John Prescott, the Last Great ‘Old Labour’ Politician

When I turned on my phone this morning to discover that the former Labour MP John Prescott had died, I felt a pang of genuine sadness. Prescott was a politician who never quite got his due, so there’s some melancholy in knowing that he won’t now experience the full-on reputational second coming he deserved. On the other hand, in recovering what was unique about Prescott’s peculiar brand of left populism we can pay him a fitting tribute – and also get some clues about how the twenty-first century left might take inspiration from his example. 

Though he would become a leading member of New Labour’s Praetorian Guard, Prescott was really the last great Old Labour politician. Born in north Wales and brought up in West Yorkshire and Merseyside, Prescott became the MP for Hull East in 1970, grounding him in a vast Labour heartland stretching from the Irish Sea to the mouth of the Humber. But his Labourism was not just a question of geography. The son of a railway signalman and Labour councillor, and a lifelong “union man” (in the gendered lexicon of the old left), Prescott took from his origins a strong sense of the working-class Labourite tradition which dominated the party’s grassroots for most of the twentieth century.

After arriving in parliament Prescott would remain a staunch – if not always wildly radical – member of Labour’s union-sympathetic left wing in the transitional period of the seventies and eighties, as the party morphed from being the confident guarantor of the post-war consensus to a more fragmented tendency in the wilderness of the Thatcher era. Then, when the Blairite moment of the high nineties arrived, Prescott found himself at the centre of British political life as he became deputy leader of a rebranded, hard-centrist New Labour party heading for Downing Street.

Prescott’s deputyship was one outcome of the manoeuvrings that had anointed Tony Blair as party leader in 1994, and throughout the New Labour years there was a persistent misnomer that he was the useful idiot of Blairism. According to this view, Prescott was a gullible figurehead of the party’s unionist and leftist traditions sporadically wheeled on stage at conferences and in media appearances to keep the grassroots happy – even as Blair and his more dead-eyed droogs were merrily destroying the last vestiges of Old Labour.

Joining this cynical perspective was the rather classist mainstream media treatment of Prescott in the late nineties and noughties. Just as Diane Abbott was mercilessly derided in the late 2010s for being “stupid” and getting figures wrong (with fairly obvious racist, misogynist and anti-leftist undertones), the leftwing, culturally working-class Prescott was repeatedly mocked by the press for his verbal and grammatical solecisms (while, for example, Blair’s wilfully surreal public-schoolboy mixed metaphors often got a free pass). 

Meanwhile, Prescott’s private life was ruthlessly raked over for evidence of transgression. Some of the media criticisms that emerged from these probings were not altogether unfair. But the smear that stuck, “Two Jags” Prescott (based on the fact that he owned a Jaguar car while using another model of the same brand for ministerial business), was as absurd as it was patronising, amounting to little more than a twisting of the fact that Prescott was behaving pretty much as government ministers always have done. Putting aside questions of personal morality, it seems clear that Prescott was demonised by the press at least in part because he was an outspoken voice of the left from a working-class background – the proverbial, provincial oik apparently and unforgivably rising above his station. 

Beyond the media caricatures, Prescott’s actual record in government – though far from perfect – was impressive enough that we might look on it as something like a sublimation of Blairism in its best moments. Indeed, Prescott’s list of achievements reads like a blueprint for a sort of constructivist twenty-first century renewal of Labour’s social democratic roots. From his prescient environmentalism (he helped with negotiations for the Kyoto Protocol), to his stubborn criticisms of transport privatisation and attempts to expand the transport system, Prescott’s work as secretary of state for the environment, transport and the regions was frequently, if not invariably, bold and ambitious – and unusually so for a government that was otherwise defined by passivity and acquiescence with the market. 

Similarly, Prescott’s role in attempting to solidify co-operation between the northern English regions through the Northern Way initiative, and his championing of the cause of regional assemblies, offers inspiration to those of us looking for solutions to regional inequality in the 2020s (though Prescott’s own schemes mostly ran aground amid the cynicism and moral drift of New Labour’s later years).

But over and above his specific political achievements there is something about Prescott’s basic political character and demeanour that deserves to be both celebrated and heeded in our present tense of Grey Labour and anodyne centrist hegemony. A few years ago, I wrote a book advocating what I called “folk opposition”. By this I meant a pugnacious, visceral leftism rooted in working-class history and culture – a political mode that might counteract right populism by acknowledging its emotional and communitarian appeal while rejecting its racism, misogyny and economic elitism. 

If anyone in the New Labour milieu embodied folk opposition, it was John Prescott. A conduit for many of the good things about the Labour party’s past, as well as a largely uncredited idealist with bold ideas about how to rebuild Britain’s civic architecture in the wake of the neoliberal scorched earth, Prescott faintly embodied some of the FDR-ish tendencies US leftists are now rightly advocating as a response to the Trumpian-Muskian nightmare. But more importantly, he underlined the great value of political soulfulness, emotionalism and sheer gutsiness as a way of capturing the popular imagination. To paraphrase Prescott’s mortal frenemies in Chumbawamba, he got knocked down, but he got up again – and so will we.