Cargo Cult Blairism

Ever since Labour’s surprising margin of victory in 1997 there has been something of an alternative history of the election alongside the official record. The official record, so far as the Blairite wing of the Labour party is concerned, is that clever leadership, disciplined messaging, well-honed tactics that didn’t frighten the swing voters and a focus on aspiration exemplified by the leader won the election.

The alternative version is that Labour glaringly missed an opportunity in 1997, and could have been far more radical if only it had realised quite how unpopular and discredited the outgoing government were. In that version of history, even Neil Kinnock could have won in 1997, and John Smith would have garnered an epoch changing landslide.

Like all histories they’re representative of ideological positions on which they’re built, although the Blairite foundation for its history is something more of an ideological vacuum than a base.

You’re welcome to ask why this matters. The answer of course is that this is a blog about leadership and communication, and I’m going to argue, as I may have done in the past, that the gap between the performance and the practice of leadership is often wider than we recognise, and reflects both reality and our understanding, or lack of it, of the past.

Cargo cults are an essential part of any serious discussion about leadership, or cultural change in organizations. If you’re trying to use tools like lean, which are as much cultural as they are practical, your first job is to avoid the impression some people get that lean practice is built on being good with post it notes and a pocket calculator.I’d argue that there are analogies with the leadership of the Labour Party — you need to make clear that leadership is more than being good with a forensic question or a capacity to put up with being questioned by the members of Mumsnet, or whatever will replace it now that it’s descended into an outer circle of the social media inferno of hate.

I have some experience of this of course. I worked for a large council which tried to embrace lean. It failed. Not because the leader wasn’t sincere, or the commitment wasn’t there, but because the expectation was that a few easy wins would persuade all of the council to change. It was foolish. My experience, also, was that the very leaders who were commissioning the lean work were hopelessly unable to embrace their duty to listen, to learn and to acknowledge the role of their workforce as the people who knew how to do the job. Not because they didn’t understand that might be required, but because they could not unlearn the behaviours that had been their practice for decades.

Cargo cults are a classic example of people who don’t understand the context of how things happen imagining that if they imitate the things they saw, then the good things will happen again. I’m not the first person to come up with the idea of some implementations of lean resembling cargo cult behaviour — a quick google produced this, and this, and this. At one stage, I suspect, lots of management consultants dropped cargo cults into their presentations as a way of pre-rebutting the fears potential customers had, reassuring their audience that they were better than that. If it sounds like this is a familiar discussion it’s because, reflectively, I’m also thinking about times when, in place management, we need to have the cargo cult management debate in the back of our minds. (Incidentally, somewhere on my list of things to do is a blog on why we need to stop talking about cargo cults as if performative impersonation instead of intelligent practice is reserved for remote communities we can look down upon with anthropological condescension).

So how does that correlate to the Labour leadership and the performance of Keir Starmer? It’s quite simple. Keir seems to think that if he emulates the performance of Tony Blair pre-1997, he can repeat that success. Worse still, some of those who worked hardest for his victory identify as Blairites, a political category built round an event, not an ideology. Ask academics what Blairism was, and they almost immediately resort to other categories, like neo-liberalism, so that you’re left feeling as if Blairism was a brand, not an ideology. In fact, it’s possible to go further; Blairism was not a brand or an ideology but an idiolect superimposed upon a continuation of the previous government’s practices and policies. (The title of Sandra Mollins article on this topic “I entirely understand” is a Blairism’ made me laugh out loud in painful recognition of the limitations of synthetic empathy).

This of course is the Corbynite criticism of Blairism and New Labour, even if they might not adopt the language I’m using. Much of that debate, and of those criticisms, has been inchoate, sometimes even incoherent, but in my view it’s rooted in the dissonance between what people were hoping for in 1997, and what they got. What they wanted was a change of policy; what they got was a break with the language of the past, but a government that continued within the same policy frameworks it had inherited. Before any of my friends start bristling about the wonders of the minimum wage, they’d do well to remember that the USA had a minimum wage from at least the 1930s; introducing one may have been a change in the UK, and a constructive response to the 1980s destruction of the Wages Councils, but it’s hardly outside the range of policy options available under neo-liberalism.

The first time I ever questioned my own views about that was in around 2003 or 2004. Working at Labour Head Office, I took a call from an angry survivor of the Potter Bar rail crash. I knew who she was; Nina Bawden was a formidable writer and a passionate advocate, In amongst the discussion though, there were some simple words that have stuck with me. She had expected this Labour government to be different. That dissonance, between what people hoped for in 1997, and what they experienced shines through the debate between the new left and right of Labour, but none of them seem to want to debate it in terms of values, or practices, or beliefs. Instead, we are told, Keir Starmer looks like a leader, in a way that slightly weird Ed and slightly odd Jeremy never did.

So here’s the challenge for Keir Starmer. He has to not only to perform the role of leader, but actually practice leadership for the whole party, and explain the values and beliefs that mean his leadership is congruent with the whole party. Cargo cult Blairism simply won’t work, because Blairism was less an ideology or a programme than it was a catechism, a collection of words that filled a gap. Much like a magician whose act was finished once someone had explained how the illusion works, so Starmer has to go back, not just to the good old days before Gordon Brown did a Callaghan by not fighting the election when he should have, but to the reasons why an angry survivor gave me a painful lesson in the gap between expectations and reality. Cargo Cult Blairism simply won’t cut it.