Looking for the left

Michael Prior

© Michael Prior 2007

Looking for the left
There is a crucial task facing the left, though one which is as yet largely unspoken let alone resolved. It is the definition of just what the left encompasses and where it lives. This is a relatively recent problem though it derives from historical structures formed a hundred and more years ago and still embedded in British politics. As such we have to begin with an historical diversion, which will probably seem irrelevant to some and too short to be accurate to others, before returning to this task. But it is necessary.

The Formation of Power
European socialist parties underwent three great convulsions in the twentieth century after their formation in the late-nineteenth century. The first was the split into at least two parts, nominally Socialist and Communist, in the early twenties after the Russian Revolution; the second was the long drawn-out cataclysm of fascism and military occupation followed by reformation; the third was the collapse of Communism after 1989. The trajectory of these convulsions was, of course, different in each country from Finland across to Portugal. But what European socialist parties have in common is that each has been formed and reformed, shaped by outside forces which have in many cases effectively obliterated them and then required them to reform under new conditions. They have in this sense a history, something written into them which acknowledges the way in which the world can change and that political formations are not immutable. This has not led, necessarily, to left formations which are either effective or comfortable for those who still call themselves socialists or just on the left. The extraordinary collapse of the French Communist Party, for example, has not yet led to the vacuum left by its departure being filled by other than a sclerotic Socialist Party. But, even so, the map of European left-wing political formations remains one which shifts and changes.

The exception, of course, is Great Britain . The British Labour Party (L.P.) is a curiosity in the context of European socialism in that it has been effectively untouched by any of the three convulsions. Formed decades after most European parties, it avoided the first simply by chronological contingency. It was established as a membership party only in 1918 and so avoided any split after the independent formation of the Communist Party in 1920 largely because the constitutional structure of both bodies made splits, at least initially, not just difficult but, in practice, rather meaningless. The failure of the second great convulsion to impact on the L.P. is an obvious historical contingency whilst the muffled impact of the third resulted from the total political dominance over the left acquired by the L.P. in the previous fifty years.

It is difficult to over-emphasise this dominance and the speed with which it occurred. In 1910, the still unconstituted L.P. won 7.0% of the votes in a two-party system in which the Conservatives and Liberals shared over 90%. In 1924, with a 77% turnout, it acquired 33% of votes cast and henceforth, even in the darkest days of 1931 when its leadership had jumped ship, it would almost never drop below 30%. A consequence of this was that a party structure, essentially ad hoc and transitional in form composed of a bag of affiliated agents most with their own external presence as well as both constitutional and de facto rights inside the party, was never challenged either by external forces or by any internal challenge. After all, using Blair's measure, it worked. The apogee of this success was in 1951 when it took 48.8% of the vote and the Conservatives 48% with a turnout of over 82%. Ironically, the Conservatives won a slim victory in seats won. This two-party dominance was maintained until 1966 when the L.P. again topped 48% of the vote and the Conservatives took almost 42%. The subsequent forty years has seen a slow but inexorable drift away from both parties with the Conservatives maintaining their general position rather better (in 1979, they took almost 44% of the votes). In the year of its resurgent triumph, 1997, the L.P. again managed over 40% of the votes but in total this was a drop of over 2 ½ million votes compared with 1951 in an electorate over 2 million people larger. The impact of a declining turnout as well as competing parties was already well under way. Even so, despite this slow shift, the pattern of two-party domination has become, after over eighty years, an ingrained political cliché even for the left.

Throughout almost the entire period from 1918 onwards, the L.P. was the site of vocal internal dissension towards a leadership invariably situated well to the right of the centre of gravity of the membership and selected solely by its M.P.s until 1979. Leaders in the L.P. seldom came from within the membership. Instead they rose to prominence via various alternative staircases, most commonly as trade union officials or as protégées of the metropolitan leaders. The party was kept under control by a fairly tight disciplinary process largely directed after the mid-1920s towards connections with the Communist Party. In the early part of that decade, Communist/Labour cooperation was quite common, even to the extent of Communists being elected to Parliament with local Labour support. However, in the 1930s when Communist international policy had shifted away from regarding social-democrats as class enemies (a position never regarded with much enthusiasm by British Communists) towards various forms of united front, the L.P. bureaucracy became increasingly keen on preventing any contact with Communists, suspending both individuals and entire constituencies.

