Funny old thing, Labour Party democracy. They elect a leader that neither the membership nor their M.Ps want because of ballot of eligible union members with a turnout of around 2% apparently based upon the basis of the voter ticking a box marked “Labour supporter”. Many Labour members ended up with two, three or even more votes depending upon their membership of an affiliated union and one or more of the ‘societies’ affiliated to the Labour Party (the Jewish Labour Movement, the Fabians, Christian Socialist Movement and so on, seventeen in all) who more less discretely ask if new members are eligible to join the Labour Party. In practice, if you want to vote in Labour elections just pay the society or union membership subscription and you will get the ballot paper even if you are in the BNP. Understand all this? Thought so.
Still, the ballot did tell us some interesting things about the Party’s membership. One thing is just how small is the number of what might be called old-time socialists. Diane Abbott’s vote of around 8% of the members suggests that members of the Labour Representation Committee with its heroic defence of Labour as a socialist party, at least potentially, might as well fold their tent and look elsewhere, perhaps to form a party which would represent their views. In fact, about 55% of LP members seem to have views which accord with the centrist or even centre-right positions of David Miliband and Andy Burnham whilst less than 40% agree with the roughly centre-left positions taken, at least for the moment, by the two Ed’s. (Both born Edward, incidentally, though Ed does sound, how shall we say, more matey. Perhaps Dave Miliband might have won). So was Ed elected by trade-union votes and by a tiny fraction of eligible voters? Well, yes, of course. And does that matter? Well, perhaps.
So what problems does the winning Ed now face? Two obvious and immediate ones.
The first , clearly, is just what he stands for in terms of policy and what has come to be called ‘vision’. Neal Lawson, leader of the Labour pressure-group, Compass, was ecstatic about Miliband’s first speech to conference when he spoke to a fringe meeting. It “ticked all the policy boxes” of Compass and meant that this centre-left group was now “mainstream”. Well, Compass policy boxes are a bit of a mix but some, mentioned by Neal, are very specific. So it is odd in view of Lawson’s ecstasy to find that ‘high pay commission’, ‘loan sharking’, ‘Royal Mail’, least of all ‘Trident’ are not mentioned in the text of his speech. A motion on Trident put forward by the Hackney CLP (that pesky Abbott) was actually ruled out by the Conference Arrangements Committee as being not ‘contemporaneous’ (sic) the day after Compass published an email to be sent to George Osborne by their supporters saying cut Trident not public services. Perhaps it should have been sent to Ed Miliband. He did use the phrase ‘good society’ four times however, a phrase on which Neal claims copyright and might be construed as a leftward shift (though it would not be surprising if it found its way into David Cameron’s lexicon).
The point of course is that Ed Miliband is trying to pull off a difficult circus trick, that of riding two horses simultaneously. He knows that he has to shift a bit to the left if only because the policies of the old Labour government closely resembles that of the new Coalition. He knows that the Iraq war has left a poisonous legacy inside Labour which has to be expunged. He knows that public service cuts following budget deficit reduction have to be opposed. But at the same time he cannot disclaim too much of his legacy if only because he was in the Cabinet when all the neo-liberal polices of Brown were being pushed through.
So the war in Iraq was a “mistake”. But was it also ‘illegal’ as Nick Clegg rightly claims. If so then are Blair and his colleagues in 2003 war criminals? And what about the post-war behaviour of the British army in Iraq? The upcoming inquiry into torture allegations will ensure that this will not go away. And what about the ongoing war in Afghanistan, not illegal as such but unwinnable and increasingly unpopular? Well, that seems OK, at least for now.
Public service cuts? “Well , I [Ed Miliband] believe strongly that we need to reduce the deficit. There will be cuts and there would have been if we had been in government. Some of them will be painful and would have been if we were in government. I won’t oppose every cut the coalition proposes. There will be some things the coalition does that we won’t like as a party but we will have to support” Public services are not mentioned. Opposition to cuts? Well, Ed Miliband supports trade unions but only responsible ones. “That is why I have no truck, and you should have no truck, with overblown rhetoric about waves of irresponsible strikes.” So, not just no strikes but no threat of strikes. Just what weapons this leaves the loyal trade-unionists who voted for him is unclear. Perhaps they can wave placards in their lunch-break. On the other hand, he does believe that care-workers should be paid better. In a later television interview he was pressed about deficit reduction. He stuck to the overall policy of Alistair Darling but felt that he would like to see more of the reduction coming from higher taxes. What taxes? Well, tax the banks and crack down on tax dodgers. Expect to hear much more on the lines of ‘Show us your taxes. Ed”.
Trying to ride two horses at once is a skilful and elegant trick but, ultimately, it usually requires a choice between one of them to avoid the nasty consequences of them pulling too far apart. There is no sign so far that Ed Miliband understands this nor what his ultimate choices will be. His problem is really that Nick Clegg and most of the LibDems are settling themselves rather comfortably in the centre and centre-right part of the political spectrum once occupied by New Labour. When in power, this occupation pushed the LibDems into rather uncomfortable postures leaning to the left. Now the position is reversed and Clegg and Cable seem to have a fairly clear strategic perception of where they want to be. Labour hasn’t.
