What is Labour's British story?
Writing from Scotland Gerry Hassan widens the OurKingdom debate on
Labour's future sparked by the intervention of the Foreign Secretary.
The
recent salvo across Gordon Brown's bow by David Miliband shows that
there is still some life in the top echelons of Labour. However,
Milband's prognosis, along with the delicate decoding and musings of
Sunder Katwala, embody the problems and limitations of thinking in
London's Labour circles.
This is an existential
crisis for Labour. It might have been brought to a head by its dire
opinion poll ratings, shocking by-election defeats and Gordon Brown's
uninspiring leadership, but it is about much more than even a
significant setback in popularity. There is a sense of pessimism and
fatalism that Labour's immediate troubles have uncovered. This go deep
into the party and helps explain its tumbling membership, as even its
once loyal supporters come to sense the tremendous limitations of New
Labour thinking as well as its politics. These include:
- What does Labour stand for beyond the platitudes of ‘economic prosperity with social justice' and ‘for the many, not the few'?
- Who does Labour give voice to and how does it aid, support and encourage the articulation of that voice?
- What is the Labour understanding of nation and place, and is there such a thing as a ‘Labour nation' and a ‘Labour place'?
Ask
these questions and you'll find that David Miliband's evocation of ‘change'
and ‘radicalism' in his ‘Guardian' piece evokes an underlying
Thatcherite orthodoxy, rather than someone calling for greater equality
in an unfair world. Decoding his text in best Kremlinology fashion
seems to indicate more than that he just wants to leave his options
open. His failure to mention social justice, beyond complaining that
the Tories have no right to lay claim to it, in an essay brimming with
platitudes, indicates that part of him views the Thatcherite/Blairite
consensus as beyond question.Gerry
Hassan is a writer, commentator and policy analyst and author and
editor of twelve books on Scottish and UK politics including The
Scottish Labour Party: History, Institutions and Ideas, After Blair:
Politics after the New Labour Decade and The Political Guide to Modern
Scotland. He can be contacted on: gerry.hassan@virgin.net
Miliband talks what
might once have been an intoxicating talk of ‘empowerment, ‘devolution'
and ‘localism'. This may still impress some Westminster anoraks and
those in its think tank world. For the rest of us, such Labour language
has become utterly devoid of substance and action. It is not just that
this language has consistently proven to be New Labour window-dressing.
It is worse than that. While such terms are consistent with traditional
Labour means and social democratic thinking in this country, they are
being deployed for very different ends.
Labour is a social democratic party. As such (as
David Marquand also points out) it urgently needs to reconsider its
historic and contemporary approaches to centralism and the use of the
state. In addition it needs to rethink its view of the nature of the
UK, and the idea of ‘the Labour nation' and ‘Labour place'.
Understanding the Limits of Centralism
Labour
has traditionally been the party of the central state. The dominant
account of this has been the Fabian tradition which saw the state as a
powerful political instrument for good - for planning, for
redistribution and for taking progressive decisions.
Under
New Labour centralism intensified to a ridiculous degree of
micro-management, often to the point of parody, and local government
was reduced to powerlessness. Westminster ministers now decide
practically everything in public life in England, sucking up powers
while they lament the state of civil society.
This
is of course a long story, beginning with the creation of the welfare
state in the 1940s, and accelerating in the 1970s with local government
cuts, and then reaching turbo-speed under Thatcherism. Blairism has
joined in with a vengeance. Reversing it would have been hard and would
have needed a politics not just a different manner of administration.
But this points to the fact that powerful forces in the centre have
produced this state of affairs. They are not about to be reversed by
warm rhetoric about ‘localism'.
State Power, its Legitimacy and Progressivism
There
has long been a Labour tradition which saw increased government
spending and the extension of the state as equalling progressive
politics. This logic would make George W. Bush among the most
centre-left politicians in the history of the United States! New Labour
utilised an approach that questioned this attitude, and has talked
about recognising the limits of the state, but it has done so to
re-order the state, acknowledging its limits to do progressive things
while continuing to support a politics where the state expands, extends
and claims more and more power - all the while deregulating where it
can, marketising as much as possible, and undermining those who believe
in the public good. Also by Gerry Hassan in Our Kingdom: "The Lessons of Glasgow East" (25 July 2008)
Who in Labour's senior ranks dares to disown the determinist view of the world offered by the Julius report which
argues that you can outsource all government actions apart from the
commissioners? A party venturing into such terrain is a party which no
longer fulfils its historic mission of protecting people from the power
of the market.