Despite this, left internal dissension largely maintained both intellectual and moral dominance amongst L.P. members. The activities of such as the Left Book Club ensured this whilst the most prominent L.P. commentators and journalists almost invariably came from the left. The L.P. became a curious, almost paradoxical, body; one whose natural policy position, as seen by its membership, was almost always to the left, often far to the left, of its natural leadership. The annual Party conference was for several decades, a battleground, with policies emerging with majority membership support as expressed by the votes of constituency delegates usually being negated by the block-voting power of the trade-unions. In continental socialist parties, such ideological differences usually resulted in splits. However, the L.P. remained largely immune to such, the defection of the Independent Labour Party in 1931 being the only exception. Two reasons can be proposed for this constancy.

The first essentially relates to power. Aneurin Bevan, the most prominent and popular Labour left-wing M.P. for thirty years from his election in 1929, described the I.L.P. decision as remaining "pure, but impotent". The extraordinary electoral dominance of the L.P. from 1924 onwards, not just nationally but, and in some ways even more importantly, in regional bastions of local government, meant that it always had at least its finger-tips on state-power even in the darkest days of the National Government. Any defection inevitably meant that such possibilities would be snatched away, permanently for the defecting group, though only temporarily for the incumbent leadership. The second reason was that the control exerted over the party machine by a right-wing leadership was essentially buttressed at all levels by the trade-unions, so that splitting from the L.P. was for many akin to splitting from a trade-union movement that for many members aroused greater devotion than the party. In many Labour heartlands, L.P. organisation was almost an ancillary to regional union offices particularly in South Wales, Scotland and the North East.

The result of this curious standoff was that a normally right-wing leadership was always constrained in how far it could shift policy to the right by the sheet-anchor of its membership whilst the left dominance amongst the membership could never be turned into major policy shifts nor into electing a leadership which accepted its policies. Gaitskell's failed efforts in the late-1950s to remove clause 4 from the L.P. constitution is an example of this impasse. It took almost exactly fifty years for any effective breakthrough to occur until a major policy decision to support unilateral nuclear disarmament was passed against passionate opposition from national leadership in 1960. The vote was won largely because the Transport Workers led by Frank Cousins voted against the leadership. Hugh Gaitskell famously vowed to "fight and fight and fight again to save the party that we love" which he did by getting a couple of unions to switch sides the following year. The membership of the beloved party remained consistently committed to unilateralism.

The Challenge to Power
The L.P. almost repeated the height of its 1951 electoral success in 1966 when it took over 48% of the vote, a point when the left, revived by evidence of greater levels of social dissent, faced a clear choice in how to proceed. There was a strand, represented by the Mayday Manifesto grouping, which urged the formation of a new kind of political formation, less attached to existing parties and more flexible in its approach to political action. This had some initial success but was splintered by the 1970 election and the success of the dominant left trend which was to 'do something' about the Labour Party. There were, naturally, various ideas on what 'to do' which evolved through the 1970s and which were buttressed by the generally socially rebellious propensity of that decade, but they boiled down to two main themes. The first was to organise inside the L.P. on a much more systematic basis. At least one Trotskyist group which came to called by the name of its publication, The Militant, did this using some form of party inside the party, whilst other left members did it using more-or-less overt networking. The Campaign for Labour Party Democracy, formed in 1973, was the most prominent of these. The Communist Party, the main left body outside the L.P, effectively abandoned all but nominal electoral pretension, and focussed instead on the formation of various broad left groupings in unions and in student politics which brought together Labour, Communist and other left-wingers in networking groups which concentrated on presenting left slates in internal elections. These proved remarkably successful in both spheres, launching the careers of several future Labour politicians including Jack Straw and Charles Clarke and, more importantly, shifting the balance of power decisively to the left in several unions including the key Engineering Workers.

