Norwich City Council To Go Green?

The county of Norfolk is one of the most conservative – with a small and a big ‘C’ – places in the country. It’s the last refuge of the diehard English, with their backs to the North Sea and nothing to protect themselves from the modern world but their prejudices. So why is the county capitol of Norwich about to take the radical step of (hopefully) electing Britain’s first Green council?

Norwich – England’s second city until the small matter of the industrial revolution – has a long tradition of radical politics and civil revolt, right back to the 16th century Kett’s rebellion, when insurgent ‘peasants’ briefly took over the city. Persecuted religious minorities – known locally as ‘strangers’ - came in large numbers from the continent. Broader ‘non-conformity’ was very strong here, embodied by reformers like Elizabeth Fry and Harriet Martineau. In the late 19th century, William Morris’ Socialist League and the English Marxists of the Social Democratic Federation had large and busy Norwich branches.

By contrast trade unionism – the solidaristic core of Labourism which would dominate 20th century British politics – was never that successful or all-embracing here. This begins to explain the contemporary rise of the Norwich Greens. Our ‘socialism’ was always more thought-out and community-based, with a life outside the workplace and the sectional interests of the unionised workforce. The Labour Party’s hold on municipal politics – apart from a period of ‘one-party rule’ in the 1980s, when local opposition to nationally rampant Thatcherism was at its height - has likewise never been that secure.

In 1933, J.B. Priestley described Norwich as “a very rich mix, equally famous for its old churches and sturdy dissenters... a city in which foreigners exiled by intolerance may seek refuge and turn their sons into sturdy and cheerful East Anglians.” He called semi-seriously for “Home Rule for East Anglia!” with Norwich as its capitol. The architectural historian Pevsner designated our magnificent City Hall, with its graceful and self-confident modernism, “the foremost English public building of between the wars”. Norwich was badly bombed in the Second World War, targeted first for its industry and then (in the ‘Baedecker raids’) for its history, and provided much of the ‘rest and recreation’ for the surrounding air and army bases. The American presence was welcome and benign.

The city followed the vogue for post-war planning and reconstruction, with a “technocratic progressivism” which now seems slightly mad – everything to be torn up or covered in concrete – and fortunately was only part-realised. Labour-led ‘modernisation’ was largely a national failure, but one of its achievements was the ‘new universities’ of the sixties. The University of East Anglia – again distinctively designed by Denys Lasdun in “weathered concrete” – brought new life to the local economy, politics and culture, with the highest proportion of graduate ‘stayers’ in the country.

Local politics – as everywhere in the UK – began to deteriorate in the 1980s and ‘90s, with Thatcherite assaults on local government. Labour was increasingly marked by a distasteful paternalism and corrosive factionalism, with marked whiffs of corruption and ‘clientelism’ in its dealings with residents and citizens. I recall the council deputy leader arguing for more council housing “because they vote Labour”. We ended up with a tired and demoralised local authority, poor in both income and performance, surrounded by hostile county and district councils driven by the worst kind of petty suburban grievance.

The challenge facing an incoming Green administration in post-Labour Norwich is daunting. Opposition is relatively straightforward, and up to now a focused electoralism - a better ‘machine’ for getting out the vote than the other parties – has brought steady advance. But taking over an ailing council, and staying in control for long enough to make a difference, is another matter. Labour has left behind a poisonous legacy: real nastiness in the way politics is done, a cowed and resentful workforce, a strategic approach which always manages to combine the worst of the old and the new. ‘Unitary status’ was promised by New Labour, and may have revived the council, but one of the new coalition’s first acts was to announce that the status quo, complete with gerrymandered boundaries with the city’s wealthy suburbs hived off to surrounding district councils, will remain.

The Greens will need all the imagination and determination they can muster. Notably youthful, and motivated mainly by the big issues of global climate change, they have to address the concerns of a predominantly elderly local electorate, and take a close interest in the minutiae of local council services. Housing is a particular challenge, with around half the city’s population living on deprived and slowly deteriorating estates. The Norwich Greens have begun to make inroads on the old Labour fiefdoms, beyond their own ‘natural’ supporters among the progressive middle class. Green councillors work very hard, and that impresses people. The ultimate challenge (and I’m sure this applies elsewhere) is to create a sustainable social alliance around a new and modern Green urbanism, and out of that a new ‘civic identity’ by which the people of this ‘fine city’ can be re-enthused.

New Labour’s ‘Critical Friends’: Compass, the Labour left and the CPGB

Within a generally bleak British political landscape, especially in and around the Labour Party, Compass offers some sign of intelligent life. Its most prominent MP Jon Cruddas is about the only one of Labour’s leaders who hasn’t been fatally tainted by the New Labour years. Its personable chairperson Neal Lawson is a thoughtful, constructive contributor to radio and TV debate about what goes on in Westminster, and a quite brilliant organiser. Compass associates can be relied upon to talk relative sense, and its publications are well written and researched, and (unusually on the left) very well designed and presented. Its events are for the most part well run, stimulating and collaborative, and its website a model of its kind: attractive, easy to navigate and updated on a daily or even hourly basis. Compass campaigns are highly professional and competent, with eye-catching themes and slogans, a focus on what can realistically be achieved and a genuinely broad range of support, aiming (if not always managing) to reach beyond the established parliamentary and party political networks.
So what’s wrong with Compass? My argument, put simply, is that – with all its talk of ‘renewal’ and ‘modernisation’, and apparently busy and purposeful ‘campaigning’ on the issues of the day – Compass is a pale 21st century retread of older political forms; specifically the factional tradition of the Labour left and at a ghostly remove, the more democratic, ‘modern’, open and popular elements of the Communist Party of Great Britain (1920-91). I am aware of the knock-on political perils of this argument; one of the abiding features of the Labour right has been its anti-communism, and in the labyrinthine and frequently internecine strife that has constituted Labour politics, the right has never hesitated to accuse the left of facilitating or even representing ‘communist infiltration’. If Compass is, as I shall argue, the contemporary umbrella for what remains of the Labour left, its opponents on the Labour right may yet in their post-New Labour desperation deploy those ancient prejudices. Other than forbidding such an abuse in the name of historical truth, and pointing out that the Labour right has plenty of embarrassing historical associations of its own (e.g. Stalin’s Fabian cheerleaders, or Mussolini’s admirers), there’s not a lot I can do about it. It would be strange if any variant of social democracy were not somehow influenced by other elements within the ‘broad church’ of Marxist-derived socialism. Compass is simply the latest example of Labour borrowing from a more rigorous but stigmatised body of thought.
This is why Compass appeals to those of us who were formed by ‘Euro-communism’, and why we should be especially wary of the chance it offers us to relive our past. And in just the same way that our blessed, doomed, conflicted CPGB, with its strategies of “militant labourism” and “revolutionary democracy”, ultimately served little more historical function than generating new ideas, personnel and energies for the Labour Party – a “ginger group” was the term used by its own internal critics – so does Compass sit on the edge of Labour, one foot in and one foot out, “with the perspective of transforming the Labour Party by remote control” (as CP dissident Pat Devine said of the 1977 British Road to Socialism) but actually exercising precious little real control or even influence on Labour’s mysterious inner workings.
Rather, Compass is merely helping the Labour Party to live beyond its natural span (at least the CPGB had the integrity to disband – however questionably – when a majority of those few left felt it had outlived its usefulness), and consuming political energies that would be better spent elsewhere. In particular, instead of providing precious artificial life support to the mouldering corpse of Labourism, Compass could be helping to create some new political form (and, at its margins and almost in spite of itself, already is) for a more promising, truly modern, broadly based and intelligent left wing politics in Britain. Ultimately everything depends on whether Compass is in or out of the Labour Party; on the horns of this age-old left wing dilemma it remains impaled yet stubbornly non-committal. It could - as Compass advocates will say when pushed (drawing explicitly on the key Euro-communist concept of ‘contingency’) - go either way.
Of course Labour may just make the decision for us all, by imploding and disbanding itself, and casting all its dwindling band of passengers adrift. This is one of the prospects being canvassed by the ‘progressive commentariat’, alongside proportional representation at Westminster and the much longed-for ‘realignment’ of British politics. I would be surprised; the Labour Party is “a remarkably resilient beast”, as a local council leader once put it to me. It has survived worse crises than its current one, and there are too many people with vested interests in its survival, not least its indirect but notable beneficiaries amongst the British ruling class. One of Margaret Thatcher’s most astute but least noticed epigrams was that “the Labour Party will never die”, uttered in 1983 at the height of the SDP apostasy, the year of Labour’s worst post-war general election result (so far).
Labour’s Absorptions
Labour tradition (which it has far more of than ‘history’) abounds in examples of vigorous social movements, usually but not always on the left, being courted and used to resuscitate the dry sponge of Labourism, and in the process drained dry of their own creative juices. Especially in the expectation or aftermath of political defeat, Labour has habitually created selective openings to the non-party left and its self-styled intellectuals – with the usual siren cries of ‘Yes, what you’ve got to say is really interesting’ and ‘But what else is there except Labour?’ - which invariably turn out to lead into dead ends of demoralisation and disappointment. New Labour – which, lest we forget, received a sympathetic hearing right across the left in its early days - is only the most recent and rawest example.
There is usually a time-lag of some years between the formation of these new ideas and their absorption into the Labour bloodstream – and initially at least a vigorous ‘immune response’ against them – but sooner or later ‘this great movement of ours’ opens up and admits limited ideological infection in safely neutralised form, suitably adapted to the Labour tradition. Think of it, to extend the immunological metaphor to breaking point, as a kind of political vaccination. Objectively (to use an old-fashioned analytical term) and historically (in this milieu, another), Compass represents just such an opening to Labour’s left flank. It purports to provide ‘direction for the democratic left’ (and that – the name of the short-lived, thoroughgoing ‘Euro-communist’ successor (1991-2000) to the CPGB – should give us another clue to what Compass is a Labourist opening for), without ever saying or seeming to really understand what that political category might mean or who it might involve.
For those of us who’ve experienced other such examples of Labour’s selective absorptions from the left – from the parliamentary leftism of Bennery to the ‘favourite Marxism’ of Neil Kinnock and the ‘new times’ of New Labour – it should be a case of once bitten, twice shy. Oddly enough, many of the central personnel of Compass have undergone a similarly exploitative process (firmly inside the Labour ‘tent’) at the clammy hands of New Labour, which explains these ex-advisers’, ex-researchers’ and in some cases ex-ministers’ current ire towards ‘the project’. Within their talk of further ‘renewal’, and New Labour being neither ‘new’ nor ‘Labour’ enough, there is anger and resentment that they too have been taken for a ride on the Blair/Brown bandwagon.
A whole chain of flattery, seduction and abuse is going on here, far beneath the media furore about honours and expenses, which taps into the underlying personal motivations – to “serve the people”, to “make a difference”, to be heard and acclaimed - for generally limited people in party and parliamentary political careers. This personal-political corruption runs right across the ‘democratic’ or ‘centre-left’, inside Labour and beyond, among a substantial chunk of the currently reviled ‘political class’, and becomes all too evident when you yourself have been cast aside. This is a profoundly dishonest and manipulative politics, destructive of people and principle, deeply rooted in British public life and instantly recognisable to those of us with memories that go back beyond the bright new today. Compass is basically where old New Labourists go to die.
Or is this uncharitable and narrow-minded? Unnecessarily and destructively purist? Some new form of another time-honoured British left wing tradition: blinkered and self-defeating sectarianism? Could the Labour appropriation of Euro-communist ideas be an example of healthy cross-fertilisation, as the more thoughtful and historically aware Compass-ites argue? Well, the proof of the historical pudding and all that; even the most generous assessment of the present state of health of the ‘democratic left’ in Britain has to be that (beyond Compass, and dwindling assets of the CP legacy like the magazine Soundings) it barely exists. There is what we might call a large and diffuse ‘cultural left’, a loose network of affiliations, ‘communities of interest or affect’, like-minded individuals and friendship circles – some of them taking on firm organisational or sub-cultural form (readership of The Guardian the most obvious)- but it no longer constitutes any kind of organised force able to exercise concerted pressure towards any specific common aim (what a quaint idea!), let alone our historical objective of ‘socialism’ (remember that?).
As such, the ‘democratic left’ stands at the end-point of a process of defeat and disorientation which began in the 1970s and reached its climax in the extraordinary ‘new times’ of the late 1980s and early ‘90s. With ‘the collapse of communism’ and the deepening hegemony of neoliberal capitalism, not to mention the wilfully confusing cultural ideology of postmodernism and the accompanying politics of artifice and ‘positioning’, the left (to quote venerable ‘First New Left’ies - Mike Rustin and Stuart Hall) made “unfortunate concessions to values that are probably better simply regarded as those of the other side”, and in particular facilitated the New Labour accommodation of Thatcherism by “hero-ising consumption”. We have yet to reckon with, or even recognise, the full effects and implications of that dismal experience. But then the British ‘democratic left’, especially its Labour and Communist components, has a long history of forgetting or on occasions obliterating its own history.