The second problem Ed Miliband faces is possibly more immediate and perhaps more important. The fact is that much of his party and most of his M.P.s distrust and dislike him. It’s not personal, he is possibly a very nice bloke; in Michael Gove’s faint praise, he is “intelligent, decent, humane”. But Labour is now a regional party of the English north and the Celtic nations with an enclave in inner London. And up here, they really do not like him. They dislike his comfortable passage wafting from a cosy Hampstead comprehensive to a place at Oxford, presumably on the basis of a ‘good interview’, after a time as an intern to Tony Benn. (Another man who has shortened his given name to something more matey). They fail to understand just why he then entered the charmed circle of Labour advisers after a brief spell working or possibly interning in television nor are they deeply impressed by a further stint ‘teaching’ at Harvard on the basis of a Master’s degree in economics. They have had clever children in comprehensives who never got near an Oxford interview and who still search for a break into some kind of media job. They simply do not understand nor like the mechanisms whereby London Labour looks after its own. They rather remember his dad not as a towering Marxist scholar but as an old Trot who occasionally wrote dull and not particularly original books trashing the Labour Party whilst mostly writing articles in obscure journals about how the working class should behave whilst not bothering to get involved in any actual political activity. They hate the way in which London fixes safe northern seats for their golden boys (and occasional girls) where they do not understand the local dialect and keep their visits to a minimum. They don’t really get the stuff about being the son of penniless Jewish refugees; it runs much less well if your dad was a Fife miner. They hate the idea of a Hampstead salon where the likes of (gulp) Tony Benn, Tariq Ali and Ken Livingstone smiled at the young Milibands. They dislike snuggling up to the LibDems who are hated up here even more than the Tories. And, deep down, they hate the knowledge that none of their own has, any more, the political stature to stand up to what Jon Cruddas, an erstwhile left M.P. who scored a spectacular own-goal by supporting Brother David but who can smell a wind when it is blowing, called “a metropolitan liberal faction”. Faction is a dangerous word to use in Labour circles as Cruddas must surely know. The last one was Militant.
Does he know about these pressures? Probably not. It is unlikely that he learnt much about the Labour Party as he floated up in his balloon and he probably still sees the ferocious Blair/Brown conflict as just a matter of two combative individuals rather than the personification of two long antagonisms inside not just Labour but of the entire British left, a fault line between its initial constituents which has never fully closed. Labour was set up as an open federation of the trade unions and the progressive intellectual societies which elaborated a full political programme. In a Gramscian paradise, this combination would be seen as the ideal historical bloc, the proletariat with its inherent but inchoate ‘common sense’ and the organic intellectuals turning this into the ‘good sense’ needed to change society. But in the real world, this kind of federation which has never progressed to the unified structure of most social-democratic parties requires a leadership drawn from all parts of the federation. Throughout most of its history, this is exactly what Labour had with strong leaders from the unions buttressing the middle-class Oxbridge intellectuals, something true of both left and right factions.
This has now effectively collapsed with Oxbridge winning by default. The disappearance of strong leaders from the labour movement both inside and outside Parliament is one of the great problems of the British left (Jack Dromey, anyone? Or Bob Crowe, just to balance the sides?). However it is a fact of life and is unlikely to be remedied anytime soon. Both Blair and Brown managed to avoid the problem, the former by his uncanny ability to float above any class or national label, the latter by his long apprenticeship in the snake-pit of Scottish Labour. But with Ed, the issue has finally come home to roost. He will, undoubtedly, try to shift the basis of Labour away from its cumbersome federal roots and more towards the supporter-based movement as against party favoured by his brother. But he is going to be handicapped, possibly fatally, by the label applied so openly by Cruddas. The knives are already being sharpened; the only real question is who will wield them.
Monday 4 October 2010
Wednesday 28 July 2010
Thoughts about coalition
Cards on the table. The author is someone who left the Labour Party in despair fifteen or so years ago and has never for a moment regretted it. Now a member of the Green Party, he will never, ever, vote Labour again so long as it is led by men who refuse to accept that lies and deceit led Britain into an illegal and immoral war. (Being led by a woman is, of course, even less likely). He will also feel a grim satisfaction when such as David Miliband and Jack Straw are hung out to dry for lying to Parliament about British involvement in torture and illegal rendition; grim because it will do little for those who suffered the sanctioned torture. Nor is he on his own. As the Dixie Chicks put it, we’re not ready to make nice.
I start like this to make clear that the British left is not, as some Compass initiatives seem to suggest, an inchoate mass just waiting for the right trigger to crystallise into a progressive alliance ready to unite behind Labour. Rather it is fractured body of people, riven with considerable bitterness and distrust and wary of any kind of effort to drive it into a convenient corral however enticingly labelled as the home of a rainbow, golden, greenleft or somesuch colourful coalition. And that’s just the members of the Labour Party. And yet, as a long-term member of that left, it is painfully obvious that some kind of alliance is just what we have to come to terms with.
The most striking feature of the May election was just how ordinary it was. In months before voting most observers, including myself, predicted that it would be a ‘wild’ election with an even lower turnout than 2005 and with some kind of revenge being wreaked on the major parties, in particular Labour, after the expenses scandal. The electorate, it was commonly felt, had become disillusioned with system. What actually happened was a small, though important, increase in turnout, resounding defeat for independents and various ‘protest’ candidates, flat-lining for the nationalists and electoral catastrophe for small parties of the left. In other words, business as usual with the, historically, not uncommon final result of the arrow of the two-party wheel-of-fortune coming to rest in that sector marked No Overall Majority. This rather normal situation has, however, been over-shadowed and largely ignored by one, rather startling, political innovation. Instead of following the standard practice of several small and no-majority governments in the past ─ to stagger on for a while and then call another election ─ the Conservatives, rather cleverly, and the Liberal Democrats, possibly cleverly, agreed a formal, negotiated coalition, a shift in governance which may turn out to be a critical watershed in British politics. Or may not.
This rather unexpected normality of the May election was what stopped a bad election for Labour turning into a rout. The small increase in turnout seems mainly to have been previously Labour voters responding, perhaps a little wearily, certainly hesitantly, to the old call to Keep the Tories Out which had become the drumbeat of most Labour-inclined commentators in the weeks before the election. This was almost certainly the reason for the dreadful results of all the left alternatives to Labour. In the case of my own Green Party this was disguised by the somewhat fluky victory of Caroline Lucas in Brighton, fluky because this is pretty much the only seat in the country which is effectively a four-way marginal where the winner needs only 31% of the vote. In nearly all other constituencies, the Green Party suffered serious declines in actual votes with the deposit-saving level reached in only two places outside Brighton.