The Character of the United Kingdom
The
mainstream Labour tradition bought into the Whig version of British
history: of continuity and lack of rupture. (See, for example, Gordon
Brown's famous speech on Britishness to the Fabian Society in January
2006 where he claimed to be continuing the "golden
thread which runs through British history - that runs from that long
ago day in Runnymede in 1215...") But Labour also perceived the UK as a
unitary state, where the centre held a monopoly of political power to
enforce standardisation and uniformity across the whole country.
This
has always been a fallacy. The UK has never been a unitary state and is
instead what the political scientists Stein Rokkan and David Urwin have
called ‘a union state'. Such a political order is neither a unitary or
federal state, but a complex hybrid. A union state can have distinct
sub-national and regional arrangements and also allows for the
maintenance and preservation of ‘pre-union rights' in the union. This
latter point explains Scotland's continued negotiated autonomy
post-1707; Wales and Northern Ireland have had different experiences,
but have undertaken routes which have preserved their distinctiveness
and enhanced their autonomy.
A unitary state
could not contain the different polities of Scotland, Wales and Northern
Ireland, but nonetheless the political centre of the UK - Labour,
Tories, the civil service and media - have consistently misunderstood
the UK as a unitary state.
Labour's participation
in this failure permitted it to preside over devolution to Scotland,
Wales and Northern Ireland without understanding the context and
implications of what it was doing. Labour established new institutions
and yet at the same time remained wedded to a unitary understanding of
power alongside the unreformed nature of the political centre.
What is the Labour Story of the Nation?
The
persistent reluctance of the nexus of ‘bright' Labour politicians like
Miliband and those of his generation in the Cabinet to even debate this
or accept that it is an issue shows that they too are in denial. Once
there was indeed a clear Labour story of the nation. It was a
profoundly British story, about progress, the forward march of working
people interwoven with the claim of organised labour: a story of ‘the
common people' which gave the Labour Party a sense of moral mission and
purpose which carried appeal far beyond its trade union boundaries.
This
account was beginning to fray in the 1960s and 1970s, and it fell apart
in the 1980s and 1990s. New Labour in part recognised this. Under Blair
it attempted to weave a new narrative about diversity, pluralism and
cosmopolitanism. This evaporated into derision over ‘Cool Britannia'
and ‘Re-branding Britain' even before the honeymoon of having Labour
instead of the Tories turned sour. It was an agenda, based on hype,
hyperbole and false-hope, profoundly urban and English, but
cod-American in its attempt to use marketing to reshape national
identities. Brown's lonely efforts at reconstructing Britishness with
responsibility and flying the flag are, in a way, even sadder. Not just
because they are humourless and lack even the British tradition of
irony and self-deprecation but also because they are second attempt to
make re-branding work!
What is the Labour Sense of Place?
Do
we have any sense about what a Labour shaped community or place looks
like anymore? Beyond the rhetoric of Labour ministers about ‘localism',
‘community empowerment' and Richard Rogers inspired ‘place making',
does Labour have any idea - after a decade of grinding central
attrition of local decision making - about what a Labour community and
place could be?
There once was a Labour answer to
this which would have invoked self-organising, self-disciplined working
class communities which were shaped by a range of voluntary groups and
activities from trade unions to church groups and cultural bodies
sitting alongside an active state.
This powerful
ideal has ended in the grim reality of Glasgow East: an area which is a
mixture of deprivation and poverty alongside the insecure middle class
of urban Scotland. What a place like Glasgow East lacks is a sense of
voice and power. It used to have both of these characteristics, in part
aided by the Labour Party alongside others. But no longer. Even before
its disastrous defeat, could anyone but the most blinkered Labour
loyalist claim the party gives a voice to such areas?
After Social Democracy?
A
major problem running through all of the above is mainstream Labour and
social democratic thinking; New Labour has appropriated its approach
but for a very different kind of politics.