Where does Compass come from?
To judge from the Compass website and associated publications, you would never guess that the organisation has any origins of its own; it’s as though it sprang out of nowhere the day before yesterday, with a bunch of ready formed signature ‘issues’ and supporters and political styles (the great socialist historian Raphael Samuel observed the same amnesia in the latter-day Marxism Today, which he found “singularly bereft of historical articles”). At present Compass is preoccupied with exposing and resisting the most blatantly Thatcherite inheritance of the fading New Labour project (which, to support my ‘delayed infection’ theory, Marxism Today did in 1998 with its special ‘Wrong!’ issue); especially anything to do with ‘Lord of Darkness’ Peter Mandelson, who is so profoundly loathed within the ‘labour movement’ you have to wonder why it’s treated him so well.
Not surprisingly, this tone of disaffection has enabled Compass to become a repository for anything and anyone who feels at all jarred-off with the state of the contemporary Labour Party, from old fashioned and largely unreconstructed Bennites to the most recently jettisoned New Labour fellow traveller. If you look closely at who actually takes part in Compass conferences and on-line debates, you’ll find a common bond of loyally oppositional disgruntlement. While other more traditional left wing vehicles like Tribune or the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy fade away, the far more a la mode Compass seems to have drawn into itself pretty much everyone to the left of Tony Blair, i.e. pretty much everyone. Neal Lawson is rightly proud of having “recruited three and a half thousand people to a political organisation of some substance” and “given a lot of people something to hope for”. Its freshness and novelty have given the Labour malcontents a new lease of life, or at least some sense that there may still be some life left in the party most have been lifelong members of. Again, Euro-communism provides a historical model, as a last rallying cry for exhausted, departing CP dissidents (who also, as it turned out, had temporarily submerged their own micro-differences in the cause of anti-leadership unity), which Neal Lawson at least acknowledges when pressed: “Compass derives a huge amount of inspiration from that kind of politics.”
But if, at least in conversation with me, he recognises a debt to Euro-communism, the rest of Compass locates itself firmly within Labourism. For all its shiny initiatives and up-to-the-moment stylings, a very particular tradition within a tradition is just about discernible: the shifting crowd of fixers and visionaries usually referred to as the ‘Labour left’. The current mood of Compass – stoic resignation at the apparent hopelessness of the Labour cause, head-shaking bemusement at the last actions of New Labour in government, talk of the Party itself being “necessary but not sufficient” and more than a hint that it’s time to make for the life rafts – itself has a long history, right back to ‘Tory Marxist’ and ‘social imperialist’ H.M. Hyndman’s despairing 1920 observation “No hope but in the Labour Party, and not much in that.” Bevan and Cripps and the other ‘Popular Front’ Labourists of the 1930s displayed the same ambivalence and disenchantment towards the temporarily subdued mother party in its post-MacDonald narrowness and self-absorption, and were briefly expelled for it. Various schools of post-war Labour intellectuals would make veiled or not so veiled threats to give up on the party unless it paid them more respect; until the social democrats did just that, and foundered on their own vanities and the institutional inertia of the parliamentary political system.
Popular affection for and attachment to Labour has always been shallow; the party has rarely commanded a substantial majority of even working class support, and for only a tiny minority has it gone beyond electoral routine – the political equivalent of going to church at Christmas - into anything resembling political activism. Repeated attempts to create a genuinely ‘mass party’ have always failed (with the arguable exception of the immediate post-Second World War period, which was historically exceptional for the whole British left). People in the Labour Party don’t seem to enjoy the experience much, to like their comrades, or to ‘belong’ to the organisation in the way Communists (with what Samuel called our “complete social identity”), Conservatives or even Liberals did and do. Compass has that same heavily conditional attachment to the Labour Party, counterbalanced by an equally historical terror of ‘the political wilderness’ outside (curious term that, when Labour’s inner life is an all too real political wilderness), and underwritten by the traditional Labourist devices of loyalty, “will to unity” and sacrifice, and the primary tribal glue of visceral, subaltern and generally unreasoned anti-Conservatism.
As well as heir to an intellectual tradition within a generally anti-intellectual tradition (which goes a long way towards explaining its barrenness), Compass is also a functioning Labour faction. The British left is notoriously amnesiac – one of the reasons we keep making the same mistakes – but there is a long and (it has to be said) fascinating history of sectarian and factional activity, more or less constructive or subversive, more or less open or dishonest, more or less collaborative or nasty. It may be inherent in the nature of political organisation, but compared to radical or ‘progressive’ political movements in other countries, the British left is unusually “fissiparous” (a term much used by Raphael Samuel). There is nothing we seem to enjoy more than a good fight amongst ourselves and ultimately (to quote Amadeo Bordiga, Gramsci’s early colleague and rival in the Italian Communist Party, and target of Lenin’s ire in Left Wing Communism – An Infantile Disorder) ”Nothing clears the air like a good split.” This of course is the prime reason the left in Britain has been weaker and less effective than pretty much anywhere else in the world, despite our own favourable historical circumstances; if you can’t agree amongst yourselves, you’ve not got much chance of getting anyone else on your side.
The Labour Party, for all its periodic purges of groups and individuals, and generally assiduous patrolling of its left flank for signs of organised infiltration (especially from the direction of the Communist Party, whose overtures were persistently rebuffed), has always had factions trying to take it in one direction or another, from the Fabians to Keep Left, the Campaign for Democratic Socialism to Tribune, and most recently New Labour. They’re not called factions, which are prohibited under the terms of the party constitution, and they usually sail under some flag of convenience like a newspaper, parliamentary interest-group, lobby or think tank, but in their internal workings and external relations they have all the functional attributes of organised factions, promoting a certain viewpoint, interest or set of policies. The ‘broad church’ party has managed, with occasional convulsions and expulsions, to hold it all in check with certain loosely defined but highly effective rules. Firstly, you have to respect the party’s main raison d’être, which is to get MPs elected (and individually re-elected) to parliament. A commitment to parliamentarism is essential, even if it co-exists with notional ‘extra-parliamentary struggle’ and harks back to a historically hazy tradition of popular democracy, where MPs bestride the dazzled nation as ‘tribunes of the people’. This is above all what secures Labour to the status quo.
Secondly, less important now but historically central, you have to defer to the party’s principal backers in the trade unions. The ‘brothers’ supplied the dosh (and still do, an amazing 73 per cent of party income in 2006). In the old days “the dead souls of Labourism” (Tom Nairn’s phrase for the much-derided union block vote) swung decisively behind ‘sensible’ policies and leaders, usually on the anti-communist right. It was the breakdown of this ‘top table’ Labour settlement which caused the last major inner-party convulsion in the 1970s and ‘80s. These days the trade unions peddle a much more amorphous ‘influence’, which means the parliamentary party leadership only need to confront them occasionally and on very carefully chosen grounds, where the trade union case is essentially sectionalist and anti-business, and their public support weak; and where achieving the government’s ‘policy objective’ specifically requires the taming of the union. Otherwise, the brothers are kept on board with regular contact and patronage, not least because even the most disenchanted can still be called upon to fund favourable party or factional activity (as with the Communication Workers Union and Compass).
Thirdly, you avoid going into honest detail on any grand transformative project you wish to bring to the public affairs of the party and the country. If you mention ‘socialism’, you have to make clear that it is something that happened in the past, one of the party’s ‘values’ that you acknowledge and honour, but you carefully avoid practical detail on how it might apply to the present or the future. You only admit, to yourselves or anyone else, certain campaign themes, immediate objectives and above all (the main currency of Labour debate) ‘policy proposals’, things the government should adopt and at least pledge to implement. Anything more ambitious, or truly ‘revolutionary’, is liable to get you booted out. Fourthly, you restrict your activity and membership to the party itself; you can talk to people outside, but you do not involve them in your tactical or strategic decisions, and you steer well clear of any serious challenge (electoral or otherwise) they might pose to Labour. Ultimately, through your trials and triumphs, joys and tribulations, functions and dysfunctions, you keep it all in the Labour ‘family’. Your political and organisational focus is on ‘winning positions’ for your people and your policies.
Compass abides by all these largely unwritten rules; on this four-point ‘test’ it fits comfortably into the long and not always honourable tradition of Labour factionalism. For example, its chairperson cites as one of its main achievements the fact that “One of our people recently became the chair of Young Labour; that’s quite an achievement, to beat the machine and take a position.” He also insists that Compass is not a faction, on the basis that it looks out beyond the Labour Party, “and wants to form relationships with people outside”, but we might also consider the group’s relative extroversion and receptiveness to non-Labour people and ideas a symptom of the bigger party’s desperation and dereliction. There’s not a lot happening in the Labour Party (including, if reports are to be believed, in recently Compass-ed Young Labour) so Compass has to go looking for new friends elsewhere, another historical function of Labour factions during hard times. It also makes sure to keep in touch with its friends in high places: it supported Gordon Brown’s unopposed leadership campaign – for no obvious reason, and to the considerable annoyance of large sections of its own members and supporters – and its other prominent MP Jon Trickett discreetly moved across soon after to become Brown’s Parliamentary Private Secretary.
The Labour Coordinating Committee
Compass’ more recent and specific origins are to be found in the Labour left of the 1970s and ‘80s, in particular the factional organisation and publications of the Labour Coordinating Committee which emerged from the wreckage of the Bennite hard left. The LCC was established in 1978, as a ‘policy’ counterpart to the ‘constitutional’ pressure group the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy, with a more consciously public profile and political role than the CLPD. Both were based on profound disillusionment with the 1970s ‘old Labour’ governments of Wilson and Callaghan, felt especially acutely among the new influx of educated, public sector professionals drawn to Labour in the aftermath of 1968. Their common aim was to prevent any future Labour government from “reneging on its manifesto commitments”, while avoiding the more traditional Labour factional activities of “fund raising and MP fan clubs”. Instead, the LCC set itself the founding task of “actually winning support for socialist ideas” and the creation of “a mass party”, primarily through Labour conference fringe meetings, and conferences and pamphlets of its own. While its focus remained firmly on the inner life of the party, it also sought positions of leadership and policy in the trade unions, and collaboration with the influential trade union ‘Broad Lefts’. As such, the LCC began life as “a Bennite ginger group”.
The most striking feature of those early LCC pamphlets, examined retrospectively, is the way they take ideas and insights from the ‘broader left’, specifically the ‘Euro-communist’ and Marxism Today wing of the CPGB, and some years after their inception attempt to apply them to internal Labour Party debate. So Labour and Mass Politics – Rethinking our Strategy, written by Charles Clarke and David Griffiths and published in 1982, draws inspiration from Eric Hobsbawm’s seminal 1978 article “The Forward March of Labour Halted?” in its observation of “the Labour Party’s narrowing electoral base, tenuous links with other progressive forces, over-identification with bureaucratic state structures and uninspiring inner-party routines.” A whole section devoted to “Learning from other movements” pursues the ‘new social forces’ from the CP’s 1977 revision of The British Road to Socialism, with its familiar checklist of “women, ethnic minorities and youth organisations” (we’ll pay another visit to the 1977 BRS later).
But there is neither open acknowledgment of these external sources nor genuine engagement with the aims and concerns of the ‘new social forces’: “the relationship of the party to these potential allies can only be worked out in practice, and we lay down no blueprints” (this refusal to specify, often justified as a commitment to ‘contingency’ and open-mindedness, and touted as one of the ‘lessons of feminism’, was also characteristic of latter day ‘Euro-communism’). And again the practical focus is on Labour’s internal politics: “Whilst our support has been growing among activists the left’s base is weak amongst ordinary rank and file supporters and union members... we need to concentrate on building our extra-parliamentary base.”
Reconstruction - How the Labour Party – and the Left – can win, written by John Denham and published in 1984, is an attempt to come to terms with “the disaster of June 9th” 1983, Labour’s ‘suicide note’ general election. Again, there is implicit reference to (apocryphally, new Labour leader Neil Kinnock’s ‘favourite Marxist’) Hobsbawm’s obituary for classical Labourism, in the observation that “The social and economic conditions which enabled right wing social democracy to achieve some success have passed.” But there is now also recognition of Stuart Hall’s accompanying argument about the emergence of hegemonic Thatcherism, as the new Gramscian “common sense” of the epoch, first elaborated in his 1979 Marxism Today article “The Great Moving Right Show”. Our ‘time-lag’ between Euro-communist inception and Labour absorption is now five years. Shortly afterwards (as if to illustrate that the process could work the other way), the term ‘Democratic Left’ appeared in the title of another LCC pamphlet, some five years before it was adopted by the successor organisation to the disbanded CPGB! It was also adopted as a factional name by LCC supporters in the National Union of Students, who had ‘taken over’ NUS in 1982 (not a pretty sight; I was there).