This unexpected result, a ‘normal’ election but one which has turned British politics in a totally new direction has provided the Labour Party and the wider left with the difficult problem of how to respond to coalition politics. The immediate, knee-jerk response has largely been what might be termed the pit-bull strategy; to attack ferociously on all fronts hoping to split the alliance between the two governing parties so that it will collapse and force a new election. There is apparent sense in this strategy for the Labour Party in that if such an election returned a Labour majority, a possibility which gains credibility if it were to be held in the midst of savage public expenditure cuts, then business-as-usual could be resumed with the bonus that the growing challenge from the third-party might be effectively extinguished.
However, there are two obvious risks attached to the pit-bull approach. First, a forced election could just provide the Tories with a parliamentary majority and the mandate to proceed with their public-sector cuts. Second, and in my view much the most likely, the assault on the coalition could fail and it would carry on with increasing confidence for a full five-year span. Clearly, a great deal depends upon the proposed referendum on a new voting system. The Alternative Vote is far from proportional but it will undoubtedly favour the LibDems, probably awarding them another forty or so seats something which, like it or not, would be ‘fairer’. It would also be a system which would effectively cement coalition politics into British governance. Just how far Labour will succeed in weaselling its way out of its manifesto commitment to an AV system remains to be seen. If it succeeds in successfully opposing its implementation in 2015 (not to mention the entirely fair removal of its current 8% or so poll advantage because of slanted electoral boundaries) then the coalition could collapse and Labour might return. On the other hand, opposing what many might see not only as reneging a manifesto promise but also a move towards a fairer voting system could result in electoral suicide.
The risks associated with the pit-bull approach are not just short-term. Outside the left commentariat which shrieks “split” every time some disagreement within the coalition is aired, there is a feeling (and it can only be a feeling) that the electorate is beginning to feel rather comfortable with coalition politics in which differing views are openly expressed and compromises are agreed. Unless some countervailing left-leaning alternative is found there is the distinct possibility, indeed probability given the bias of AV voting, that Britain will be governed by a centre-right coalition for many years. The C word has been much used on the left in recent months but has been given remarkably little concrete clothing, often reducing to the dismal slogan of the Labour Representation Committee – support the coalition against cuts and join the Labour Party. So what are the obstacles to forming at least the embryo of such a coalition? There seems to me to be three rather separate issues here.
The first is the obvious problem that the policy direction of the New Labour governments, to which all four of the male candidates for the Labour leadership are tied, contained much that overlaps, often quite specifically, with current Coalition policies. It would be too much of an intrusion into personal grief for most Compass members to labour the point, but the fact is that the Coalition is proving quite adroit at pointing out just how much of what they are doing is little more than an extension of Labour policy. A VAT rise? Would not Darling have done just this next January? Apparently so according to Mandelson. Academy schools? Was it not a declared ambition of Labour to hasten their formation? Public expenditure cuts? Was it not Brown’s declared policy to slash the scale of deficit financing? Just how Labour can extricate itself from this morass remains to be seen but it clearly a problem for the formation of a centre-left bloc that its major potential component has a recent history of sitting rather to the right of centre.
The second and, in its way, more important problem is the incapacity of Labour, both leadership and many members, to understand the concept of political alliances. There are good historical reasons for this block which are difficult even to summarise here. (Those interested in greater detail might refer to an essay of mine in Left Out: Policies for a Left Opposition Today which can be found at www.lwbooks.co.uk/ebooks/ebooks.html or http://hegemonics.co.uk). Essentially they come down to the fact that in its origin and throughout much of its history, Labour was itself a coalition bringing together rather disparate groups into one rambling organisation, perpetually at odds with each other and united only by the need to present a single electoral face. This coalition existed through to the 1970s when, it can be argued, it actually reached its apogee with just about every left group in Britain, including the Communists and most Trotskyist bands as well as Labour factions, in various informal coalitions fighting each other for control, direct or indirect, of the Labour Party. It fell apart in 1981 with the defection of the Social Democrats and afterwards with the reorganisation of Labour as a centralised body suppressing both internal factionalism and external links and drastically limiting the democratic involvement of its members. Yet despite this change, the mindset of Labour, both leadership and members, across left and right, remains one which retains the idea that Labour remains the coalition of the left and cannot contain the concept of political alliance outside itself. Two vignettes to illustrate this, one from the right and one nearer the left.
In his Kier Hardie lecture in July this year, David Miliband asked the rhetorical question “Why did Hardie refuse an alliance with the Liberals?” (http://www.davidmiliband.net/2010/07/09/keir-hardie-lecture-2010/)To which, of course, the answer is he didn’t as, after being elected in West Ham with the Liberals not standing a candidate, he moved to sharing his dual-member seat in Merthyr Tydfil with a Liberal and helping to negotiate the Lib/Lab pact in 1903 which led both a Liberal landslide and the election of 29 MPs under the name of the Labour Representation Committee. Hardie worked as part of various Liberal/Labour alliances throughout his parliamentary career. It is possible that Miliband’s mistake stems from a poor education. More likely it stems from the ingrained habit of rejecting alliance as part of any Labour strategy and refusing to see that it is actually something present even in its formation.
More towards the left, just after Gordon Brown’s coronation as Labour leader, Jon Trickett M.P. wrote in 2007 for Compass about the task facing Labour:
We need to learn to multi task again; simultaneously reconnecting with all parts of the coalition into a new historic block. This is the task which Gordon Brown must address if he is to win. The first hundred days were devoted to emphasising the change of PM and also to establishing an impression of competence and strength. These are necessary attributes of governance but as the polls now show they do not amount to a strategy for reconnecting with Labour’s missing millions. The stakes are high but the prize is a great one. Brown has the opportunity to create a coalition, win a fourth term and in the process change Britain into the social democratic country which is waiting to be born. www.compassonline.org.uk/news/item.asp?n=940
The coalition to which Trickett refers is one which he believes formed in 1997 when “New Labour created a huge coalition, or historic bloc, of social classes, ethnicities, progressives and public sector workers”. Trickett’s problem, leaving aside the curious bundle of social categories he deploys, is that he fails to see any difference between the Gramscian concept of an historic bloc and the political formation which seeks to represent that bloc. He automatically sees only Labour as the legitimate political vehicle for representing the somewhat amorphous social bloc with which he is concerned. In a sense, Trickett is a true child of the 1970s and it is fully in line with the politics of that period that he was part of the group of Compass M.P.s that resisted any introduction of electoral reform in the Compass agenda. Ironically, this was the one policy which could have won a victory for Labour in May had it been deployed in 2007.