Although most of the Labour leadership remained on the right, this sustained networking meant that by the end of the 1970s, the left for the first and only time gained effective control of the National Conference and elections to the National Executive. This provided the basis for a series of rule changes which allowed some measure of democracy for the party membership including a say in election of the leader and deputy-leader and automatic re-selection of sitting M.P.s by their local constituency party together with the National Executive claiming the responsibility of writing the Party's election manifesto based upon party policy as decided by Conference. The key change was constituency re-selection, a fundamental democratic practice which the right-wing of the L.P. simply refused to accept. In 1981, under the leadership of the Limehouse Four, 27 Labour M.P.s left the Labour whip in Parliament and formed a new party, the Social Democrats. Working almost from the outset in electoral alliance with the Liberals, the S.D.P. achieved several notable by-election successes, notably in Crosby and Hillhead, both Conservative seats, at a time when the popularity of the new Thatcher government was at its nadir. Essentially, the Alliance stripped away both Labour and Conservative votes and, for a brief moment, looked as if it might re-shape two-party politics in Britain. But, thanks in good measure to the errors of Argentinean bomb-fusers, the victory in the Falklands War revived Conservative popularity. In the 1983, election, the Conservatives slightly increased their national vote as compared with 1979 whilst the Alliance stripped 10% off the Labour vote. The SDP gained 6 seats and 11.6% of the vote, its high-water mark whilst the Conservatives gained a majority of 144.

It was at this point that the British left fell apart. Contrary to the image now sedulously peddled by Labour politicians, the 1970s was not a time of great internal dissension on the left. Certainly the Trots railed against betrayals, specific and general, but, as noted above, overall there was a remarkable level of agreement as to political strategy. There were a few dissident voices against the general 'militant labourism' of the left, a strategy of ramping up industrial action over wages and pushing Labour policy to the left via trade unions votes but these were largely ignored. There was little dissension over such left positions as opposition to the Common Market, even went this went down to defeat in the 1974 referendum and proved to be probably the most unpopular of Labour policies after 1979. Nor did opposition to any form of incomes policy arouse much debate across the spectrum from what would now be termed the 'soft left' through to the ultra-left. There was, of course, considerable dissent on the right. In the 1983 election campaign, Dennis Healey, the deputy-leader, distinguished himself by an almost open hostility to the plan to drop Trident. This left-right conflict had existed inside the L.P. since its founding. But after 1983, left against left descended to open warfare whilst the right-wing of the L.P., in particular right trade-union leaders, worked systematically to limit the democratic changes made in 1979 and to restore the normal right-wing dominance over policy formation.

The left broke apart over two issues. The first was the suicidal attempt by Arthur Scargill to use the miners' union to promote what amounted, at least in fantasy, to an anti-Thatcher uprising over the bodies of his hapless miners. The second was the assault by the re-elected Thatcher government on the power of local councils in particular rate-capping and the abolition of the Greater London Council along with other metropolitan authorities.

The former blew away the remains of the broad left alliance within the unions as even some Communist union-activists doubted the wisdom of Scargill's actions whilst others such McGahey, the Communist leader of the Scottish miners, refused to break ranks with the code of solidarity. The latter was a more complex, though less heart-breaking, issue centring around the democratic rights of locally-elected bodies to resist central diktat as to how they should raise money. Although councils all over England were to some degree involved, amongst them the G.L.C. led by Ken Livingstone, South Yorkshire (David Blunkett) and Islington (Margaret Hodge), the key focus was Liverpool which seemed resolute in its intent not to set a balanced budget within the limits of the rate-capping imposed by central government. They seemed set upon the same, well-publicised, path as George Landsbury and the Poplar Council in 1921, which had led to imprisonment, mass support for the jailed councillors and ultimately to their victory, and Clay Cross council in the early 1970s . In the event, both the Militant-dominated council and the leadership of the Labour seemed more intent on squaring up to each other than defeating the government with the former failing to take the decisive steps over the edge of legality, something for which it undoubtedly had considerable popular support in Liverpool, and the latter sending in its special forces to dissolve the District Labour Party and initiate expulsion proceedings against dissidents throughout the country.

