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Andy Pearmain
© Andy Pearmain 2007
Whisper it softly, but we might just be living through the last days of British Labourism. It has arguably been in decline ever since it was born, and given organizational embodiment in the Labour Party 100-plus years ago. The Labour Party put down remarkably shallow roots amongst its "core" constituencies: people remembered they were Labour at elections, returned a new bunch of Labour politicians, and then got on with their decidedly un-political and defiantly non-ideological lives. The party has nonetheless proved a remarkably resilient beast, not least because of all the people - MPs and Lords, councillors and worthies, officials and functionaries, cronies and clients - with a personal vested interest in its survival. But when Labour can no longer deliver electoral success, parliamentary majorities, government office and notional power, it loses its basic raison d'etre.
The Labour heartlands are deserting, Scotland and now (almost) Wales. England was prepared to offer it a last chance in the guise of Blairite New Labour, but looks set to reject Brownite New-Old Labour. Not least because it is not recognizably English (see my Soundings background piece, "England and The National-Popular' http://www.lwbooks.co.uk/journals/articles/pearmain07.html) and just looks tired, boring and (in the personas of Brown, the various Milibands and other Brown-ette child soldiers) plain weird. The only places Labour continues to "control" are the post-industrial cities of northern England, where opposition is feeble or non-existent and the local political culture is thoroughly debased. Even there Labour strangleholds are faltering, if only because of public apathy and the continued weakening of local government.
Of course, Labour and Labourism are different if related phenomena. New Labour was arguably both response to and cause of the final demise of traditional, subaltern class-based, respectably deferential, culturally religiose and sentimentalist, socially conservative Labourism. But now that New Labour is reduced to the bunkered, quasi-vanguardist elite core it always really was, it is hard to see it as anything other than Labourism's last gasp (see my other recent Soundings article, 'Labour Must Die' The only things keeping Labour going are the political life-support systems of union funding (always democratically questionable and historically dwindling, but still significant); the spare cash of the more grateful of the new super-rich; the metropolitan political-media class, whose vested interest in Labour is that it gives them something to chatter and scribble about; and the time and attention of hard-core party members with nothing better to do with their lives. As soon as this lot clear or die off, the old corpse can be safely buried and mourned.
So, if Labourism is (hopefully) dying, what of its polar opposite on the rather bedraggled spectrum of British left wing politics, the curious phenomenon of leftism? It is customary in contemporary political analysis to suppose that, with the passing of the Communist Party and the decline of the Labour left, it no longer exists. Undoubtedly it's become harder to locate, but I would argue that it has been dispersed across the whole political and cultural landscape, and continues to pop up in the most surprising places. If I could be bothered, I could probably come up with some climatic or horticultural metaphor, such as leftism's most implacable opponents in the CP and the Labour Party used to chuck around in times gone by: something about winds and weeds. And actually, the Socialist Workers Party has done very well out of New Labour's war in Iraq (in membership terms at least), and now consciously models itself on the CP of the 1930s, the vanguard party at the head of a new Popular Front (Or is it a "United Front"? I was never wholly sure of the difference, let alone whether it actually mattered; it seemed to come down to whether you let in Tories, as if many of them wanted to be). But first, a brief historical survey.
The far, extreme or ultra left in Britain was always a pretty marginal force, primarily because of the dominant, dead hand of labourism, but also because of the thankfully good sense of the British masses. This meant that the left has always consisted of obscure sects, occasionally (and temporarily) brought together by some passing historical convulsion. The most obvious examples are the Soviet Revolution that inspired the foundation of the CPGB, which forever after struggled to become much more than an amalgamation of ill-matched groupuscules; capitalist crisis and the rise of fascism in the '30s, which eventually created a solidarity of emergency that carried the left through the war and into its post-war heyday; the variegated cultural revolutions of 1968, which provided the left with fresh impetus, causes and personnel, while severing its traditional social and cultural roots; or the collapse of the social democratic consensus and the emergence of Thatcherism in the early '80s, which for a while at least shocked the left into some semblance of oppositional unity.
This last example is key to understanding where we are today. The failure of the Bennite hard left, followed by the twin disasters of the Falklands War and the miners strike, helped to establish the hegemony of Thatcherism, which the left took many years to fully comprehend. By then, the late 1980s, it was simply too late. The new, neo-liberal dispensation was well established. Britain was well on the way to the property-owning, share-dealing, service-economy, shopping and consuming, US-aping, business-state, deeply divided and uneasy society we now live in. The left was broken, disillusioned and dispersed, either into the cultural and ideological enclaves of "identity politics" or into what E.P. Thompson (talking about an earlier generation of defeated lefties) called "quietism".
