he general election 2005 has given political
anoraks enough interesting things to think and
argue about to last a lifetime. A result which
on the face of it produced a defeat for both Blairism
and the nationalist version of Conservatism served
up by Michael Howard is certainly worth mulling
over to see what is says about the political currents
which might be on the up in the years ahead.
What, most importantly, have we learnt about the
position of Blair in the political culture of the
UK? Undoubtedly a remarkable figure – possibly
even in his own way, brilliant - but we can now
best understand his success in terms of the strangely-shaped
hole which appeared in British politics during
the years immediately after the demise of Thatcher
and her own version of ‘the project’.
The mood which prevailed in the early 1990s was
the yearning for a kinder, gentler Britain, capable
of healing the bitter divisions opened up during
the decades of privatisation and the erosion of
the welfare state. The premiership of John Major
represented one attempt to fill that hole, but
it ultimately failed because his Conservative Party
remained consumed by the bitterness of the Thatcherite
factions which had lost their way somewhere round
the time of the poll tax and the squabbles over
Europe. Even the younger generation which had grown
up with no memory other than that of the Iron Lady
dominating their lives felt it was strange to see
the parade of weird and rather nasty old men trying
to barge each other out the Tory party leadership
ring.
Blair’s cracking good wheeze was to cook
up plans to insert himself as the sensible chap
who would put an end to all that silly nonsense,
and in doing so persuade the voters that what they,
a young, smart Britain yearning for a new start,
really wanted was a caring sort of niceness determined
to sort out the mess.
He was so right in this viewpoint that not only
was ‘young Britain’ prepared to back
him, but to do so in the sort of numbers that constituted
the first of his two landslides back in 1997. With
the good fortune to inherit an economy set for
a period of sustained economic growth, the Blair
project developed the sort of momentum which made
a second and even a third time more-or-less inevitable.
Progressive century
But the ambition was even larger than that of
winning a couple of general elections in a row.
Blair and his co-thinkers talked in the most extravagant
terms of laying the foundations for a whole century
of progressive governance during the course of
which a global society would emerge underpinned
by the principles of equality and fairness, prosperity
for all and social justice. It was a grand vision,
and the task in front of us now, of evaluating
his leadership in the period when it winds to its
close, is to answer the question; just how far
has Tony Blair taken us in the direction of an
egalitarian world? Have we begun to see during
the course of the past eight years the chiselling
out of a new political tradition capable of transcending
all that went before?
There are very few true believers in the New Labour
camp nowadays. The recent conference of party activists
convened under the banner of Compass (“new
directions of the democratic left”) saw a
motley crew of ex-Blairites flying the flag for
a fresh epoch of radicalism, marked as Neal Lawson,
its leading spokeperson proclaimed, by new collectivisms
and new solidarities. Even young Labour ministers,
jostling for position in a generation which expects
to assume a bigger share of the power in the next
few years, are not too timid to declare themselves
in favour of ’renewal’ – and
in doing so explicitly acknowledging the jaded
and burnt-out character of the government in which
they currently serve.
Amongst the most intelligent of New Labour’s
apologists, The Guardian journalist Polly oynbee
stands out. A modernised social democrat (that
is, one who has gone beyond the revisionism of
Crosland and his followers to cast herself adrift
from any desire for an organic connection with
the party’s historic base of working class
support), Toynbee hopes for a dignified exit for
a politician she now believes is the major obstacle
to the further development of progressive politics
in Britain. At the same Compass conference she
opined, rather incredibly, that Britain was getting
more social democratic by the day, to the extent
that it could now well afford to do without the
help of the dashing prince who started to push
it down this road.
Social democracy?
The issue of whether New Labour’s version
of state interventionism really is a version of
social democracy has been debated most thoroughly
in a volume edited by Raymond Plant and his colleagues,
The Struggle for Labour’s Soul: Understanding
Labour’s political thought since 1945 . Contributors
to the discussion argue that New Labour represents
a variety of different things, including a modernised
social democracy, but it takes an old Croslandite
like Lord Plant to note that the distance along
the path of revisionism now traversed by the Blairites
has taken them into realms which would not have
been recognised as social democratic by the likes
of the thinkers of the 50s and 60s.
