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Gerry Hassan on a New Socialism and the need for a radical politics
British politics are in a strange place - one where while some of the landscape remains the same so much is different. All of the three main parties have been disorientated by the result of the election and coalition along with the scale of the crisis.
One response to this from parts of the left is to retreat into the hoary old slogans of opposition and struggle, of shouting ‘Tory cuts' without strategy or the need for rethinking. Another approach of part of the centre-left is to hope it can at an elite level influence the Labour leadership and win it to a progressive agenda; an approach which has paid scant dividends throughout history and nearly always ended in disappointment.
The dominant Westminster commentariat opinion has already established its position on Labour after the election. The narrative is that Labour is heading back to its old comfort zones and that Ed Miliband has already failed as Labour leader: branded by the mainstream media as illegitimate, indecisive and lacking in political strategy.
Then there are the opinion polls. Labour may be cheered by the polls - and in most it is at or above 40% - and ahead of the Conservatives. However, Miliband's ratings - are so critics allege - the lowest for any new leader apart from Michael Foot, William Hague and Nick Clegg; Neil Kinnock, John Smith, Tony Blair and David Cameron all had higher ratings. The argument is clear: Ed Miliband is a loser.
In the last week Gavin Esler interviewing Alistair Darling on ‘Newsnight' talked of as a fact that Miliband's leadership was ‘faltering' (1), while John Reid has been out on military manoeuvres. Labour's new leader said Reid in his intent on ending the era of New Labour ‘does not understand New Labour' or the need for change to embrace ‘permanent revisionism' (2).
Ed Miliband is being seriously patronised and underestimated in these accounts. He defeated the media and political establishment's favourite candidate in the Labour leadership election (his brother David). He has drawn a decisive line under Blairism and New Labour with its corruption, cronyism and corporate love affair, and he has openly declared that the Iraq war was ‘wrong'. And each week at Prime Ministerial Questions he has shown he can do well against David Cameron.
Yet the whole Blairite political establishment in Labour is feeling the loss of what it sees as its by right: how it proscribes what is possible and not possible in politics. The old ruling order feels it has been chucked out of power, and its way of seeing things: no deviation from New Labour as under attack.
Miliband has in his journey so far drawn significantly from the work of Compass who have worked for the last few years on developing a post-New Labour politics. Rather helpfully in the last couple of weeks, Neal Lawson, chair of Compass, and John Harris, a journalist, have written a major essay exploring the prospect of new thinking, ‘Time for a New Socialism' (3). This lays out the challenge to Labour and Ed Miliband and makes the case for a ‘new socialism' which is equipped to deal with the challenges we face.
Lawson and Harris concede that New and Old Labour are both dead and good riddance to them. Social democracy with its statism, top downism and experts know best approach, has been in retreat for decades. And they believe ‘a new paradigm' is emerging around the need for greater equality, a more regulated capitalism, pluralism and decentralism.
This is frankly for all the good intentions a threadbare analysis and prospectus. There is no understanding or critique offered of the nature of the British state, the undemocratic nature of the political order of Britain, and no reference made to the insular character of our politics and political classes.
There is the story of Britain that Lawson and Harris tell which is a narrow, discredited one totally focused and obsessed with Westminster bubble politics with no mention of the crisis, debris and disaster which this has brought about. Nowhere do they make the connection between the economic crisis engulfing us and the political crisis and order which brought this about because they just don't see it.
There is a passing nod to ‘an era of pluralism' and ‘the new politics' personified by the coalition and Edinburgh, Cardiff and Belfast, but it is all a fleeting mention. Lawson and Harris do not challenge the unitary state account of Britain which gave us Thatcherism, Blairism and Old Labour. Even more damning they ignore England, and the fact that while Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have developed new political cultures and voices, England has been left as the nation of the democratic deficit.
While we have Scottish and Welsh Labour with all their imperfections, English Labour has yet to be born. This is terrain which Jon Cruddas, Labour MP for Dagenham has stated is central to Labour and democracy; it is also ground Compass have systematically ignored, as do Lawson and Harris.
What we do get is the constant Compass refrain of ‘the good society' which is as nebulous and flawed an idea as ‘the big society', and in many respects even more vague. There is no real curiosity shown for the Cameroon Conservatives or the substantial rethinking going on in centre-right circles.
