The diminution of community

Decades of privatisation and its rhetoric have left us with a community that struggles to conceptualise its real collectivity.

It is correct to point out that the role of geographical community has been significantly weakened in the three decades of market fundamentalism. The last of the great working-class struggles, the miners strike 1984-85, grew out of an identification with community. Those communities are now fractured.

I will list here without comment what I regard as the major reasons for the diminution of geographical community in the age of market fundamentalism:

1. Geographical mobility (people moving from one location to another with little commitment to where they live)

2. Economic inequality (financial segregation of the working class with minimal shared existence.)

3. Stress through insecurity (flexible insecure work, with little time left to devote to the clubs and societies that comprise community.)

4. Altered consumer consumption patterns (from the public market to the private shopping mall, where trespass laws prevent any non-authorised meeting)

5. Break-down in family structures (Isolated individuals spending more time with self-maintenance than reaching out to others in the community)

6. De-homogenisation of culture (Immigration can enrich a local community, but it can also divide it)

New Labour in government (1997-2010) in its spin recognised the loss of community by creating the post of community secretary in the government. The main thrust, though, was to try to re-invent artificial, illiberal and undemocratic religious “communities” by co-opting right-wing clerics. Segregated education became the main tool of bringing this about. Of course, all this served to further break up secular geographical communities (e.g. the loss of local comprehensive school)

Chesterfield Socialist Conference 1987

The Chesterfield Socialist Conference of 1987 attempted to revitalise the left in Britain. Instead it marked its demise.

The year 1987 was an important year, not just because I failed my driving test the day after Mrs Thatcher won her third term in office, but because – although I did not know it at the time – events that year would signal a speeding up in the collapse of the left in Britain.

In October 1987, the first Socialist Conference was held in Chesterfield, the mining constituency which Tony Been famously won in a byelection in 1984. Ralph Miliband described the conference, which brought together the Labour left with several outside groups and parties, as the biggest meeting of socialists since the Leeds Convention in 1918. Benn, Miliband and Eric Heffer all gave powerful orations in the hope of heralding in a rebirth of the radical left in British politics.

Yet, it was not to be. Kinnock (with Hattersley, Smith, Kaufmann and the then youngsters Blair and Brown in tow) announced a policy review, misnamed ‘Labour Listens’ which meant that the leadership listened to everybody except socialists. The remaining socialist policies were either dropped or sidelined. Inside the party de-democratisation took hold and the socialist left was marginalised or expelled. In this stifling atmosphere of party discipline, Kinnock stumbled on until losing to the Tories yet again in 1992.

John Smith’s leadership 1992-94 promised a Labour Party consolidation on the basis of some kind of mild social democracy – and, but for his death, he would have taken Labour to victory in 1997.

But that was not to be, either. In 1994 (the last contested Labour leadership election until 2010), desperate for success, Labour elected Tony Blair, whose drift to the right in the next decade and half would have been unimaginable in the early nineties. So New Labour was born and the Left and socialism ceased to be.

Blair's New Labour: Ending Labour as a progressive movement

The following comment, penned in October 2006 during the Blair New Labour years, remains an accurate description of the period, especially in predicting David Cameron's election in 2010. What I did not foresee was the Financial Crisis of 2008 or the rise of Jeremy Corbyn in 2015.

Blair's New Labour is a reactionary creed and has destroyed the Labour Party as a progressive party

There are some elections which mark a transformation in the body politic, such as 1945 and 1979. There are others which mark its continuation; I see 1951 and 1997 as elections which are mostly about new management teams to administer the status quo. Until Britain's two historic parties of left and right have both had a turn in Number 10, one cannot talk of a new consensus. Mr Blair's role was to consolidate the Thatcherite consensus; he has done so admirably well.

There are two practices of New Labour which stifled left and progressive forces. The first happened inside the Labour Party: the defeat of social democracy and the establishment of a top-down, managerial non-democratic party structure. The second is ongoing: the political practice of triangulation; i.e. moving so far to the right on policies (e.g. civil liberties) that the Conservative opposition can only utter me-tooisms, (like David Cameron) or else take refuge in lonnyland (like John Redwood). Triangulation, though, is only possible because Blair faces no threat to his left flank (Cf. Schroeder with the Greens and the Linkspartei/PDS).