New Maps for the Nineties – A Third Road Socialist Reader, published in 1990, represents an early public appearance by future Compass chairperson but then trade union official Neal Lawson, who edited this collection of essays on the general theme of “The Crisis of the British Left” (and showed some of the design flair which would later characterise Compass). In keeping with the common upsurge in left wing ‘optimism of the intellect’ of the late 1980s, and a determination after a decade of ‘high Thatcherism’ to look on the bright side of ‘new times’, the pamphlet is a positive attempt to flesh out a “Third Road – a politics which explicitly seeks to break with the two dominant traditions of 20th century European Socialism – gradualist reformism and Leninist insurrectionism”. This includes a sympathetic section on Gramsci, his conception of “socialism as a process of change” and the “importance of pre-figurative activity”, some fifteen-odd years now after the onset of the original Euro-communist application of British ‘Gramscism’.
There is also by now a strong sense of disillusionment in the leadership of Neil Kinnock, who shows “little intellectual or theoretical substance behind the socialist rhetoric”. Neal Lawson now puts it like this: “the way the LCC developed politically from ’81 is the story of the Kinnock years, the way projects start from principles in a left wing direction, then after successive election defeats they become more about chasing power.” This marks the estrangement, exacerbated by the late-1980s Labour Party Policy Review, between the ‘soft left’ (with the LCC at its core) and the Kinnockite officials, advisers and politicians (marshalled by former LCC pamphleteer Charles Clarke) who were busily centralising control of the party in the parliamentary leader’s office. The historically transitional character of Kinnock’s leadership, the precondition for New Labour, comes through in New Maps for the Nineties’ plaintive “in the absence of strong democratic socialist forces, accommodation to the centre becomes almost inevitable.”
By 1993, just such an accommodation is evident in the LCC’s Modernising Britain, alongside the absorption of the ‘New Times’ analysis of the state of modern Britain advanced by Marxism Today in 1987/9 (back to a five year gap!), which is semi-reverentially caricatured as “an army of academics proclaiming the coming of the information society and a post-industrial, post-Fordist future.” There is an explicit link to the ‘personalisation’ strand within New Times (initiated by Charlie Leadbeater’s 1987 MT article “Power to the Person”, and recently a central theme in New Labour’s ‘public sector reforms’) in Modernising Britain’s advocacy of “choice and customisation... People must feel that they are individuals with their own rights and autonomy in their dealings with the welfare state”. But again, after further superficial analysis of “hopelessly old” Britain, the pamphlet falls back on the more comfortable terrain of what Labour should do to itself. To the historic problem of a “state that has been unable to develop the right kind of relationship with wealth creation” the answer is that “Labour must modernise itself.” The final four pages (in a pamphlet of fifteen) concerns itself with “Modernising Labour”, through constitutional reforms like OMOV (One Member One Vote) in every party election and (a sign of the dwindling power of the labour movement’s ‘industrial wing’) the abolition of the trade union block vote.
The internal political significance of these procedural changes for the Labour left was in marking a final clear divide (already signalled in Pat Seyd’s mid-1980s New Socialist article “Bennism without Benn”) between LCC and its erstwhile constitutional counterparts in the CLPD on the terrain of ‘modernisation’. But within all this there are signs of other new strains within the Labour family: “It sometimes seems as if the only role the membership has in today’s Party is in providing a database of names and addresses for fund raising appeals and a source of workers at election times.” This is described as “the massive but passive approach to membership”, with the leadership given a free hand in the party’s public presentation: “Party members are not even surprised any more when they read in The Guardian that Labour now believes in an entirely new economics, when they know that at best no more than twenty people would have seen the draft before it is leaked to the press... the days of mass membership political organisations are over, particularly as the Party has no clear idea what its membership is there for.”
By this stage you get the distinct impression that the LCC has run out of steam, partly because the baton of ‘modernisation’ has been firmly grasped by New Labour: as Neal Lawson describes it, “Blair comes in, everything’s transformed but by then he has control of the machine and he’s racing way ahead of the LCC, ditching Clause 4 etc. The organisation had nothing to do because he was doing much more of it, much faster and more powerfully.” Within the party, serious political differences were now emerging that had been masked through the 1980s, “but at the time those differences weren’t allowed the space to appear because you were too busy trying to save the party from utter failure at the polls, infiltration by Militant... There were people that wanted Labour to win again and there were people who wanted to take it over for Trotskyist ends. Within that stark polarisation it was very hard for any kind of nuance to exist.”
The end of the LCC, Renewal and the emergence of Compass
The Labour Coordinating Committee was wound up in 1998, twenty years and a long way from its “Bennite ginger group” origins. It chose to mark the occasion with publication of its own history, written by Paul Thompson and Ben Lucas, whose second sentence observed with some pride that “successive generations of LCC are helping run government or the Party machine”. By now the debt to Hobsbawm is made explicit, in the pamphlet’s title The Forward March of Modernisation and its recognition of his “theoretical analysis of why Labour’s defeat in 1979 was more than just a blip, but represented a major turning point in which the corporatist Fabian model of post war politics had reached its end. The history of the LCC has been about getting Labour to come to terms with this analysis and to modernise its ideology, politics, style, structure and message.” Of course, by this stage both Marxism Today and the CPGB had disappeared (apart from the one-off ‘Wrong!’ issue of 1998 and the dwindling band of latter day Euro-communists in the Democratic Left, itself to be wound up soon after), so it was quite safe to lay claim to elements of their ghostly legacy.
On that other side of the equation, the ‘Euro-communists’ had long since realised and understood their position of detached, delayed and selected influence on the process of Labour modernisation; a contemporary application of the traditional ‘gadfly’ function of communist intellectuals for ‘militant labourism’ that extends back through the troubled history of relations between the Labour and Communist Parties. As Marxism Today editor Martin Jacques told me, “Labour people would attack us on something – like The Forward March of Labour Halted? – then two years later agree with us” (as we’ve seen, the time-lag was usually rather longer). He also recalls a private conversation in 1989 with Peter Mandelson, who said “We’d never have been able to do it (take over the Labour Party) without you”; and another in 1991 with Tony Blair, who made plain his utter contempt for Labour and Labourism: “Other Labour people would only go so far, but he just kept on going...”
When Marxism Today was being wound up in 1991, Jacques could look back with some pride on the magazine’s contribution to the debate on how (or whether) the left should respond to Thatcherism, and the ‘realignment of the left’ it prompted: “Put crudely, the Bennites, CP Stalinists, the Trotskyist groups and conservative forces were on one side; and MT, the Euro-communists, the soft left and the Kinnockites were on the other.” If this was a process of intellectual exploitation, its victims were wholly willing, not to say flattered (as Hobsbawm, launched into a glittering post-communist career as a ‘public intellectual’ and New Labour associate, quite plainly was). Furthermore, the 1980s/’90s ‘realignment of the left’ heralded by ‘New Times’ was a curiously one-sided affair; there was no equivalent ‘realignment of the right’, and behind the Cameroon ‘makeover’ of the Conservative Party the political and ideological infrastructure of Thatcherism is pretty much intact (not least because New Labour has taken great care not to dismantle it).
For their part, the authors of The Forward March of Modernisation (both one-time LCC chairpersons) are also aware of the risks of appropriation by larger political forces, and of the substance within the “two over-riding myths about LCC: that it was primarily an organisational machine for taking on the hard left; and that it did the ideological dirty work for successive leaderships in swinging the party to the right” (this latter was of course a major accusatory theme of MT’s contemporaneous and embittered “Wrong!”). They also recognise that Labour is most receptive to intellectual provocation in electoral adversity: “It is an uncomfortable fact that LCC has always been at its best after defeats.” To reconcile the contradictions inherent in these relationships and situations, LCC “settled into a role of critical support to the new (Kinnock) leadership”. While they deny close liaison with the ‘Kinnockites’, “LCC had to do the slates, the model motions, the identification of speakers” because “in those days the Party machine simply did not organise on the conference floor.” Again, for all the talk of ‘mass politics’, the focus remains on Labour’s internal affairs. What really got the LCC going was a good old inner-party wrangle.
When the “powerful Scottish LCC” proposed that the national organisation “accept the ‘leading role of the working class’, a large number of younger, London-based members primarily out of the student movement arrived by train to sink it.” New polarisations were emerging, between “a fundamentalist left wedded to a dogmatic version of class politics” and “a strategic left, LCC on the inside, Marxism Today and others on the outside, who were developing a pluralistic politics that recognised that Thatcherism was a distinctive enemy and challenge, not just business as usual for capitalism.” So the compliment was retrospectively repaid, in language that echoed Marxism Today’s own emerging four-cornered analytical model of left/right/radical/ conservative (in case you’re wondering, Bennite or ‘hard’ Labourism was ‘left conservative’ and Thatcherism was ‘right radical’) and the shared commitment of “the pragmatic majority” to “political pluralism” (this latter another key code-word of the ‘new times’).
The same underlying model is evident in the condemnation by Blair and other New Labour figures of “the forces of conservatism”, an outburst that was met (like much of the Third Way) with bewilderment by the broader political ‘commentariat’, who were pretty much oblivious to the Euro-communist roots of New Labour. They never really got the underlying nuances of the ‘new times’ of the late 1980s and early ‘90s either, with its wide-eyed paeans to the liberating ‘contingencies’ of ‘flexible specialisation’ and globalisation, and New Labour had no interest in disclosing or acknowledging them. I would argue now that the ‘realignment of the left’ ushered in by New Times is better described as wholesale disorientation. It’s not so much that the ‘democratic left’ consciously changed its position relative to other forces within the traditional, popularly understood and still prevailing left-right spectrum, as that it lost (in its customary insularity and self-absorption) any clear sense of its own of where it fitted. Like (by then) its flagship Marxism Today, it had (as Martin Jacques puts it) “floated free” of its historical moorings.
The process gathered pace after the ‘more honourable’ 1987 general election defeat, when for all the razzamatazz of Mandelsonian presentation (for Thompson and Lucas) “the Party was still addressing a society where millions of union card-carrying men worked in big factories.” LCC played a full part in the subsequent Policy Review, in contrast to the abstemious abstention of the hard left and in a spirit of “swallowing our pride and working with those who are interested in winning power.” All the same, it reserved the right to criticize as well as support: the Policy Review was “saved from mediocrity by the intelligence and creative thinking of key individuals”, but was otherwise simply a matter of “dumping unpopular policies”. Heffernan and Marqusee present a slightly different version in their meticulous but generally poisonous account of the Kinnock years: “Every year, when its submissions were largely ignored, the LCC would express disappointment with the review’s lack of “vision”, “strategy”, “radicalism” or “priorities”, then demand that Party members and conference delegates back it anyway.”
By this time, there is a sense in the LCC’s own account of itself that the self-styled “outriders for change” are no longer making Labour’s political weather – they wanted “a positive strategy of modernisation (but) Labour never really got to have this fundamental debate”. These were “difficult years for avowed modernisers”, not least because the key figures of New Labour – Blair, Brown and Mandelson – begin to loom large and to subsume ‘debate’ within their own parliamentary ambitions, so that their critical supporters’ “criticism has all but disappeared”. All they have left to offer Labour is their support. In the process the ‘mass politics’ of the earlier LCC shrinks to the ‘modernisation’ of the soft left, which is then absorbed within the ‘project’ of New Labour; “To do anything other than support the leadership in these circumstances would have been the worst kind of self indulgence for the LCC.”
Other kinds of shrinkage are evident within this process: of feminism for example, whose powerful critique of patriarchal social relations and personal identities (of which the Labour Party has been a primary site) was reduced to a matter of inner party procedure, in particular quotas and ‘women only shortlists’ for MP selection; or democracy, which shrank to a proposed Bill of Rights (never enacted) and proportional representation (limited to the electoral margins, and kept well away from Westminster, where it might have made a major difference). There is yet more internal party procedural reform like the 1996 ‘Commission on Party Democracy’, whose stated aim of ensuring that “Labour in government would not lose touch with its members and that a culture of betrayal could not develop in the grassroots” has plainly been thwarted, on both counts. There are other ghostly echoes of Euro-communism, in the 1996 proposals for a “University for Labour” (whatever happened to that?) which harks back to the 1970s Communist University of London, or for “turning Labour branches into agents for social change and community regeneration” on the CP’s latter day, looser ‘democratic centralist’ model. And more broadly, there is shrinkage of historical analysis and political strategy into lists of discreet and unrelated ‘policy objectives’ within the conventional categories of government (or rather, that other New Labour buzzword, ‘governance’).
