The fifth tradition (Chapter 1 of 6): Why the Labour party still matters to the left

(Long post alert – 3,700 words)

Introduction

Now then, I have a lot to say, and I’m going to say it.  There’s no way you can stop me.  Not many of you read this, but no matter.  It is time to get these matters off my chest.

And so in this six part series I’ll be examining, from a determinedly left wing perspective and as well as my little old brain will let me, the following some ideas in the following ‘chapters’:

1.  Why the Labour party still matters to the left, despite (or perhaps even because of) the last 12 years in government, and why the Labour party is not beyond recall;

2.   Why and how the current economic crisis remains an opportunity for the  Labour left to push forward its agenda

3.  Why the Labour left now needs to recognise the best of its history and achievements, for lessons on how to react to the current circumstances, while moving away from some of the invasive traditions which have done so much to harm the labour movement in the last thirty years, and in so doing how the Labour party can recreate itself as a, or even the party for the 21st century. 

 It will come as no surprise, to those who have read my posts as they have moved from an assessment of how the Labour left failed the working class and towards a call for a new ‘narrative’, that there will be a focus on the need to re-establish at the heart of the Labour party the ‘primacy of the working class’, but that we must do so by establishing a narrative of what the working class is, and (to paraphrase Compass) how it lives in the 21st century.

4.   How the left within and around Labour party can re-energise itself at local level. 

In particular I will contend – and I think this will be the most controversial, even counter-intuitive aspect – that the local left-led Labour parties must kick back against the managerialist approach adopted by Labour’s hierarchy, challenge the notion that a good local party is a ‘campaigning party’ (ultimately to the exclusion of all else), and re-politicise themselves as guardians of 21st century working class interests.

5.   The challenges that face the Labour left at local government level, an essential (though sometimes overplayed) aspect of the political arena, and how Labour councillors need to consciously rise to the challenge of re-politicising their role, so as to become not just a local but a national force once again.

6 A summary piece on how Labour can and must develop a ‘fifth tradition’ if it is serve a useful purpose in the 21st century, and how it may die if it does not.

If that sounds ambitious stuff for a blog that not that many people read, that’s because it is. 

If it sounds wildly optimistic, given the current public view of the Labour party and its prospects in the coming period, that’s because I am optimistic.  Otherwise I wouldn’t be committing myself to several thousand words that relatively few people will read (at least for now).

The Labour party and me

And I am optimistic about the future of the Labour party.

I still think that the Labour party offers the best organisational structure for the representation of the interests of the working class in Britain, though as I will explore in chapter 3 and again in chapter 6, such representation must necessarily have an international dimension, and I am less convinced of its capacity in this respect.

I know such a view is controversial.  I have lost count of the blog comments I have seen where members of the Labour left are ‘advised’, with differing degrees of courtesy, that if they really are socialists, they should leave the Labour party today.  Here is just the most recent one – I don’t keep a proper record.

So I think it’s right to start out by establishing why I think the Labour party is the right place for people on the left in Britain to be.

First, though, I should stress that my belief in the Labour party does not come from any emotional bond.  I am not one of those who says things like: ‘I will never leave the Labour party, because it is in my blood’, because it is not in my blood.

I’ve only been a member since 1999, and only properly active since 2001.  In the late1980s, before I went to live overseas for most of the 1990s, I was a not unsuccessful Branch Secretary of a very large union branch, but it never even occurred to me to join the Labour party, which had absolutely no relevance.  In the mid-1980s I even voted for the Liberals (or it may have been the SDP) as a tactical vote against the Conservatives. A bit stupid, I admit readily.

Because I don’t have the emotional and family ties that others have, if I come to believe that there is a more effective route to pursue my political objectives (which are much firmer and, I believe, much more coherent than they were in the 1980s), then I will feel no great loss at leaving the Labour party, and taking elsewhere whatever skills and energies I have left.   The Labour party is a 100 years old, but it has no god given right to exist, and if it is supplanted by a more effective force able to act more effectively in the interests of the working class, then that will be a good thing.

My political beliefs have much in common with many people who have decided that the Labour party is now a lost cause, and I do not blame them for having made this choice. Yet I do believe they have made the wrong choice, and have done so out of ignorance of what the party is, of its potential, and – as significantly – because they conveniently igmore the reality that  the left is, in many ways, responsible for the current position of the party.