It is up to historians to judge just how fragile was the hold of Thatcherism on Britain in the mid-1980s, the years when the most ferocious of its neo-liberal policies were being implemented. The urban riots of the early part of the decade had already placed markers for the deep opposition faced by this agenda whilst the repressive tactics used to crush the miners' strike, which had almost amounted to martial law in some places, had repelled a very wide section of society. That there was a strong undertow of support for the miners was shown in 1992 when, in the pouring rain, the largest political demonstration between the Aldermaston marches and the anti-war protest in 2003, took place almost spontaneously in London. It was to protest the plan by Michael Heseltine to close most of the remnant of the British coal industry. It suggested that a more careful and less fragmented protest had been undertaken in 1983 it could have succeeded. Again, if a significant number of councils had stuck by their initial avowals to refuse to set rates under the new capping rules then an entirely new path might have been set for British politics. It was, after all, only a few years on in 1990 that Thatcher herself was effectively deposed by the threat of widespread civil disorder over the poll tax. It has probably not escaped Gordon Brown's notice that issues of local finance, however dull on paper, have proved over many decades to be among the most explosive in British politics.

Be that as it may, the fact of the times was that the manner in which resistance collapsed with so many left-wing Duke of York's turning back just as the top of the hill approached led to dismay and disillusion towards and within the left which has lasted to the present day. On an individual level, actions such as Livingstone's sacking of John McDonnell, the finance director of the G.L.C., over the latter's desire to prolong resistance set up internal rancour which was still evident in McDonnell's abortive campaign for the Labour leadership. More importantly, it is from this time that one can date the slow erosion of Labour support in the Northern cities which were at one time its main bastions. There was considerable popular support for resistance to the Thatcherite assault on local councils which were clearly and correctly seen as attacks on representative democracy. One can still see residual signs of this in, for example, Livingstone's enduring popularity in London; in Dave Nellist's continuing presence on Coventry Council fifteen years after nearly winning the constituency as Independent Labour after his de-selection; and, perhaps most remarkably, Tommy Sheridan, who fought the 1992 election in Glasgow Pollock from a prison cell serving six months for anti-poll tax actions. The way in which the Labour national leadership refused to support any form of resistance to rate-capping which risked illegality and focussed, instead, on the removal of Militant was, undoubtedly, a key factor in the failure of the left in this period.

Alongside these internecine struggles, there were two other processes at work. First, the Communist Party, whose industrial influence had been decaying for a decade or more, finally collapsed under the weight of its internal conflicts and international events. This meant that the one body which had attempted to unite broad left groups inside unions in common purpose disappeared. Second, a well-financed effort was made by the right of the L.P. to gather together their various groups in the L.P. which remained after the S.D.P. defection into a single effort to 'reclaim' the party (which no doubt they loved just as much as Gaitskell). This tortuous and clandestine process has recently been documented in some detail by Dianne Hayter . It amounted essentially to a systematic media-campaign and in careful mobilisation of union-leaders to restore the normal right-wing balance on the Labour National Executive and in the annual conference. The latter proved relatively easy given that the towering figures of Jones and Scanlon had been replaced by much less forceful individuals and, in the case of the engineers, by an old-fashioned right-wing leader in Duffy.

