 his Compass pamphlet appears when
New Labour is looking down the barrel of an electoral
gun. On October 25th Labour recorded its worst
opinion poll rating for 20 years, while David Cameron
has established a clear lead over Gordon Brown
as a potential Prime Minister. The Labour vote
has been declining since the peak of 1997 and by
the 2005 election the Party had lost four million
votes.
Astonishingly, New Labour continues to march on
oblivious of its peril. While Labour won a clear
majority of seats in 2005, it did so on 36 per
cent of the vote and over fifty MPs hold marginal
constituencies. None of this registers with Labour’s
faithful, who continue to operate as though Business
Is Normal.
While most of the Party is sleep walking to disaster,
two tendencies have emerged who accept that things
cannot go on as they are. One, the New Labour hard
liners organised in the Project, continue to campaign
for tight control by a small professional elite
at Westminster. This lucratively paid group of
apparatchiks aim to be funded in part by a powerless
network of supporters in the country, similar to
the US Democrats. To achieve their aims, they have
to destroy the party’s federal structure
and its remaining fragments of internal democracy.
While the Projectiles are well organised and coherent,
the opposition tendency committed to democratic
renewal of a membership based party is anything
but. This pamphlet is therefore very timely and
is an important step in developing a renewal of
progressive politics and a winnable agenda to counter
that of the Project.
Labour is however not alone in its problems, and
one of the starting points for the discussion Cruddas
and Harris put forward is the decline of membership
based parties in face of disorientating social
trends. While the pamphlet is refreshingly honest
in its analysis, and the section ‘Where are
we and how did we get here?’ is accurate,
it doesn’t develop two crucial insights which
are touched on but not highlighted. The first is
that there are apparently inexorable trends to
centralisation and control in all major parties,
certainly in Britain, not just the Labour Party.
Secondly, while other parties have been affected
by similar trends, in Britain the Labour Party
has been uniquely cynical in offering a Partnership
Agenda, a Party for the Many not For the Few, while
practising All Power to the Man In Number 10.
Although the strategic analysis is underdeveloped,
the authors provide an excellent history of the
failure of New Labour to deliver on any of its
promises of internal party debate. However this
is not set in the context of the operation of an
Iron Law of Oligarchy which would have made Michels
green with envy – nor the fact that both
Blair and Cameron operate an identical political
practice. Both leaders believe that elections are
won in the soggy centre, and by wooing the media,
and that their own supporters are the Enemy Within.
While Labour Leaders (Brown included) see their
members as too left wing for comfort, however moderate
they are in practice, they triangulate on the Clinton
model to move to the centre, a process which means
constant attacks on their own political base to
convince a conservative media that they are safe
and can be supported. New Labourites believe that “The
Sun Won It” in 1992 and they may well have
a case. Their political strategy is based on the
need to win votes from soft Tories, as the Labour
base support is too small to win elections and,
they believe, has nowhere to go however disillusioned.
They are wrong. Many Labour supporters are now
voting Liberal or not voting at all, while for
the white working class the BNP has emerged as
an attractive option. Meanwhile the Labour Party’s
internal organisation has disintegrated. Harris
and Cruddas tellingly quote former Number 10 Policy
Unit head Geoff Mulgan as saying “A lot of
the tacticians have favoured very visible battles
with liberal-left opinion just in terms of winning
over the right wing press…. It’s caused
all sorts of problems essentially, it weakens – it
hollows out – your own side”. Mulgan
is right. While the right wing press is a major
problem for progressive politics, destroying the
Party’s organisational base has left Labour
with little on the ground to fight elections with.
The pamphlet is strong on analysis, weak on prescription,
and relies too much on the Power Commission headed
by Helena Kennedy. The central issue which progressive
politics has to engage with is that politics in
Britain has become exclusive, and has to become
inclusive if it is not to become a cynical game
of Woo The Right Wing Media. The Westminster game,
for all parties, has become a dance with powerful
interests in the global village. The sense that
ordinary people are no longer a factor is palpable
and a major reason for the growth of cynicism,
and extremist politics. In a democratic society,
if the mainstream parties ignore ordinary people
and treat them as puppets to be manipulated electorally,
then the voters will drift towards populist parties,
mainly of the right, who are at least listening
to public opinion.
In this context, the Power enquiry was part of
the problem, not part of the solution. However
admirable the intent, the participants were part
of the exclusive elite at the top of our society.
Establishment figures are simply not in touch with
reality. For example, the idea of giving parties £3
for every vote they receive would be disastrous
in areas like Dagenham or central Stoke on Trent
where the BNP are gaining support. Far from boosting
democracy, it would make a bad situation a thousand
times worse. The deliberations of the chattering
classes cannot be taken seriously.
The immediate strategy for dealing with Labour’s
predicament has to be to focus on, and develop
an inclusive politics for all those natural Labour
supporters who have been marginalized by the Project.
A good place to start is with public sector workers,
regarded as the enemy within by all governments
for a quarter of a century. The strategy for all
governments has been to assume that without the
stimulus of the market, public sector workers are
lazy idle bastards who need to be whipped into
working like Trojans. Thus marketisation has been
carried through ruthlessly, and where services
could not be privatised they have been subject
to draconian supervision through inspection and
league tables, ‘named and shamed’ in
a particularly odious New Labour phase, and de-professionalised.
It is not merely their own members that New Labour
regards as the enemy within. Its own traditional
supporters are treated with Thatcherite severity.
And in a telling response to a conference defeat,
a government minister, Charles Clarke, commented
that this was merely the producer interest within
the party rebelling in its own interest. New Labour
was the defender of the consumer. This pathetic
illusion has a basis in reality, for too many public
services have failed those who need them most,
and the case for rigorous inspection and accountability
is overwhelming. Teachers should campaign for a
better OFSTED, but they should not be campaigning
against OFSTED as such.
The key to a revival of progressive politics is
for a new partnership of those disadvantaged by
the Thatcher philosophy that ‘there is no
society’. This was what New Labour appeared
initially to promise, notably through the New Clause
4. Partnership in Power was not a bad idea in itself,
but ruthlessly compromised when it posed a threat
to the leadership. The role of the Party in negotiating
and renegotiating partnership over time never became
a reality. However as Labour staggers toward defeat
at the next election, the attempt to reconnect
with Labour’s natural supporters and potential
new ones in a new Partnership in Power is the only
way forward.
* Fit For Purpose - A Programme for Labour
Party Renewal by Jon Cruddas and John Harris
(Compass, 2006) |
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