Some people point out that Labour's social and educational policies have improved the lot of the worst-off in the inner cities. I acknowledge the point that vis-à-vis the Tories New Labour has higher social spending because if it did not there would little to sustain New Labour's electoral base. Yet, it should be noted that inequality in the UK continues to grow, and the commercialisation of every aspect of social service provision undermines the collectivist universalistic philosophy on which that social provision was based.

Social democracy sought to modify capitalism so that it functioned at least to some degree in the interests of working people. New Labour has reversed the logic: people need to be modified so that they function for globalised capitalism. While it might often be better to be employed on the minimum wage than to be on the dole, Blairism is a revolting enslaving philosophy that is an anathema to everything the left ever strove for.

Most people in Britain in Blair's decade have experienced rising living standards so there has been a period of political peace and political disengagement. What Iraq did was to thrust the rottenness of New Labour in front of people's faces, and, once the teflon had cracked, mud stuck everywhere. Discontent there is, but sadly it is not channelled constructively, and is it is likely to end up propelling Mr Cameron into government.

Vladimir Derer: his argument was correct

The election of Jeremy Corbyn seems to suggest that the way forward for the political left is through the Labour Party.

I remember back to a winter’s evening in the mid 1980s when Vladimir Derer addressed a meeting in the Exeter City Library. The gathering wasn’t heavily attended, with only a handful of Labour left people from Exeter and the south Devon area, plus a couple of activists from the non-Labour Party sects, communist and Trotskyist. Derer had already passed the height of his influence and the majority of Exeter Labour Party had by then already turned their back on him.

To the younger generation today, Derer’s name and work are not well-known; yet in the 1970s and early 1980s he was the organisational driving force behind the move to the left in Labour Party. Earlier, in the 1950s and 1960s, the Labour Party had been comfortably in the grip of leaders who pursued mild social amelioration from inside the Parliamentary party. But by the early 1970s several things had changed: economic growth had faltered, so hard choice about who got what had to be made; power in the trade unions had partially shifted to radical shop stewards; and the constituency Labour Parties were gaining an influx of young left-wingers. The situation was ripe for change.

Derer believed that the key to socialist reform lay in and through the Labour Party. His thesis was both articulate and simple: in the advanced capitalist countries no new socialist parties had emerged as a significant political force since the formation of the Third International in the 1920s, and therefore effective socialist activity could only take place inside the prevailing party of the centre-left, by which he meant the Labour Party in Britain. Opportunities (not opportunism), he argued, were few and far between and had to be seized when available. Such an opportunity was now presenting itself.

The problem, though, with the Labour Party left in the 1970s was that it ranged from left-wing social democrats though to revolutionary Trotskyite groups, so building a unity based on policy was impractical. Yet, the party could be moved leftwards by democratisation: if the rank and file elected and controlled the leadership, then the result would a left-wing party. To that end the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy was formed in 1973 and Derer became its secretary in 1974. The drive to the left was by means of an intra-party struggle for party democracy.

The left reached its peak of influence in the Party in 1980. In 1981 the tide turned: Tony Benn failed in his attempt to take the deputy leadership and the right regained control of the Party’s National Executive Committee. Though the final reckoning wasn’t fully apparent until a few years later, the left had lost the fight for the Labour Party; and the steady march to the right had begun.

The lean years for the left 1983-2015

The third of a century leading up to sudden and unexpected election of Jeremy Corbyn as party leader in September 2015 was one of almost continual and progressive defeat for the left inside the party. There were two phases of defeat. The first was under the leadership of Neil Kinnock (1983-92) plus the short reign of John Smith (1992-94) in which the divide in the Labour party was mainly about alternative economic policies. Labour’s right believed, economic conditions permitting, in taxing, spending and regulating to ameliorate the conditions of working people. The left believed economic power (nationalisation and worker’s control) was needed to change the ways of capitalism, if not to abolish capitalism all together. But some kind of compromise between the two positions was theoretically possible, even if difficult to achieve. Though the role of the left diminished, particularly after the 1987 election defeat, the left still possessed a minor influence over policy.