John Harris in a follow-up piece writes that ‘the post-war model of state provision is over' yet at the same time ‘the solutions the post-Thatcher settlement' offered only made matters worse.' As Harris rightly asks, ‘Does a shadow state run by Serco, Capita and the rest do anything to empower anybody, apart from those companies?', and answers no; he then casts around to find ‘a guiding idea' for the left and ‘public sector reform' and desperately tries to identify it in co-production: the technical, managerial vision of early New Labour and Demos and the like pre-1997 (4).
This sort of left writing found in the Lawson and Harris essay has a strange timelessness and listlessness about it. For all its talk of urgency and now it could have been with a few changes of detail written in 1983. It focuses nearly completely on Labour, internal party conversations, and with the concept of ‘the left'. This is that age-old belief that through focusing on perfecting Labour you can change the world.
For all its claims of pluralism and abandoning the comfort zones of New Labour, this is deeply tribal, old-fashioned thinking: the party at the centre of everything, the zenith of aspirations a kind of ‘Back to the Future' to social democracy and ‘new socialism'. David Marquand has written in response to Lawson and Harris, that given the state of politics domestically and internationally, focusing on the health of Labour as your central activity is ‘displacement activity' (5).
What then does this hold for Ed Miliband and life post-New Labour? The age of New Labour is over; it has exhausted itself and become part of the problem, not the solution, and its advocates morphed into the new conservatives. Miliband clearly sees the challenge for him as one for the long distance runner and not a sprinter. This demands a politics as ambitious and ideological as Margaret Thatcher aspired to when she dared to remake ‘the common ground' when she became Tory leader in 1975.
Miliband faces huge obstacles to achieving this. There is Labour tribalism and love of anti-Toryism. Then there is Labour short-termism - which will be aided by the cuts and coalition unpopularity - which still does not understand why people don't vote Labour and has little grasp why millions of working people vote Conservative.
This approach infects so much of what passes for analysis even from thoughtful voices, with Polly Toynbee subscribing to the complacent view that if Miliband plays it straight victory will be his, writing that ‘only mighty blunders of great idiocy can stop Miliband's party winning the argument with enough voters' (6). After all Labour's history this kind of non-thinking and knee-jerkism is one of the greatest obstacles to understanding the scale of the challenge; have people forgotten how poor Labour was at winning elections until Blair and New Labour came along; or the sense of pleasure and schandenfreude which exists across parts of the left about the actions and resulting unpopularity of the Lib Dems (7): as if all of this will remove the pesky Lib Dems and return things to that nice, tidy two party politics, an attitude similarly found in Scottish Labour's paranoid hatred of all things Scottish Nationalist (8).
More seriously in the medium to long term is what Labour stands for? The old social democracy is dead, but it cannot be resuscitated by a new social democracy or socialism. The values of the left and social democracy are as tarnished in the current crisis as that of the right and neo-liberalism, both being modernist projects fixated and based on economic growth.
New radical thinking is needed which is not based on internal Labour conversations, or endless questions about ‘what would the left do about ... welfare, work or civil liberties?' Addressing the future of Labour requires addressing the future of society, Britain, and imagining a different future.
What this requires is a politics beyond party which has a set of stories, mission and agency, and links to philosophy, economics, sociology and psychology. It has to have an understanding of the complex mosaic of class and inequality in Britain which isn't just about the working and middle classes, or the vagueness of the ‘squeezed middle'. Somehow the language of aspiration, liberation and freedom has been seized by the right and neo-liberalism, territory the left once thought was its own. Globalisation has used the language, values and zeal of a liberation movement to an extent the left has still to recognise. And it has made its claims on the future with its determinist belief in the inexorable forces it gives voice too; this sense of ‘the official future' - that tomorrow belongs to globalisation - has again stolen the left's mindset without the left even recognising the scale of the change this has resulted in.
It has to go with the grain of societal change in the way Old Labour did at its peak along with Thatcherism and New Labour. We have to develop a new language and philosophy which balances the claims of equity with efficiency, choice and voice, producer and consumer interests and capture, and which takes back the values of freedom and liberation from neo-liberation.