There is no sign that the Labour leadership has learnt any lessons from this. We know, after all, the direction which David Miliband wants to take the Labour Party having set it out last year in a Tribune article (www.tribunemagazine.co.uk/2009/08/07/how-the-next-decade-can-belong-to-labour). He wants to shift Labour into being a party with supporters rather than members; a vast mailing list of potential donors and election workers with the US Democrats and the Greek Pasok as his model. There is little sign that any of the other leadership contenders would demur from this whatever vague noises they make about party democracy to reel in the membership vote. Under the business-as-usual scenario, such a reorganisation might make sound sense in finally putting the idea of Labour as a coalition to rest and finally converting Labour into a kind of political brand rather than a party. However, it has little relevance to the problem of creating a new political coalition to counter that of the Conservative and Liberal Democrats.
It was, I think, the British Communist Party which first thought up the concept of broad social alliances which would, in effect, replace the working class as the leading national progressive force with, first, the anti-monopoly alliance and then the broad-democratic alliance. My favourite recipe for these is that they would include “workers in factories, offices, professions, working farmers, producers and consumers, owner-occupiers and tenants, housewives, young people, students, pensioners, workers in the peace movement and those active in the defence of democracy”, that is pretty much everybody including some under multiple hats. Trickett’s version (which I suspect owes a lot to this 1970s quasi-Gramscian theory) is much the same kind of thing, a kind of hopeful shopping-list similar to the notes sent up the chimney to Father Christmas every December. This is our third problem. The Gramscian concept of an historic bloc is a grouping of social forces which, together, can form a political alliance, conservative or progressive. It is, in other words, a political calculation which shifts throughout a nation’s history. The task of the British left today is to envisage just what a progressive social bloc looks like today. Clearly this is a much more complex task than either naming any immediate party coalition or simply listing a comprehensive social map of British society. It involves understanding just where nationalism in Scotland and Wales fits into such a progressive bloc; the future role of organised labour in its different forms; how social activists, particularly those concerned about climate change, can be induced to work with political structures rather than, as at present, largely outside them; the role of the large number of NGOs with radical agendas, for example those which participated in the G20 Put People First marches. And these are just the simpler issues.
Simple naming such a wide groups suggests the difficulty of the task. The left has become splintered across such a wide range of groups, some organised into single issue campaigns, some with an agenda which goes beyond any simple classification as ‘left’, that it is impossible for any single agency, let alone one party, to organise them. A rather complex kind of coalition is not just desirable, it is a fundamental necessity. And, make no mistake, it has to be done with the immediate backdrop of a coalition which is in the process of itself organising a centre-right bloc which may prove surprisingly resilient. Cameron’s Big Society and Broken Britain pitches can be easily mocked. However, he is reaching into an insight about a current social malaise in Britain which is has a wide resonance and not just on the right. (See for example, a Compass Thinkpiece on Feel-Bad Britain to which I contributed some three years ago http://www.compassonline.org.uk/publications/thinkpieces/item.asp?d=257).
All in all, the British left is between the rock and the hard place with the rock being the need to respond actively and constructively to the attacks upon the public sector and the hard place being the lack of any effective political agency with which to do this. The role of the Labour Party with its seemingly unstoppable move towards centralised control and its grip, albeit highly regional, on left electoral results is clearly a central problem. But so too is the unremitting ‘workerism’ of parts of the left, which still cannot see past the largely emasculated trade-unions as vehicles for political change, and the quasi-anarchism of parts of the activist left. In other words, to reach the destination of a left coalition it would be best not to start from here. But at least to state the problem and outline the destination is a start, a point from which the British left can move. Compass could play an important role in this given its sometimes uneasy stance promoting both a more pluralist left politics and also a commitment to supporting Labour. In a sense this paradoxical position encapsulates the problems of the left. Perhaps it could start by coming clean about this dilemma. Cards on the table, remember.
I start like this to make clear that the British left is not, as some Compass initiatives seem to suggest, an inchoate mass just waiting for the right trigger to crystallise into a progressive alliance ready to unite behind Labour. Rather it is fractured body of people, riven with considerable bitterness and distrust and wary of any kind of effort to drive it into a convenient corral however enticingly labelled as the home of a rainbow, golden, greenleft or somesuch colourful coalition. And that’s just the members of the Labour Party. And yet, as a long-term member of that left, it is painfully obvious that some kind of alliance is just what we have to come to terms with.
The most striking feature of the May election was just how ordinary it was. In months before voting most observers, including myself, predicted that it would be a ‘wild’ election with an even lower turnout than 2005 and with some kind of revenge being wreaked on the major parties, in particular Labour, after the expenses scandal. The electorate, it was commonly felt, had become disillusioned with system. What actually happened was a small, though important, increase in turnout, resounding defeat for independents and various ‘protest’ candidates, flat-lining for the nationalists and electoral catastrophe for small parties of the left. In other words, business as usual with the, historically, not uncommon final result of the arrow of the two-party wheel-of-fortune coming to rest in that sector marked No Overall Majority. This rather normal situation has, however, been over-shadowed and largely ignored by one, rather startling, political innovation. Instead of following the standard practice of several small and no-majority governments in the past ─ to stagger on for a while and then call another election ─ the Conservatives, rather cleverly, and the Liberal Democrats, possibly cleverly, agreed a formal, negotiated coalition, a shift in governance which may turn out to be a critical watershed in British politics. Or may not.