The second period began in 1994 with arrival of Tony Blair and the birth of New Labour. Social democracy and redistribution were thrown out in favour of full acceptance of unbridled market capitalism. Working people were to be slotted into capitalism and not have resources re-directed to them; public provision in health education and elsewhere was to be provided by private capital and private management. Labour in government after 1997 saw a bonfire of everything traditional Labour, left or right, had ever stood for: the acceptance of growing inequality, with Blair flaunting his and New Labour’s relationship with the super-rich; a love affair with the far right around the globe which led to Britain eagerly following President Bush into the Iraq War in 2003; and at home New Labour oversaw a growing illiberalism manifesting itself in an expansion police powers and a diminution of civil liberties.

Life inside the Labour Party fundamentally changed, too. Since the eighties, but particularly since the arrival of Blair and New Labour in 1994, the Party structures were de-democratised, conferences choreographed from above; meaningless forms of consultation replaced intra-party elections. Worse still, the Left vacated the Party leaving a membership consisting mainly of municipal careerists and their hangers-on. Outside the ranks of Labour, no new left-wing Party established itself, even after Labour abandoned social democracy in the 1990s. The Green Party remained fixed in a niche partly of its own making; and George Galloway’s ephemeral Respect Party was both a parody and betrayal of socialist values. So when Labour lost office in 2010, with its lowest share of the poll since 1983, it was empty and irrelevant in the face of the financial crisis that had engulfed Britain and the world since 2008.

The Corbyn revival

In 2010 Labour had its first contested leadership election for sixteen years. In a feeble reaction against the excesses of New Labourism, its members – and particularly its trade union members - opted for Ed as opposed to David Miliband. The new leader proved not just personally ineffective, but also surrounded himself by a team of people like himself who had made their careers during New Labour’s neo-liberal years in government. For this reason, the Labour leadership were utterly hamstrung in their ability to stand up for working people, and went into the 2015 election without any clear message and lost. Ed Miliband resigned as leader within hours of defeat.

The right had ruled the labour Party for decades unchallenged and had grown complacent. In a move to weaken the trade unions, the election of the leader was turned into a direct vote of all party members, registered Labour trade unionists and any Labour supporter who paid £3. The veteran left-winger, Jeremy Corbyn who had entered Parliament in 1983 just managed to get onto the ballot paper and then unexpectedly went on to win with 59% of the vote. New Labour was slapped in the face by Corbyn-supporting party members, who had been sidelined for years, but still harboured progressive thoughts. Corbyn also won among trade unionists, manual and non manual in both the public and private sectors. Workers were fed up; they had been told for years to hang onto New Labour, even though despised them, lest things be worse for them under the Tories. And finally new ranks of Corbyn activists sprang up among the educated young, whose educational debts and abysmal prospects in housing and employment consigned them to a life of misery.

Furious at Corbyn’s election to the leadership, a majority of the Parliamentary Labour Party did all they could to destabilise him: a series a staged resignations from his shadow cabinet and a vote of no confidence in him, culminating in a leadership challenge by Owen Smith. The NEC did all it could to bias the election against Corbyn: 130 000 new party members, disproportionally Corbyn supporters, were denied a vote, thousands more were expelled or suspended for any number of dubious reasons. Yet, Corbyn triumphed, boosting his vote to 62%. And though the right-wing, by bureaucratic manoeuvring, has managed to keep control of the NEC, nonetheless today the Left is a powerful force in the Labour Party, and has a reasonable chance of taking control of it.

And Vladimir Derer

Vladimir Derer died in June 2014, so like Tony Benn who had passed away three months earlier, he never saw the election of victory of Jeremy Corbyn. Yet all the evidence points to his vindication. Left activism is more effective inside Labour than outside it: and it was to Labour that progressive people turned after 2015, not to smaller left parties or to new parties. The proof will never be final but today seems to prove the correctness of an analysis penned by Derer four decades earlier.

The End of Politics in Britain

It is always interesting to look back into the past and see how one predicted the future wrongly. This short comment was published in March 2008. In it I rightly sketched the meaninglessness for working people of the then New Labour administration, though I underestimated the extent to which Cameron in government from 2010, with the Liberal Democrats in tow (2010-2015), would further slash the remains of the welfare state in the midst of the 2008-1013 recession, the longest in the post-war period. And I utterly failed to foresee the rise of Jeremy Corbyn in 2015.

Social inequality is sharpening, while political parties are converging.

