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Doreen Massey
© Doreen Massey 2008
It is often noted that Labour has lost much of the social base it had so long assumed - trades unionists and the working class. The implications of this shift are more fundamental than is usually recognised. The fact that the party so long assumed its social base has left it, now, with no idea of how to intervene politically to create political constituencies and alliances. It has gone straight from taking a social base for granted to a reliance on focus groups. What is needed, instead, is the construction of political alliances and - part and parcel of the construction of such alliances - the articulation of a political frontier that both defines the wider vision and differentiates it from other political forces.
Since 1997, Labour's obeisance to the finance sector has made such a political project, even were the party to think in such terms, virtually impossible. But times have changed, and an alliance against those very forces (and what they stood for, socially and economically) now looks possible. Maybe, as Chuka Umunna wrote, having so shamefully not seized the historic opportunity that 1997 seemed to present, there is now a second such moment, a period of openness and mobility that might make it possible to refashion the lines of political discourse and affiliation.
The Green New Deal, for instance, published through the New Economics Foundation, takes such a possibility seriously. A response to the 'triple crunch' of financial crisis, peak oil and climate change, it argues for a radical transformation of the finance sector, and the creation of a 'carbon army' of employment in new technologies to transform the economy in a green direction. Such a programme, it argues, might bring together movements that have been campaigning separately and begin to create 'a new political alliance' of those forces adversely affected by finance's dominance. Jeremy Gilbert also points to this need to build countervailing forces to finance capital.
The point is that this is a programme that is both a set of highly necessary and radical policies and the beginnings of thinking about how to construct a social base. This is not a job for the Labour Party alone. The role of the wider left is important. On the one hand, there is a host of existing campaigns whose voices need to be more widely heard. On the other hand, there is a role that journals and journalists, blogs and bloggers can play in helping to shift the terms of debate. One aim should be to create alternative narratives of things that are already going on.
For instance, the recent dramatic rise in popularity of the Post Office and of the Cooperative Bank has probably largely taken place because people see them as safe havens for their money. In other words, it has resulted from an individual(istic) motivation. It needs to be pointed out that this greater security comes from these institutions' underlying ethos of mutuality - a characteristic that, as Michael Stephenson argues, we need a lot more of in these parlous times.
Or again, Labour has recently introduced a number of measures that could easily be part of an alternative politics or a Green New Deal (redistribution through tax changes, job creation through insulating homes). But they remain individual policies. Something here to fix this; something there to respond to that. We need to show how they can be woven into larger narratives about a different kind of society, and how that differentiates the left from the right. And, of course, a further aim of such narratives would be, in building a sense of direction, to point out how much more could be done.
Part of the Comment is free Soundings debate, first appeared 26 November
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