This rather unexpected normality of the May election was what stopped a bad election for Labour turning into a rout. The small increase in turnout seems mainly to have been previously Labour voters responding, perhaps a little wearily, certainly hesitantly, to the old call to Keep the Tories Out which had become the drumbeat of most Labour-inclined commentators in the weeks before the election. This was almost certainly the reason for the dreadful results of all the left alternatives to Labour. In the case of my own Green Party this was disguised by the somewhat fluky victory of Caroline Lucas in Brighton, fluky because this is pretty much the only seat in the country which is effectively a four-way marginal where the winner needs only 31% of the vote. In nearly all other constituencies, the Green Party suffered serious declines in actual votes with the deposit-saving level reached in only two places outside Brighton.
This unexpected result, a ‘normal’ election but one which has turned British politics in a totally new direction has provided the Labour Party and the wider left with the difficult problem of how to respond to coalition politics. The immediate, knee-jerk response has largely been what might be termed the pit-bull strategy; to attack ferociously on all fronts hoping to split the alliance between the two governing parties so that it will collapse and force a new election. There is apparent sense in this strategy for the Labour Party in that if such an election returned a Labour majority, a possibility which gains credibility if it were to be held in the midst of savage public expenditure cuts, then business-as-usual could be resumed with the bonus that the growing challenge from the third-party might be effectively extinguished.
However, there are two obvious risks attached to the pit-bull approach. First, a forced election could just provide the Tories with a parliamentary majority and the mandate to proceed with their public-sector cuts. Second, and in my view much the most likely, the assault on the coalition could fail and it would carry on with increasing confidence for a full five-year span. Clearly, a great deal depends upon the proposed referendum on a new voting system. The Alternative Vote is far from proportional but it will undoubtedly favour the LibDems, probably awarding them another forty or so seats something which, like it or not, would be ‘fairer’. It would also be a system which would effectively cement coalition politics into British governance. Just how far Labour will succeed in weaselling its way out of its manifesto commitment to an AV system remains to be seen. If it succeeds in successfully opposing its implementation in 2015 (not to mention the entirely fair removal of its current 8% or so poll advantage because of slanted electoral boundaries) then the coalition could collapse and Labour might return. On the other hand, opposing what many might see not only as reneging a manifesto promise but also a move towards a fairer voting system could result in electoral suicide.
The risks associated with the pit-bull approach are not just short-term. Outside the left commentariat which shrieks “split” every time some disagreement within the coalition is aired, there is a feeling (and it can only be a feeling) that the electorate is beginning to feel rather comfortable with coalition politics in which differing views are openly expressed and compromises are agreed. Unless some countervailing left-leaning alternative is found there is the distinct possibility, indeed probability given the bias of AV voting, that Britain will be governed by a centre-right coalition for many years. The C word has been much used on the left in recent months but has been given remarkably little concrete clothing, often reducing to the dismal slogan of the Labour Representation Committee – support the coalition against cuts and join the Labour Party. So what are the obstacles to forming at least the embryo of such a coalition? There seems to me to be three rather separate issues here.
The first is the obvious problem that the policy direction of the New Labour governments, to which all four of the male candidates for the Labour leadership are tied, contained much that overlaps, often quite specifically, with current Coalition policies. It would be too much of an intrusion into personal grief for most Compass members to labour the point, but the fact is that the Coalition is proving quite adroit at pointing out just how much of what they are doing is little more than an extension of Labour policy. A VAT rise? Would not Darling have done just this next January? Apparently so according to Mandelson. Academy schools? Was it not a declared ambition of Labour to hasten their formation? Public expenditure cuts? Was it not Brown’s declared policy to slash the scale of deficit financing? Just how Labour can extricate itself from this morass remains to be seen but it clearly a problem for the formation of a centre-left bloc that its major potential component has a recent history of sitting rather to the right of centre.
The second and, in its way, more important problem is the incapacity of Labour, both leadership and many members, to understand the concept of political alliances. There are good historical reasons for this block which are difficult even to summarise here. (Those interested in greater detail might refer to an essay of mine in Left Out: Policies for a Left Opposition Today which can be found at www.lwbooks.co.uk/ebooks/ebooks.html or http://hegemonics.co.uk). Essentially they come down to the fact that in its origin and throughout much of its history, Labour was itself a coalition bringing together rather disparate groups into one rambling organisation, perpetually at odds with each other and united only by the need to present a single electoral face. This coalition existed through to the 1970s when, it can be argued, it actually reached its apogee with just about every left group in Britain, including the Communists and most Trotskyist bands as well as Labour factions, in various informal coalitions fighting each other for control, direct or indirect, of the Labour Party. It fell apart in 1981 with the defection of the Social Democrats and afterwards with the reorganisation of Labour as a centralised body suppressing both internal factionalism and external links and drastically limiting the democratic involvement of its members. Yet despite this change, the mindset of Labour, both leadership and members, across left and right, remains one which retains the idea that Labour remains the coalition of the left and cannot contain the concept of political alliance outside itself. Two vignettes to illustrate this, one from the right and one nearer the left.
In his Kier Hardie lecture in July this year, David Miliband asked the rhetorical question “Why did Hardie refuse an alliance with the Liberals?” (http://www.davidmiliband.net/2010/07/09/keir-hardie-lecture-2010/)To which, of course, the answer is he didn’t as, after being elected in West Ham with the Liberals not standing a candidate, he moved to sharing his dual-member seat in Merthyr Tydfil with a Liberal and helping to negotiate the Lib/Lab pact in 1903 which led both a Liberal landslide and the election of 29 MPs under the name of the Labour Representation Committee. Hardie worked as part of various Liberal/Labour alliances throughout his parliamentary career. It is possible that Miliband’s mistake stems from a poor education. More likely it stems from the ingrained habit of rejecting alliance as part of any Labour strategy and refusing to see that it is actually something present even in its formation.