This week has seen the opinion polls giving the Conservatives a sufficient lead over Labour for an overall majority in the 2010 general election. Across ‘Middle England’ - for whose supposed benefit New Labour was designed - Cameron’s freshness, rather than any great policy issue, seems to be the driving force behind the Tory surge. Little now divides Britain’s two leading parties: both want to commercialise everything, both are middle-class oriented and led, both are devoutly Atlantist. Over the next couple of years the cautious Brown, who for ever will be Blair’s grey deputy, will try to emulate Cameron, flog the New Labour agenda to death, and will probably fail in everything.

The last termination of a Labour administration was in 1979. That defeat gave rise to two voices. One was fundamentalist: "let’s make a socialist Labour Party worth fighting for;" the other was to urge ‘moderation and unity’ in the hope that the Tories would trip up and the pendulum would swing. But nobody would have said then that a change of government hardly mattered. What might follow Brown’s 2010 poll defeat?

The Labour left, of course, no longer exists. Labour’s formulaic denunciation of the new Tory government’s further assault on the less well-off will ring hollow after a decade and half of New Labourism. Unless new political lifeblood flows from somewhere, (e.g. Scottish independence and a new politics there?) then in Britain we are looking to a new political age characterised by a collapse of party politics in full-blown American style.

Prospects for the Left in Britain - as seen in 2010

The prospects for the British Left seem dire; and the situation is entirely different from in the past.  (Written in 2010)

Overall, I am extremely pessimistic about the prospect of building a progressive movement in Britain. I had hoped in the mid-2000s that the total abandonment by New Labour of progressive politics in general and the huge opposition to the Iraq War in particular would lead to a serious organisation to the left of Labour coming into existence. Instead, all we got was George Galloway blending his own egocentric personality with an illiberal cultural relativist agenda in the form of his politically marginal Respect Party.

Since 2010 Labour has been in opposition to the Conservative Liberal Democrat coalition government. About what to do there are two contrasting opinions among people on the left.

On the one hand, there is the view that however awful New Labour was between 1997 and 2010 in government, nonetheless it is the only political organisation that working people have to advance their interests. We should, therefore, work for a Labour government to be elected in 2015 because even the worst Labour government is better than this. Of course in the meantime we can campaign and try to move Labour leftwards.

On the other hand, there is the view that the Blair-Brown governments crossed the Rubicon. New Labour in office abandoned social democracy, built up capitalist power and inequality, sought to diminish personal and civic liberties and actively promoted a sycophantic pro-Americanism around the globe. The people actively engaged in that project still lead the Labour Party today. Asking working people to put their faith and aspirations in Labour is, therefore, dishonest and will yield nothing but disappointment.

Superficially in this debate one can find similarities in the ending of the Blair-Brown governments in 2010 with the close of the Wilson-Callaghan years in 1979. Perhaps the most significant similarity is that Labour in opposition tends, at least initially after losing office, to start moving leftwards. And that was apparent in the symbolic election of Ed as opposed to David Miliband as party leader. But on closer examination there are two crucial differences between then and now.

First, unlike New Labour, the Labour Governments 1964-79 never abandoned social democracy. Wilson’s self-declared remit was left-leaning: to advance the well-being of working people within the post-war consensus and to be progressive in social, civic and personal affairs. In the latter, if not so much in the former, Labour chalked up significant success: abolition of the death penalty, legalisation of male homosexuality and abortion, lowering the age of majority to eighteen, etc. So in 1979 one could argue: “Labour is basically sound, but what we want is a more left-wing and progressive version of it. Let’s join and see what we can do”

The second crucial difference between now and then is that when Labour lost office in 1979, the left had never been so strong in the constituency parties and in the trade unions. There was real hope that by “mucking in” the left could win through. In 2010 Diane Abbott, the left-over of the Bennite Left was on the leadership ballot paper thanks only to the self-interested charity of New Labour MPs, who wanted to prevent the election being characterised as one between four white middle-class men. The movement behind Abbott was tiny and marginal. Few socialists remain active in the Labour Party.

My conclusion is that the situation in 2010 is fundamentally different from the one in 1979. The stain of New Labour cannot be washed away even in half a decade. Socialists cannot be, and cannot be seen to be, the junior partners of the people who managed New Labour after 1994, both in government and opposition. The Labour Party will not change its spots soon. If the left has a future it is not with Miliband and Balls. Tactically we might vote for them in elections, but that is all.

