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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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