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Guy Aitchinson
© Guy Aitchinson 2008
How does a party so closely wedded to a discredited economic orthodoxy find the political will to renew itself after years of draining incumbency?
No, that's not a hypothetical for Republicans to ponder on the day of the US elections (it's too late for that), but Jon Cruddas's succinct summary of the dilemma facing New Labour at last night's Guardian-Soundings sponsored debate.
Any retreat to the party's old Labour comfort zone would provide an inadequate response to today's challenges and also lack credibility from a party that has so unashamedly championed market liberalisation. Instead a panel that stretched from Harriet Harman to openDemocracy author Jeremy Gilbert and the hot hope of the Compass group Chukka Umunna, grappled with how the party's traditional values of economic and social solidarity could be realised in dramatically changed circumstances.
Madeleine Bunting in the chair did her best to make everyone feel an Obama moment. But Cruddas struck a note of scepticism. The financial crisis fills him with "foreboding" rather than "confidence", he said, as history shows it is nearly always the right that gains in tough times as voters turn to a "sour politics of identity" in search of a quick fix. Recent comparisons of Gordon Brown with Roosevelt ignore the fact there is no ready-made framework for the party to turn to, although progressive taxation; a radical plan of social housing; a new regulatory regime; a Green New Deal and scrapping Trident and ID cards to fund a "new military covenant" and more police all provide "illustrative examples" of whose side the party should be on, according to Cruddas.
Harriet Harman was in a clear minority in the room when she suggested the debate should be about "building on New Labour" rather than surpassing it. It was the Labour party's experience of impotence in the 1980s, she said, which led to the creation of New Labour as a "delivery mechanism" for Labour values and a sign of its success that David Cameron has had to shift his party onto centre-left terrain to become electorally competitive.
Recent focus on the economy has sometimes obscured the fact that the current crisis is also a failure of the political system itself. There were signs Harman grasped this when she spoke of "refreshing democracy" and "opening out politics to the people", but how this would be done exactly was left unclear (certainly there was no mention of the floundering Governance of Britain agenda with which Brown launched his premiership).
Chuka Umunna, the young Labour candidate for Streatham, had a clearer sense of what's needed when he described as "awful" the adversarial politics of PMQs and spoke in favour of electoral reform. This is a second chance to make the case for collectivism after 1997, he warned, and it won't last long. But his was still a traditional collectivist versus individualist framework. Terms such as network, freedom or liberty that might touch the wider but committed public were notably absent.
Academic and activist, Jeremy Gilbert, took issue with Harman's claim that the New Labour government has been informed by collectivist values. It has, he argued, capitulated to neo-liberalism, seeing its role as "merely to equip individuals to compete in the global marketplace". New Labour's failure is not simply the cultural one defined by Umunna of failing to challenge an "individualist national psyche" entrenched by Thatcher: it is a failure to change material conditions.
Thatcher's "brilliant strategic move" was to sell off council houses which in one swoop transformed a generation of working-class Labour supporters into a class of property speculators, creating a strong pressure on government to maintain Thatcherite policies.
But New Labour refused to build any democratic counter-weight to the power of finance capital, instead clinging to the "Fabian fallacy" that a benign and omniscient government could fix things from Whitehall. Polly Toynbee and others are wrong to herald a new era of Keynesianism, according to Gilbert. The conditions don't exist any longer for the kind of approach that made social-democratic politics possible after World War Two.
At the end of a lively debate Madeleine Bunting took a straw poll to gauge whether the audience were indeed more or less optimistic based on what they had just heard. She thought that as many raised their paws to say they were more optimistic as did so to say they were less. Quite a few abstained. She cheerfully reported that the glass was half-full.
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