labour could be set to be replaced by a new Macron-style start-up, or, as it seems will soon be the case in Germany, a Green ascendancy. That is, unless, it can find its Joe Biden.
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