Compass – pointing the Left in the wrong direction: A response to Neal Lawson and John Harris

(Long post alert – 3,900 words.  Pdf file here for ease of reading)

1. The usual needless finger-warming preamble

‘This is a major new essay from, Paul Cotterill, one of the UK’s leading political activists and commentators, which which will kick start a major debate about the future of the Left in Britain. It is framed as a response to John Harris and Neal Lawson recent ‘No Turning Back’ essay in the New Statesman.’

Well, I haven’t got resources of a think-tank to big me up, so I have to do it myself…..

This is, indeed, a response to Neal and John’s essay, with which I profoundly disagree. It will be an essay; whether it becomes a ‘major essay’ depends, I contend on a) whether anybody bothers to read it b) it has any influence on what happen in British politics. The same of course might have been said of John and Neal’s essay, but they already seem pretty sure of themselves.

2. What this is essay is and is not

This is not primarily an essay about the ‘political outcomes’ set out by John and Neal, at the end of their essay, that they would like to see come about:

‘a mixed economy in which industries and services that the nation relies on are socialised, not privatised. We can allow markets to flourish but know we are served by more plural and diverse means of production….’

For the record, I am ‘hard left’ enough to think that the ‘regulation of the market’ which lies at the heart of this vision will simply be insufficient to deal with the logics of capitalism, and particularly to deal with the newly emerging raw power of capitalism, which is emerging swiftly in the aftermath of what John and Neal, correctly, identify as the collapse of the ‘purer’ form of neo-liberal ideologies of the effectiveness of the free market.

In section 5 I will touch back on the way in which capitalism is changing, and becoming more difficult to challenge, not less (as John and Neal suggest it is), and how this affects how the Left must react.

However, I want to argue here not about intended outcomes, but about the tactics for reaching those outcomes. To do this, I am content to work within John and Neal’s ‘centre left’ paradigm, and to accept for now that it might be possible to ‘regulate’ capitalism, in the way they set out, for the good of everyone, and in a way which ‘closes the gap between rich and poor’, and benefits the planet at the same time.

I want to argue ‘in paradigm’ for two main reasons.

Firstly, intended outcomes are clearly inextricable from how we achieve them – you can’t go somewhere very well if you don’t know where you want to go – but I also think it might be beneficial for the whole of the Left if we try, at least as a tactic of unity , to collapse the distance between hard and soft left. This is because, to a great extent, while the intended outcomes may be different, effective tactics for the first part of the struggle are likely to be much the same.

Broadly speaking, the ‘centre left’ feels that getting to the point of an appropriately regulated ‘market economy’ will be sufficient, and that’s fine. As a member of the ‘harder’ left, I’m fairly comfortable with the idea that any effective action which takes us in that direction will open up demands for further change, further redistribution of power, and a route beyond a duly regulated but still fundamentally capitalist economy, and on towards the post-capitalist economy I would like to see before I die.

Second, and interrelated with this first reason for arguing ‘in paradigm’, it is Compass members, and others of the ’soft left’ that I seek to reach with this major essay. There’s actually a good deal of energy in the Compass movement, and much to admire.

It is a particular shame, I would argue, that such energy that might be otherwise productively used looks like it might be wasted in pursuit of tactics which will not work, and when a readily alternative course of action lies open; this is not the policy-idea based route of John and Neal, but one based on a better understanding of the real dynamics of social change and social movements – dynamics the right seem to understand only too well.

3.  We’ve been there before

So how do I know that what John and Neal propose – what they call the ‘creation of a politics that transcends party lines’ – will not work?

Essentially, I know because it’s already been tried, it didn’t work then, and there’s less reason for it to work now.

The last time it was tried by the Centre Left was, not unsurprisingly, the last time a Labour government which had disappointed its supporters was swept from power to be replaced by a more overtly rightwing government.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the battered Left largely took refuge in urban local government, where Labour had some kind of power base. Confronted by the early days of Thatcherism, during which the bark was louder than bite as regards local government, the Left sought to develop new coalitions, and to develop new ways of doing politics, and the term the ‘New Urban Left’ was coined. For the first time in many areas, the Labour party opened it doors to ‘non-traditional’ influences (or had the doors opened for them), and broad, loose campaigning were formed of, for example, a newly resurgent women’s movement, professional academics, members of the early green movement, and BME organisations, all looking to advance their local positions via control of Councils and other bodies e.g. Health Authorities.