More towards the left, just after Gordon Brown’s coronation as Labour leader, Jon Trickett M.P. wrote in 2007 for Compass about the task facing Labour:
We need to learn to multi task again; simultaneously reconnecting with all parts of the coalition into a new historic block. This is the task which Gordon Brown must address if he is to win. The first hundred days were devoted to emphasising the change of PM and also to establishing an impression of competence and strength. These are necessary attributes of governance but as the polls now show they do not amount to a strategy for reconnecting with Labour’s missing millions. The stakes are high but the prize is a great one. Brown has the opportunity to create a coalition, win a fourth term and in the process change Britain into the social democratic country which is waiting to be born. www.compassonline.org.uk/news/item.asp?n=940
The coalition to which Trickett refers is one which he believes formed in 1997 when “New Labour created a huge coalition, or historic bloc, of social classes, ethnicities, progressives and public sector workers”. Trickett’s problem, leaving aside the curious bundle of social categories he deploys, is that he fails to see any difference between the Gramscian concept of an historic bloc and the political formation which seeks to represent that bloc. He automatically sees only Labour as the legitimate political vehicle for representing the somewhat amorphous social bloc with which he is concerned. In a sense, Trickett is a true child of the 1970s and it is fully in line with the politics of that period that he was part of the group of Compass M.P.s that resisted any introduction of electoral reform in the Compass agenda. Ironically, this was the one policy which could have won a victory for Labour in May had it been deployed in 2007.
There is no sign that the Labour leadership has learnt any lessons from this. We know, after all, the direction which David Miliband wants to take the Labour Party having set it out last year in a Tribune article (www.tribunemagazine.co.uk/2009/08/07/how-the-next-decade-can-belong-to-labour). He wants to shift Labour into being a party with supporters rather than members; a vast mailing list of potential donors and election workers with the US Democrats and the Greek Pasok as his model. There is little sign that any of the other leadership contenders would demur from this whatever vague noises they make about party democracy to reel in the membership vote. Under the business-as-usual scenario, such a reorganisation might make sound sense in finally putting the idea of Labour as a coalition to rest and finally converting Labour into a kind of political brand rather than a party. However, it has little relevance to the problem of creating a new political coalition to counter that of the Conservative and Liberal Democrats.
It was, I think, the British Communist Party which first thought up the concept of broad social alliances which would, in effect, replace the working class as the leading national progressive force with, first, the anti-monopoly alliance and then the broad-democratic alliance. My favourite recipe for these is that they would include “workers in factories, offices, professions, working farmers, producers and consumers, owner-occupiers and tenants, housewives, young people, students, pensioners, workers in the peace movement and those active in the defence of democracy”, that is pretty much everybody including some under multiple hats. Trickett’s version (which I suspect owes a lot to this 1970s quasi-Gramscian theory) is much the same kind of thing, a kind of hopeful shopping-list similar to the notes sent up the chimney to Father Christmas every December. This is our third problem. The Gramscian concept of an historic bloc is a grouping of social forces which, together, can form a political alliance, conservative or progressive. It is, in other words, a political calculation which shifts throughout a nation’s history. The task of the British left today is to envisage just what a progressive social bloc looks like today. Clearly this is a much more complex task than either naming any immediate party coalition or simply listing a comprehensive social map of British society. It involves understanding just where nationalism in Scotland and Wales fits into such a progressive bloc; the future role of organised labour in its different forms; how social activists, particularly those concerned about climate change, can be induced to work with political structures rather than, as at present, largely outside them; the role of the large number of NGOs with radical agendas, for example those which participated in the G20 Put People First marches. And these are just the simpler issues.
Simple naming such a wide groups suggests the difficulty of the task. The left has become splintered across such a wide range of groups, some organised into single issue campaigns, some with an agenda which goes beyond any simple classification as ‘left’, that it is impossible for any single agency, let alone one party, to organise them. A rather complex kind of coalition is not just desirable, it is a fundamental necessity. And, make no mistake, it has to be done with the immediate backdrop of a coalition which is in the process of itself organising a centre-right bloc which may prove surprisingly resilient. Cameron’s Big Society and Broken Britain pitches can be easily mocked. However, he is reaching into an insight about a current social malaise in Britain which is has a wide resonance and not just on the right. (See for example, a Compass Thinkpiece on Feel-Bad Britain to which I contributed some three years ago http://www.compassonline.org.uk/publications/thinkpieces/item.asp?d=257).
All in all, the British left is between the rock and the hard place with the rock being the need to respond actively and constructively to the attacks upon the public sector and the hard place being the lack of any effective political agency with which to do this. The role of the Labour Party with its seemingly unstoppable move towards centralised control and its grip, albeit highly regional, on left electoral results is clearly a central problem. But so too is the unremitting ‘workerism’ of parts of the left, which still cannot see past the largely emasculated trade-unions as vehicles for political change, and the quasi-anarchism of parts of the activist left. In other words, to reach the destination of a left coalition it would be best not to start from here. But at least to state the problem and outline the destination is a start, a point from which the British left can move. Compass could play an important role in this given its sometimes uneasy stance promoting both a more pluralist left politics and also a commitment to supporting Labour. In a sense this paradoxical position encapsulates the problems of the left. Perhaps it could start by coming clean about this dilemma. Cards on the table, remember.
Friday 18 June 2010
Left Out
There were some headline results in the May election which seemed to be good news for the left, Caroline Lucas winning in Brighton and the BNP being wiped out in Barking council being amongst them. Unfortunately the detailed results point in the opposite direction. The election was a disaster not just for Labour but for all the left.
The BNP in fact did rather well. In Barking, Margaret Hodge was returned comfortably but the BNP increased its vote and came a comfortable third. They lost all their seats on the council because of a factor common to all minority parties across the country. Council elections have even lower turnouts than general elections. The coincidence of the two pushed up council participation and in most councils this meant that minority parties were squeezed as the increased vote went mainly to the big three. In Manchester, the Green Party polled its highest ever vote in Hulme ward, where it once had a councillor, but was pushed into third place as the Labour and LibDem vote soared. In Lewisham, where the Green Party had six councillors, they held on to only one as turnouts doubled.