The Labour party, betrayed by the left?

Many on the left have departed from the Labour party because they feel betrayed by the national government’s policies and actions while in power over the last 12 years. 

I share some of that sense of betrayal, but this is tempered by the recognition the constraints under which national governments feel they must operate in a ‘globalised’ environment, where, as a current example, the threat by a self-appointed credit agency to reduce the overall rating from AAA unless massive public spending cuts are put in place, can seem all too real, and of much greater and immediate importance than the welfare of its own citizens during a recession. 

This is not to excuse the current government, of course, because even to start to accept the all too convenient thesis that the nation state is powerless in the context of financial globalisation is to give free rein to that thesis then becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy of capitulation to neo-liberal norms.

But is important to ask exactly why has our Labour government of 12 years substantially failed to take on the countervailing pressures of globalisation and neo-liberal normalisation?  

One simple answer is that those in charge are traitors to the cause, and the personal, very visceral hatred of senior Labour figures by many on the left is there for us all to see, and is understandable enough.

But I prefer a more ‘structural’ answer, not least because I find it hard to believe that Gordon Brown, or Tony Blair before him are ‘traitors’, or even bad people, rather than the victims of their own circumstances (and, as I’ll explore in chapter 3, New Labour’s ‘alien’ traditions).

My preferred answer as to why our government has not behaved as we thought it would and should, on so many issues, is that, as the Labour party, we did not tell it what to do properly; that we did not support it, or the Parliamentary Labour Party, to make the hard, institution busting decisions that it should have done in the late 1990s.

Overcome with gratitude to New Labour for seeming to make Labour electable again (and I dispute that it was New Labour that actually did this), as a party we took our eye off the ball, and assumed that our New Labour leaders would govern in the interests of those the Labour party was set up to serve.  Many of us, with notable exceptions, just assumed that everything would be sorted out for us, and that the job was now more or less done. 

We failed to make the appropriate demands of our leaders; indeed the problem was that we accepted them wholly as leaders, no longer as delegates sent to do the party’s bidding in parliament.  We failed to make our demands, so of course the leaders listened and acted upon the demands of those who did make them – business lobbyists, those in favour of deregulation, those in favour of PFI, those in favour of continuing to delude ourselves about our relationship with the USA.

Thus for example, when the new Labour government commissioned the Cruickshank report into the workings of the banking industry in 1998, and the report came back recommending much tighter control on banks, who were making excessive profits yet were fundamentally guaranteed by the taxpayer, the left did not stand with the government and demand that the recommendations be implemented.  Indeed, I’m not even sure the left noticed.  So the banks lobbied hard, and the banks won.  Whose fault is that?

The uncomfortable reality is that the left only really have itself to blame, and to repeat the mantra that ‘I didn’t leave the party, the party left me’, before ceremonially tearing up the party membership card, is an act of self-delusion.

Because, back in 1997/98, the left could have regained control of party policy; the unions would have come on side, and the membership was essentially as leftwing as it had been in the 1980s. 

One of the most striking things about Paul Whiteley’s and Patrick Seyd’s three studies of the Labour party membership, the first from 1983 and the second from 1992 and the third from 2001 (with Patrick Seyd), was how, despite both significant societal change, and the changes at the top of the party under Neil Kinnock and the move to the right that would culminate in New Labour and the victory of the Blairite ‘modernisers,’ the rank and file of the membership retained its socialist values and beliefs.   The same message came out of Hilary Wainwright’s seminal 1987 Labour: A tale of Two Parties.

Look and ask around the grassroots membership in 2009, and the same remains true; people remain in the party because they have socialist beliefs, and young people join the party, albeit in somewhat smaller numbers, because they have been developing socialist beliefs.

The problem is that a party which remains dominated numerically by people with socialist beliefs came to be dominated and ‘managed’ (see chapter 3) by a small elite that thought they had the intellectual wherewithal and the political ‘nouse’ to take the party into a glorious post-socialism, classless future. They were able to convince many of us (myself included for a while in the late 90’s) that they had indeed found some new way of doing things.  They even convinced themselves. They were wrong.