The result was that once Kinnock had started his assault on the Militant group, it proved relatively easy to steadily roll-back the democratic practices of 1979, ironically using the slogan of One Member One Vote (OMOV), a principle which had never been part of L.P. democracy and, in fact, never would be in any meaningful way. The long paths of this process are too dreary to itemise. Its final stage was the assumption of the Labour leadership by a man whose attachment to the L.P. was minimal and whose attitude to the general membership verged on the contemptuous. There has been a tendency amongst some political analysts to see this as a kind of redemptive punishment, a session on the naughty-chair for a party whose membership had transgressed decent behaviour which had made the party 'unelectable'- the key word of the time. That the most significant part of this transgression leading to 'unelectability' was the refusal by the right of the party to accept democratically-decided policy slipped into oblivion to be overlain by legends of the 'loony left' as sedulously fostered by the Daily Mail and the Sun and of quick sound-bites about "the longest suicide note in history". In a recent pamphlet about reforming the L.P., the M.P. regarded as being the most left-wing in the deputy-leadership elections referred to "the horrors and wreckage of the early 1980s" without any reference to the split being a policy issue leading to the defection of a group of right-wing M.P.s or indeed anything connected with politics, a kind of Black Plague.

There is a similar tendency in selective amnesia which has emerged in the Labour left to view the past two decades as split into two parts; the genuinely modernising years after the election of Kinnock to the leadership in 1983 up to John Smith's death in 1994 followed by the tyranny of Blair in the succeeding years. This approach to democracy in the L.P. is identical to that which insists on describing the New Labour project as Blairism, said to be something which did not exist before 1994 and will cease to exist at the end of June, 2007. In fact there are no elements of the centralising and controlling practice of the last ten years which did were not initiated in the period after 1985, for example the substitution of policy formed in broad outline at conference with a National Policy Forum preparing rolling policy documents. The distortion of this body into the Byzantine mechanism for controlling dissent may have progressed much further under Blair and Brown than was intended in 1990 but its basic intent was always there. It is unclear to what extent this programme was clearly formulated in the mind of those such as Kinnock, who were part of the 'soft' left in the mid-80s, and to what extent they were bounced into their precipitate action by the vociferous attacks within the media of the time sparked by the miners' strike and the attempts by Labour councils to defend their position. Certainly Kinnock's famous speech at the 1985 Labour conference is clearly that of a rattled man relying on rhetoric to get out of a difficult corner. Although not the first time that the L.P. had been attacked by newspapers, one can see here the start of a different order of media attack using distortions and outright lies to force half-hearted rebuttals from Labour leaders unsure as their response and then for them to clamp down on anything not approved by head-office.

Into this litany of loss of nerve, foolishness, betrayal and defeat, one final note should be appended.

There was a third, popular struggle which took place in the 1980s whose outcome was more positive. In September, 1981, a march by a small group of women from Cardiff arrived at the gate of the Greenham Common U.S. airforce-base to protest against the planned positioning of cruise-missiles there. They set up a camp which, in various forms was to last 19 years and to spark a whole variety of linked protests including several mass demonstrations, civil-disobedience and challenges all the way to the High Court over the legality of the nuclear build-up. Greenham emerged from the two left movements of the 1960s and 70s which had escaped domination by the 'socialist left', the anti-nuclear campaigns begun by C.N.D. at the end of the 1950s and feminism, a combination which although disputatious managed to avoid the suicidal progress of the two other popular protests against the Thatcher regime.

Just what role, the Greenham Common camps played in shifting nuclear policy in that decade is unclear. But in political terms, the final result was, at the very least, a good draw for the protesters. The Greenham women took rough policing, prosecution and vicious vilification in the press and emerged with massive international publicity and support. They were so far, as left protest of the times went, the last women left standing. They also spawned a genuinely new kind of left, one in which new forms of organisation developed which centred around consensus, the absence of leaders and a willingness to place most emphasis upon personal direct action rather than indirect political representation. The anti-global and environmental movements of today draw a great deal from this. They tend to drive to drive the socialist left mad with apparently endless searches for consensus decisions and sometimes circular arguments. But their effectiveness in mobilisation has been proved even if such mobilisation often seems ephemeral.