I don't see how the challenge of managing and regulating the forces of capitalism, power and privilege can be mustered by social democracy or a ‘new socialism'. Social democracy is in retreat everywhere, in crisis, and has been proven inadequate everywhere. Instead, we are going to have to break with the politics of the past, and take the best from the social democratic tradition, while developing a post-labourist politics which is a mix of red, green, feminist and the best of the radical liberal democratic traditions. And that cant just be an adding together of a left ‘rainbow coalition', but instead through these mixing of traditions aiding the true emergence of a genuine ‘new paradigm'.
That may sound at the moment suitably vague and woolly, but at least it is a more humble, honest and radical starting point than believing after all the retreats and humiliations of social democracy, we can just turn back the clock, and reheat the old progressive story. That is truly living in the comfort zones of the past, and much much more is required now.
Gerry Hassan
Notes
1. Newsnight, BBC Two, December 15th 2010.
2. The Daily Politics, BBC Two, December 14th 2010.
3. Neal Lawson and John Harris, ‘Time for a New Socialism', Compass, December 2nd 2010, http://www.compassonline.org.uk/news/item.asp?n=11735
4. John Harris, ‘Labour needs New Socialism - and coalition', The Guardian, December 4th 2010, http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/dec/04/labour-new-socialism-coalition
5. David Marquand, ‘The future of Ed Miliband's Labour Party is overshadowed by the threat to our civilisation, the barbarians are well past the gates', OpenDemocracy, December 13th 2010, http://www.opendemocracy.net/ourkingdom/david-marquand/future-of-ed-milibands-labour-party-is-overshadowed-by-threat-to-our-civil
6. Polly Toynbee, ‘A red carpet of opportunity awaits shell-shocked Labour', The Guardian, December 13th 2010
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Comments
on 10 January 2011, 12:27:11 AM
Given the times we are in we need more much more of the latter, and I find it telling that the central questions I posed as missing in John Harris and Neal Lawson’s ‘Time for a New Socialism’ – are not answered, addressed or acknowledged in Neal’s reply.
It would be a valuable contribution to the debate on the British left, the work of Compass, and the health of democracy – if we could begin to have a genuine debate and discussion over the following:
1. The nature, character and form of the British state – and why our political establishment, political classes and institutional opinion – including on the centre-left just don’t understand what Britain is.
Point here: Britain is not and never has been a unitary state – but a union state; everything about our politics – Westminster, parliamentary sovereignty – is different from this perspective.
2. The collapse of the Tory and Labour accounts of Britain has left us with a vacuum; the Tory unionist account of Britain had huge appeal across the UK – while Labour had a people’s story of Britain based on welfarism and state action.
These have both bitten the dust – and we are left with Tory and Labour stories which are barely plausible; localism anyone – New Labour or Cameroon Conservative? The UK no longer has a gut, emotional set of stories – believed in by people – from the centre-right or centre-left. That’s kind of serious and significant.
3. The nature of the British state has been fundamentally altered these last few decades; it has become a neo-liberal state. Compass have done lots of good things here, but I think and it is only my opinion – that what Compass have ignored is the link between these changes and the territorial dimensions of power and politics in the British state. The fact namely that – most of the UK just does not matter to the winners of Britain plc – most of Scotland, Wales, the North of England.
4. From this there is the missing ingredient in democracy: the English dimension. There is Scottish Labour and Welsh Labour, but no English Labour. And not only that but there is a deafening silence on most of the left where there should be noisy, informed, concerned debate and agitation: Jon Cruddas being the sole significant exception.
The left have always had problems with England – but this now matters more and more. It is no longer an option to remain silent and embarrassed when the subject of England is raised. The governance of England, the lack of democracy, the chasmic democratic deficit are increasingly issues. If the left does not speak on these areas – they will leave them uncontested to the Tories, or worse, UKIP and the BNP.
Maybe Compass think all of these issues are marginal. Maybe some people still think if you capture the central British state with the right programme – and institute PR and constitutional reform – it is all eventually going to be all right.
I suggest that avoiding these issues is the road to disaster. Believing in the Westminster model and the British state has paid less and less dividends to the centre-left. It led directly to New Labour’s embrace of Thatcherism.