At a semi-intellectual level this new way of doing things was The Third Way, and included concepts like ‘the hollowed out state’, where in a complex world power was being devolved outwards to ‘partners’ and ‘communities’ and upwards towards Europe and big business.  

Fundamentally, this was all hokum – government retained its power to act if it wanted to – but it was a useful self-fulfilling prophecy which allowed government to distance itself from what had been its core responsibilities, at international level under the cloak of ‘globalisation’, and at domestic level under the guise of ‘partnership working’.

At a media level, we were told that politics as we knew it was at end, and that the most important thing was ‘what works’.  This was the cover for the development of PFI and wider privatisation, including of health care. ‘What worked’ was a balance between private and public, we were told, though we were never told where the balance of power lay between them.

And just as an earlier generation of people with essentially socialist beliefs – that’s why they were in the Labour party – was taken in by the new ‘identity politics’ of the 1980s, which seemed to provide a convenient excuse not to have to worry about the realities of class inequalities (see chapter 3), so in the late 90s and early 2000s, the left was taken in by the glamour and the glitz of a new political philosophy, brought to use to make our lives as (champagne) socialists easier and a bit more modern.

We need to be big enough to acknowledge that we taken for a ride.  As I’ve said above, the left must bear its own share of the blame, and in so doing start to take the steps to make sure it doesn’t happen again. 

Then we need to get over it and move on.

The Labour party, down but by no means out 

For there is much reason for hope.

While the deliberate ‘non-ideology’ of New Labour (or at least the vacuous essentialisms of its  communitarianism) has now been shown for what it is (a handy cover for handy neo-liberalism), and while New Labour as a concept is now in its death throes, the Labour party is still here, and so is its socialist membership.

Sure, the membership is in crisis, but then the membership has been in crisis before, and come out stronger on the other side.  These are the opening lines from the aforementioned 1983 study by Paul Whiteley:

‘The Labour Party is in serious trouble, and faces a series of crises greater than it has experienced since the 1930s…….Every organisation which faces multiple crises will at some point reach a stage of no return……This has not leadey happened to the Labour party, and it is certainly not inevitable that it will happen.’

The crisis of membership of 2009 is only as bad it was in the late 1970s, when many members felt wholly disillusioned with the apparent inability of the Callaghan government to cope with international financial pressures without resorting to a distinctly non-socialist incomes policy.  

The result was a surge of leftwingthought and practice in the 1980s, challenging the institutional conventions of the time, especially at local government level.  There was a surge in membership with people drawn in from outside the party, enthusiastic about the changes within it.  As I’ll explore in the chapter 4, some serious mistakes were made, and with longstanding negative consequences for the Labour left, but the energy and commitment of the 1980s Labour left needs to be recognised.

And there is no reason that the same thing cannot happen this time around.  While membership numbers have certainly plummeted since the highs of the mid-1990s, when it was actually quite trendy to be a member of the Labour party or at least an overt sympathiser (remember Britpop?), they have only plummeted back to where they were. 

I don’t have the exact figure to hand, but I think current membership is around 200,000.  The members that have been lost are, to a significant extent, made up those ‘fair weather supporters’ who never really contributed that much in the first place, and who have cancelled their direct debit and moved on.  Certainly some members of the left have made the deliberate choice to leave the party and become active elsewhere, but then still others have decided to join.

Though clearly membership numbers are important financially to the party (which wastes quite a lot of money on publicity tosh), they are not the most important indicator of its continued relevance.   More important than how many people pay their subscriptions is the continued institutional links and legitimacy that the Labour party continues to enjoy, in spite of its current unpopular profile.  

Some high profile trade unions may have cut their links, but most have not.  In most local parties, there is some representation from trade unions on the General Committee, though with varying levels of day-to-day engagement in party affairs which is largely dictated by the unions’ different historic links in different localities, as well, for example, with whether local Labour social clubs have remained or closed.

And the party remains a genuinely national party.  While the structures have fallen apart to the point that the party simply does not exist in a few places (notably in the South West), in general the party keeps on going. Sometimes it does so by hook or by crook and seemingly against all odds, but it keeps going.  It keeps putting up candidates, however unlikely they are to win, and while electoral politics is not everything, the presence on the ballot paper of the name Labour remains important as a statement of the continued capacity to organise locally.