But the most compelling statement about what the
victory of Blairism has meant for the overturning
of social democracy is provided by Eric Shaw in
his essay in the same volume. Shaw argues that
the “whole notion of class structure and
inequality has vanished from New Labour’s
discourse”, replaced with “the image
of a fluid and individualistic society based on
free and voluntary transactions […]” From
this perspective social injustice is seen arising
not from the core logic of a system in which capital
and labour occupy positions of structural antagonism
towards one another, but out of ‘distributional
conflict’ – emerging at the periphery
of an otherwise healthy society from a partial “malfunctioning
of the system, or short-sighted, self-interested
behaviour by ‘producer interests’.”
The question of the fundamental reform of society
does not appear on the Blairites agenda. For them
the adverse effects in society arise from technical
difficulties with the operation of markets, rather
than the distribution of wealth and power across
a social system defined by the existence of economic
classes. The formulation of policy becomes detached
from an identification with the core interests
of the classes defined in the British social democratic
tradition as ‘labour’ and instead becomes
a matter of mobilising technical and expert skills
to fix the parts of the system which are malfunctioning.
This appears to be an adequate description of
New Labour’s approach to governance. Its
emphasis on elite partnerships mobilising the administrative
and technical expertise of capital to solve the
functional problems of everything, from health
and education, through to transport urban planning,
and even criminal justice and the eradication of
poverty consistently comes at the expense of the
radical democratic engagement of wider sections
of society acting to transform society.
New Labour is certainly a reformist approach to
politics, but the distance down the path it as
travelled in the direction of functionalist elitism
has meant that it has crossed a line taking it
beyond social democracy.
Social conflict
Social democracy certainly presents us with a
complex approach to politics, which by virtue of
its extent and breadth, is well capable of generating
conflicting elements. But it is a spectrum of ideas
and approaches which marks itself from its ideological
cousin, liberalism, by its consciousness of the
fact that the advancement of democracy and the
promotion of equality in society inevitably generate
clashes of interests between the economic and political
power elites and the subaltern classes. Right wing
social democrats believe that such friction can
be mediated through parliamentary structures, whilst
more radical socialist currents look for strategies
which generate a democratic response to inequality
and exclusion from political power with a stronger
organic connection to the daily lives of the labouring
classes themselves.
If it is the case that the Blairite project is
now unravelling, because the strange conjunction
of political moods which existed in Britain in
the early to late 1990s is no longer in place,
then we can expect opportunities to arise once
again for the currents it has succeeded in marginalising
for so long.
As we move into a period in which the smart technocratic
fixes of New Labour become more transparently inadequate,
as private finance initiatives hit the buffers,
city technology colleges flounder, poverty-elimination
targets fall further away and high-tech strategies
for international competitiveness confront stiffer
competition from the rise of China, the scope for
a resurgence of something which looks a lot more
like socialism has to be on the cards.
At this point socialists are wont to start talking
about preparations for founding new social movements
and parties. This would be a tediously inappropriate
response to developments which have to derive their
substance and meaning from organic movements in
society, rather than the ambitions of politicos.
We should look for sensible, incremental steps
to move the process along, and in this context
the revival of the left in the trade union movement,
and the organisational energy being displayed by
COMPASS in the Labour Party at the present time
all look good and provide reasons to be hopeful.
This is a furrow which Chartist magazine has itself
ploughed for well over a decade now, ever since
the Labour left was eclipsed by the modernising
ambitions of the New Labourites in the late-80s
and 90s. A sense of the subtle rhythms of possibilities
is essential for a movement which has set itself
the vast task of re-building the world from the
bottom up, and during those years when the ‘forward
march of Labour’ was halted, there simply
was no possibility of mass socialist politics emerging
as a dominant force in Britain or any other European
country.
What to make of the times we live in now, when
it is the forward march of specious ‘third
road’ approaches which have become caught
in the mire? Watch, learn, and organise... |
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