Ralph Miliband died before New Labour

The Marxist academic writer, Ralph Miliband, died in 1994 before the establishment of New Labour under Tony Blair, and before his sons, David and Ed, became involved in the Blair-Brown governments.

Throughout his academic career, Ralph Miliband wrote about the Labour Party from its inception up until his own death in 1994, with his main area of interest being the Party's role during the Post-War consensus. His thesis from the mid sixties onwards was invariable: the Labour Party could never bring about socialism in Britain. And his insistence on this point gave rise to the quip that he even produced two sons to prove it.

Ralph Miliband emphasised that the maintenance of capitalist rule in the West required both repression and reform. The post-war Labour prime ministers: Atlee (1945-51), Wilson (1964-70, 1974-76) and Callaghan (1976-79), for any number of reasons, were loyal to the British power structure and the post-war consensus, and therefore never sought fundamental change in favour of working people. These men, however, envisaged, and did to some extent achieve, a limited number of progressive reforms.

In 1994, Ralph Miliband died and in the same year Tony Blair became leader of the Labour Party. Blair and New Labour found themselves on a completely different political landscape in 1997 compared with any of their Labour predecessors. But crucially, they had no social democratic aspirations and intended to reconcile the Party and the electorate to market fundamentalism. Both Miliband’s sons, David and Ed, found leading roles inside New Labour: David rose to be foreign secretary and Ed became Labour opposition leader in 2010. Both have no experience in, nor desire for, class or socialist politics. David retired from active politics in 2013.

The issue that Ralph Miliband confronted was the inadequacy of Labour Party reformism. He could never have envisaged a Labour Party, led by his own son, which had deteriorated even further, and had abandoned reformism and even mild social democracy.

Triangulation - New Labour's Modus Operandi

The following comments on triangulation were made in January 2008

Since its assumption of office in 1997, New Labour has unashamedly adopted triangulation as a modus operandi. In the Tory-Labour electoral battle, triangulation consists in New Labour's strategy of adopting policies to the right of Conservative home territory, thus leaving the Tories nowhere to pitch their tent. Blair and Brown have pursued traditional Thatcherite fare: privatisation, PFI and benefit cuts, along with a disregard for civil liberties, sycophantic pro-Americanism, EU bashing and an expansion of religious schools. Only in those areas where either Labour’s pre-election commitment was too strong to abandon (e.g. devolution to Scotland) or where popular feeling is overwhelmingly anti-Thatcherite (e.g. in favour of high levels of spending on health and education), has triangulation not been applied.

Triangulation to be successful, however, has external and internal preconditions. In the external environment, i.e. outside the Labour party, triangulation generally only operates effectively in a two party system in which it is difficult for a new party or an existing smaller party to colonise the territory vacated. In Germany for instance the rightward shift in SPD led to a growth in the reformed communists, with the PDS, capturing territory abandoned by the social democrats.

Internally, the party pursuing the triangulation strategy must have freedom of policy manoeuvre. First, the party leadership must be devoid of principle to perform triangulation manoeuvres. Blair fitted that role perfectly. Further, the rank and file of the party need to be pacified. In the case of New Labour two processes were at work here. One was the process of de-democratisation which progressed step by step from 1980s (expulsions, the downgrading of conference and other elected bodies); the other was a desire to surrender all decision-making to the leadership if that were the price of wining, with the result that a cult of obedience is created. But it is not just the members of the party that need to be silenced, but the interest groups behind the party must be either by-passed or won around. Britain’s Labour supporting trade unions, after eighteen years of Tory government, have clung to the New Labour boat like drowning men, more keen to stay alive than worry about the direction of the boat.

Triangulation, of course, is a strategy not an ideology. Given that triangulation more than anything else has characterised the New Labour’s period of office since 1997, we can explain the ‘empty feel’ of the whole New Labour project. The only ‘ideological’ element injected into the policy, apart from its Thatcherite inheritance, has been Tony Blair’s religious conservatism illustrated in his crusading zeal which he shared with George Bush and which was also evident in his promotion of religious schools.

That the British left has reached a state such as the one described above without serious challenge is an indictment of a whole generation of left-wing people in Britain.