When Stuart Wilks-Heeg, in his study of local parties in Burnley and Harrogate, laments the decline of the local party (link here) and the fact that in both places Labour is held together by ‘less than 100’ diehards, he fails to take on board that it was ever thus.  

Back in the mid-1970s, anti-Labour socialist Cynthia Cockburn was busy lamenting the fact that Lambeth Labour party meetings only had 20 people at it, while just a few years later pro-Labour socialist Hilary Wainwright was celebrating the fact that, on the other side of the Thames, there were meetings with up to 20 people present.  20 odd years laster, neither here not there socialist Andrew Coulson was talking about how difficult it is to get 20 poeple at a meeting.

It’s easy to see the glass half empty if you’re on a downer about the Labour party, but just as easy to see it half full.  Whichever way we look at the glass though, it’s not changed that much.

And out there on the big wide world, has the public’s relationship with the Labour party changed that much? 

It never ceases to amaze me, when I’m out canvassing, that people still refer to themselves not as in support of Labour, but as Labour: Oh, I’m Labour….The whole family’s Labour…This is a Labour area… and so on’.

That’s not to deny that electoral support for Labour has collapsed in areas where the local party has been ineffective at keeping it going through the hard times, but it does suggest that in many areas, like mine, there remains a deep-rooted affinity with the Labour movement, roots that have not been washed away by 15 years of New Labourism.   Certainly, there is much to do to restore and revitalise that affinity, but there is also much to work with.

Labour as least worst

If there were a better alternative for the left, I’d choose the alternative.  But there isn’t. 

There isn’t a leftish political organisation with the same roots and links. There’s no other organisation with its national coverage. There’s no other organisation with anything remotely comparable a membership. 

That is not to say that there are others in the left doing good stuff.  The Socialist Party can teach Labour a lot about how to re-forge links with the trade union grassroots.  More importantly (and more controversially, it can teach us a lot about the relative importance or otherwise of electoral politics (see chapter 3).  But the Socialist Party still, nearly 20 years after its emergence from Militant (and it is a very different beast), has less than 2,000 members.  I do not expect those 2,000 members to move over and join Labour right now, though drawing them in should be a medium term aim for the Labour left, but I expect even less to see large numbers of Labour members join the Socialist Party.  As most Labour members know, ‘you’re a long time dead’, and leaving the Labour party is, for all but a select view a death nor just in terms of party membership, but the longstanding friendships that often go with that membership.

While I single the Socialist Party out for begrudging praise, I am not going to engage here in a review of the capacity of all the minority leftwing parties and organisations, not least because I don’t know enough about them.  Indeed, the fact that I, as someone fairly interested in leftwingpolitics and ideas, don’t know much about them, may be reflective of their lack of importance in the grand scheme of things.

Of greater importance as rival to the Labour party for the hearts and minds of the left is the Green party, if only because of its electoral success, and the fact that any further rolling out of PR may benefit it further.

But the Green party is not a party of the left.  While it has members who are of the left – some of them intelligent and committed – as a whole the party does not pass the basic eligibility test for membership of the left.  The Green Party’s primary purpose is not to represent the interests of the working class.   Any party who has high profile spokespeople who think the recession is a good thing is, I’m afraid not to be trusted.  And many Labour party members up and down the country know that, because they know the Green party members in their area are more interested in environmental statements than they are in ordinary people’s lives.

Conclusion

The Labour party is far from perfect, but it’s the best we’ve got right now. 

It can and will get a lot better in the next few years, and in the chapters that follow I’ll be examining how it can learn from its past – both the good and the bad – to do just that, seizing the opportunity of the financial crisis to present a strategically coherent alternative, and an intellectually coherent future.

The MPs’ expenses scandal of the last couple of months has changed the dynamic of the Labour party.  The Parliamentary Labour Party remains an elite unto themselves, but things are changing as the grassroots finds its voice, and the leadership starts to listen. 

These are exciting times to be a member of the Labour party.  And as with the economy, now is not the time to cut and run.  Now is the time to invest in the prospect of sustainable growth.

See you for chapter 2.