Then and Now
In some superficial respects, the situation of the L.P. now bears some resemblance to that of the mid-1960s; a party whose leadership is pursuing policies opposed by most of its membership and is able to control these differences by an internal structure in which the membership is essentially powerless. However, the situation now is radically altered not simply because the membership is now far less; 177,000 and falling compared with nearly a million signed-up forty or so years ago but because the entire context within which it works is different and because the mechanisms of control are far tighter. The latter need little further description. It is the context which is important, specifically three issues; the diminished role of trade unions; the loss of moral leadership by the left; and the hollowing out of the British state with the associated crumbling of the two-party system.

The role of the trade-unions in left politics has always been one of the defining features of British socialism separating it from the European tradition. They have always had two, distinct and in some ways contradictory presences. The first was as a politicising agent in the working class in terms both of strengthening support for the party which it had a major role in founding and of providing a steady flow of leaders, albeit largely white males, at all levels of left formations. The negative side of this presence was a persistent strand of syndicalism in these formations, a strand which continued through to the reliance on industrial action to achieve political ends in the 1970s and, ultimately, to the disastrous miners' strike. This presence was responsible for most of the political energy of left groups outside the L.P. and in nearly all local campaigning inside and outside it. Union activity was also the main unifying feature of the left through all periods of division between political groups. The second presence was as part of the bureaucratic apparatus of the L.P. which, throughout most of its history, sustained a leadership to the right of the majority of the membership. Labour leaders have almost invariably been drawn from a professional strata with few links to the working class but they have always been buttressed by strong union-based leaders. Inside both the national conference and the National Executive Committee, it has invariably been the union votes which have kept the party safe for the leadership whilst in the mid-1980s it was union-leaders who restored right-wing authoritarian leadership. This arrangement has effectively been in place since the formation of the Labour Representation Committee in 1900 which was re-christened the Labour Party in 1906 .

These two presences have often been contradictory but, until the last two decades, the first has always been seen on the left as a factor which outweighed the second given that it seemed as though overcoming the right-wing bureaucratic presence was both possible and required the grass-roots support of a politicised union movement. As noted above, in the mid-1960s, this possibility was the dominant and ultimately successful project within all left formations. Forty years on, this dual-role has been splintered. The unions are, numerically, much diminished. Their previous grip on large parts of the private-sector has all but disappeared and continues to decline whilst their membership is aging. Union density is now amongst the lowest in Europe. This is a long-term trend begun in the Thatcher years but which has continued unabated throughout the whole period since 1997 under Labour.

That this is a tragedy for British workers is undoubted. However, the political implications of this long-term decline have yet to be assimilated - at least on the left for it is clear that Brown and Blair have long taken them onboard. Essentially, the second presence, that of providing bureaucratic support for Labour leaders, remains largely undiminished. The twelve (out of thirty three) union nominees to the N.E.C. provide reliable votes to provide the five government nominees with a simple majority on their own leaving the six representatives of the membership to offer token dissent. However, the other presence of providing politicised leadership has almost totally vanished. Any left project which involves an element of shifting the unions to the left has disappeared as they have adopted an increasingly administrative role with respect to their members. This is not to suggest that in some places and over some issues, unions never play a progressive role. In mobilisations against the BNP, for example, local and regional union offices have provided valuable support. But, overall, it is clear that the kind of support for the left which once existed at grass-roots level is largely gone. Brown and Blair understand this. They know that the unions, nationally, are tied to supporting the Labour leadership in the hope, almost totally unfulfilled, that they will enact forms of labour legislation which relax the constraints of the Thatcher era. They also know that the left-turn inside the unions of the 1970s will never happen again. Unfortunately, this obvious fact has yet to dawn on, for example, the CLP representatives on the NEC who campaign vociferously against any action which they see as altering the federal structure of the L.P. even though this structure is the very thing which renders them impotent. The future role for trade-unions in the British left is one of the great unspoken issues that the left has dodged.