There were many successes as well as failures, and in a more charitable reading than I give it here, I have celebrated some of the hard-won achievements, then seen as extraordinary, now thoroughly mainstream, such as the equal opportunities in public employment and the right to at least some level of transparency in grant funding processes.

This was the heights of ‘identity politics’. For a while, it seemed like the place to be, and I’ll be the first to admit that it was attractive. Back then, when I felt I was banging my head against a brick wall with an old style public sector union branch which cared for nothing other than what seemed very narrow issues of terms and conditions for (a section of) the workforce it represented, it was refreshing to feel part of a wider movement which accepted me if I accepted all that everyone else brought to the party. And we genuinely thought we were part of the vanguard against Thatcherism. It felt like a good place to be, a good place to feel good about yourself.

But in the end, it didn’t change very much at all. Any advances made in local government were largely swept away by Thatcher in post-1985 mode, and under our very noses the the managerialism of the modern local government of targets, performance indicators, and a very political commitment to the status quo under the guise of depoliticisation was introduced.

David Blunkett, hero of the Sheffield Left, made his move to parliament, and kept going right, Derek Hatton became a radio talkshow host, and I was struck, a few weeks ago, by how Graham Stringer – probably the most influential Council leader of the lot in Manchester – is now described as an anonymous backbencher with a penchant for foot in mouth about dyslexia.

Outside the relatively confines of local government, even more so, the Great Moving Right Show (see section 5) just kept on moving right, while the New Left was busy with its identity politics and feeling good about itself.

Meanwhile, the real heart of the left, the trade union movement, was busy getting disenfranchised from the party it had founded at national level, and alienated from the strange new middle-class lefties at local level. Ask many an older trade unionist what happened to her/his party in the 1980s, and the description that comes will not be the one of a Labour party opening up to wider, more socially liberal influences, modernising its structure and its campaigning tactics. Instead you will get a picture of a party being wrested from its roots, with the remaining Labour social clubs pulling away from the party structure to being a slightly sad drinking hole, and trade union affiliation to the local party becoming a matter of duty and form rather than function.

That is not to say that those of the (New Urban) Left of the party were not correct in their attempts to open the party out beyond its traditional working class base and embrace what seemed like a new form of liberal socialism – the socialism of identity politics born in the 1960s. As a youngster back then, I was all in favour of it, because it was a good less stuffy than what I was used to in the union. But nor should be underestimate the unintended consequences of the middle class Left’s usurping of the Labour party, because the disenfranchisement of the unions in particular is still with us today, and makes everything we need to do now more difficult.

And what did the rise of this ‘identity politics’ really achieve anyway. Under a New Labour government and its communitarian ideology (if it warrants such a title), the notion that diverse interests groups could demand their rights from the state in equal measure to everyone else has been replaced by a dogma of ‘rights and responsibilities’ and all the diversity of the group is now expected to accommodate itself to the essentialist notion of ‘the community’ – a community which is defined by a strange new homogeneity of suspicion and fear of otherness.

The practical implications of this subtle but all too real shift are clear enough, for example in the recent government guidance to statutory agencies on funding of ’single groups’; it is no longer acceptable, for example, under New Labour, to fund groups that support black women’s groups such as Southall Black Sisters unless they make a commitment to ‘integration’ with the community. The idea was beaten off by the voluntary sector, for now, but the idea that the government should have thought in such terms in the first place is indicative.

The whole idea of identity politics – that heterogeneous groups might coalesce to make demands of the state for equal material treatment – has been swept away by the advance of a intellectually baseless, but extremely persuasive, state commitment to a ‘community’ committed to nothing but defending itself and its ‘Daily Mail’ values.

In summary, the well-meaning Centre-Left of the 1980s reacted to the rise of the Right in Britain by opening itself up to a wide range of influences, personalities and liberal ideas, and importing them into Labour, just as post-Marxist intellectuals then all the rage told us we should, because working class struggle was dead. In so doing, the Centre Left (of whom I was one) felt good about itself, but its successes have been short-lived, and we have been outmanoeuvred by the Right, as reflected by New Labour. Worse, we have, as a Labour party/Centre Left largely severed our links to what gave us strength in the first place – the working classes.