The journal Renewal was founded “to promote the underlying politics of modernisation to a wider layer of activists, academics and opinion formers” and fill “a very particular gap in the market for a non-sectarian but clearly focused and intellectually rigorous journal for Labour modernisers”. There are more echoes here of Marxism Today, folded in 1991. It hired the same designer as MT, but weirdly Renewal ended up looking and sounding much more like the earlier, pre-Jacques ‘journal’ edited by James Klugman, dry and dull in content and staid in design and layout, another ‘shrinkage’ perhaps (Neal Lawson says it was trying to look like New Left Review). Within the politics of the emerging New Labour project, “with Blair so far ahead” (Thompson and Lucas), Renewal and associated initiatives represented an attempt by the LCC to get back in front. If so, it was largely in vain. Blair and co.’s “superhuman” drive and “electrifying” fervour carried all before them, at least till their second year in government, when ‘reality’ began to exert a brake on what was always an extraordinarily narrowly based and inherently cautious project (or rather, as I argued earlier, faction, with more than a hint of Leninism in its political practice). New Labour had ‘hegemonized’ the Labour Party, but failed utterly to hegemonize the country or even the political system.
The LCC was disbanded in that same year of 1998, observing of itself that “Even the name Labour Co-ordinating Committee confines us to a previous era” (Martin Jacques made the same point about the name Marxism Today in its farewell issue seven years earlier!), and of New Labour that “the project is to define a project”. Neal Lawson puts it rather differently: “We got elected in 1997, and within a few days we were asking what we do now.” Renewal was absorbed into the outer circle of the governing New Labour camp, on the same ‘critical friend’ basis that LCC had adopted towards the Kinnock leadership. Amongst its own initiatives was “Nexus, Britain’s first virtual think tank of academics, writers and policy wonks and explicitly committed to New Labour”. According to Tony Blair, addressing a joint Nexus/Guardian conference ‘Passing the Torch’ on 1st March 1997, “Nexus has a crucial role in sustaining the momentum of progressive politics.” According to its now sadly untended website, “Nexus has moved. The site has been archived to provide a record of our work”, but there is no link provided. Britain’s “first virtual think tank” seems to have disappeared into the ether. According to its founder, “Nexus was another Lawson venture... it just tailed off, because it wasn’t a politics rooted in anything vaguely left wing.”
Compass Today
Renewal continues publication, with a recent ‘re-launch’ and a circulation of around 700, but its impact and ‘influence’ is limited. There is a close but ill-defined relationship with Compass, which more boldly embodies the LCC’s historic role as “outriders for change” within the Labour Party. The idea for Compass emerged after the 2001 general election, amid growing disillusion with Blairite New Labour. According to Neal Lawson, “We were New Labour’s best friends, they’re going off the rails, let’s do something that says we need to get it right.” It is funded “pretty evenly between members, trusts who can give money to such a political organisation, and trade unions”, though the trade union element is declining as Compass becomes more critical of government and, by Lawson’s admission, less able to procure “short term deals” (though not for all; the CWU remains a generous sponsor of Compass’ campaign against Royal Mail part-privatisation, which – for Lawson – represents “a pretty serious breach of the labour and social democratic intent of the party” and for the moment has been kicked into the short grass).
In broader terms Compass provides (for Neal Lawson)
“an organised centre of politics founded on equality, democracy and sustainability or new issues like well-being... Compass has become a very strong pole within the Labour Party, centre left, soft left, democratic left, call it what you want. And we’re shifting as an organisation, from being a Labour Party oriented group into something that looks as much outside. You have to try to build organisations that push politicians in the direction you want them to go in... Sometimes I think we’re the monks in the monastery in the dark ages, and the job is to keep the flame flickering, then sometimes I think wow look at all these fantastic opportunities for a new politics. The most important trait in any political movement is perseverance.”
This is persuasive stuff; we all need ‘optimism of the will’, as well as our customary ‘pessimism of the intellect’. As such it’s an attractive retread of what drew me as a much younger man to the briefly ‘Euro’-Communist Party of the mid-1970s. When Neal asks
“How do you build alliances and networks of people who want social justice, sustainability, greater democracy, proper civil liberties? That’s the space we want to work out of. What are the mechanics of joining people up into a progressive alliance? What’s the structure, the culture, how do you build confidence and trust so those alliances become more effective? We can work with loads of different people to shape the intellectual and organisational terrain...”
he could be paraphrasing the bolder sections of the 1977 revision of The British Road to Socialism, the most thoroughly democratic of the CP’s programmes, right down to the use of quasi-Gramscian political metaphors like ‘space’, ‘mechanics’ and ‘terrain’. The concept of a “progressive alliance” is very close to the ‘anti-monopoly alliance’, or latterly the ‘broad democratic alliance’, with which the CP sought (and persistently failed) to break its political quarantine.
And when Neal says, in justification of Compass’ commitment to Labour, “you have to capture state power in order to give power away and do all the things you want to do”, he’s not very far away (given the intervening 32 years of demoralisation and retreat) from the 1977 BRS’ “the essential feature of a socialist revolution is the winning of state power”. When he adds “But that’s not enough, you have to build up civil society as well if you really want to take on conservative vested interests”, he could be tabling a Euro-communist amendment in the bright-eyed manner of the year-long 1977 BRS debate, memorably recorded in a Granada TV documentary, Decision: British Communism. Likewise, you could easily adapt the BRS formulation “Ready to listen and learn as well as provide strategic leadership, Communists will more and more become a trusted and respected popular force” to describe Compass political strategy for its own ‘long march’ through the Labour and parliamentary institutions.
If the LCC (described now by Neal Lawson “as a funnel to inject new ideas into the Labour Party”) adopted the broader historical perspective and social analysis of Euro-communism (eventually!), then Compass seeks to apply the CP current’s practical politics of alliance-building, policy ‘intervention’ and strategic ‘leadership’. But there always was immense conceit and self-aggrandisement in that last notion, of a small, intellectual current within a tiny, marginal party leading a nation (but it was fun at the time). And in the same way that British Euro-communism lacked the means to actually impose any of this on bigger political forces and historical circumstances (including the CP itself, with all its “historic baggage”), so Compass – while much ‘admired’ and ‘respected’ in and around the Labour Party – actually achieves very little for all its political ‘busy-ness’ .
We ‘happy few’ Euro-communists also made very nice political friends and advisers, but were very rarely admitted into real positions of leadership, the ‘smoke-filled rooms’ and the ‘corridors of power’ of British politics. The best we could hope for, like Compass now, was a glimpse through a slightly open door, or flattering condescension from the real power-brokers. And, I repeat, all our “revolutionary democratic” insights and “new times” perspectives were reduced, cherry-picked and neutralised along the way. Neal Lawson admits to having “drawn inspiration from going to the Marxism Today events in the ‘80s, and styled successive things, especially for Compass, around that model”, but when he says these later Compass events “were not as cultural as I’d have liked”, he gives us another historical example of that ‘shrinkage’.
Like ‘Gramscian’ Euro-communism, the ‘democratic left’ politics of Compass is easy to admire and difficult to disagree with. But if it didn’t work for and in the CP, which baulked at the leap into modern democracy and pretty quickly fell back onto the more familiar ‘terrain’ of militant labourism with the defeat of the Euro-communists at its 1979 Congress, why should it work some thirty years later (and in far bleaker political circumstances) for and in the Labour Party? The CP may have been carrying the baggage of Stalinism, economism and workerism and plenty else (including, I’ve always thought, some very peculiar people amongst its membership), but the bigger party has its own historical burdens, and even less of an appetite for intellectual debate, the politics of alliance, the reshaping of ideology and culture, and democracy as a principle rather than merely a means to power. While it sits there, with its deadening historical presence and institutional inertia, the prospects for any genuinely transformative political project of the democratic left, inside or outside the Labour Party, remain pretty bleak.
There is a further, more difficult historical fact about Labour-Communist relationships. Throughout their mutual existence, the Labour left has mimicked the phrases and slogans of the CP. The CP would be duly flattered, and imagine that this indicated a far closer relationship – “left unity” and the potential for “a Labour government of a new type” – than ever actually existed. What the CPGB never fully understood was the process whereby, deployed within the institutional frameworks of the Labour Party and the parliamentary state from which communists were ruthlessly excluded, these rhetorical formulations were domesticated and tamed. What we ended up with was Labour left MP Eric Heffer’s “The Class Struggle in Parliament” and Dennis Skinner’s House of Commons class-clown act. It got them rave reviews in the Morning Star but ridicule everywhere else. The far cannier Italian communists called this kind of thing ‘maximalism’ and kept their distance, even from the ‘Third International Socialists’ of the 1920s.
In Britain nobody ever actually took seriously the ‘revolutionary’ phrase-mongering and sloganeering of the CP and the Labour left, and ‘ruling class hegemony’ was never substantially threatened. The problem was, and remains, that the Labour Party has never been an appropriate agent of historical change, but rather an object of and obstacle to it. The ultimate test for Compass, for all its commitment to alliance, democracy, pluralism and partnership, and for its viability as a life raft out of the wreckage of Labourism, is whether it allows membership of political parties other than Labour. That is something it has so far refused to contemplate, as I found when I applied as a (not particularly avid) member of the Green Party. Under Labour Party rules, it would expose Compass to what we in the CPGB used to call “administrative measures” within the factional bun-fight of the “political wilderness” of the contemporary Labour Party. For as long as that’s the case, Compass can only ever claim to have a little toe in non-Labour waters.
Who are these people? A New Labour left roll-call
At the very end of Lucas and Thompson’s The Forward March of Modernisation there is a helpful appendix listing the membership of the successive LCC Executive Committees from 1981 to 1998. It’s a kind of ‘soft left’ family tree (and gold dust for historians!), which provides some gauge of the organisation’s changing priorities and personnel over most of its lifetime. To begin with, in the early to mid-1980s, it’s mostly MPs and stalwarts of the National Organisation of Labour Students (NOLS, a key proving ground for modern – and ‘modernising’ – career Labour politicians; remember those entrained LCC students coming to sink ‘the leading role of the working class’). Other interesting names pop up – the Labour historian Eric Shaw, ‘gorgeous’ George Galloway, Cherie Booth (no sign of her husband), millionaire heiress and future New Labour junior minister (and serial patron of ‘democratic left’ causes) Fiona MacTaggart – but for the most part these are dedicated party operators and managers, ‘behind-the-scenes’ people.
In the mid- to late 1980s, there is a brief, small shift towards local government and the heroes of ‘municipal socialism’, including for just one year Ken Livingstone; then into the ‘90s, an increase in the proportion of ‘advisers’ and ‘policy wonks’, reflecting the rising influence of MPs’ staffers and ‘left-leaning’ think tanks, the pacification of the party under Kinnock’s latter day centralisations and consolidations, and a palpable shift between generations and types of Labour ‘activists’ in these ‘new times’. The old combat and donkey jackets make way for sober suits and tasteful ties; anti-racist and anti-nuclear lapel badges are replaced by a single, discreet, union or party pin. After that it all seems to settle down, with the same names recurring every year: the formation of a distinctive generation within the political class, self-selecting and self-supporting. These are the professional ‘campaigners’, fixers and lobbyists, peddlers of ‘ideas’, policies and ‘influence’, the ‘organic intellectuals’ of the modern Labour Party, ‘organising’ its affairs, debates and public presentations; bright-eyed, smooth-faced, one-dimensional men and women.
In their fastidiously researched but deep-dyed sectarian account of the ill-fated Kinnock leadership, Richard Heffernan and Mike Marqusee lay bare the career path from the Bennite “task force” of the early LCC to New Labour on the verge of government, via NOLS and what became its fiefdom the National Union of Students, and the ‘soft left’ in the Party machinery, trade union officialdom and the Parliamentary Party leadership. “These Labour movement arrivistes brought with them a predilection for tight-knit caucus politics, for the deal struck behind closed doors, which they had acquired in student politics, (and) well-honed skills in faction-fighting which were highly valued by the Kinnock leadership.” They were concentrated almost wholly in London, around Westminster and selected boroughs and Constituency Labour Parties, “a coterie of trainee professional politicians. Value-free, ambitious, convinced of their own inherent right to govern; their only interest in political ideas or political debates was to manipulate them to outflank rivals or promote favourites”. The political style of New Labour is all too evident in this caricature.
There are other historical continuities. For all its early distaste for “MP fan clubs”, the LCC always carried a heavy superstructure of inactive ‘names’ and notables (just as the CPGB cultivated a layer of celebrity ‘sympathisers’), as well as its core activist cadre of “NOLS insiders, straight out of student politics with little practical Labour Party experience”, or for that matter of life in the larger world. Compass shows this same propensity for a layer of left wing celebrities on its conference platforms and publicity: the journalist John Harris, often accompanied by friendly pop stars looking to be taken seriously, the ubiquitous Polly Toynbee and Baroness Helena Kennedy QC, and other members of “the wider progressive community”.