I would like to emphasise that I believe Compass have done much productive work on the centre-left of British politics. I have written and said so many times.
Yet we need to begin a debate and discussion about the nature of the British state, its atrophied and deformed nature, and how it has changed in recent decades, what it has allowed and what this means for our democracy. And there needs to be an urgent engagement with the English question.
I trust the above will be taken in the comradely and friendly spirit it is offered, and I am more than happy to play a small part in aiding and encouraging Compass work and debates in the above areas. I welcome any thoughts from Compass and others.
on 08 January 2011, 10:43:46 AM
What I find so extraordinary is the way that New Labour and/or the Labour Party take for granted the vast untaxed inequality of the receipt of unearned gifted and inherited wealth. Why is there so much acceptance of the traditional conservative political ideology of unrestricted Dynastic Capitalism cascading down the generations? Why do we hear so little of the Liberal political ideology of property for all?
The inspiration for the left must come from the continuation EU-sceptic Liberal Party, whose constitution calls for liberty, property and security for all, which means the dreaded R word - Redistribution of the inheritance of wealth.
Forget the LibDems, who dropped the traditional Liberal Party demand for property for all when they were joined by the EU-fanatic Social Democrats from the right wing of the Labour Party.
A party for the majority of people in our country should be in favour of two major changes.
Firstly it should call for the UK to leave the EU, the ludicrous Common Agricultural Policy which pays fortunes every year to those who have inherited their land tax free (£300,000 p.a. to the Duke of Westminster and £500,000 p.a to the Prince of Wales - are we living in Ruritania?) and the wasteful Common Fisheries Policy which caused a million tons of fish to be thrown back into the North Sea every year.
Second, it should call for the redistribution of the inheritance of wealth in each new generation with a £10,000 UK Universal Inheritance for all UK-born UK citizens at 25 financed by radical reform of Inheritance Tax including abolition of all the current scandalously unlimited 100 per cent exemptions for lifetime gifts and agricultural, business and shareholding assets belonging to the wealthy.
on 01 January 2011, 5:05:35 PM
And it's a massive component in labour structure.
Marx was a writer/sometime jornalist.
Wordsworth wasa (great) poet.
That's a real and life-enhancing job.
The fact that,like Marx,patronage sustained him,is incidental.
Compass is important because it uses new technology
to promote wider discussion of labour values,
especially provincial and international thoughts.
The dreaded "complex mosaic"!!
I will concede that old labour's clubby/semi-masonic
aspects are well lost.
Look forward to your stimulating observations this year!
on 31 December 2010, 12:44:45 PM
Old Labour is traditional Labour. New Labour was pragmatic Labour (New Liberalism). Next Labour is experimentation and challenging the previous two Labour concepts. Compass Labour is a mixture of individualistic ideological (unrealistic) driven propaganda that reaches out only to those who wrongly believe that a refound Marxist ideology has risen from the dead through the convenience of looking through the eye of the Capital city. Coincidently, Marx never had a real job, similar to many that champion his legacy at Compass
Unfortunately Liberal democracy is the final end chapter of the 20th Century, whether we like it or not.
Labour is not London. Pluralism and Diversity is only argued in those areas that are cosmopolitan. This is not as a result of Labour values. This is a result of socio- economics of which Labour have only played a small part during the last 100 years. Taking advantage of the current social patterns and norms in London by using an organisation, as they see it, that attempts to doctrinate a minority of followers by on the hoof gender and anti consumer and anti - marketisation politics, for example,that does not resonate well with those in ex mining, ship building and agricultural communities in the North, who rely on the market to live and blossom. Compass and its folly are alien to reality in these communities.
COMPASS IS OUT OF TOUCH, INSULAR AND DETACHED FROM REALITY. PERIOD!
People obviously agree with my moaning as there is little opposition to my comments
on 30 December 2010, 7:47:56 PM
The best of old/traditional labour values had their roots in caring and loving kindness,and above all fairness.
A sense of community and inclusion.
Gerry's "complex mosaic" imagery isn't the core of an excellent essay.It's waffle.I dare to think I could do better,or at least be less "vague and woolly".I'm damned sure you could formulate a more realistic programme.
Let's start with coalitions.And let's rule them out.
It's not personal,but Gerry is big enough to take hard knocks in debate.