4. The same mistake again?

But this is the direction that Compass, judging by John and Neal’s essay, would have us travel again. This time the sanctuary of a Left disappointed by a Labour government we;d all hope for better from cannot be in local government, because that possible sanctuary has been washed away by twenty more years of centralised diktat on what local government can or cannot do, and an accompanying culture in the Labour party which places local political initiative at the bottom of the NEC-Regional Party-CLP-LGC-hierarchy, and the overriding ambition of many Labour groups is to tow the party line and not embarrass the government.

With that local sanctuary gone, the Centre Left has found another convenient bolt-hole, one that’s even more less productive overall than local government was, which, as I’ve said, did make some advances and had a lot of good, brave, committed people in it. The new bolt-hole is the think-tank world, and accompanying centre-left blogoshere, or if you’ve got the background and the contacts, centre-left journalism of the type Neal and John are comfortable with.

In this world, even more of us can feel safe and sound and feel that by paying our Compass subscription and even doing the odd entry on our blogs or message boards, we’re making a bit of a difference. This, I suspect, is the reason for the popularity of Labourlist; the feeling that with Derek at the helm we are really starting to combat the rightwing hold on the blogosphere. Never mind that most of those people who look at Labourlist have a pretty good idea which way they’ll vote, and wouldn’t merit much attention if you met them on the doorstep and noted them on your canvass sheet, either because they solidly against or because they’re solidly for. It feels good to be part of something, doesn’t it? Again, I include myself here. There’s nothing like home comforts.

And like last time around, John and Neal want us to open ourselves up to a new range of ideas and influences. This time around it’s not so much identity-based groups that we’re asked to encompass, because they’re part of the communitarian fabric now. This time around it’s the ‘issue groups’ we must make coalition with to drive forward the Centre Left agenda.

We should, say John and Neal, forge a deal with the Countryside Alliance.

Excuse me a second, while I reach for the sick bucket. What kind of deal could we possibly want to forge with the Countryside Alliance, a grouping about as far removed from the basic values of the Left as it’s possible to get, and which wouldn’t get the concept of material inequality if it landed on its collective head from a great height? This would not be a coalition for a new politics, but a coalition against it.

Likewise, the Convention for Modern Liberty may sound more reasonable liberal, and certainly there are some decent people within it, but – as I’ve explored here – their overall values are not of the Left. They are about rights for people who already have many material rights and advantages, not about rights for the dispossessed.

In short, strategic coalitions may be OK in principle, but we do need to think about who we want to coalesce with, and why, because to me that kind of coalition looks more like a total sell-out of everything the Left is supposed to stand for.

But perhaps the most comfortable thing about the sanctuary of the think-tank world is that you get to make policy, totally unencumbered by the fact that you’re in no position, and are most unlikely to be in a position, to implement it.

While John and Neal’s essay talks a good game about the need for a new politics, the jump straight to the policy ideas that would be good to implement if they ever got into power belie a complete misunderstanding of how the kind of social movement that they want to see take place actually take place.

As Don Paskini has pointed out, four of the policy ideas John and Neal put forward are around changes to the tax regime. Social movements are based not, though, on pumping out policy ideas for the refinement of tax. They are based on the development of a popular desire to change something big and important and to change it soon. They are based on the need for adversity, not compromise; they are based not on the rationalities of policy-making, but on the emotional intelligence that something needs to be put right, and the confidence that, if people get together quickly, then it can be.

A ‘new politics’ cannot be primarily about policy ideas. It must about creating a discourse, creating a belief that change can come, and its about taking it to a wider readership/listenership than those who do policy ideas. In the Left case, I will argue below, its about taking that discourse back out to what was our core constituency, the working classes.
 

5. The New Great Moving Right Show

Making policy more important than discourse is not a mistake the Right make. Thirty years ago, Stuart Hall’s seminal The Great Right Moving Show showed how Thatcherism was constructed from a ‘discursive articulation’ of two popular themes – that the welfare state (under Labour) had failed, and that the Conservatives represented a return to traditional family values and to good ‘housekeeping’. Policy changes, especially on public spending, actually came later than the rhetoric; it was more inaction than specific policy actions which allowed de-industrialisation to gather pace in the early 1980s.

Now, it seems to me, we are on the move rightwards again, after 12 years of a government which has done little to take us back left. This time, the discourse if somewhat different, but it is more dangerous for it. This time it is less intellectually coherent than the early 1980s, when the neoliberal economics of Friedman and Hayek gave the Right a foundation for its rhetoric.