For Heffernan and Marqusee, LCC literature was “peppered with enigmatic injunctions: ‘ideals need ideas’... ‘articulate the alternatives’”. These would find an echo, in style and (lack of) substance, in Compass’ later motto, supposedly a quote from Ghandi, ‘Be the change you wish to see in the world’ (did they mistake it for something by Gramsci?). And like LCC (and New Labour in government), Compass leaves behind a litter of abandoned campaigns, slogans and projects which briefly flash across the political/media stratosphere and leave no lasting trace but a vague sense that these people are ‘players’. Just three years ago, Compass organised a series of debates about ‘The Good Society’, with several large working parties of democratic left notables, which produced three glossy publications and much favourable newspaper coverage; now, it seems, almost wholly forgotten.
Heffernan and Marqusee conclude their account of the LCC with a list of their own, of dozens of NOLS/LCC activists who would go on to make their careers (and lives) in and around the Labour Party. By 1997, the year of New Labour’s landslide general election victory, (according to another analysis) fully 27 per cent of the party’s new intake of MPs described themselves occupationally as “political organisers”. This represents a new curriculum vitae for Labour, displacing earlier generations of pre-war trade unionists, post-war public sector professionals (all those Croslandite lecturers and managers), then under Thatcher, lawyers and another whiter-collared influx of trade union officials and local government officers. They all at least had some prior experience of life outside the Parliamentary Labour Party. The new Labourists have brought with them the deeply formative life-experiences of bitter faction-fighting in student, party, council and trade union politics; but precious little sense of life’s broader setbacks and consolations. These are the ‘child-soldiers’ and ‘robots’ you see drafted in to by-election campaigns or cheering the arrival of a Labour minister at some conference or PR stunt. Or, seemingly from nowhere, becoming one of those Labour ministers...
Heffernan and Marqusee’s is a thoroughly jaundiced account, an embittered funeral oration for the Labour ‘hard left’, but it contains an important kernel of truth about the way in which modern Labour goes about its business: it is, to say the least, dull and remorseless, with regular outbursts of unpleasantness and acrimony, and very little time for the bigger issues of political theory, principles and ideas. There is a harsh, impatient focus on the processes of politics rather than its purposes, means over ends, objectives over aims, the immediate over the long term, personalities over ‘policies’, insults over ‘issues’. Labour has an abiding tendency to reduce big ideas to fit its own small political horizons, primarily by the exclusive focus of its inner life on the winning ‘by any means necessary’ of policy debate and elected office, which requires shifting coalitions of convenience around certain fixed ‘lines’ and ‘positions’ and the constant exchange of personal favours and obligations. And always the debilitating question, central to the age-old empiricist Labour reflex: “And what are you going to do about it?” To which the answer always seems to be: “Join the Labour Party.”
This style of politics can be found all across the ‘broad church’ and at every stage of Labour history, but in earlier times it was relieved by some level of intellectual ferment, and leavened by rituals of humility and deference, a protective and solidaristic “ethos” derived from the proletarian experience of subaltern resistance to capitalist exploitation. Those rules and manners of ‘respectable’ interpersonal relations have now been stripped away in the acid bath of cultural populism. You won’t find too many of Hugh Gaitskell’s “simple honest souls” or much of Tony Crosland’s “uninhibited mingling” in the modern Labour Party (or, for that matter, very much original thinking). This kind of politics also attracts and produces a certain kind of personality, on a spectrum from the quietly diffident, through the meticulous ‘nit-picker’ to the crashing bore. These are not particularly bright sparks, but oh how they would like to be, which partially explains their admiration for Marxism Today and the ‘Euro-communists’, who could be just as shallow and narrow and factionalist, but numbered among them some genuine intellectual ‘stars’ and carried the inverted, semi-clandestine historical glamour that came with the burdens of CP membership or association.
No Turning Back?
The fullest recent statement of the Compass ‘position’ came in a New Statesman article by Neal Lawson and John Harris in March 2009. It was called “No Turning Back” for no obvious reason; one of those “enigmatic injunctions” which Heffernan and Marqusee found in the works of the LCC, perhaps, and which could be readily adopted by any of Labour’s wings and factions. In the same vein, the article begins: “we have to change completely the way we live.” Well yes... Its diagnosis of political crisis is hard to fault: “there is a grim sense of business as usual” and “a very dangerous disjunction between the actions of career politicians and the aspirations of wider society”; “Labour still genuflects to the forces of big business” and the party’s responses to social and environmental emergency amount to “little more than cynical window-dressing”. The most coherent response from within Labour has been “a revival of pre-Thatcher politics” (Ah, so that’s what we’re not supposed to turn back to...), but that won’t do: “we need green jobs, not jobs at any cost” and “If there is to be no turning back to market fundamentalism, there can be no turning back to state and party fundamentalism either.”
So far, so Marxism Today; a manifesto for the New Labour left which Compass seems to want to represent . There is even a nod towards the ‘Gramscian sociology’ of Karl Polanyi (which I and my fellow-authors of recent neo-Gramscian text Feelbad Britain made fertile use of) in Lawson and Harris’ “To turn society in a different direction, markets will have to be regulated and trammelled by social forces – the state and civil society... institutions that allow society to make the market its servant.” The problems start – just as they always used to in Marxism Today – when we turn to what strategic action to take about it all, and get whole fistfuls of crumbs of comfort and grasped straws. So, “No Turning Back” offers “hints of something better” in the machinations of “left Brownites” (what?) and “new progressives”, while “the TUC are making daring noises”. Meanwhile, a long way from the Labour Party, there is the “growth of social movements, many with an international focus” (and as such surely symptoms of the ‘national’ political left’s decline) “and millions of ordinary people doing what they can to change their lives and make those of others better – by buying ethically, recycling, volunteering and downshifting” (well yes, we all must do what we can, but these are personal ameliorations not political challenges, and for all that ‘the personal is political’ there is a crucial distinction, or rather as above “disjunction”, between our daily lives and party politics). Then we’re onto the weary mantras of “single issues have to be joined up” and “a politics that transcends tribal party lines” (now where have we heard that before?).
The online discussion (admittedly not often a source of good sense) of the NS article was largely along the sceptical lines of the above paragraphs. “No Turning Back” offers us a compelling analysis of the crisis in British politics, but absolutely no sense of what to do about it, especially in and around the ailing but “remarkably resilient” Labour Party of which Compass remains such a resolutely ‘loyalist’ faction. The article rather gives the game away with its concluding ten policy points, of which (according to Neal Lawson) “nine were in the Green Party manifesto in the 2005 general election, about six were in the Liberal Democrats’ and none of them were in the Labour Party manifesto.” The party ‘machine’ shows no sign of willingness to incorporate Compass ‘policy points’ into the ‘official’ party line, or gratitude for Compass’ precious life-support.
Meanwhile, “No Turning Back” co-author John Harris wrote more recently in the Guardian that he’s giving the Labour “dinosaur” another year or so, before emulating most of his friends in voting, supporting or even joining the Greens. Neal Lawson’s most recent public utterance, in response to Labour’s terrible performance at the Norwich North by-election, included the quite bizarre observation that “this is a centre left moment”. There was no supporting argumentation, when all the electoral evidence – with the victorious Tories and UKIP combined out-polling every other party, and Labour reduced to whispering that the Tory candidate is a lesbian (she isn’t) – points rather to a ‘centre-right moment’. Meanwhile, according to insiders, leading Compass MP Jon Cruddas faces a serious risk of defeat by the BNP in Dagenham at the coming general election.
Which direction now for the ‘Democratic Left’?
There is a very definite sense here of a historical current that has run its course, veered in one direction or another over its thirty-odd years of existence, and now lies becalmed in a comfortable but slowly cooling and evaporating puddle. New Labour is clearly exhausted, though its key personnel are busily constructing for themselves other guises and vehicles inside or outside government. Pretty much everything any of them are now doing is guided (and explained) by the imperatives of ‘positioning’ after looming general election defeat. The Labour Party is in worse shape than ever before, and increasingly haunted by the (so far) barely articulated question: what’s the point of a Labour Party if there will never be another solely Labour government?
This was after all, amid the muddle of its early 20th century foundation, its clearest original purpose. Its main historical intellectual current, social democracy, foundered on mid-1970s capitalist crisis, and for all our later efforts to ‘rethink’ and revive it (even in this latest capitalist crisis, with muted forms of ‘neo-Keynesianism’), just won’t come back to political life. Meanwhile Labour’s social and cultural roots in the ‘national-popular’ lived experience of Labourism are breaking up and dispersing with the profound disaffection of its ‘progressive’ middle class intelligentsia, the continuing disintegration of the British working class and the mutation of some of its nastier pieces into aggrieved howls of reaction like the BNP.
Compass recently held one of its ‘rallies’ with the Communication Workers Union against part-privatisation of the Royal Mail, in my home city of Norwich. I went along, partly to say hello to Neal Lawson but also for the purpose of research for this article. There were 26 people in the audience, including me, and fully 8 panellists, 7 men with one female SERTUC official; not much sign of ‘new ways of doing politics’ here. The trade unionists’ speeches were all about Labour government treachery and betrayal, and the union’s rousing defiance: “We will continue to fight to keep the Post Office public for the next 300 years!” The SERTUC official began her speech by thanking Henry VIII for the Royal Mail. Lord Mandelson was the communal villain (it’s a shame he no longer has a moustache, because we could imagine him twirling it, pantomime-style). A friendly local Labour MP blamed the last Tory government for creating the “steamroller of privatisation”, and urged us to vote Labour because the next Tory government would use the Labour legislation to proceed to full privatisation. Neal Lawson pledged the continuing support of “a radical left wing organisation like Compass”, but urged us to seek the broader support of “people on the centre left” on the basis that “Royal Mail is one of the few places where we are still equal” because we all pay the same for stamps.
The ensuing discussion was mostly a chance for angry postmen to tell us they’d never vote Labour again, but I couldn’t help pointing out (after the MP had made the customary MP’s early departure) the profoundly depressing double bind facing the CWU, one of the few remaining unions with a serious corporate presence in their ‘industry’. The more vigorously they resisted the government, and the more public support they seemed to be winning, the more determined the government would become to face them down. And the ‘public’, already being whipped into a froth of fury about the supposed privileges of public sector employment – job security and pensions and so on - and the ‘inevitability’ of public spending cuts to pay for the banking ‘bail-out’ under the next government (of whatever party stripe), will not side with the posties. This will all be part of the calculations of that most calculating of politicians, Lord Peter Mandelson. If this really was all about the government’s ideological commitment to privatisation, and smashing old-style union resistance to it, then the union – no matter how many ‘constructive and viable alternatives’ Compass and others supplied them with – was on to a loser.
The panellists mostly looked back at me blankly (several approached me afterwards to say yes I was right, it was deeply depressing. They personally had given up on Labour, and they hoped their union was going to disaffiliate). My point about the CWU’s double bind seemed to be confirmed when talk turned to the alliance-building required for success, and a union official observed that “we don’t want to be seen to be leading that, because we don’t want to give the right wing press ammunition”. Neal talked rather forlornly again about this being “a centre left moment”, which prompted discussion to turn to the desirability of a general strike. Or rather, as a Socialist Worker seller contributed from the door, “a chance to re-fight the miners’ strike and win this time...”
Oh my God... My final thought on leaving the rally was: why is Compass involved so heavily in this? The campaign, for all its carefully marshalled argument and widespread support, is bound to lose in the end, because the Royal Mail is one of the few remaining public services which can be readily incorporated into the established commercial sector; another example of Thatcherite cherry-picking. Part-privatisation may yet form one of the last spiteful acts coming out of the New Labour bunker, though for now it’s been delayed by the government’s parliamentary travails, and the need to head off CWU disaffiliation before an expensive general election campaign. It has simply been deferred for Cameron to implement, and for the union to gloriously but uselessly oppose, thereby proving the new Tory government’s anti-union mettle. I can only imagine Compass’ involvement is some kind of payback for the CWU’s sponsorship of its conferences and publications, allied perhaps to some calculation of who might be lured on board the Compass life raft after the general election defeat and possible Labour implosion (actually the Greens are better placed to take advantage of union disillusionment).
After the meeting in Norwich I found myself thinking, reminded by the Socialist Worker seller perhaps, of the 1984/5 miners’ strike, and the disastrous double-bind it forced on the Communist Party. The CP was caught between the industrial syndicalism of Arthur Scargill and the coruscating neo-liberalism of Margaret Thatcher (and the manic egotism of both), between its own ‘militant labourism’ and its latter day commitment to democracy, with its ‘leading comrades’ pleading in vain behind the scenes for a national ballot. It was, as it turned out, a significant step along the way to the CPGB’s destruction, as well as the far bigger loss of a tradition of industrial militancy, of solidaristic community and a whole proletarian way of life. Meanwhile, Labour under Kinnock, Smith and Blair set about making itself “electable” again.