This is historically characteristic of periods following "passive revolutions" like Thatcher's (or in Gramsci's day, Mussolini's). The re-settlement of capitalist prerogatives around a new, reinvigorated "historic bloc" has always pushed the left out of the public spotlight and back at each other's throats, where life is actually a lot easier and more comfortable. So, apart from those hardy souls who stuck with the SWP - it's amazing to see the same old names pop up: Pat Stack, John Rees, Lindsay German etc., offering the same old recipe of hyperactivism to a constantly turning-over and burning-out "mass membership" of students and local government officers - where did the British far left go?
Well, quite a few went via the Labour Party, the Kinnockite soft left and so on, into the "project" of New Labour. I always see people like Milburn and Byers as "deep entryists", sent clandestinely into the Labour Party by their Central Committees. Then being gradually initiated, absorbed and worn down by the arcane ways of Labourism, not to mention the seductive lure of personal advancement; and eventually forgetting why they entered in the first place. Except that there are strong currents of leftism in the political practice of New Labour. I've already mentioned its vanguard elitism. Then there's the fixation with policy-detail, which goes along with that peculiarly intellectual leftism (characteristic of the International Marxist Group, of which Milburn and Byers were members) that devotes itself to the perfect "programme", in front of which the workers will bow down and gratefully offer their hearts and minds. The New Labour inner core's blind, quasi-messianic determination, often in the face of established fact, to pursue a certain "line" whose basic truth will eventually become plain to everyone else, is another old leftist habit.
But above all, there is the fundamental contempt for the views, feelings, opinions, lives and experiences of ordinary people. I see this elsewhere too: in the wackier, millenarian end of the Green Party and associated movements, which at their further shores merge with the lunatic fringes of animal liberation, conspiratorial paranoia and food-faddism. At its worst, extreme Greenery is as thoroughly anti-modern, anti-urban and ultimately anti-human as fascism, which (let's never forget) meets leftism at certain points of the political and ideological circle. We will change you and your lives, whether or not you agree.
Thirdly - and most problematically for the readership of Soundings and this article - there is the leftism which found succor and shelter in the "identity politics" that took shape in the 1980s. In fact, as the traditional forms and struggles of left wing politics withered and died, the "new social movements" - the roll-call of gays, women, black and minority ethnic communities - gave leftism a whole new set of energies and causes. They were usually identifiable by the term "positive": whether that be "images" or "discrimination in employment" or the playground of new leftism I found myself working in through the 1990s, HIV/AIDS "activism". All of them imbued with a dismissive and condescending attitude towards ordinary people, still hopelessly mired in their various 'isms' and 'phobias'; and of course, reacting with dismissive fury to "political correctness gone mad" and eventually consigning the 'new left' to the same historical dustbin as the old one.
And the really funny thing is that the people of the "new social movements" - gays, women and blacks - did not thank us for our leftist condescension towards them, but set about biting off their own chunks of the Thatcherite pie. The pink pound; retail therapy; black sportsmen and women and musicians: all bear witness to the capacity for consumer capitalism to "include" everybody in its embrace, "regardless of sexuality, gender, ethnicity..." or whatever other boxes the Human Resources Department of the neo-liberal metropolitan elite wants to lock us up in. Equal Opportunities means just what it says: we are all free to hustle and grasp, accumulate and consume, express and display ourselves. It's just that, as in Animal Farm, some are more equal than others.
So what can we do about it? We can start by talking, openly and honestly, about how we got into this mess. And we should be talking with anyone who's prepared to talk to us, from thoughtful Tories (beneath the spin and froth of the Cameroons, there are some really interesting discussions going on among the "soft right") to the remnants of the far or ultra left. We might just be at one of those points in British left wing history where things are so bad, with the collapse of New Labour, that everybody has to sink their petty differences in favour of a greater common cause. And even if we can't do that, there will be plenty of people currently on the far left getting a little cheesed-off (as most eventually do) with the constant round of meeting-haranguing and paper-selling, and looking for a more productive, democratic left politics.
But ultimately, we have to stop talking amongst ourselves, and get out "amongst the people", whoever and wherever they are. There really is no alternative to mass, democratic politics, as I and my co-authors argue in the pamphlet "Feelbad Britain: A View from the Democratic Left" As we sit in our seminar rooms in Hampstead, discussing global politics at the Soundings "event" in our grandiloquent, world-sweeping way, we might spare a few moments for discussion of how we reconnect the (democratic) left to the lives and preoccupations of ordinary British people.
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