So am I,so are you,and so are Neal and Mr.Harris!
on 29 December 2010, 8:45:07 PM
Excellent essat Gerry, which identifies Compass and its mentor for what it really is. Failing and defunct of real 21st Century Ideas.
on 29 December 2010, 6:50:00 PM
some might call us woolly and vague,but we are actually a red green and feminist explosion establishing a truly social democratic new order.
she prepares and cooks the meals,and I wash up and put away.she has the vision of the garden,plants,nurtures.I undertake the heavier tasks of digging and weeding.
as one of the first social revolutionaries in late mediaeval england,john ball, opined,"when adam delved and eve span,who then was the gentleman?"
we won't mention theconsultancy fees associated with the serpent.
on 29 December 2010, 4:50:31 PM
on 29 December 2010, 3:43:16 PM
Not my words,but Chantelle Houghton on her split with Preston,
[OK magazine 7/09/10].
Now she's with Rav Wilding.
Surely it isn't going sour between two celebrities of the
progressive centre left like yourself and Gerry?
Remember Jon Cruddas' profound credo~do not do unto others
what you would not want them to do unto you.
I am available for mediation on the premium rate line.
Meanwhile concentrate on the together days,
and think about where you fit into Gerry's complex mosaic.
And continue with the series of dialogues with the sons of Kernow
in Lostwithel.Also the feminist daughters of Kernow in the Lizard lighthouse.
on 28 December 2010, 11:06:37 PM
on 23 December 2010, 10:06:45 AM
You can work on from that via Prezza's blueprints.
Eventually missionaries can set up schools in estuary English,
perhaps using Polperro as their HQ.
Otherwise re-forge links with Phonecia,present day Lebanon,
to unleash the Cornish wild cat economy.
Evangalists from Northampton Saints can re-establish a
half-way decent rugby tradition again.
Orlando could show how tourist visitors needn't be
treated as grockles ripe for exploitation solely.
Local pride or cultivated grievance?
I dwelt among unknown men in lands beyond the seas
Nor Cornwall did I know till then how much I missed cream teas.
on 22 December 2010, 7:29:09 PM
"PR and federal regions answer the questions the other posters are asking"
Perhaps but is the left proposing a grass-roots from the bottom up reworking of our democracy? Establishing true popular sovereignty? A citizens convention that decides who are the nations (regions) of these isles and then decides the appropriate level of autonomy within a federal system? No they are not and they don't look like they are considering it either.
Instead we have the tired old top down imposition of artificial government zones and rabid hostility to all expressions of Cornishness or Englishness.
on 22 December 2010, 3:09:41 PM
Auden slipped too easily into the netovshchik cast of mind.
Wordsworth still towers over our poetic landscape.
To analyse the French Revolution in profound verse
is a massive achievement,but only a part of his legacy.
Wordsworth thou shouldst be living at this hour,
England hath need of thee!
I suppose for the moment Gerry and JonC will have to
voyage the strange seas of silent Thought alone
on our behalf.
But its rather like watching a dance routine choreographed
by H of steps,compared to a Michael Jackson number from
his pomp.
on 21 December 2010, 3:18:40 PM
We need politicians to reflect this and embrace social democracy again, smoke screens, PR and marketing nonsense has prevailed too long. Thatcher and Reagan brought back ruthless free market capitalism. People power can end this and reintroduce social democracy, and with PR and federal regions answer the questions the other posters are asking.
on 21 December 2010, 2:10:05 PM
Equally depressing is watching McCluskey try to become the Scargill of 2011; something which only serves to recall the old adage of historical tragedy repeating itself as farce.
Certainly, words like 'socialism', 'social democracy', even 'left' have become more than a little faded and tatty. After all when Ed can claim to be a socialist, it must be recognised that the word has a limited usefulness. But to crush Lawson and Harris because they continue to use these words and try to illuminate them with very fuzzy concepts like the 'good society' is as unfair as it would be to accuse you of also being equally fuzzy, something to which you do admit. The central issue is to stop the idea of pluralism, which they do use a lot in a very diffuse way, drifting away, as it is already doing, into just getting LibDems to defect to Labour or, at the very least, join Compass. It would, for example, have been interesting for Lawson to report on the politics of pluralism as expressed by those with whom he briefly shared a sleeping bag. But whatever their faults, they are giving it a try. You are right. We need a new language but it has to be fashioned out of the old if it is to be intelligible.
