Ever since a little bit of to and fro with Luke Akehurst (whom I wish all the very best with his personal health) I’ve been meaning to batter out a post called ‘The Four traditions of Labour’, in which I seek to debunk the accepted wisdom that there are two traditions in the Labour party – the left and the right.
I’ve never quite got round to it, but in brief the four traditions I identify are:
1. The long established left tradition, from the ILP onwards and through Miliband etc., which regards a focus on parliamentary politics as at best a distraction, at worst a betrayal.
2. The other long established tradition, broadly called labourist, which has no truck with revolutionary politics and is content with operating within the parliamentary system.
3. A tradition that started with entryism into the Labour party in the late 1970s and early 1980s of a variety of groupings for whom class politics no longer had primacy, and for whom ‘identity politics’ (itself influenced by the social currents of the 1960’s) was the hallmark – a well-meaning but intellectually flawed politics which I would contend was actually more damaging to the longevity of tradition 1 than was the more overtly oppositional tradition 2.
4. A more recent tradition still, commencing in the early 1990s, and in main part a reaction to continued national electoral defeat, influenced heavily by Putman and Etzioni’s essentialist communtarianism, and accepting neoliberal socio-economics, globalisation and the freemarket as the sine qua non of a ‘progressive’ Britain. This is the dominant though certainly not unchallenged tradition in the parliamentary party at the moment, and has few substantive links to the other, earlier traditions.
It’s more complex than that, but I’m trying to be brief.
My contention is that people like Luke are adherents not of the second tradition, but of the fourth, even though they do not acknowledge this (or even recognise the discontinuity of doctrine, if not ethos of loyalty to leadership, between 2 and 4).
This non-battered post occurred to me as I read Tom Harris MP’s recent post, and his PPC colleague Stuart King.
Tom is writing about his concerns that the Labour party may use the ‘anti-toff’ campaign tactics of the type which weren’t deemed to be very successful in the Crewe and Nantwich bye-election last year.
I think what Tom and Stuart (PPC for Putney) say in justification is revealing of where they sit in terms of the traditions they set out.
Tom says:
‘But for most of my 25 years in the Labour Party I’ve argued for the notion that class warfare is irrelevant. And I’ve argued that Labour can only win by being the party of aspiration.’
Stuart echoes this:
‘I agree. The politics of aspiration not envy are what propelled us to three election victories.’
In Tom’s and Stuart’s world, it seems, aspiration is a matter for the individual, and is the direct inverse of envy.
For Tom and Stuart, there is no validity in the conception of an aspiration to change things at a societal level; for them, there really is just no conception of aspiration as a group activity, as a thing all the other three Labour traditions might happily refer to as ’solidarity’.
There is only the neo-liberal dream, now all too stark a reality, of opening up opportunities for personal ‘aspirants’ to do what, in their tradition, might be called ’success’, but in older traditions might have been called ‘exploitation of others’.
Tom goes on to say that Labour must focus, not on personal upbringings of the Conservative leadership, but on their ‘their political philosophy and policies.’
Yes, I agree. My problem, though, is that the political philosophy of Tom and Stuart, espousing individual ‘freedoms’ and aspiration at the expense of any solidaristic notions that were held dear by predecessor traditions in the Labour party, don’t actually seem very different at all from that of the Conservatives.
Fortunately, as I’ve said, such views are not unchallenged in the Labour party, and in my more optimistic moments I see a fifth tradition beginning to emerge, a fusion of 1 and 3 with the bad 3 bits stripped out and some other bits thrown in for good measure. But that’s another post.
Interesting, although I would categorise the first of the traditions more generously, describing the parliamentary sphere as an arena where power must be fought for, as a place where progress can be consolidated and real, if marginal, gains made.
If you aren’t more generous to the first tradition, then Bevan doesn’t fit in any of the traditions (sceptical as he was of parliamentary politics, he certainly didn’t see it as a betrayal or distraction).
Characterising the first as I have, I do identify with the fifth tradition you hint at & I’ll be very interested to see what you have to write about that.
Tim, yes absolutely, that’s precisely the complexity I think I would have written up in the main ‘four traditions’ post if I’d written it, as I think it’s this very tension between 1 and 2 which may have some lessons for 5. Perhaps I do need to write it, in order to prepare for a tradition 5 post. The other area of complexity to unpick is the difference between doctrine (4 traditions) and ethos within the party (arguably much more homogenous), and I think this links back into the ‘Bevan question’.
Paul, I think you should clarify that you were referring to the intellectual Miliband, not the sons who prove his theories were correct.
Not all of the entryists, of course, are from the left. There are those entryists who are firmly rooted in the David Owen Tendency, careerists but with no-where else to go now. If the Lib Dems grew at the expense of Labour they would become Lib Dems over night without passing GO and collecting far more than 200 quid on the way. Harris is firmly rooted in that ‘tradition’ – if it deserves such a tag. Where the man thinks the Tories get their policies from, if not a class based ideology, is beyond me.