The Compass/CWU campaign looks like another inner Labour fix between the brothers and the factionalists, as well as a further chance for Compass to distance itself from the hard core of New Labour ahead of the expected general election catastrophe and the remaining Labourists’ dash for their own life-rafts. Compass is ‘positioning’ itself as the core of a purist rump which will spend the next few years attempting (and no doubt, in narrow organisational terms, succeeding) to sustain an ailing but comfortably oppositional Labour Party, and coming no nearer a genuinely ‘hegemonic’ political project than Labour has ever done. And what, as diehard Labourists always counter, is the practical alternative to any of this? Well, bearing in mind the way Labour post-mortems have always gone in the past, with their untypical receptiveness to outside perspectives, and my ‘delayed infection’ hypothesis, let’s ask: what were we old Euro-communists saying a few years ago? I seem to remember an article in the magazine Soundings arguing that for any prospect of progressive political change in Britain, of genuine ‘realignment of the left’ and re-connection with the hopes and fears of ordinary people, “Labour Must Die!” Oh yes, it was me that wrote it...

Pieces of Labourism and the Fascist Possibilty

A friend of mine very nearly became an MEP in June. He was top of the Green Party list in the East of England, and while the electoral maths was complicated, he basically needed ten per cent of the regional vote to win a seat in the European parliament. He had always been reasonably hopeful; the Greens have been steadily building their vote in local elections and winning council seats across the region. In our home city of Norwich, they are now the main opposition council group, with a realistic chance of becoming the largest party and forming a minority administration in the next year or two. As so often, this is largely the work of a few key individuals, including a quite brilliant young organiser who was recently elected national Green Party deputy leader in the hope that he can apply on the national stage some of the magic he has worked in our fine city.
The Norwich Greens will soon displace Labour, who have run the council for most of the last sixty years (including a period as a near ‘one-party state’ in the late 1980s), with a steady decline in the last ten. In 2002, Labour lost control to the Liberal Democrats, who had themselves built support over the previous twenty years. Having had their moment in the spotlight, and failed to make much difference to what is generally a ‘poorly performing’ local authority, the Lib Dems are now falling away. Labour have been able to run a minority administration for the last few years, but their voters and councillors are declining with age and demoralisation. As my Green wannabe-MEP friend reports, “the only people voting Labour are dying, have an occupational interest as trade union officials, or somehow think it will help them get on life.” Beyond these elderly diehards, professional Labourists and Blair-era ‘aspirationals’, the ‘core vote’ no longer exists.
The Greens are benefitting not just from this Labour decline but also from the ‘secondary erosion’ of the Labour vote which Liberal ‘community politics’ pioneered. The real damage was done to Labour in the 1970s and ‘80s, locally and nationally, when the party was apparently at its most disputatious and lively, but its ‘community roots’ were being torn up by the ‘new times’ of Thatcherism, the temporary politicisation of the professional middle class (who ‘took over’ the party in a kind of genteel social entryism, then promptly moved on into the SDP or the ‘political wilderness’ of jokey disillusionment and private consolation) and, with deindustrialisation, the disorganisation and dispersal of the working class. Once people stop habitually voting Labour, it seems, they’ll switch very readily among other options; a kind of electoral consumerism or, less charitably, promiscuity. Freed of their tribal loyalties and work-based disciplines, they only very reluctantly ‘return to the fold’ (as in 1997; and doesn’t the term ‘return to the fold’ speak volumes about how they were traditionally – and now refuse to be – regarded by Labour’s electoral machine?).
‘Labourism’, however you define it, is now pretty much exhausted on every level: industrial and economic (with the break-up of what was once the largest and most powerful proletariat in the world), ideological and moral (with the displacement of class as our primary source of personal identity), programmatic and strategic (with the failure to devise a modern and distinctively British social democracy), as a ‘movement’ (with the loss of trade union corporate and political power), and as a foothold in the institutions of the state (with the self-willed isolation of the Parliamentary Labour Party and the New Labour coup d’etat). The Labour Party persists, mainly because of the few hundred people (and the ruling class) who have a vested interest in its organisational survival, but Labourism is now little more than nostalgic yearning for a past that was itself never much more than a woolly dream.
What has happened in Norwich, as in most other Labour ‘heartlands’, is the break-up of the social alliance that underwrote ‘the Forward March of Labour’ for much of the twentieth century. This alliance consisted of most of the organised, waged, culturally unified and overwhelmingly white, classically ‘subaltern’ working class on the one hand, and the radical-liberal, ‘progressive’ and well-educated (and –intentioned) sections of the salaried middle class on the other, the ‘traditional intellectuals’ of the professions and the public services. While Labour was in the ascendancy, and able to influence the terms of the ‘national interest’ and ‘common purpose’, these two very different and culturally antagonistic social groups rubbed along pretty well together. The British working class got its long sought-after ‘voice in parliament’ and a ‘fair share’ in the spoils of capitalism and the Empire. The progressive ‘salariat’ got a say in government, and a chance to apply its technical and administrative skills to the running of the country. For the political and trade union elites of both, there were parliamentary seats and government posts as incentive and reward. The ‘brothers’ and the ‘toffs’ might get on each others’ nerves, with their rude or affected manners and language, but they held their noses and tongues for the sake of the ‘good old cause’.
This arrangement, the political expression of the very British historic compromise between capital and Labour which gave us the ‘post war social democratic consensus’, reached its zenith in 1951, when Labour polled its highest ever vote on the back of its most purposeful and effective government but still (because of the vagaries of the electoral system) lost power to the Tories. This is a familiar enough oddity; what’s less well known is that this was also a near-historic high for the Tories, and above all for the two-party dominance of British politics. In that election, the Tories and Labour shared a whopping 96 per cent of the total vote, which was itself an amazing 82.6 per cent turnout. For all their mutual antipathy, the two class-based political blocs had reached a kind of weighty accommodation, reflected in the sense of social harmony and cultural unity, steady prosperity and widening ‘affluence’, state and public service reform, ‘national-popular’ purpose and communal peace that generally characterised Britain in the 1950s. The decade has been mythologized for its stultifying blandness and conformism – to be spectacularly shattered by the ‘swinging sixties’ - but this should not blind us to its overall atmosphere of stability and recovery, which most British people experienced as real material and familial progress.
The subsequent story of British society has been the break-up of that consensus, firstly under the weight of the deep and protracted problems of our capitalist economy, which date back to the end of the Victorian era, and secondly by the brutal and superficial resolution of those problems by neo-liberal Thatcherism, whose primary target was the corporate power of the trade unions. They were duly tamed; a crucial factor in popular acquiescence to our latest recession and upsurge in unemployment. With the break-up of Labourism, New Labour has adapted and modified the neo-liberal model to a more global and consumerist form, with initial electoral benefits in the ‘boom’ years but now disastrous effects in the ‘bust’. One of the main victims of ‘the project’ has been the Labour Party itself, which is now weaker organisationally and politically than since its emergence as something like a mass party in the aftermath of the First World War. Labour has never been an individual membership party (the unruly constituency parties were always outweighed by the ‘dead souls’ of the union block vote and the ‘sovereignty’ of the parliamentary party; nowadays the leadership just does what it wants), but apart from its dwindling coteries in and around parliament and local government it’s hard to see much sign of political life.
Its ‘activist base’ has shrivelled with political disillusionment, especially over Iraq. The spadework of ‘getting out the vote’ has always been done mainly by local councillors, but with every fresh election a proportion are culled; there are now around 5000 (less than half the Tories), mostly in impoverished city and district councils (they have been pretty much wiped out in the better funded counties, where more seats were lost than retained in the latest elections alone), and whole regions of the country are now virtually Labour-free. The only things keeping the show on the road are the patronage of the state (all those less newsworthy ‘expenses’ which sustain the party’s staff and organisation), the grudging and increasingly conditional support of the trade unions and of a small circle of ‘progressive’ rich people, the media-political nexus of the Westminster village and their insatiable hunger for ‘news’, and an electoral system which militates strongly against innovation.
Nonetheless, new political forces are emerging from among the pieces of Labourism and of its dialectical twin, popular Toryism, which was surprisingly strong in the industrial cities and usually won around a third of the working class vote, and sometimes more. As a social group, ‘working class Tories’ were generally beneficiaries of Thatcherism (or liked to think they were), but as a distinct political constituency an early but neglected victim. All that remains of that urban Conservatism are a few shabby Conservative clubs (whose main attraction was always the beer), and a toehold in the suburbs. The Tories, like Labour, have built new support among the extra-urban middle class, but the two-party bloc system has been steadily crumbling since its 1951 zenith.
The Greens are benefitting from the disaffection of the progressive middle class, especially after Blair’s disastrous decision to enlist in Bush’s ‘war against terror’, but also in disgust at New Labour’s refusal to undo the privateering ‘excesses’ of Thatcherism. Green electoral growth is based largely in districts around universities and among public service professionals, who are quietly outraged by deregulation and ‘outsourcing’ of services they have devoted their careers to (and made disproportionate and canny use of for themselves and their families). That’s a relatively benign outcome of the break-up of Labourism, and does a little bit to address the very real catastrophe of climate change (though there is a ‘dark side’ to environmentalism, expressed in its anti-modern, anti-urban and – especially on its animal rights fringe – anti-human elements, and in its messianic and often apocalyptic anti-political tone). What I want to turn to now is the rather darker piece of Labourism represented and cultivated by the British National Party.
There has never been a serious fascist party or movement in Britain; our political and electoral cultures and systems discourage the ‘extremes’ which elsewhere in Europe have at times taken state power and, partially recovered from their catastrophic defeat in the Second World War, now become part of the modern mainstream (as most recently in Italy, where Mussolini’s followers form a major part of Berlusconi’s governing party). In Britain the distinctive ‘historic compromise’ between capital and labour neither allowed nor required a formal fascist political organisation to perform the historical function of ‘disciplining’ the national working class (though Thatcherism at times came close). Instead, the combined ‘radical liberal’ ideologies of free trade and free collective bargaining meant the huge and historically ‘advanced’ British working class was almost uniquely ill-disciplined (the primary reason for its relative lack of technical skill, its cultural and social ‘backwardness’). When necessary, they were disciplined as much by their own institutions (the trade unions, Labour Party etc.), cultures (sport, light entertainment, ‘mind-numbing routine’) and moralities (respectability, humility, simplicity, practicality) as anything else.
But there is in any society what we might call a ‘fascist possibility’, a certain combination of prejudices and interests which receive expression through particular political methods and stylings, classically based on a strong hankering after order, uniformity and rules. It’s usually based among the lower middle class or ‘petty bourgeoisie’ but crucially requires the sponsorship of more exalted social groups with serious power and resources, and the acquiescence or fragmentation of the organised working class (and the willing ‘muscle’ of some of the fragments). Its classic expressions are of course German Nazism, Italian Fascism and (to a lesser extent) Spanish Falangism: those over-familiar ‘monsters’ which loom so large in the corrective imaginations of our popular cultures and school curricula, and create such misleading expectations of how fascism should look and behave.
The crucial historical point about the ‘fascist possibility’ in England is that it has no single organisational home, but is instead dispersed across our society, culture and politics. By and large it has been subsumed within the Tory/Labour dichotomy that has dominated modern British politics, but it has always been socially latent and – during periods of economic turbulence like the 1930s or the 1970s – liable to organisational expression in noisy, rude and (in several senses) ‘offensive’ movements like the British Union of Fascists or the National Front. Once it’s served its demonstrative, facilitative or disciplinary purposes, English ‘fascism’ gets put back in the box till next time. The examples I’ve just cited are the obvious ones, with their own historical associations of violence and subversion; what are less often acknowledged are the ‘fascist’ currents which have formed tributaries within the dominant modern British ideologies of Conservatism and, more to our point here, Labourism.
It’s well known that Mussolini started out a revolutionary socialist; he edited the Italian socialist newspaper Avanti! until he broke with them over the First World War (he also had his own Labour admirers, like Evan Durbin and John Strachey, right through into the 1930s). What is almost completely forgotten is that late Victorian Britain had an equivalent political shape-shifter in the curious figure of Henry Myers Hyndman (1842-1921), who also supported the war and split with much of the left over it. Hyndman deserves fresh study in his own right, as founder and long time leader of the first avowedly Marxist and programmatically socialist political organisation with any level of popular support in Britain, the Social Democratic Federation. Hyndman was by the far the most effective ‘left wing’ political operator and orator of his day, equipped “with the vehemence of a great soul and the simplicity of a child”. He associated on equal terms with Marx, Engels, William Morris, Tom Mann and Edward Carpenter, as well as numerous politicians in and around government and ruling circles, including Tory ex-Prime Minister Disraeli - who he tried to persuade to support “democratic reorganisation of the empire” - and the Salvation Army founder William Booth, whose momentous study Life and Labour he partly prompted. But Hyndman seems to have made a habit of falling out with pretty much everyone he knew.