The Meaning of the Wikileaks leaks

The US embassy cables put into the public domain by Wikileaks do not contain any top secret intelligence and hardly tell us anything that we did not already suspect. Nevertheless, they are important in two ways: first, they are highly embarrassing to the US, so those who oppose US imperial power around the world can enjoy the Schadenfreude; and second – and more importantly – they provide evidence for much of what the left has previously believed to be true.

For me the most interesting is the confirmation of the utter subservience of the British government (both New Labour and the Coalition) to US interests. The constant and repeated mendacity of Blair-Brown government is well illustrated; for instance in deceiving the electorate and parliament on matters such as the outlawing of cluster bombs for PR purposes while clandestinely allowing the US to continue to hold them on British soil.

That Liam Fox gave full details of planned military procurement to the US Embassy hardly raises as eyebrow. Yet it is interesting to note that when the cables revealed that a FDP official had given details of the coalition negotiations in Germany to US diplomats, he lost his job within hours.

Will the publication of these cables do long term harm to the US? I don’t think so. If three million Americans with security clearance had access to this data base, we can be sure the information therein was already common knowledge in Paris, Moscow and Peking. Certainly, publication will force those wanting to cooperate with the US to think twice before opening their mouths to US diplomats, but overall the cables prove something very favourable to the US: for the most part US embassies function properly and orderly in promoting US interests around the world.

Phil Woolas and Harriet Harman

Woolas lied and conjured up inter-ethnic prejudice to win his seat.

In office he was one of the New Labour's bootboys who enjoyed his roles in the whip's office and as minister for deportations. He famously attacked lawyers who defended defenceless immigrants; yet now he calls on such services to try to save him from deportation from the Commons.

For once I salute Harriet Harman in her proclamation that Woolas has no future with Labour. What weakness on the part of Ed Miliband to have appointed him to the immigration portfolio in the shadow cabinet in the first place.

The end of social democracy

Following on the idea of the left becoming proficient at losing, I would just add this.

There is a double bind. First, not in half a century have the left been out of office simultaneously in Britain, France and Germany. Worse still today we see conservative governments in northern Europe from the Netherlands to Scandinavia. The failure of social democracy is in no way specific to Britain; it is a European phenomenon.

Second, we have witnessed the passing of social democracy within formally social democratic parties: New Labour in Britain, or the Harz package in Germany. Often the main party of the left today is little more than a cosmopolitan elite capturing the vote of public employees who depend on a ‘big state’ and poorer sections of the working class who have nowhere else to turn.

New Labour's Repressive Legacy

Labour can never be a progressive party again unless it confronts its flirtation with authoritarianism while in office.

Since his election to the Labour leadership,Ed Miliband has attempted to shut the door on the excesses of New Labour. Muffled criticism has been heard on Iraq, social inequality and the demise of civic and personal liberties. Nevertheless the overall tone of the Labour leadership is that we should move on. But can the sins of New Labour be so readily forgotten even if not forgiven?

If the left can easily explain, but not forgive, the Iraq fiasco and the boosting of social inequality, there is one aspect of the Blair-Brown years (1997-2010) which needs careful examination, namely New Labour’s assault on civic and personal freedoms. This was no small matter: people incarcerated without trial or public evidence; wide scale intimidatory use of stop and search powers against people on the street, especially photographers; people threatened with prosecution for criticising religion; mass registration of people on the pretext of combating paedophilia… and so on. By 2009 it was possible to talk about the lights going out on liberal democracy in Britain.

The reflex response of some on the left, namely that all this was prompted by the future necessity of repressing the working class, who would rise up in response to the capitalist crisis is surely nonsense. The organised working-class had never been weaker. The key to understanding this phenomenon lies elsewhere.

Many of the repressive measures were due to a cynical populism (detention of supposed would-be terrorists) or a desire to outflank the Tories and the Daily Mail. The security industry is a strong lobby (technology for ID cards and E-Borders); yet there is something else, something more fundamentally rotten.

When the Tories ran Britain (1979-97) they had obvious political and economic objectives, but no clear social one; didn’t Mrs Thatcher say that there was no such thing as society? Politically, the Tories destroyed the institutions of working-class resistance: the trade unions and local councils, many of which, and especially so in urban areas, were in Labour hands. Economically they imposed market fundamentalism on Britain, but socially they cared little about what happened to the swelling ranks of the unemployed. The jobless had scraps of welfare thrown at them and lived in junk estates.

