Is Tristram Hunt's Resignation the Beginning of the End of the Labour Right?

And will something other than chaos grow in its place?

January 13, 2017, 2:07pm

Sad news today for Stoke-on-Trent Pizza Express, who are losing their biggest customer. Yes, Tristram Hunt will be resigning as Labour MP for the constituency of Stoke-on-Trent Central in order to become the director of the Victoria and Albert Museum (I don't know much about Hunt's credentials as a museum director, but what I would say is that when I told my partner – an art historian – this fact she spat water all over my desk in disbelief).

The art world's loss is, let's face it, the Labour party's gain. Hunt wasn't just an arch-Blairite, he was everything about Blairism stretched and distorted into a cartoon version of itself. The son of a literal baron, Hunt was educated at the University College School (an institution posh enough to be part of something called the "Eton Group") and Cambridge (where he was, apparently, a member of the Footlights alongside celebrity Labour rightist Robert Webb).

Before becoming an MP, Hunt worked as a TV historian, specialising in Victorian urban history. Among Hunt's publications is a biography of Friedrich Engels, which might indicate a serious interest in the politics of working-class struggle – but if so, this is an interest cold and detached, as a thing of the past only to be studied, not something vital and ongoing. Case in point: in 2014, Hunt crossed a picket line in order to deliver a lecture at Queen Mary, University of London on "Marx, Engels and the Making of Marxism".

Hunt's politics inhabited this weird liminal space between outright elitism and the sort of affected man-of-the-peoplism that only the son of a baron can aspire to. So on the one hand, he was capable of telling the Cambridge University Labour Club that, as "the top one percent", it was their duty to "take leadership" in the Labour party and draw it away from Corbynism. But on the other, he would get in trouble for implying that only forceful "yummy mummies" with too much time on the hands were interested in their children's education, or for writing a column for the Guardian arguing that we need to start charging entry fees again for the big national museums (including, in fact the V&A – time to start worrying, decorative art fans) because only middle-class people cared to visit them.

By 2016, Hunt's conviction that Labour needed to do more to "connect" with working-class voters had predictably degenerated towards the rhetoric of lip service to "legitimate concerns" about immigration, coupled with a sort of bumbling assertion of being "comfortable" with hollow symbols of nationalism such as the St George's Cross. Hunt was showing the intellectual cowardice that is currently endemic in the Labour right: refusing to make the argument that problems associated with immigration – such as a lack of housing and strains on the healthcare system – might not actually be caused by immigration. He compounded this cowardice by attributing his own inability to relate to the working class to the left's refusal to engage in shallow posturing.

Hunt's departure indicates the beginnings of a trend: in December, his fellow Labour rightist Jamie Reed announced that he would be resigning as MP for Copeland in order to take up a job working for the nuclear power industry. Figures who must have once thought they represented the resurgent flames of Blairism turned out to be its dying embers. Hunt in particular was, for a time, frequently mentioned as a future Labour leader.

The Labour party will benefit from the absence of these sort of figures, whose ideas were relevant during a status quo largely destroyed by the upheavals since 2008. They are politicians of the past and their only substantial contribution to the Labour party in recent years has been to make it stupider and less responsive to the actual interests of the people it represents, most recently by pushing it towards a xenophobic rhetoric that – distressingly enough – Corbyn and McDonnell now seem to have, in some measure, adopted.

Two key questions remain. Firstly, how big a trend is this? Hunt surely can't be the last of his generation of Blairites to go – what of Chuka Umunna, Liz Kendall or Rachel Reeves? Secondly, what does the resignation of these figures represent? Will it spark a genuine renewal, like a forest fire clearing the space for something new to flourish? Or will the Labour party continue to unravel as it sinks to increasingly startling betrayals of what few principles it might still be considered to have left?

@HealthUntoDeath

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