In the general election, Lucas’ win in Brighton, itself a rather aberrant result in that she won with only 31% of the vote in what is effectively a four-way marginal, conceals poor results elsewhere for the Green Party. Having made a huge effort to stand in as many seats as possible, in nearly all places the vote went down compared with 2005, often by 40% or more with the voting in London being particularly dismal. Just to pick out a few constituencies: in Hampstead, the vote dropped by over 62% to only 759; in Calder Valley which contains the almost legendary green town of Hebden Bridge and a ravaged Labour Party, it went down by 37% whilst in Manchester Withington, the vote dropped by 50%. So far as I can see, outside Brighton, the only constituencies to save their deposits were one of the Norwich seats and Cambridge. So bang goes a couple of hundred thousand pounds.
The votes for fringe left parties almost defy description with perhaps the prize going to the Workers Revolutionary Party whose candidates bought their votes at almost £10/ballot just on the basis of lost deposits alone. In Manchester Central, the WRP actually produced a leaflet sent round on the election freepost which proudly announced that their candidate lived in Hackney in London and attended Goldsmiths College. Jonty Leff amassed precisely 50 votes for this effort to be surpassed by four by the Socialist Equality candidate. Neither bothered to attend the count.
A little further away from the mad left, the peculiar socialist alliance known as the Trade Unionist and Socialist Alliance at least scrambled into three figures but often only just. In Manchester Gorton, a local trade union activist got 337 votes trailing the Respect candidate who got 507. Respect’s collapse from the halcyon days of 2005 when George Galloway actually won a seat was particularly and rather sadly notable. In May, its votes were, roughly, halved.
In contrast, BNP votes mostly increased even though it failed to make any sensational breakthrough. The same is true of UKIP, whose interventions probably cost the Tories a few seats. A summary of the BNP results is that in 2001, the BNP fought 33 seats and polled 47,000 votes; in 2005, they fought 117 seats and polled 192,746 votes whilst in 2010, the BNP fought 339 seats and polled 563,743 votes. Simple maths shows that their average vote is slowly increasing even as they spread over the country. This shows a systematic rather than dramatic spread in support. It is unlikely that they will breakthrough into parliamentary seats under first-past-the-post but their council support will inevitably grow.
What happened in May rather defied expectations. Instead of a drop in turnout and a swing away from established parties there was a slight increase with a clear disinclination to vote for independents and left groups. The election was in this sense rather traditional with the arrow on the wheel-of-fortune stopping in the segment of the wheel marked ‘No Overall Majority’, the result predicted for months beforehand. What was rather surprising was instead of the usual pattern of such results in the past – to struggle on a with minority government and call a quick election – there was a swift pact to form a coalition, so swift as to arouse suspicion that it was a deal already in place.
The problem now for Labour and the rest of the left is that this coalition is looking rather stable. Of course there is some whistling in the wind about discontent in leftist LibDem circles and there will undoubtedly be some defections. But this does not indicate structural instability. The point is that the LibDems have always been most comfortable as a centre party. Their recent outflanking of Labour on the left really came about because of the shift in Labour to itself become the national centre-right party rather from any ingrained progressive tendency. Just talk to anyone who lives in a city run by the LibDems. You will find very few red flags being hoisted over town-halls.
This coalition has advantages for both parties. It enables Clegg to restore his party to their natural place in the political spectrum and he will gladly give up a few of his left-leaning members for this. Besides, there is a whole line of authoritarian Labour government measures just waiting to be knocked over to appease this group. Goodbye ID cards is just the start. Lookout for at least one big defence project to be stopped, possibly even a moratorium on Trident. And aren’t we all just waiting for the inquiry into the allegations of a cover-up over torture. This will be held over until Miliband (D) is safely elected then we can all enjoy the sight of his misleading, not to say lying, to Parliament being exposed over leisurely public hearings. And then there is the Chilcot show soon to resume. What’s not to like? And of course there is always the holy grail of PR if not now then maybe, possibly, some time.
For Cameron, apart from the satisfaction of re-decorating No. 10, there is the chance to ditch his recalcitrant, almost mad right-wing. Does the prospect of a few defections to UKIP really worry him?
No, the problem for the British left is a deep one: that this coalition will do what New Labour was always striving to achieve, the formation of a stable centre-right bloc based upon English nationalism. It was always this last that was a major stumbling bloc with Scottish Labour being its solid bastion but also its albatross, something it could not shoot but which still hung around its neck.
So what to do? Phrases like ‘rainbow coalition’, ‘progressive alliance’ and so forth as widespread but the fact is that no one really knows how to form these. All the leadership contenders apart from poor Diane Abbott, dependent upon David Miliband’s charity to even be nominated, would quite clearly sit comfortably in the Tory/LibDem coalition. Their efforts to distance themselves from the policies which they themselves instigated already looks desperate, by September one can look forward to complete mental collapse. The central issue remains that any kind of new left coalition must depend upon a significant fraction of the Labour Party breaking from the centralised right-wing control under which it presently resides even if it subsequently form some kind of alliance with the right-wing. At present this seems unlikely with excited chatter about flocks of new members and a change in party structure. Dream on but remember that all parties get a membership boost in the run-up to elections. The BNP claims to have 8,000 new recruits something which may have more substance than Labour’s boasts.
Perhaps a boost for a new book which I co-authored would help. Left Out: Alternative Policies for a Left Opposition tries to provide some answers. Available from Amazon and good book-shops (ISBN: 978-1-4457-8182-2) or by downloading from www.hegemonics.co.uk or, soon, from Lawrence and Wishart’s website, it tries to tackle the problem of how some kind of left alliance could be formed over the next five years. Inevitably it is only a start but at least it is a beginning.
The BNP in fact did rather well. In Barking, Margaret Hodge was returned comfortably but the BNP increased its vote and came a comfortable third. They lost all their seats on the council because of a factor common to all minority parties across the country. Council elections have even lower turnouts than general elections. The coincidence of the two pushed up council participation and in most councils this meant that minority parties were squeezed as the increased vote went mainly to the big three. In Manchester, the Green Party polled its highest ever vote in Hulme ward, where it once had a councillor, but was pushed into third place as the Labour and LibDem vote soared. In Lewisham, where the Green Party had six councillors, they held on to only one as turnouts doubled.
