28.09.2011

Off-colour Blairites

Ed Miliband is being attacked from the right, argues James Turley

It is a commonplace these days that politics - like more or less everything else - has been ruined by spin and PR. The roll-call of villains and debacles is well storied: Alastair Campbell, Andy Coulson and even the makers of the dodgy Iraq dossier have gone down in the public memory as people declaiming on the good society from a position of amoral hypocrisy.

The more subtle side-effect, however, is that an idea just doesn’t cut it any more unless it can be reduced to a catchy sound bite. Thus the proliferation of colour-coding in mainstream politics: in rough order of appearance, we have had the Orange Book Liberal Democrats, Red Tories and Blue Labour (one is prepared to let the Greens off, since ‘green’ actually means something in politics).

The conference season has now dumped another two of these things on us - a series of left-leaning Labour also-rans have launched a Red Book, while the great and the good of Blairism have given us a Purple Book. So now, it seems, the Labour mainstream is divided between red, blue and purple factions, from left to right respectively.

In keeping with the current weakness of the Labour left, it is probably safe to say that the ‘red’ book is going to be the least politically significant of the lot. It compiles what amounts to a series of left-liberal Keynesian verities (which it calls “ethical socialism”), demanding an “ethical approach to profit” and rather more insidiously an “ethical foreign policy”.

The Purple Book, put out by the Blairite think-tank, Progress, cobbles together the musings of Blairites great and small, from new MPs like Rachel Reeves up to and including the Prince of Darkness himself, Peter Mandelson. The key political line of these people is (supposedly) “the small state”, and contributors bend over backwards to put their views into some kind of intellectual tradition (RH Tawney comes up a lot).

Nonetheless, the headline proposals have a drearily familiar ring to them. Take a proposal from Alan Milburn, former health secretary and Tory collaborator, to force schools that fail three years running to conduct a referendum among parents on the subject of the school’s ownership. Even on the most superficial level, this is quite obviously backdoor privatisation in the Thatchero-Blairite mould.

Leaving it there is insufficient, however. Let us consider this demand in the context of all the guff about the small state. How is it going to work? The same way all such privatisations do - with bottomless government subsidies to private providers. Milburn also champions the idea, popular on the American libertarian right, of education vouchers - a parent would be able to take their child, as well as 150% of the cost of a state education, to an ‘alternative’ (ie, private or religious) school. This, of course, amounts to yet another public subsidy.

Milburn’s idiotic proposal is a good example because it at least superficially squares up with older right-libertarian arguments for a ‘small state’. That, however, can hardly be said for Caroline Flint’s proposal for “housing asbos” (anti-social behaviour orders), which would prevent evicted social housing tenants from living within five miles of their former home. This is just a melange of two of the most self-evidently counterproductive policies of New Labour, and a perfectly Blunkettesque lurch into right-populist demagogy.

Such are the times that even these reactionaries have to admit that the market does not necessarily solve every problem perfectly. Yet they are very much on message when it comes to the key economic issue of the day - Labour, argue old goblin Mandelson and bright young thing Tristram Hunt, should stop pussyfooting around on the matter of cuts, and say openly and clearly what would be cut and why.

“Our starting point must be the acceptance of this uncomfortable political reality that the public has accepted the government’s explanation of the financial crisis,” writes Hunt: that is, reckless spending by Labour has caused all the difficulties. There is no point trying to convince the population otherwise with boring things like graphs, because “politics is not an empirical social science: it is about people’s perceptions and emotions, their hopes and insecurities.” In other words, the people are fickle and dense, and must be manipulated; only high-flying historians like Tristram Hunt are concerned to base their perceptions on how things actually are.

There are two major significances to the Purple Book. Firstly, it is a reminder that the Blairites have not gone away. David Miliband and Peter Mandelson still lurk in the shadows (by all accounts, that is where Mandelson likes it best), stirring things up and looking forward to a future takeover.