That’s mainly why he’s been derided by memoirists and biographers as variously “an extremely chauvinistic arch-Conservative” (for Engels) or “a shop with all its goods in the front” (for Margaret McMillan). Hyndman also had a propensity for scandal, and never quite got over a major crisis in the early days of the SDF, when he accepted money from the Tory Party – delivered by a shadowy ‘bagman’ called Maltman Barry who could have stepped straight out of Conan Doyle - to put up candidates against Liberal MPs. There is also something inherently ridiculous – in a deeply English way – about Hyndman the high Tory scion, convinced Marxist and one-time gentleman county cricketer, who in old age “reflected wryly on the possibility that if I had kept clear of socialism, I could have been Secretary of State on the Tory side”. My favourite image, relayed in Francis Wheen’s excellent biography of Marx, is of Hyndman the portly businessman dressed in a frock coat and silk top hat thanking his working class audiences on behalf of his wealthy family for the surplus value accrued from their labour and redeployed by him in the cause of revolutionary socialism.
But beyond the anecdotes and caricatures, Hyndman’s true significance is in the concepts and traditions he tried to combine as a “revolutionary patriot”, “Tory Marxist” (Phillip Blond take note), “democratic imperialist” and, perhaps most perilously of all, “national socialist”. The SDF itself split and reconstituted itself several times, including (briefly, in 1917-19) as the National Socialist Party, and never had more than 12,000 paying members and a few hundred activists, concentrated in London and Lancashire. It was wary of the trade unions, which Hyndman regarded as an integral part of the functioning of liberal capitalism (he was by no means alone; Gramsci was saying pretty much the same thing at the same time). It was in and out of the early Labour Party, with (to quote Hyndman in 1920) “No hope but in the Labour Party, and not much in that”, while its main anti-Hyndman faction (the British Socialist Party) helped to found the ill-fated Communist Party of Great Britain. The SDF was eventually disbanded in 1941, and left little to show for its sixty years of organisational existence.
But its ideological legacy is evident in the history of Labourism, particularly the central, perennial attempt of the ‘labour movement’ (party and unions) to reconcile the interests of class and nation in its historic aims of representing the former and running the latter. For Pelling, what distinguished Hyndman (and the SDF under him) from the rest of the early 20th century Marxist and socialist left was his appeal to the English working class, who Hyndman regarded as the most advanced in the world. By contrast, the various other groups and parties of the left were led by “immigrants and exiles from the Continent” and elements from “the Celtic fringe”. The Labour Party would have more than its share of both, especially the latter, but the key to its foundation, growth and eventual establishment as a parliamentary and occasionally governing party was its social and cultural base among the patriotic, nationalist and imperialist, socially conservative English masses. The “free-born Englishman”, a progressive stereotype in (say) the historical writings of E.P. Thompson, could also embody (as Mercer and Schwartz pointed out in their 1981 critique of Thompson) “the notion of English ‘stock’ and ‘birthright’ (which) have informed the radical right and the proto-fascist fringe.”
Labour’s rising star in the 1920s - as it displaced the Liberals as the main anti-Tory opposition and had its first unhappy taste of government - was another faintly ridiculous dashing toff, whose politics and rhetorical power bore ready comparison to the recently deceased Hyndman; a ‘national socialist’ and ‘democratic imperialist’ and early advocate of Keynesian responses to capitalist crisis by the name of Oswald Mosley. Mosley was the early Labour equivalent to Tony Blair, a superficially bright and over-confident fixer and networker, with an abundance of self-regard and opinion never quite matched by ability or judgment. Mosley’s appeal to Labourism is summarised by sympathetic biographer Robert Skidelsky as “Workers of the Empire, Unite!” He served briefly as a Cabinet Minister in the second Labour government (1929-31), and (Skidelsky argues) offered up one of the more coherent responses from in and around the Labour Party to the gathering Depression, before resigning in 1930 to establish the New Party. The New Party was a kind of early dry run for the SDP or (arguably) New Labour, an attempt to ‘break the mould’ and apply a politics of technocratic fix to capitalism in crisis. It foundered, just like the SDP, on the durability of the established parties and the inertia of Britain’s institutional framework, not to mention the competing ambitions and personalities of its leaders around Mosley. He fell in with the other rising ‘national socialists’ elsewhere in Europe, and suffered for the basic betrayal of British national interests, ‘decorum’ and decency this represented (though as late as 1939 he still managed to draw the largest ever crowd in Britain for an indoor political rally).
Nowadays Mosley does not even figure on the roll-call of Labourist traitors - Ramsay MacDonald, Phillip Snowden, Roy Jenkins etc – and very few Labour people seem to realise that he was once one of them. But when Gordon Brown advocates “British jobs for British workers”, with the enthusiastic endorsement of Labour heartland ideologues like Phil Woollas MP (recently seen blushing beside Joanna Lumley), he is simply giving contemporary expression to a deep historical current within Labourism. And the fact that it is also a slogan to be heard at ‘wildcat’ trade union action against factory closures, and (as Brown was rudely reminded) in BNP literature and broadcasts (coupled with “And we really mean it!”), indicates other horizontal as well as vertical continuities. The same ideological impulses – nationalist, xenophobic, residually and nostalgically imperialist, patriarchal, statist and workerist, angry and aggrieved and potentially violent – are at work here. They are as old as the British nation-state, but normally kept underground and nicely ‘out of the way’, in private attitudes rather than public discourse. However, a particular set of events – deep recession, military conflict or political scandal, to take a few recent examples – will occasionally bring them bubbling nastily back up to the surface; or, as with the current rise of the British National Party, emboldened into louder and relatively unashamed popular expression.
How to ‘Deal’ with the BNP?
By way of preface, I need to make a couple of points plain. Firstly, I am not for one moment suggesting that the Labour Party is or has ever been a fascist organisation. There was a flurry of controversy a couple of years ago when an article appeared on the internet by an American academic with a handy 25-point test of how fascist any individual or group might be (Brown’s New Labour scored, I seem to remember, 16 or 17, with Blair a few points behind); ‘political science’ at its most crass. Secondly, I am not suggesting that anyone should support the BNP either. My own personal opinion is that the BNP embodies a lumpen little Englanderism, all the more loathsome for its relative subtlety and effectiveness. But it can neither be ‘exposed’ nor effectively opposed unless we properly understand it, and make some imaginative effort to understand why people do support it.
The BNP’s recent successes have prompted a flurry of liberal agonising, mostly in and around the Guardian newspaper and BBC Newsnight, which has done little but demonstrate the distaste of the professional intelligentsia for what remains of the white working class, and as such affirms my basic historical point about the break-up of the social alliance that underwrote Labourism. The Guardian sampled the opinions of ‘top historians’ in the aftermath of the Euro-elections; it was mostly good sense, with much use of the terms ‘proportion’ and ‘perspective’, but what struck me was how little these people seemed to know or really care about the situation in England. To a person (including his eminence Eric Hobsbawm), these ‘left-leaning’ intellectuals and ‘Nazi experts’ had far more insight into ‘abroad’ than our own country. One of them went so far as to suggest that the most effective response to the BNP was “ridicule... an underestimated weapon.” Yes, I thought, what the disaffected English white working class really need is a further dose of liberal ridicule...
The British National Party was founded in 1982 by John Tyndall from a faction of the National Front and (more distantly) the British Union of Fascists. It grew steadily through the 1990s, in response to the local effects of burgeoning ‘globalisation’, specifically the effects of rapidly expanding immigration on the lower-skilled sections of the workforce. Poorly skilled and resourced whites, especially in the metropolitan hinterlands of East London and Lancashire, felt their wages and job prospects squeezed and their districts visibly changing with the influx of Bangladeshis, Africans, Eastern Europeans and other ‘new migrants’. Nick Griffin took over from Tyndall in 1999, and set about ‘modernising’ the BNP, playing down its traditional anti-semitism and thuggery, playing up its anti-Islamism and its ‘civilized’ values, broadening and deepening its electoral appeal and taking on the new methodologies of Public Relations-driven politics. By 2007, the Daily Telegraph reported, the BNP’s was “the most visited website of any UK political party.” It has more than 10,000 members and a wider social base far beyond its traditional right-wing core.
Under Griffin, the BNP has mounted serious local election campaigns and won dozens of council seats. It now claims over 100 nationwide, mainly in the old SDF strongholds of East London and the North West, as well as the traditional far-right stamping grounds of Essex and the West Midlands. They are almost always former Labour seats, won with ex-Labour votes (likewise their two new MEP seats). The BNP have had some trouble holding onto council seats, because successful candidates have been exposed as thugs or morons (there are plenty of those among other parties’ councillors who generally go unchallenged) or in some cases unreconstructed Nazis; but as a register of inchoate protest, voting BNP seems to have growing popular appeal; “two fingers to the establishment”, as a Labour minister recently put it. In the 2005 general election, it won 192,850 votes, 4.2 per cent of the votes in contested seats. This is a very real and present electoral threat; but primarily to Labour.
There is no evidence that standard ‘anti-fascist’ campaigns - usually in the form of legalistic or procedural challenges, journalistic exposes, leafleting and demonstrations, or unity-themed pop concerts – are actually working against the new-style BNP. They might serve to rally convinced anti-fascists, and to alert others who were unaware of the local threat, but it’s doubtful that they dissuade anyone already thinking of supporting the BNP. I watched assorted Trots shouting and gesticulating at Nick Griffin’s battle-van outside the Euro-election count in Manchester Town Hall, with (it seemed) a camera crew for every ‘protestor’, and I imagined him inside laughing his union jack socks off. Prominent and regular Guardian investigations, I’m sure, achieve a similar effect.
If anything, these campaigns can be counterproductive, smacking of ‘victimization’ by the social and cultural ‘establishment’, and fuelling the BNP and its supporters’ own strong sense of subaltern grievance and ‘martyr complex’. Prohibition is never especially effective in liberal democratic societies, whether of drink and drugs, gambling, sex or political affiliation, especially if it’s based on sniffy middle class censoriousness. The main effect of ‘No Platform for Fascists’ was always unwarranted status and exposure for the ‘fascists’, apparent denial of their democratic rights, and the implication that anti-fascists were somehow scared of open debate. Besides, in the modern media age (especially the internet, of which the BNP has made such effective use) ‘platforms’ cannot actually be denied, except by media boredom and public indifference; and those are not responses currently evoked by the BNP.
The party’s setbacks, in lost support and seats, are more often down to candidates’ incompetence or disreputability, or to internal disputes and splits like a recent, spectacular one over its ‘internal security’. A number of BNP councillors have quit early or failed to turn up to council functions and fulfil council duties; but (with some personal experience of my own) being a councillor can be a big letdown after the brouhaha of election. You realise fairly quickly that your status is pretty lowly and your powers strictly limited; at the same time, the expectations of your constituents (or, as Tory MP Alan Clark memorably dubbed them, ‘mendicants’) can be relentless and utterly unrealistic. When your fellow councillors are shunning you, and excluding you from the ‘official’ posts and functions that compensate for all the drudgery, you’re bound to wonder whether it’s worth turning up at all.
And for all the fuss in local and national media about non-attending BNP councillors, there is no indication that the general public cares much either. If anything, treating public office as a waste of time may well boost the BNP’s ‘anti-establishment’ credentials (the same goes, I’m sure, for being denounced from Church of England pulpits). When ‘democratic politics’ itself is in such widespread disrepute, at street, council or parliamentary level, it does the BNP no public harm at all to be seen to be excluded from it. Eventually, the BNP will have to learn the ropes of municipal politics – backbiting and stitch-ups, harassing council officers, the creation of networks of patronage and favour amongst ‘service-users’ and tenants, the manipulation of local media etc. – and (as has already happened to longer-serving BNP councillors) be domesticated by its dull grind, but for the moment they can revel in their ‘outsider’ status. And as they grow, they will attract more capable, traditionally ambitious people.
Likewise, to attack the British National Party as ‘racist’, as opponents habitually do, somehow misses the point. The BNP is undoubtedly racist – with more than a few hard-core ‘scientific’ proponents of white supremacy, including new MEP Andrew Brons - but only in the same sense as much of the marginalised, fragmented and disaffected white working class it appeals to. This broader racism is compounded by cack-handed attempts to deal with it, which derive from a largely middle class conversation about language and ‘manners’, and from the vested interests and wishful thinking of institutionalised multiculturalism and ‘the race relations industry’. When racial tolerance and diversity are promoted as mainly a matter of using the approved language, and being generally ‘nice’ to ethnic minorities – and when multi-faceted poverty and growing inequality inhibit genuine social interaction between all classes and identity-groups - it’s not surprising that the less articulate and ‘polite’ elements of the ethnic majority react against it.