Perhaps we should resurrect as the poem for our time, Auden's lament from a dive on Fifty-Second Street watching "as the clever hopes expire of a low dishonest decade." As he goes on:
Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and dust
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.
On a more practical note: a challenge to Compass. In a new-found spirit of pluralism, try holding your annual summer rally in Manchester with a live big-screen video link to London. Let's see how many of the metropolitan elite know where Euston station is.
on 21 December 2010, 1:48:30 PM
on 21 December 2010, 12:15:17 PM
A sorry state of affairs but one that simply mirrors the majority of English peoples lack of understanding.
With it's massive population England dominates the UK politically, economically and culturally. Due to this there is nothing easier for you average English resident to do than go about their business totally ignoring the English question, West Lothian dilemma, Scotland and Wales. The six counties are a little more difficult as blood has been spilt.
These nagging little questions, if they exist in an English persons consciousness at all, just don't merit any great attention. No one is going to get hot under the collar for a new federal settlement or an English parliament...yet...
I'm sure if you stopped 10 people in the road and asked them to draw England they'd produce a map of the island of Great Britain. Then if you asked them if England should have a parliament they'd look at you with puzzlement and ask in response "where does my MP go?". England politicians reflect this situation. Left and right. Compare this to Belgium where we find two of its three regions are of equivalent size.
Going back to who are the home nations. If you ask the government they'll give you the establishment view although I'm not sure 'Northern Ireland' really qualifies as a nation.
If however you sound out the people across these Atlantic isles as to what their national identity is a different picture emerges. Cornwall rises into view and 'Northern Ireland' becomes messy with half the population considering themselves part of the Irish nation and the other half part of some British nations that no one else really belongs to any more.
So which view is more legitimate the conservative establishment one or the grass roots view born of the people? Which view should a new plural and decentralised left give precedence to?
on 20 December 2010, 10:34:02 PM
on 20 December 2010, 9:46:26 PM
on 20 December 2010, 8:50:20 PM
Yes, I do know what the anglo-british establishments view is of who the home-nations are. Equally I'm fully aware of the identity that has been instilled in me from my family, community and upbringing in Kernow. They disagree. Cornwall is not Scotland but it is not Wiltshire or Essex either.
As for the rest of what you say I totally agree. Of course I can see devolution hasn't been finished to the detriment of the inhabitants of England and the Duchy of Cornwall. The British state-nationalist left is part of the establishment so what do you expect?
I'm simply and continually disappointed by overwhelmingly under-informed opinions of Cornwall and the Cornish question.
If you multiplied our population by ten -5M instead of 500K- things, I'm sure, would be quite different. An indictment of a rather sad yet pervasive small-so-ignorable mentality towards the Cornish question.
on 20 December 2010, 4:34:29 PM
Whatever the merits and demerits of Cornish devolution - the four nations of the UK are England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.
You dont take your argument forward by trying to ignore this basic fact; and within this context you have to face up to the challenge that the British left and political classes - dont understand the character of the UK and dont seem to care that they dont. And that they dont understand the missing imgredient of the union: the English dimension and how the largest nation of the UK is governed in an undemocratic manner.
Support for Cornish devolution/self-government hopefully doesnt preclude you seeing the wider crisis of the UK and the British state/democracy.
on 20 December 2010, 3:26:07 PM
No! This is wrong! Whilst I don't deny that England is being ignored so too is the Cornish nation. Something you are equally guilty of and due in, no doubt, to your own centralist anglo-brit preconceptions.
A few stats to open your eyes.
37% of School kids in Kernow prefer Cornish rather than English OR British when describing their identity. PLASC Schools ethnic data.
50,000 people signed a petition in 2002 calling for Cornish devolution.
This was supported by an opinion poll that placed support for a Cornish assembly at over 55%.
On Cornwall Council there are no Labour councillors but there are Mebyon Kernow, independent and LibDem councillors who support devolution and national recognition.
You want more "pluralism and decentralism"? Great! Then stop thinking of Cornwall inside the establishments enforced English county box.
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