The second shift in context is more subtle but, in its way, more important. In the mid-1960s, the Labour left held a majority amongst the Party's membership and could offer effective opposition to the leadership because it held on to a moral and a broad intellectual hegemony both inside the Party, which the best efforts of Crosland and Gaitskell failed to dent, and also outside in a broader left. This domination was based around 'socialism' as it was then understood. In Eley's words: "For roughly a century between the 1860s and the 1960s, the socialist tradition exercised a long-lasting hegemony over the Left's effective presence…If the Left was always larger than socialism…socialist parties also remained at their indispensable core." Eley writes of the European left. In Britain, the membership of the L.P. plus that of the Communist Party was the essential core of that broader Left largely defined by the L.P. and its affiliates. One can see this intellectual domination in the ways in which successive Wilson governments grappled with the problems of the British economy, never straying too far from the tenets of a planned economy however far these failed to cope with mounting difficulties.

In 2007, this central hegemony of socialism as the normal language of the left and as a sheet-anchor on the ultimate practice of Labour leaders has disintegrated. Again in Eley's words: "Socialist languages of politics, socialist models of organising the economy, socialist projections of the good society, socialist ideas in general have all been catastrophically delegitimized…Socialist ideas now have a more embattled and less legitimate place in the public discourse than one might ever have anticipated even two decades before." I am not arguing here that this is either a good or a bad thing, simply stating a fact about the place which the socialism, which was the core ideal of L.P. membership in the 1960s, now has in political discourse even on the left. It has no pull, even a residual one, on the Labour leadership who are now evidently free to pursue whatever policy seems most fitting their own designs, and it has little attraction within a wider activist left. Yet, and this is something that becomes startlingly obvious as one moves around the various public debates centred on the L.P., the left within the L.P. seems largely oblivious to this fact. The problem for them remains that of getting back lost members and decrying the betrayal of socialism by New Labour in general or, for those who quixotically carry a flag for Gordon Brown, specifically Tony Blair.

The third shift in context is the overall hollowing out of the British state and of the two-party system which has sustained it for so long. This is the issue which really lies at the heart of the problem of what defines the left and where it resides. In the mid-1960s, Britain was a unitary state governed within the framework of a two-party system, historically largely dominated by the Conservatives but with Labour the only constant and legitimate opposition. This system had by 2005 almost fallen apart. Scotland and Wales had started down paths of national legal identity, whose future routing is uncertain, but which has already given their nationalist parties a leading role. In England, a slow edging towards a more pluralist political structure had given a third party an increasingly prominent role despite the obvious unfairness of the electoral system. All this had taken place against a background of growing disillusion with the political system as a whole reflected in the decline in electoral turnout. It is worth noting that this decline is a specific feature of the present Labour government. Up to 1997, electoral turnout in Britain had hovered in the mid-70%s for decades. Its landslide in seats won in 1997 came as much from a lower turnout as from its increased votes and the two successive elections have shown a continuing large drop.

It remains unclear just where this process of hollowing out, that is the way in which outward forms are maintained but the internal structure is progressively weakened, will lead. Two paths can be seen. One is formation of the kind of minority or small-majority governments which were seen persistently between 1964 and 1974 but with the balanced vote between Labour and Conservative falling to around 35% of the turnout rather than the 45% of the previous era. This could lead to a negotiated reform of the electoral system adopting proportional representation following the lead of the Scottish, Welsh and European elections. This, in turn, would lead to the formation of coalition governments in which the 'left' would stretch across sections of several of the governing parties. A second path could be that Labour or Conservative maintain workable majorities despite having less than 20% of the electorate vote because of quirks of the electoral system and an even lower turnout. Such a manifest failure of the system, particularly in a potential context of security tension, real or imagined, is as likely to lead to a form of electoral dictatorship as anything progressive. Parties which have lost any kind of popular support and are hollowed-out versions of their past selves, but which maintain the forms of government, can swing wildly to maintain their power.