New Labour made minimal attempts to empower and/or ameliorate the conditions of ordinary working people, other than the ephemeral palliative of permitting the intoxicating and ultimately disastrous credit boom. Instead, using the language of ‘responsibility,’ and for Blair ‘communitarianism,’ they deployed state repression to weld everyone into their ‘place’ in Britain's class-divided capitalist society. This, I believe is the true origin of New Labour’s authoritarian statism, and it is something that needs to be fully explored and rejected.

Blair, Brown and bad politicians

It is very depressing indeed that Britain was managed 1997-2010 by men of low calibre and principle such as Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. Peter Mandelson is cut from similar cloth.

There is an old saying in politics: shit floats to the top. The only means of part remedying the problem is to have greater openness in government and more accountability by parliament. It is absurd to have the reform of government departments, for instance, brought about or stymied to avoid the tantrums of ministers.

Labour in 1979 & 2010: the difference

I suppose I should answer my own question concerning whether the left should now put their hopes in the Labour Party of the future.

Superficially one can find similarities with the ending of the Blair-Brown governments in 2010 and the close of the Wilson-Callaghan years in 1979. Most significant among them is that Labour in opposition tends to start off moving leftwards. But on closer examination there are two crucial differences between now and then.

First, unlike New Labour, the Labour Governments 1964-79 never abandoned social democracy. Wilson’s self-declared remit was left-leaning: to advance the well-being of working people within the post-war consensus and to be progressive in social, civic and personal affairs. In the latter, if not so much in the former, Labour chalked up significant success: abolition of the death penalty, legalisation of male homosexuality and abortion, lowering the age of majority to eighteen, etc. So in 1979 one could argue: “Labour is basically sound, but what we want is a more left-wing and progressive version of it. Let’s join and see what we can do”

The second crucial difference between now and then is that when Labour lost office in 1979, the left was never so strong in the constituency parties and in the trade unions. There was real hope that by mucking in the left could win through. In 2010 Diane Abbott, the token left-winger, is on the leadership ballot paper thanks only to self-interested charity of New Labour MPs. The moment behind her is tiny and marginal.

My conclusion is that the situation in 2010 is fundamentally different from the one in 1979. The stain of New Labour cannot be washed away in a few months. Socialists cannot be, and cannot be seen to be, the junior partners of the people who managed New Labour 1994-2010. The Labour Party will not change its spots soon. If the left has a future it is not with Balls, Burnham and the Miliband brothers.

Is working in the Labour Party worthwhile?

Even though I was active on the left of the Labour Party in the early 1980s, I doubt today whether socialist involvement in the Party can be effective.

In the 1980s our complaint against the Wilson/Callaghan governments (1964-79) was that they had been staffed by men with over modest objectives. Nevertheless Roy Jenkins had secured a raft of liberal reforms in the 1960s and the left had strengthened inside the Party and the trade unions. It seemed possible in the early days of Thatcher that a more left-wing Labour government was both possible and meaningful.

New Labour’s (1997-2010) main feature was not the modesty of its reform, but its desire to consolidate Thatcherism under new management. That required a different sort of Labour Party as Blair realised from the outset. Party internal democracy was undermined till it no longer existed, top-down management was imposed leading to choreographed conferences and left-wing activists either resigned or became marginalised eccentricities.

Socialism and social democracy are now too long dead in the Labour Party to be revived. I think I’m right, though I wish I were wrong.

That said, activity in the Labour Party is better than doing nothing or engaging in self-marginalisation through climate camps.

My hope would be that Britain could build a left-wing reformist party to the left of Labour which would win support for itself and prevent Labour from moving to the right. It would have to watch its left flank.

The absence of PR and the fractious left make that difficult in Britain; but nevertheless I believe it should be attempted.

Perhaps we should look to the experience of the German Left Party.

Confronting New Labour's authoritarianism

In the Labour Party, now in opposition, there is talk about moving on but one aspect of their term in office needs careful examination. It is easy to explain how New Labour presided over the highest levels of social inequality in Britain since 1945: Labour sought political power, but in reality existing capitalist power found Labour. Blair et al were the ideal instruments.

