Taken As Red: How Labour Won Big and the Tories Crashed the Party
By Anushka Asthana
Published by Harper North, 2024, £22
Reviewed by Helen Pattison
Taken as Red was published in September 2024, chronicling the run up to the general election in July 2024, and the election itself. It gives readers the view of the deputy political editor of ITV, Anushka Asthana, a former journalist at The Guardian newspaper, as she watched it unfold from behind the scenes.
Perhaps the most revealing thing about this book is how it, unintentionally, exposes the incredibly rapid pace of events in British politics today. Just six months after its release and the book feels extremely out of date. It is brimming with enthusiasm for the “most seismic election in a generation”, which it puts down partly to the Tories’ destruction of their own party, and Starmer’s ‘bold fight’ to win power.
What it fails to recognise at all, is the extremely volatile period of British capitalism which this book was written in. Seventeen years after the great recession, and in a period when Britain’s standing economically in the world has been pushed back, with low productivity and teetering on recession. It has been the ruling classes attempts to deal with this economic crisis which has played its part in the tearing apart of the Tory party and then a reshaping of British politics, as Asthana talks about in the opening. Already there is huge anger at Starmer’s government.
The fallout felt by the Tories can’t be simply explained by poor leadership which Asthana tries to do, recounting how she followed the Tory leadership as a journalist in the years leading up to the election. The Conservative Party was once the most successful capitalist party in the world. It was an effective political vehicle for the capitalist class, including having a mass membership base throughout the country. Following the second world war, the Tory party membership nearly reached three million. Today it sits at about 130,000 members with an average age of 73.
Its decline is connected to the difficult situation facing British capitalism, and the fact that the Tories were unable to find a route to healthy capitalist growth was reflected in the last election. A section of billionaires saw the Tories as an ineffective voice for them. The likes of John Caudwell, billionaire owner of Phones4U, jumped ship and donated to Labour instead of the Tories for the first time in his life. Other sections of the capitalist class believe that the Labour government might be better placed to push through the necessary attacks on the working class that the Tories could not. As Starmer goes on an assault against welfare, many will conclude this was true.
That said, it doesn’t mean the ruling class will completely give up hope that a transformed Conservative Party could still play a useful role in the future as a ‘second eleven’ as support for Labour declines.
There are some similarities with the situation after Boris Johnson’s election victory in 2019. Then there was an expectation from commentators that he could be a feature of politics for the next ten years, that his political earthquake would simply carry on. Yet just three years later he had resigned. Taken as Red is written as if oblivious to the idea that Starmer, despite his majority in parliament, could end up leading an extremely unpopular and divided government.
Like much of the capitalist-owned press, this book sees the general election, with the big landslide for Labour, as potentially offering British capitalism some much-needed stability after the era of Johnson, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak. She laments that people described Starmer’s victory as shallow, despite the fact that his vote share was lower than Corbyn’s 40% in 2017, and that this election saw a historically low vote share received for the main two parties.
In her view the election was a “strategic coup” and her analysis is removed from the very real and growing anger at falling living standards, which at this stage has no mass political working-class expression. A deep-rooted anger has been growing, particularly during the last 17 years of economic crisis, as people’s expectations for the future fall further behind their realities.
The situation today is very different from Tony Blair’s first few years in office. At some points Blair had a 70% approval rating. That same period was marked by historically low but consistent economic growth, in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union and increasing globalisation.
But compare that to the situation the Labour government faces today. Just weeks into the new administration, despite the huge relief of finally getting rid of the Tories, Starmer was seen to be doing “very or fairly well” by just 34% of people. By February this year, 56% of people said they were disappointed in Labour’s performance, and just 18% said they were pleased. Already there has been the rebellion on the two-child benefit cap, and an even bigger revolt against cuts to disability benefits brewing. Despite Starmer’s majority, it is also the parliament with the biggest potential block of independent MPs, as a result of the anger at Starmer’s stance on the war on Gaza and suspensions from the Labour Party.
Asthana’s book fails to predict this at all, whereas the Socialist Party has pointed out that any incoming Starmer government would quickly come up against growing anger and his already shallow support could turn into movements against his policies and government.
Even when Asthana says it was an efficient result, getting a spread of support from across the country, there is no understanding that during this election millions of working-class people voted against the Tories rather than in support of Starmer’s policies and that the same people could be mobilised against this government in the next period.
Already there have been many resignations from Labour at council level. In Broxtowe, for example, 20 councillors, alongside 100 members of the local Labour Party, have formed an independent group. The Sheriff of Nottingham was forced out after voting against the council’s austerity budget. In Dudley the Labour group leader resigned in protest at the government’s welfare attacks, after 41 years as a Labour Party member.
What the book does cover is the organised opposition to Corbyn’s leadership which took place within the Labour Party itself. Corbyn’s popularity meant they felt unable to defeat him simply though an internal coup after the 2017 election, but plans were put in motion to regain the leadership. Early chapters of the book give an insight into how that was planned, funding was fought for, and then the campaign built amongst MPs, including attempts to undermine The Canary website, which was seen as a source of news for Corbyn supporters. The campaign went as far as trawling though Facebook posts to report comments that could be seen as antisemitic, the idea being to undermine the online organising of Corbyn supporting groups, whether or not the posts were antisemitic or not.
At the same time, the book covers the huge wave of support for Corbyn’s manifesto. Today, many people faced with a Starmer government presiding over big attacks on the benefits system, increasing funding for military budgets and rising student fees, can remember when the leadership stood in opposition to all of these. It was this, rather than clever slogans, which posed the possibility of building an independent political alternative to Starmer’s Labour which has been regained as a reliable tool for capitalism.