Ed Miliband may have contributed the foreword, and indeed he is probably on board with many of its distasteful suggestions; yet this is a veiled attack on him from the right, for his indulgence of Blue Labour, for sneaking into ‘David’s job’ off the back of union votes, for his history as a Brownite ... It is another step in the protracted war of position between the two principal factions of the Labour right.

The distinction is a fine one, but significant. Blair’s political project was to liquidate the Labour Party as the Labour Party. He considered the breakdown of Lib-Lab politics - indeed, the party’s very foundation - to be a great step backwards for ‘progressives’. Brown and his epigones are pro-capitalist, rightwing undesirables, but they are tribally loyal to Labour.

As long as the forces pulling Labour apart are weaker than the ones holding it together, this is not a significant difference. However, we live in interesting times. The economy is headed for disaster (well, more disaster). George Osborne has no plan B, and his plan A - the austerity programme shared with much of the advanced capitalist world - is very visibly failing to restore economic growth in this country. Similar policies are failing more catastrophically in Greece and elsewhere. This is the stuff ‘national governments’ are made of - and the likes of Peter Mandelson and David Miliband will be queuing up to play the part of a Macdonald or Snowden. After all, Alan Milburn has already helped the government out on ‘social mobility’.

The other significance is a certain change in style from classic Blairism. These are the same odious policies we remember from the Blair era, but then they emerged fully formed from the offices of various technocratic polling gurus and spin doctors. Even very mild leftwing opposition to them was met with sneers about how out of touch the north-London granola set was with ‘real’ people’s ‘real’ opinions - which was another way of deferring to the technocrats, who, of course, had intimate knowledge of polling data and so on.

Now the likes of Mandelson feel the need to intellectually justify that project - a task made all the harder, given that the classic Blairite mix of bureaucratism, privatisation and authoritarianism makes sense only from a perspective of clinging onto power - and more importantly, bourgeois backing - at any cost. Nonetheless, it is a task they must attempt - the ‘purples’ are trying to put the knife into the ‘blues’, and the latter, however bizarre its mix of labour-movement pride and little-Englanderism may be, does rest on some kind of serious intellectual project. Maurice Glasman is not just another careerist policy wonk.

So, against all the odds, there is something encouraging about the appearance of this vile book - it at least testifies to the fact that the level of debate in the Labour Party is inching out of the apolitical-technocratic gutter. The ideas flying around the different factions in the party mainstream may be bunk, but at least they are ideas.

In a sense, they have to be - neither the Ed nor David Miliband factions have sufficient control over the Labour apparat to discipline the other in that manner, nor can they fight things out, as Brown and Blair often did, in Whitehall. The appearance of these fads testifies that Labour is beginning to open up; the question is how long it will take one faction or the other to weld the door shut again.

It is unfortunate, then, that nobody is using this space - such as it is - to argue for socialism. Purple and blue Labour alike advance criticisms of “free-market capitalism”, but in the former case it is merely the least convincing smokescreen in history, and in the latter a reactionary critique. The “ethical socialism” of Red Labour simply amounts to the same Keynesian sweet nothings familiar from decades of Labourite lack of imagination. (This programmatic timidity has in any case not stopped New Labour scaremongers from portraying Red Labour as a return to the ‘hard leftism’ of the 1980s.)

Substantially the same politics, without the tiresome liberal canards, are raised by the Labour Representation Committee and others. The public political profile maintained by Socialist Appeal is inherited wholesale from the Militant tradition of Trotskyoid left social democracy; in any case, they are more interested in building their sect than building a Marxist (or even more minimally socialist) opposition to the domination of the pro-capitalist right.

We should not let Labour’s uninterrupted history of treachery lead us to think that this was always the case. Factions in the Labour Party have frequently argued for different versions of a socialist transformation of society, from Marxist supporters of the early CPGB to reformist socialists of the Independent Labour Party. One could even consider the bureaucratic socialism of the Fabian Society under this general rubric.

Today, capitalism is all but falling down around our ears. Yet never before has there been such a paucity of lefts willing to argue for an alternative society.