Harder to explain, though, was New Labour’s assault on civic and personal freedoms. People incarcerated without trial or public evidence. Wide scale intimidatory use of stop and search powers against people on the street, especially photographers. People threatened with prosecution for criticising religion. Mass registration of people on the pretext of combating paedophilia… and so on. By 2009 it was possible to talk about the lights going out on liberal democracy in Britain.

Many of these measures were due to a cynical populism (detention of supposed would-be terrorists) or a desire to outflank the Tories and the Daily Mail. The security industry is a strong lobby (ID cards and E-Borders); yet there is something else, something more fundamentally rotten.

When the Tories managed Thatcherism 1979-97, they defeated the trade unions and local councils and imposed market fundamentalism. What happened to the victims did not worry them too much; they had scraps of welfare thrown at them and lived in junk estates. New Labour, using the language of ‘responsibility’ and for Blair ‘communitarianism’ attempted to weld everyone into their place in Britain's class-divided capitalist society. This, I believe is the true origin of New Labour’s would-be totalitarianism, and is a foul ideology which needs to be exposed and trashed.

My point is this: the left has the task not just of confronting capitalist power in the economic domain to secure a greater share of the social product for ordinary working people, but it needs to assert universalism (as opposed to cultural relativism) and political liberalism, both of which have been so stained by New Labour.

Jon Cruddas: friendly critic of New Labour

Jon Cruddas is a man who has always liked to straddle the official New Labour line and flirt with the left as his voting record in Parliament shows.

It is no surprise that he did not wish to run for Labour leader. His personality seems to dispose him to be friendly critic of the Labour establishment only.

• Voted very strongly for introducing foundation hospitals.votes
• Voted moderately against laws to stop climate change.votes
• Voted moderately against introducing student top-up fees.votes
• Voted very strongly for a stricter asylum system.votes
• Voted a mixture of for and against a transparent Parliament.votes
• Voted strongly for Labour's anti-terrorism laws.votes
• Voted very strongly for more EU integration.votes
• Voted very strongly for removing hereditary peers from the Lords
• Voted strongly for a wholly elected House of Lords.votes
• Voted very strongly for the hunting ban.votes
• Voted a mixture of for and against introducing a smoking ban.votes
• Voted very strongly against replacing Trident.votes
• Voted very strongly for allowing ministers to intervene in inquests.votes
• Voted very strongly for the Iraq war.votes
• Voted very strongly against an investigation into the Iraq war.votes
• Voted strongly for equal gay rights.votes
• Voted moderately for introducing ID cards.votes
• Voted strongly against greater autonomy for schools.

Organisational set backs for the left since the 1980s

The diminution of working class and social democratic pressure is indeed in part due to legal restrictions on trade unions, their de-politicisation and marginalisation in most of the economy and in politics.

To that one must also add two further domains in which social democracy was squeezed out.

First the Labour Party itself. The rise of New Labour was both cause and effect of de-democratisation of the party structures, choreographed conferences, top-down control and consultation replacing elections. The fact that there has not been a contested election for leader since 1994 speaks for itself.

Second, in the 1980s much was made of municipal socialism. The centralisation of power started by Thatcher was continued by New Labour.

Can David Miliband succeed?

Can David Miliband succeed?

Just look where he is coming from as a loyal Blairite. New Labour junked everything that Labour hitherto stood for, social equality, civil liberties and international law, in order to profit from and ingratiate itself with big business and win ephemeral support from Middle England. Electoral success became the only raison d'etre for this compromised and unprincipled party.

Today the Labour Party has the backing only of its core voters who have nowhere else to turn. David Miliband has nothing in common with those people and their problems.

The great shame is that David didn't learn anything from his famous and much respected father. But there again if he had he wouldn't have risen to the top of New Labour.

Faith Group Leaders and Government

Faith Groups and Government (27 December 2009)

Religious leaders have been granted a privileged consultative status in the British home office. Implied is the idea that these leaders somehow represent their respective communites. This is nonsense.

If the majority of English people were to be represented by "a religious leader" based on their or their ancestor's religion, most would be represented by the Anglican Church. An atheist can’t represent you even if you are one, because there are only faith groups on Home Office Minister, John Denham's consultative committee.

Most of these "so-called" Anglicans would vomit at the idea that Anglican bishops represented their interests. So why is different for Muslims and Jews?