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Michael Prior
© Michael Prior 2007
It is difficult to be too negative about the British left. The current Labour
leadership is in the happy and historically unique position of being able
to ignore such of its membership as still clings to the name, depriving
them of any say in policy formation and able to keep the financial support
of most of the unions without even offering scraps of legislative support.
The appointment of Digby Jones, a reactionary anti-trade unionist, as a
junior minister was a final humiliation. Outside the Labour Party, the left
is divided into several, often fractious groups - sometimes in the form
of the old sects; sometimes inside parties whose overall stance is not necessarily
left, such as the Greens, Scottish and Welsh nationalists and Liberal Democrats;
sometimes, and probably most numerously, as disaffiliated and disaffected
individuals working in a myriad of local or national pressure groups but
with little or no general political contact.
The essential problem is this: forty years ago, the left both inside and
outside the LP had a common general aim - to shift the LP to the left using
as a primary vehicle a politicised trade union movement. There was ferocious
conflict over the details of this approach, which concealed the overall
strategic agreement of the Labour left, the Communist Party and the various
Trotskyist groups. Remarkably, this strategy was successful in that at the
end of the 1970s the LP was indeed secured by the left and, if Argentinean
bomb-fusing had been more competent, Britain might have had a socialist
government in 1984. Such a government would probably have gone the same
way as Mitterrand’s brief flirtation with socialism in the early 1980s.
However, what actually happened was that the Conservative government was
able to push through a hegemonic shift in the policy base of British governance,
and policies which, whilst never having general popular support, succeeded
in shifting what can loosely be called the ‘common sense’ of
British politics sharply to the right.
I want to take for granted the way in which Blair and Brown shifted Labour’s
policy base on to the ground of this new neo-liberal hegemony. I also want
to take for granted the inevitable continuation by Brown of this programme.
The interesting thing about Brown’s new regime is the political problems
which it faces. There are essentially three of these.
The first is that the British state is slowly falling apart, with the effective
separation of Northern Ireland, the slow-motion departure of Scotland and
a slower, though still inexorable, process in Wales. So far, Brown’s
response to this has been to try to provoke some kind of political support
around the idea of ‘Britishness’, one of those weasel words
which mean, in practice, something quite different to their surface meaning.
In this case, ‘British’ actually means English, in a drive to
give Labour the majority in England which it will increasingly need, but
so far lacks, as the Celtic nations drift into their own channels. That
he should adopt direct from the BNP the slogan ‘British jobs for British
workers’ is evidence for just how serious this issue of Englishness
is seen by the Brown cabal.
The second problem is that the drop in electoral turnout, combined with
the steady advance of third party voting, threatens to become a crisis of
political legitimacy if it continues much further. It should be emphasised
that both these, and in particular the former, have been a feature of the
Blair/Brown regime, one that was allegedly pushed to power by popular acclaim
but which, in practice, has proved to be a form of political poison.
The third is more complex but no less serious. Brown and Blair drove New
Labour to adopt all the clothes of neo-liberal capitalism so that by now
Brown’s central political position is essentially that of a right-centre
nationalist party. However, this terrain is one already occupied by a previous
incumbent who is unwilling to vacate it and who still, loosely, ‘owns’
it. To appreciate this it is only necessary to note how often Labour is
said to have out-manoeuvred the Conservatives by occupying ‘their’
territory. In other words, Labour is still seen as a party which has taken
power, rather like a cuckoo, by stealing another’s nest. The result
is a political system which has shifted from apparently immutable two-party
stability to one perpetually unstable as potential voters swing from one
centre-right nationalist grouping to the other, depending on which manages
to push the right buttons at the right moment.
Brown’s central problem is that New Labour achieved power in 1997
essentially by offering a new take on Thatcherism; something in which it
had some success. However, sharing a house with another tenant means that,
ultimately, the other will have their day. On this inexorable law Brown
is now hung. His only way out is to claim legitimacy over the premises now
shared by Conservatives and to move them out, something that requires them
either to relinquish them or to be erased from them. In first, tentative
steps, Brown has begun to lay out his stall. In policy terms, to stay rock-solid
on the nationalist centre-right whilst, politically, begin to offer a home
to disaffected or possibly just bored members of both the Conservatives
and the Liberal Democrats. Play tunes on the theme of being the Big-Tent
Party and hope that, at a suitably opportune moment, he can turn over the
National Unity card, split the Tories by filching a chunk of their MPs,
and possibly some of their leadership, and humiliate the Liberal Democrats
by doing the same thing with them.
The British left has never recovered from its historic defeat in 1984; never
quite been able to accept it or to formulate any alternative strategy. Brown’s
political imperative may, paradoxically, provide it with a new start. In
both Germany and Italy, the formation of new centre groupings has stimulated
the left to begin to regroup and consider its options. In Britain, the final
explicit formation of the LP as a centre-right nationalist party could also
lead to new kinds of left unity, even to some kind new left formation. It
is early days, and it depends, annoyingly, on developments largely outside
our control. But is a start.
(This is a condensation of a longer essay available as Looking for the Left
at www.hegemonics.co.uk)
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