These three major shifts in the context of national and party political discourse mean that the 'problem' of the L.P. is now almost diametrically opposed to that which was posed forty years ago. Then the problem was how to change it internally. Now the problem is how to dissolve its electoral dominance over the left without provoking a potentially disastrous shift to authoritarian modes of governance and, simultaneously, how to re-construct the left within a new structure which takes into account the new political landscape of the 21st century. This does, of course, require some answer to the delayed question of what, in this new landscape, does 'left' actually mean?

Searching for the Left
There are many answers of course but the following may serve. The left encompasses those who believe in some measure: that usually social and collective responses to general social and economic issues are to be preferred to individual ones; that, in particular, market processes are undesirable in providing public services; that a practical and functioning democracy should exist in all areas of social activity including economic; that forms of ownership other than private may be preferred in many sectors of the economy; and that equality is a public good in its own right. There is plenty of scope for the argument and dispute traditional on the left over these but they encompass what most would think of as forming it.

So where does this left now reside? Perhaps a division into five, overlapping sectors is helpful. First, there is a core of left-wingers within the remaining membership of the L.P. including some elected Labour representatives. Second, there is a left fraction of a number of the parties which have largely developed over the past three decades including the two nationalist parties, the Green Party and, yes, the Liberal Democrats and which will also include some of their elected representatives. Third, there are the members of those small socialist groups which still retain an explicit attachment to the Communist or Trotskyist parties of the past. Fourth, there is a body of individuals who have been members of the Labour Party as well as those Communist or Trotskyist parties, who retain left ideals but have detached themselves from active politics. Fifth, and probably the most numerous, there is a body of individuals who are active in some form of political action, both local and global, and who regard existing political formations at least with scepticism and often with downright hostility. Some of them are descendants of the local campaigns once organised by Labour and Communist members but now largely detached from any organised political body. Others are more similar to the Greenham women in their forms of organisation.

Just how many people could be assembled under these headings is impossible to know; a personal guess would be around a quarter of a million with the majority in the last two categories. But numbers are, at least for the moment, largely irrelevant. The task faced on the left is how to fashion some kind of network from these disparate groups which can acknowledge each other and engage in debate about political strategy, without attempting to denigrate the choices that have led to their particular place of residence but with the objective of developing some discernible impact on practical politics. This is not a new project. It can be seen forty years ago in the May Day Manifesto group and nearly thirty years ago in Rowbotham, Segal and Wainwright imagining how the left might move Beyond the Fragments. There were efforts in the 1990s to form some kind of red-green alliance which effectively amounted to a new kind of left unity. All failed though not without some initial success. Why should any new endeavour succeed now?

The negative answer to this is that there is really no alternative. Two efforts to work through the L.P.- one based upon a democratic left turn, one on a centralised, pragmatic approach - have failed whilst the left outside the L.P. has fragmented in all directions without any clear purpose. The positive answer has to be that Britain is approaching a general political conjuncture in which a programme of a left coalition could have real purchase given a shift towards proportional representation throughout the electoral system. Organised and systematic tactical voting based upon simple criteria for being 'on the left' could have a swift impact in such circumstances. A second, practical, reason is that the Internet has provided the tools for national, interactive networking and support which provide cheap and fast replacements for the paper and envelopes, newsprint and telephones, meeting rooms and pubs which have in the past sustained left projects (and which to a large extent still do).

Where to begin? Perhaps the best approach is to change the metaphor used to describe left political action which, in a sense, has been dominated by the quasi-Darwinian slogan that from acorns do big oaks grow though only one acorn succeeds, crushing out all the other seedlings from failed acorns. Instead let us turn to rain-making by seeding clouds with silver iodide particles, no one of which is decisive but in which all are necessary. The left exists in Britain as a large amorphous cloud without measure and without purpose. Just what would happen if it could all shift in one direction is hard to know but it would certainly be spectacular. We should take as our alternative metaphor that from many particles a flood can come.

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