Now, while the Left is busy celebrating the end of Friedman and Hayek’s ideological stance but not suggesting concrete anything in its place, beyond the odd policy idea on tax, the right is getting on with the job of filling the void. As David Harvey said presciently (in a book written before the current financial crisis):

It has been part of the genius of neoliberal theory to provide a benevolent mask of wonderful-sounding words like freedom, liberty, choice and rights to hide the grim realities of the restoration or reconstitution of naked class power…’

Now, as that ‘mask’ slips, the Right moves towards a new, intellectually vacuous but rhetorically power position: all the faults in society are not the fault of capitalism, but of those who seek to thwart it, those who seek to corrupt our way of life with their liberal ways and their PC phrases; those who are not with our ‘community’ are against us. This new movement rightwards is dangerous because it is based on enmity rather than coherence of view, and in the end (as I’ve argued here) is based on an anti-intellectualism which in turn leads to the risk of ‘pre-modern’ savagery towards those less fortunate.

While we sit around in our think-tank bubble, the world out there is lurching right, and the BNP is rising. When we come out, the place will be very different.
 

6. A new direction for Compass – backwards to the future

So which way should the Left be heading, if it shouldn’t, as I argue, be heading towards coalition with interest groups whose values it should not share, and its eventual co-option by them.

Counter-intuitive though it may seem, I think Compass would be better of forgetting its new politics of coalition with the ‘liberal right’, and start heading back towards where it might really pick up some support – the working class.

The undeniable energies and resources of Compass should be focused not on a ‘new politics’ of compromise, but on a re-establishment of the link between labour (and the surplus army of labour of the growing unemployed). The working class as an ‘interest group’ may have been ignored for twenty years, but – unlike the interest groups now co-opted to communitarian ideals – it still really exists in all its objective, Marxian glory.

Look what happened at the oil refineries just a few week ago. A not-quite-so-spontaneous rising of workers produced a great deal of sympathy and support from across the county, not just from the same industry from people up and down the land who may not now define themselves as ‘workers’, but who, by the objective measure that they have their surplus labour skimmed – are just that, and who recognised exploitation of their fellow workers when they saw it. Sadly, much of the party political Left missed the connection, either because they were still too focused on identity politics, or too busy in their think-tank cosiness to realise that this was a Life of Brian moment, where Judith rushes in an shouts ‘It’s happening, it’s really happening’ while the committee of the Judean People’s front put forward a new policy idea of tax or something.

While it may not be comfortable to hear, the only formal group of the Left that really got to grips with what was going on was the Socialist Party, the group that used to be Militant but is a different beast altogether nowadays.

At local level, as we go through the grindings of the recession, local Labour parties need to be getting back to their roots as best they can, and re-engaging with local union branches.

At Compass level, the Left needs to be forgetting about coalition with groups which simply do not share the same value base, and getting back to its roots, helping to forge – through the new technologies it is already good at – a ‘new old’ discourse, not about how we can tinker with capitalism, but how capitalism is the root of the day-to-day exploitation of workers, what ‘workers’ are in a post-industrial landscape, how class is embodied in skimming of workers’ labour, and how a worker ‘identity’ trumps all the other ones that have been co-opted by the liberal bit of neoliberalism.

All rather old-fashioned for a forward-looking think-tank, you might argue, but one which I would argue actually follows from a reading of the British Left’s recent history of failure, and which is actually, for all its Marxian underpinnings, more progressive than the ‘progressive’ ideas that John and Neal bring us.

It is more progressive, whether or not you want to get to the ‘regulated market’ endpoint that John and Neal desire, or whether you want to go the whole caboodle, and develop a post-capitalist economy.

7. Postscript

While thinking through this article, Jon Cruddas, Compass leader-of-sorts, put out this article.

While the conclusions he appears to draw in his call for a ‘new socialism’ do not appear much different from those in John and Neal’s essay, the language he chooses suggests there is hope that Compass, under his lead, might, if it gets its focus right, start to address what really needs to be done. Though he doesn’t follow it through I particularly like this section:

‘The material class politics that we never confronted – around housing, employment insecurity and pensions – was submerged by the housing bubble. Now these tensions are being racialised as recession, employment standards and demographic change collide. The popular terms of debate around immigration capture a profound sense of unfairness felt by thousands, many of whom are on a journey towards a very different communitarian politics, built round a nationalistic nostalgia transposed into a modern tribal identity – essentially a class politics of the far right.’