The racism of the BNP’s new support is not what we might call a ‘core belief’, and is always amenable to exceptionalism among personal acquaintances (‘he might be black but he’s a nice bloke’); and the blatant racism of the BNP’s constitution is likely to be tempered under legal challenge for the sake of public funding. Rather, the popular value-base the BNP appeals to is all those feelings of having been ‘left behind’ by the modern world, felt at times (I’d suggest) by many of us; that’s why it tends to pop up in relatively marginal places like Burnley or Sunderland or Thurrock, with little presence in London or our other big bustling cities. There has been a lot of good recent history into internal English migration, which was a major feature of our capitalist economy and society during its most vibrant periods. It is only more recently, with the post-war social settlement of the welfare state, full employment and council housing, that our indigenous population has ‘settled’ into its own ‘colonies’ (‘reservations’ might be a better term). Perhaps we should see the BNP as a reflection of social stagnation rather than upheaval. And ‘we’ (by which I mean the liberal intelligentsia) need to be much more attuned to the class dimension of our public discourse. When we call ‘these people’ racist or fascist – or ‘chav’ or ‘underclass’ – are we actually saying they are stupid? There is a bourgeois distaste for fellow humanity here that goes all the way back to Gulliver’s disgust at the Yahoos of Houyhnhnmland. And there are plenty of historical variants on the Yahoos’ own customary response “to discharge their excrements on my head”.
The real problem for Labour is that it cannot ‘deal’ with the BNP without confronting its own history (which it is generally reluctant to do, beyond a certain misty-eyed sentimentality) and the casual racism of much of its own traditional ‘core’ support (which would require far deeper social roots and a clearer understanding of the experiential basis of popular ideologies than Labour has ever actually had). And confronting the old Labour racists - especially in the language and manners of contemporary ‘anti-racism’, an overwhelmingly educated, ‘progressive’ and liberal, middle class discourse - would simply reaffirm their subaltern grievance and disaffection. This is the vicious double bind facing Labour MPs in BNP-inclined constituencies, shuffling between denunciation and endorsement of underlying white working class grievances. This same popular resentment about being told what to think is evident in popular reactions to ‘political correctness gone mad’ (a term the BNP makes much use of), especially in their more jokey, Sun-type manifestations, which represent a long-established and very English aversion to pomposity and bossiness.
Beyond the BNP: contemporary ‘fascist possibilities’
If the BNP pose a threat, it is crucial to understand its nature and to keep it in proportion. They will never win serious power; there are one or two very bright individuals in the BNP national leadership, but they have difficulty keeping a grip on the hotheads (a problem for all necessarily cross-class political organisations, in periods of growth as much as decline). Their support is strongly concentrated in particular places where there are long traditions of politically articulated social prejudice, and new and old forms of ‘bad behaviour’, those parts of the country which have always been in a certain sense ‘no-go areas’ for ‘respectable’ values. Elsewhere, the ideological complex the BNP feeds upon is much more diffuse, and to be found in other social or cultural sites which are explicitly resistant to political exploitation; football, for example, where beneath the PR gloss and supposed ‘community roots’ the same old atavism survives, with a very modern motor of ruthless commercial exploitation.
To sit in a football crowd these days is to be surrounded by gullible, baying idiots (Yahoos indeed), with little real interest or understanding of the game itself, but drawn by the showbiz and commerce and the promise of personal and communal emotional release; anger mostly, with odd moments of ecstatic triumphalism, fuelled by copious amounts of dis-inhibiting alcohol. The recently and sadly deceased J.G. Ballard, a far better social critic than novelist, put it like this: “What I think we’re seeing is the white tribes of England reasserting their identity. This is not necessarily a racist thing, I don’t think. But there have been so many waves of immigration into this country - Asians, blacks, Kosovans, Poles. And I can see that football is one of the ways in which the white working class can say remember us. It’s a rallying call to the old tribal instincts that multiculturalism has buried under this tissue-paper eiderdown of correct behaviour.”
If Gramsci was right to regard modern newspapers as proto-parties, then we might regard the Daily Mail as an all too actual embodiment of ‘the fascist possibility’. Nick Davies calls the Mail “a perfect commodity, designed to be sold to a particular market, of lower middle class men and women. If, in order to speak for their interests, the Mail must attack, it will. Black people, poor people, liberals and all kinds of lefties, scroungers, druggies, homosexuals, they will all be attacked. And if it is necessary to attack too the rich and the powerful and any political party, including the Conservatives, then so be it. It sells its readers what they want to see in the world.” The Daily Mail is, according to Davies’ extraordinary survey of the global media, the most aggressively spiteful (and successful) newspaper in the world, with an untypically growing readership amongst the enraged, suburban, insecure lower middle class (a crucial component of classically fascist movements). Who needs a fascist party when we have a fascist paper with a mass circulation and sphere of political influence? The Daily Telegraph is not far behind, in tone and sales, with its extraordinary scoop of MPs’ expenses, however factually and journalistically questionable it will all turn out to have been. There is more than a little of the ‘fascist possibility’ in the populist ‘damn ‘em all’ outcry about home-flipping and duck houses. It has provided an outlet not just for the arcane pointlessness of parliamentary politics (what are MPs actually for?) but also for public distaste for any kind of democratic politics (which most people, with little to run beyond their own lives and households, have very little personal experience of).
The BNP will never get to run anything, not withstanding a total ‘makeover’ (which some of their leaders dream of, complete with a suitably modern ‘feminine touch’), but they have substantial nuisance value. Sooner or later some poor Tory, Lib Dem or even Labour council leader with ‘no overall control’ is going to have to take them into power-sharing coalition, but the BNP will find it onerous to assume and exercise practical responsibility for the mundane routines and services of local government. That is not their historical point; they are not a primary political force, seeking any kind of social hegemony, but a secondary expression of the break-up of Labourism. For Labour to ‘deal’ with the BNP – in the sense of destroying rather than accommodating it - would require reassembling the social alliance it was based upon, and for the moment that seems unlikely. New Labour was in large part an attempt at precisely that, but ineptly executed and very narrowly based; as such, it represented a last gasp rather than a revival of the Labour tradition. To be fair, some of Labour’s more intelligent and honourable MPs are trying hard to find new ways of understanding and engaging with the aggrieved, ‘left behind’ white working class, especially in constituencies where their own seats are under threat, with some temporary localised success. But Labour’s decline and fragmentation is a larger, undeniable historical fact.
It just may be that in the short to medium term – and I have no doubt that this will be a bitter pill to swallow, especially for Labour – the ‘political class’ (another phrase which speaks volumes about the social exclusion of the majority from democracy and the exercise of power) will have to accept that the BNP articulates and represents a genuine and widespread popular standpoint towards the modern world. And that by accommodating this particularly nasty piece of Labourism within the formal ‘democratic’ framework of local councils, European and (eventually) national parliaments, you can blunt some of its nastier edges and begin to ‘educate’ people out of it. After all, a similar local accommodation has been engineered in Northern Ireland with the extremes of republicanism and loyalism, both of which have had more than their fair share of ‘fascist possibility’. Whether or not you accept the full reality of ‘the peace process’, which (on one reading) has simply transferred criminality from the political and constitutional to the civil and social arenas, it has to be some kind of progress from the worst of the Troubles. In the Middle East and elsewhere, ‘democracy’ is edging towards some kind of accommodation with Islamism; while Italian democrats, including most of the left, have always accepted (sometimes perhaps too readily) co-existence with their own (actual) Fascists.
Will the BNP Last?
How serious and permanent is the BNP’s surge of popularity and support? Has its lumpen little-Englanderism found a settled place in the political undergrowth? Or will it prove to be the same kind of flash in the pan as the Green vote in the European elections exactly twenty years ago, when the very young Green Party won a startling 2.4 million votes? That turned out to be a spectacular example of a one-off ‘protest vote’ among a low turnout in an election not many people were too bothered about. The European elections, with their peculiar list system, do allow committed voters the indulgence of voting as they feel at that moment. In the following general elections, people normally revert to type and tribe and calculation, albeit within a long-term decline in party affiliations. It has taken the Greens many years of hard slog ‘community politics’ to get anywhere near their 1989 result, and their vote is patchy and (I suspect) vulnerable to new kinds of disillusionment. The professional middle class is no more ‘constant’ or politically unified than any other social group; if anything, in this era of ‘shopping around’ for everything from holiday insurance to topical opinion, less so. This other, nicer ‘piece of Labourism’ may yet take its political custom elsewhere.
In the 2009 Euro elections, the Greens actually polled 8.7 per cent, over two points higher than the BNP on 6.5 per cent, but with their vote more dispersed across the country, won the same number of seats. The BNP vote did not increase significantly over the last Euro elections; it was just better organised. Their two seats, to confirm the argument that they are capitalising on the break-up of Labourism, are in the post-industrial North of England, while the Greens are in the middle class ‘heartlands’ of London and the South East. A lot now depends on the BNP itself, just as the Greens now recognise that they actively squandered their 1989 success. So far the BNP is managing its historic opportunity very effectively; Nick Griffin is a past-master at liberal-baiting. Its actual European election campaign was very skilfully conducted, with a slickly produced and in its own way highly impressive party political broadcast on 13th May.
We might sneer that the BNP’s PPB had the visual style of a regional ITV daytime game show, but in electoral reality they share the same target audience. It took up the topical populist tack of “professional politicians with their snouts in the trough” (by contrast the BNP “are not in it for the money”, though they stand to gain roughly £500,000 for every Euro seat) and the anti-social behaviour themes pioneered by New Labour, which translate the authoritarian populism of its Thatcherite inheritance into a local application of low-level vigilantism. In practice it means uniformed patrols of council estates and now, with the BNP “leading the way in the West Midlands”, mobile CCTV cameras. A hard-faced young woman read from an autocue that some BNP councillors have been re-elected for second 4-year terms. It was all strangely effective (especially when compared to the Green Party’s lamentable effort a few nights later, which looked like a piece of GCSE Graphics coursework).
As long as Labourism continues its historical process of disintegration, and Labour suffers the political and electoral consequences, there will be plenty more rich pickings for the BNP. In the meantime, we should prepare ourselves for greater ‘offense’, as bigotry and ignorance become more emboldened; at the same time, we might try not to be quite so easily offended. As so often, things are probably going to have to get worse before they get better, with a general shift to the right in our ‘centre of political gravity’, in tune with the historical effects of economic recession (which, at least in Europe – Euro election night ‘commentators’ take note - always favours the right). Thatcherism managed to subsume the ‘fascist possibility’ of the 1970s within its own historic bloc, in that case the decidedly rural, provincial and identifiably popular-Tory racism of the National Front and its offshoots on the far right. But that was in the setting of a new and vigorous ideological construct, with lots of big ideas that amounted to a genuine strategic vision (whose most effective advocate Norman Tebbit could be heard recently urging people “not to vote for the major parties”). Tebbitt probably helped to boost the performance of the sleazy Thatcherites of UKIP, but this piece of popular Toryism only really comes to life at Euro-elections. The single-issue, anti-EU UKIP represents what we might call ‘the sergeant major’ vote, a ‘Dads Army’-style anti-continentalism, strongest in the outer suburbs of the home counties. This particular ‘fascist possibility’ will be re-absorbed into the Conservative fold under the allure of imminent general election victory for Cameron’s neo-Thatcherism, refreshed from its years of idle, moat-clearing opposition, and ready to drive the utopian visions of the free market deeper into our personal lives and public services, with huge public spending cuts universally accepted as ‘inevitable’ alongside the hegemonic nostrum that ‘business knows best’.
For all their best efforts and occasional near-misses, nothing in the Labour past, present or future has ever shown that kind of visionary (if always slightly bonkers) dynamism. New Labour’s tragedy has been to remain mired within the ideological morass of Thatcherism (and in fawning awe of the “absolute and unaccountable power” of the Daily Mail), while failing to lay permanent claim to its political inheritance. And in the meantime, the old Labourist working class becomes increasingly dis- ‘organised’ in the traditional trade union sense, ‘ill-disciplined’ in its behaviour and attitudes (thus prompting ever shriller middle class moral panic), and receptive to modern versions of our less savoury English proletarian mentalities. Back to my friend the just-failed Green Euro-MP. He told me that his own prospects largely depended on the BNP; if they got more than 5 per cent, this would split the vote that might just give one ‘minority party’ a seat in our region. In simple electoral terms, the contest at this level was about who could grab the largest chunk of the crumbling Labour vote.
On the council estates – those reservations of historic Labour patronage, still accounting in Norwich for about half the population - there were plenty of people telling him that if they bothered to vote at all, it would be Green or BNP. As it turned out, our regional vote pretty much mirrored the national, with the Greens on 8.8 per cent and the BNP 6.1 per cent, and neither winning a seat. In a lovely electoral metaphor for the state of our fractured and fractious country’s social and cultural relations, a seething brew of mutually hostile minorities, they cancelled each other out. Our one regional Labour MEP, an oleaginous bureaucrat not often seen in these parts, scraped back in, just.