In the general election, Lucas’ win in Brighton, itself a rather aberrant result in that she won with only 31% of the vote in what is effectively a four-way marginal, conceals poor results elsewhere for the Green Party. Having made a huge effort to stand in as many seats as possible, in nearly all places the vote went down compared with 2005, often by 40% or more with the voting in London being particularly dismal. Just to pick out a few constituencies: in Hampstead, the vote dropped by over 62% to only 759; in Calder Valley which contains the almost legendary green town of Hebden Bridge and a ravaged Labour Party, it went down by 37% whilst in Manchester Withington, the vote dropped by 50%. So far as I can see, outside Brighton, the only constituencies to save their deposits were one of the Norwich seats and Cambridge. So bang goes a couple of hundred thousand pounds.
The votes for fringe left parties almost defy description with perhaps the prize going to the Workers Revolutionary Party whose candidates bought their votes at almost £10/ballot just on the basis of lost deposits alone. In Manchester Central, the WRP actually produced a leaflet sent round on the election freepost which proudly announced that their candidate lived in Hackney in London and attended Goldsmiths College. Jonty Leff amassed precisely 50 votes for this effort to be surpassed by four by the Socialist Equality candidate. Neither bothered to attend the count.
A little further away from the mad left, the peculiar socialist alliance known as the Trade Unionist and Socialist Alliance at least scrambled into three figures but often only just. In Manchester Gorton, a local trade union activist got 337 votes trailing the Respect candidate who got 507. Respect’s collapse from the halcyon days of 2005 when George Galloway actually won a seat was particularly and rather sadly notable. In May, its votes were, roughly, halved.
In contrast, BNP votes mostly increased even though it failed to make any sensational breakthrough. The same is true of UKIP, whose interventions probably cost the Tories a few seats. A summary of the BNP results is that in 2001, the BNP fought 33 seats and polled 47,000 votes; in 2005, they fought 117 seats and polled 192,746 votes whilst in 2010, the BNP fought 339 seats and polled 563,743 votes. Simple maths shows that their average vote is slowly increasing even as they spread over the country. This shows a systematic rather than dramatic spread in support. It is unlikely that they will breakthrough into parliamentary seats under first-past-the-post but their council support will inevitably grow.
What happened in May rather defied expectations. Instead of a drop in turnout and a swing away from established parties there was a slight increase with a clear disinclination to vote for independents and left groups. The election was in this sense rather traditional with the arrow on the wheel-of-fortune stopping in the segment of the wheel marked ‘No Overall Majority’, the result predicted for months beforehand. What was rather surprising was instead of the usual pattern of such results in the past – to struggle on a with minority government and call a quick election – there was a swift pact to form a coalition, so swift as to arouse suspicion that it was a deal already in place.
The problem now for Labour and the rest of the left is that this coalition is looking rather stable. Of course there is some whistling in the wind about discontent in leftist LibDem circles and there will undoubtedly be some defections. But this does not indicate structural instability. The point is that the LibDems have always been most comfortable as a centre party. Their recent outflanking of Labour on the left really came about because of the shift in Labour to itself become the national centre-right party rather from any ingrained progressive tendency. Just talk to anyone who lives in a city run by the LibDems. You will find very few red flags being hoisted over town-halls.
This coalition has advantages for both parties. It enables Clegg to restore his party to their natural place in the political spectrum and he will gladly give up a few of his left-leaning members for this. Besides, there is a whole line of authoritarian Labour government measures just waiting to be knocked over to appease this group. Goodbye ID cards is just the start. Lookout for at least one big defence project to be stopped, possibly even a moratorium on Trident. And aren’t we all just waiting for the inquiry into the allegations of a cover-up over torture. This will be held over until Miliband (D) is safely elected then we can all enjoy the sight of his misleading, not to say lying, to Parliament being exposed over leisurely public hearings. And then there is the Chilcot show soon to resume. What’s not to like? And of course there is always the holy grail of PR if not now then maybe, possibly, some time.
For Cameron, apart from the satisfaction of re-decorating No. 10, there is the chance to ditch his recalcitrant, almost mad right-wing. Does the prospect of a few defections to UKIP really worry him?
No, the problem for the British left is a deep one: that this coalition will do what New Labour was always striving to achieve, the formation of a stable centre-right bloc based upon English nationalism. It was always this last that was a major stumbling bloc with Scottish Labour being its solid bastion but also its albatross, something it could not shoot but which still hung around its neck.
So what to do? Phrases like ‘rainbow coalition’, ‘progressive alliance’ and so forth as widespread but the fact is that no one really knows how to form these. All the leadership contenders apart from poor Diane Abbott, dependent upon David Miliband’s charity to even be nominated, would quite clearly sit comfortably in the Tory/LibDem coalition. Their efforts to distance themselves from the policies which they themselves instigated already looks desperate, by September one can look forward to complete mental collapse. The central issue remains that any kind of new left coalition must depend upon a significant fraction of the Labour Party breaking from the centralised right-wing control under which it presently resides even if it subsequently form some kind of alliance with the right-wing. At present this seems unlikely with excited chatter about flocks of new members and a change in party structure. Dream on but remember that all parties get a membership boost in the run-up to elections. The BNP claims to have 8,000 new recruits something which may have more substance than Labour’s boasts.
Perhaps a boost for a new book which I co-authored would help. Left Out: Alternative Policies for a Left Opposition tries to provide some answers. Available from Amazon and good book-shops (ISBN: 978-1-4457-8182-2) or by downloading from www.hegemonics.co.uk or, soon, from Lawrence and Wishart’s website, it tries to tackle the problem of how some kind of left alliance could be formed over the next five years. Inevitably it is only a start but at least it is a beginning.
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