David
Miliband might like to claim the solution is a fusion of ‘social
democracy and radical liberal tradition' into a "single narrative" as if the latter could be
transplanted across without really altering the nature of social
democracy as we know it. In fact fundamental surgery is needed. Labour
and social democracy have never in their history adequately understood
the limitations of the state and centralism in the way that late
Victorian and Edwardian radical liberalism instinctly did.
Phil
Collins and Richard Reeves, whom Katwala counter-attacks, are both
right and wrong here. They are right to address the over-arching shadow
of the Fabian tradition of centralism which like an Upas tree has
killed off the British left's older decentralist traditions. However,
their remedy is even more ‘poisonous' than Fabianism: an
anti-political, dogmatic and narrow view of politics and economy, one
which is bereft of any concept of political economy, and filled with a
notion of change shaped by management consultants and buzzwords.
Labour
does desperately need to alter how it thinks of the world. It needs to
weave a path which avoids the twin cul-de-sacs of Fabianism and the new
conservatives. It needs to open up to new ideas about territoriality,
nation, state and place. It needs to ask what would be the ingredients
of a successful, self-governing, self-sustaining Labour community and
place, and how it balances this with issues of equity? We know one
thing for sure - Glasgow East and the existing order of things is about
as far as you can get from such a place as possible.
(Instead,
the only ‘hope' or sense of spirit Labour offered the voters there was
a defiant defensive ‘we'll show them' local patriotism after the SNP
pointed out that some of its health indicators were worse than Gaza. A
kind of sad futureless syndicalism, ‘We may be hopeless, but we are the
hopeless of Glasgow so watch out!' that may indeed have drawn 10,000
loyal supporters to the polls - but even they know it has no future.)
Meanwhile,
a change of thinking, and a new radical politics, that does indeed
combine elements of social democracy and liberalism, is already
underway: outside of Westminster and the narrow bandwidth of New
Labour. Progressive agendas are already growing across the UK. Of
course, sometimes they are noisy and suffer from interference. But this
is a sign of their vitality. In Scotland, first, the coalition of
Labour and the Lib Dems, and now, more pronounced, the SNP minority
administration, have given life to a revitalised social democratic
sensibility. In Wales, the Labour/Plaid Cymru coalition, and in London
before Boris Johnson's election, the Labour/Green collaboration, have
shown similar possibilities.
What such genuinely
new "fusions" of power have in common is that they have developed
within the context of bodies elected by proportional representation,
and they gave voice to very different constituencies and their leaders
do not echo New Labour mantras: Alex Salmond in Scotland, Rhodri Morgan
in Wales, and Ken Livingstone in London - all representing a new kind
of popular politician. But reading David
Miliband's ‘Guardian' article and Sunder Katwala's response, I get the
impression that the Westminster Labour village of ministers, advisers
and think tanks, has little grasp of this. They don't understand that
lots of us already inhabit a political process that is broadly positive
and we have a different experience of change from the direction New
Labour has taken.
There
have been considerable achievements of a decade of Labour. But it is
tarnished and threatened by where it seeks to take progressive - and
British - politics. The Westminster village
seem blind to the way New Labour has trashed the egalitarian and public
impulse of the labour movement and diminished what it means to be on
the left. Old fashioned social democracy needed to be democratised, to
put it mildly. Instead, Blair-and-Brownism, for want of a better word,
have made it something worse. There is now no unique Labour story of
its mission and purpose, merely a commitment by its officer class to
the new order. Nor is there a Labour story of the nation and nations of
these isles.
Progressives
need to offer sustenance to the hopes, energies and imaginations of
people with effective concepts of voice and power. Such a new
progressive imagination can already be seen in Scotland and Wales,
where it will continue to grow with or without Labour. It will then
find its English form.
The choice for Labour is whether it wants to remain the party of the new ancien regime paving
the way for the Conservatives or whether it can begin to make the break
from this mindset. No debate about the future of Labour is worth its
salt if it fails to confront this.
This article is published by
Gerry Hassan, , and openDemocracy.net under a Creative Commons licence. You may republish it free of charge with attribution for non-commercial purposes following
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