James Purnell’s weekend post on Comment is Free about how to get politics out of the mess it’s in has, at last count, 220 comments, the majority of them shouting in outrage about the whole notion of state funding for parties with variations on ‘keep your hands off our cash, you vermin’.
Iain Dale has been promoting this approach on his site. I’m not sure if he’s bothered to read the post, which seems pretty clear in its proposal that less state funding should be provided than currently.
‘Amid the current anger at politicians and politics we must bite the bullet of state funding for political parties – alongside cutting the overall amount the taxpayer spends on politics. This funding must not be money for newspaper advertisements, billboard posters or spin doctors.’ (My emphasis)
In fact what Purnell appears to be advocating is something not a million miles to what I proposed here - adding up all state funding ALREADY spent on political parties, taking a slice off, then distributing to local parties on a formula related in some way to levels of local activism (I proposed a direct link to party membership, and he is much vaguer).
The rationale he gives for his proposal is, I have to say, utterly infuriating:
‘By offering state funding to parties in return for them engaging the entire public through local activism and policy-making we would incentivise them to return to their roots as vehicles for bringing citizens together to change their communities – not separating them into narrow segments of valued voters.’
There are many people who identify themselves as ‘old Labour’, or just ‘leftwing’ who will look at this part of James Purnell’s speech and want to vomit on their cornflakes.
They will see Purnell, rightly lambasted for his lead role in the ‘welfare reform’ legislation betrayal, as nothing more than a hypocrite, panicked like many others into proposing reform, any reform, as a distraction from the real issue at hand over the last month – the fact that a good number of Labour MPs have been shown to be corrupt.
Many will find the whole the idea of a ’socialist Purnell’ oxymoronic, and Purnell himself irredeemable.
But I’m more of an optimist about human nature. I believe in second chances.
Reading the article in full, there are bits I like, bits that convince me that James Purnell is on the right track towards some kind of socialist (re)awakening.
I would not have expected a member of the New Labour cabinet, in 2009, to use the term I have used many times on this blog, ‘conception of power’, and to do so in a way which suggests he actually understands what he’s talking about. But Purnell does just that.
‘Conception of power’ is, of itself, a term that can only really be used positively by socialists, For the Right, there is nothing to conceive other than the status quo, because the Right believes in ‘plurality’ of power, of a world where all have equal opportunities in the market place of life, where all political processes in democratic states are open to everyone as long as they have the talent and the get-up-and-go. For the Right, the whole notion that it might be good to think about things like how the financial institutions of capitalism might influence political choices is just a non-starter.
Purnell is correct, therefore, when he takes Cameron to task over the way he uses the word power, in an own attempt to create a smokescreen from the pressing matter of rampant corruption by Conservative MPs. He is right to identify that Cameron simply means extra ‘consumer choice’ when he talks of ‘power to the people’, blissfully ignoring the reality of what ‘consumer choice’ actually means when it comes, for example, to education.
Purnell even offers a decently socialist definition of politics, in relation to his understanding of where power really lies:
‘Politics is the means by which we seek a fair distribution of power, wealth and opportunity in society.’
So what has brought about this apparent socialist epiphany? Is it just Purnell in panic mode, grasping that anything that looks like it might not be linked to MP corruption?
That’s a reasonable enough reading, and one that both new best mates Tom Harris and Bob Piper give to the general way senior politicians are scrabbling about, trying desperately to outdo each other on who can offer up the most radical sounding reforms to the ’system’ without having to say that quite a lot of their particular party’s MPs appear just to be crooks.
But I actually think Purnell’s article reflects both a more complex, more interesting, and ultimately important response to the current crisis.
To understand what’s happening, I think a little bit of political theory might help.
Martin Smith, Professor of Politics at the University of Sheffield and clever bloke to boot, wrote a very good book in 1999 called ‘ The Core Executive’. In this book, he demolishes many of the older analyses of the way power works amongst the national political elite, which he suggests are based on normative readings of how political power should be exercised in Westminster, and are essentially rooted in the ‘how to run Westminster manual’ written by William Bagehot in 1867.
He then goes on to build on the notion of ‘resource dependency’, originally developed by Rod Rhodes in the late 70’s and early 80’s, which suggests that politicians build around themselves ‘webs’ of mutual dependency, creating a ‘positive-sum’ of power, where one poltician’s (or senior civil servant’s) power is enhanced by that of another, and vice versa. It is, in lay terms, poltics as ‘you’ll scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours’, except that the increasingly luxurious scratching tools can be bought on expenses.
What Smith’s analysis of this ‘positive sum’ misses out of course, is that the whole mutual resouce dependency depends upon the active disempowerment of those excluded from the ‘web’. In Labour party terms, this is precisely what happened to the local parties, disempowered by a New Labour which found other, already more powerful groups with whom they could develop a cosy relationship of mutual dependency, and were then able to see the grassroots as an expendable resource (for more details of some aspects of this, refer to Dave Osler’s book ‘Labour Party plc).
Suddenly, everything has changed. Just as the exogenous shock of the Poll-Tax riots in the late 1980’s made Margaret Thatcher ‘expendable’, because the resource she brought to the bargaining table was no longer enough to justify the mutual dependency of her cabinet, so here (though more quickly) the apparently exogenous shock of the expenses scandal has changed the position fundamentally.
While some look (mistakenly) to the supporters of PR and vague electoral and parliamentary reform for a new framework of mutual dependency, James Purnell has read the situation more clearly. He has identified that his cabinet colleagues and the PM no longer offer him the resource of political legitimacy that they did, but he’s also spotted that grassroots parties (not just Labour) may be on the move, and that here may lie not just safety, but a new source of power as long as he makes the right move quickly. This is the response of an astute politician, who needs to be seen to lead, but who’s also to working out who to seen to lead. The fact that Dale and co fail to read the article and offer the obvious abuse is neither here nor there; he has a different readership in mind, a grassroots readership he knows is may take matters into its own hands, but may need someone to represent them around parliament.
He may or may not have seen John McDonnell making the same move at the same time, though with infinitely more initial credibility.
He doesn’t get it all right, in that he misses a key point about how local Labour parties. They shouldn’t be reaching out to some mythical ‘community’ – Purnell has not yet thrown off the communitarian speak of New Labour – they should BE those local communities (of interest, and in Labour’s case, of working class interest).
But it looks like he may be a quick learner.
Meanwhile, as cabinet members who were only too happy to be a member of an elite club a month ago scrabble for position with their chosen new resources, knowing full well that they can no longer rely on each other for support because that group strength has gone, there’s one obvious casualty. As Peter Kenyon rightly identifies this morning, Gordon Brown is all ‘I, I, I’ as he announces his new National Council for Democratic Renewal. That use of ‘I’, I contend though, is not out of choice.
At the end of Schiller’s political resource dependency masterpiece ‘Maria Stuart’, Elizabeth looks around her for support, and finds no-one but the loyal powerless,
In the same way, Gordon’s looking round a very empty cabinet room. His colleagues didn’t mean to leave without saying good-bye; they just got called away suddenly.
James Purnell, of all people, has buggered off back to the Labour party (though he’s not yet arrived). Whether or not he finds the door ope when he gets there is another question.
What did he do with his expenses again?
But Cameron’s Thatcherite “smaller state equals greater power” analysis is incredibly partial and shallow. It ignores the way power is distributed and exercised – and the way one person’s power can constrain another’s. While an overweening state can disempower, so too can failing markets or unjustified inequalities.’