Hm, I’d agree you need you clarify your categories; it’s a bit confused to concentrate on ‘means’ in 1 & 2 and then ‘ends’ in 3 & 4. How about a nice grid, with ends on one axis and means on the other? Saying people are ‘labourist’ is not very descriptive, after all – is their only distinguishing feature a support for parliament? Seems a bit unfair on Hattersley et al. Agree with you about Mr Harris though.
Blimey, Tom, Bob and John – I wasn’t expecting to have my essay marked. In my defence, I did say that this was the post I hadn’t actually written, so you might expect it to be a little bit less coherent than normal: it was just a quick batter out before I got to the substantive (in this post) issue of how I think the fourth tradition has cast off any pretence of Labour notions of solidarity in favour of a neoliberal approach to personal freedoms-if-you-get-that-choice.
Bob, yes – a fuller post on this would have covered where the SDP/David Owen tendency fits into this typology of traditions, though I think that group fits closer to tradition 2 than to tradition 4, into which I fit Tom Harris and his ilk. I do not blame him personally, but he is part of the newer ‘career structure’, largely invented under Blairism in the 1990s, and which relegates party experience behind for example, journalism/PR (Tom was a journo) and paved the way for all the careerist wannabees like Stuart that we see now. This was all part, though of the bigger picture of a move away from Labour roots and the ‘depoliticisation’ of the the party. Someone like tom would never have got to an MP in a previous time, as he wouldn’t have been seen to have the requisite skills and experience.
I think that’s a bit harsh on Stuart King, Paul. He seems like a decent, committed, pleasant community politician from his website (all I have to go on) – just because he disagrees with you doesn’t mean he’s a careerist! I imagine he goes down pretty well with the female electorate too…
Yeah, fair enough, though he did go on Tom’s website and use almost exactly the same phrase about aspiration…
I’m not sure that I buy your tradition-divisions here Paul.
I think it was Herbert Morrison said that “socialism is what Labour governments do” – and I’d put Luke (as a London Labour stalwart) firmly in the same tradition – not one that started C.1990 or even at the point of re-entry for SDP-ers.
Broadly, I reckon that the ‘aspiration’ theme runs from Crossland’s ‘The Future of Socialism’ – redistribution not from ‘punitive’ taxes but from the fruits of the inevitable growth that would flow from a spell of glorious socialist government.
Personally, I’m of the view that a Kautskyite instrumental view of democracy (you can’t have socialism without a reverence towards democracy) is one that stands up to scrutiny and serves us very well. It’s one of the real fault-lines I find, and it marks the point where lefties like myself get into arguments with people who are less dismissive of extra-parliamentary activities within and beyond the party.
It sometimes makes us look like apologists for the leadership and the Morrisonites which is (from our point of view) really *really* unfortunate. And it results in us talking about class a good deal less than we really should do as well.
Paulie
Thanks for dropping by.
I’m actually quite happy to be disagreed with here. As I’ve said to others on this thread, I haven’t written up my detailed thoughts on what I describe very briefly as the earlier traditions, as the main point of the post was to get to the idea that ‘New Labour’ doctrine does not emanate substantially from the Croslandian tradition of the ‘fruits of growth’ from an accommodation with capitalism.
As most people seemed to have homed in on the tradition typology element, though, perhaps it is worth doing that fuller post.
Were I to do so, I would lay much greater emphasis on what I refer to very briefly as the distinction betwee tradition of ‘ethos’ and tradition of ‘doctrine’. This terminology is taken direct from Henry Drucker’s 1979 Doctrine and Ethos in the Labour Party, which I reckon is up there as one of the great postwar studies of the Labour party.
This is where I’d come to my assessment of Luke’s place in the tradition, and I think where we might find common ground (I should stress that I’ve never met Luke and and am going simply on his bloggings, so of course it’s all a bit artificial and simply uses Luke as an example of a strong trend in the party). I’d argue, with Drucker, that Luke adheres strongly to an already strong ethos in the party of conservatism, pragmatism and above all loyalty to leadership, and that is this which draws his doctrinal leaning from the Croslandism you mention and over the ‘border’ into New Labour’s quite different political philosophy-in-action.
Further, I’d argue that the party ethos is moving now quit quickly towars a less reverent one (not going into reasons here) and it is this that makes Luke’s older, in many ways, ‘respectable’ ethos stick out like a sore thumb, at least in the blogosphere.
On your thoughts on democracy, yes, I couldn’t agree more. Part of the problem you may have in your arguments with those further to the right in the party, I suspect, is that those arguing with you have set up a convenient straw (wo)man in the argument – that being the socialist who, because of her/his socialism, does not believe in democracy. It can be hard to argue with those who simply cannot get the paradigm shift, that it democracy is inherent to socialist thought, and that it is perfectly reasonable to criticise an adherence to the current form of national democracy while still remaining a ‘democrat’. But perhaps that’s a longer post.
[...] In short, the Labour left should now be setting in motion the process of establishing a new tradition within the party – the ‘fifth tradition’ I referred to all the way back here. [...]