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© Soundings 2007
Once you became an MP, what was the experience of Dagenham like?
The velocity of change in Dagenham is extraordinary. You see global forces ripping through it and the wreckage being creating. But the government cannot offer anything other than a benign take on these forces. What's worse is that politically it is actually ratcheting up the tensions.
What do you think the solutions are?
I think we can retrieve this situation if we remake a class politics which recognises the heterogeneity of the working class. But class has no traction within the Labour Party.
Why is this?
The answer lies back in the intellectual moves made by Blair - particularly the debates around the knowledge economy - which assumed that the working class is withering away. As Blair transformed Labour into New Labour he legitimised the change by importing an intellectual framework that described old labour as being in empirical decline. The working class was no longer of relevance as a political and economic category.
But you can challenge that view by looking at where jobs are being generated, and what is happening in the real economy as opposed to the new economy. Look at the interlinked issues of the demand for labour, the patterns of migration, the long-term inequalities in wages and access to public services, and housing. Focus on these issues and we'll be able to get back into the debates around inequality and social immobility, and so find alternative, social democratic remedies.
Your analysis contradicts a lot of what the more high profile sociologists are saying about individualisation.
I'm arguing that we anchor the experiences of different groups in a materialist politics. That is not necessarily reductive. It allows you to contextualise materially the shared experience of different people. The approach we have at the moment is a semiotic game of emphasising difference, be they symbols of race or religious difference. It's unable to understand or navigate its way through the politics of migration and demography. For the last ten years New Labour has used patterns of migration as a twenty-first century incomes policy, holding down the wages in semi-skilled and unskilled work. Now the government is reaping the consequences.
Is it just about identity politics? The ideology associated with the knowledge economy is about constructing supposedly self-reliant individuals out of class subjects.
This human capital approach has all the hallmarks of right-wing liberal economics. The only deficiency that matters is imperfect information and knowledge. The Labour Party has retreated to the foundations of neoclassical political economy. The state is removed as an actor except for providing the means to access human capital. Once this access is perfected inequality is remedied. What counts is individual rational decisio- making and discounting for the future, rather than materially locating the inability to work or to become socially mobile within a broader pattern of inequalities. This was always the fundamental dividing line between left and right and it has been intellectually collapsed. This to me is the intellectual cornerstone of the whole movement that is New Labour.
Does this intellectual project have its source in Peter Mandelson and Charlie Leadbeater at the Department of Trade and Industry in 1997?
The 1998 White Paper on the knowledge economy is the definitive neoclassical testimony to the New Labour project. It was followed by a second White Paper in 2001, which addressed the creation of a labour force suited to the knowledge economy. I think these will be seen as key texts that shaped the New Labour project. In terms of the history of economic thought it places New Labour on the right of centre intellectually; a neoclassical Labour. The White Papers intellectually emptied out the whole of the labour and social democratic traditions.
Was Mandelson the key figure in shaping this New Labour politics?
What he was doing with Leadbeater was profoundly important intellectually. They provided the justification for the lack of desire to intervene over and above simply correcting market imperfections. Stuart Hall's analysis of New Labour's 'double-shuffle' is absolutely right. The veneer, the narrative, the language was brilliantly constructed, but underneath was the much more important engine which was working off the deep liberal agenda of the commodification of public services, responding to capital's global demands and the like.
You present a very different image from the one many people have of a New Labour, that it is dominated by a pragmatic 'let's see what works' mentality.
I do think there was a deeper philosophical movement in New Labour that was worked through during the long period of opposition. The genius of Blair when he became party leader was his ability to tell a story that legitimised all the political retreats since 1979. The intellectual work helped to mobilise and organise the electoral cohorts that mattered in terms of gaining political power. It also wrote off the working class and other groups who had no political traction. It used a sociology that assumed they had no empirical significance in the future.
How did it start coming undone?
The world was not like their stylised construction of it. The central contradiction of the knowledge economy thesis and the higher education debate is the belief that there is a massive expansion in the demand for graduates. If there isn't this demand and you're equipping people with this utilitarian way to tap into something that doesn't exist, they end up doing jobs for which they're overqualified. You've got generational immobility in the jobs market and in housing.
New Labour's emphasis on the supply side and its liberal economics has created a series of contradictions?
I think New Labour's reforms, which were influenced by the knowledge economy thesis, are built on sand. The question is how can we create new forms of economic and social solidarity that can deal with the economic problems we face and also address the renewal of democracy and the global issues of environmentalism. The only alternative approach is one grounded in the empirical realities of modern Britain in terms of migration, housing, labour market insecurity. It also demands electoral reform. I always thought electoral reform was a second order issue. Now I think our present electoral system has helped to sustain the neo-liberal project.
The full version of this interview will be published in the New Year in Soundings 38.
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