The Labour right and the media

Often, far-left outfits do have something prescient to contribute.

“To reassure, to show that it can be trusted, the Labour right must uphold the interests of capital and therefore attack and disappoint its own base. That includes constant attacks on internal democracy, albeit in the name of democracy, and imposing more and more bureaucratic controls over ranks and file MPs, councillors and members. As a result the Labour Party tends to atrophy at the base and therefore the right becomes ever more dependent on the capitalist media. A vicious circle.”

Yep…

Mandelson, which Mandelson?

Cabinet minister Lord Mandelson described it as a “Blair plus” manifesto and denied Mr Brown had had to be converted to his predecessor’s public service reforms: “He invented New Labour with Tony Blair and myself and others.” -12 April 2010

Peter Mandelson has waded into the Labour leadership contest by criticising Ed Miliband for producing a “crowd-pleasing Guardianista” general election manifesto - 19 September 2010

I’m not sure which himself his Lordship prefers, but I think both of them will succeed in pushing people towards Ed Miliband. He’s worked wonders for Ken Livingstone’s campaign already.

It’s precisely tired, overexposed and evidently confused figures like Mr Mandelson we need to see a bit less of in the Labour Party. Clear the decks, start fresh. Move on.

UPDATE: Former Compass Youth Chair, poet and renaissance man David Floyd points out via facebook that:

“What Peter Mandelson amusingly calls a ‘crowd-pleasing Guardianista’ manifesto did not gain the support of The Guardian at the last general election. They backed the Liberal Democrats.”

I would also add that as well as failing to please the Guardian, it also failed to please the crowd, which by definition is rather larger than the Graun’s readership…

Ed Miliband is New Labour – but I’ll vote for him

I wasn’t born into Labour. I chose it. Because I am committed to its ideals and ultimate ends.

For my time in the party I have self-defined as being on the left. I grew up under a Blair government, the furthest right any Labour government has ever been. War. Privatisation. Having a pop at the single mums. Fighting the unions. All that stuff.

Things that characterised Labour’s right-wing in the 1980s seem to be issues of common sense to me. Apart from a chunk of stuff related to party democracy, I would have pretty much agreed with Blair when he was running for leader. Even now, I find that I primarily identify with the mainstream values of many of our international sister parties, hence the design of this blog.

The point I’m making is that I’m increasingly convinced that Labour’s established form is to the right of me and in a phase of particular intolerance, and that as a result I have been shaped into being more bolshy than I otherwise necessarily would have been at my age. That can annoy people I know, but on a certain level… well, discontent gets stuff changed, doesn’t it?

A Blairite friend of mine assures me that in any other age I would have been on the party right. Perhaps, a bit. I tend to agree with Kinnock and Hattersley.

So I suppose I ended up on the left party for the usual reasons, but mostly because the party is to the right of mainstream international social democratic politics. A sort of attempt at a kind of ‘third way’ thing, if you get what I mean. None of that wet nonsense here.

So here is what I don’t get: according to certain folks, Ed Miliband is a dangerous Trotskyist. Now, immediately, that gets me thinking that David Miliband’s campaign is probably too narrow. I certainly don’t see where he has reached out to us on the left, although admittedly he hasn’t really committed to anything right wing either. He’s mostly just uncommitted. Vague. This seems to be the new was forward for Blair protegés, because Oona King is at it too.

The bit that really concerns me is this:

I support Ed Miliband as my first preference, and that has taken me weeks and weeks to decide. Even now I feel fraudulent as my super-hero alter-ego, Captain Enthusiasm.

Basically, despite the possibility that in other ages I would be on the right or at least the centre of the party, he still feels a fair way to the right of me, while Abbott feels a good bit to the left.

He has served for a long time in a New Labour government, and has always been an adherent of that creed, albeit a ‘left-Brownite’ one. I simply don’t accept that he is some kind of ‘appeaser of the left’. But he is the only one who has made a pitch to a part of the party that isn’t actually where he has most closely identified with. I still don’t believe that backing Ed will get a lot of things done that I would like to see. But I think he could begin to rehabilitate our brand and our culture, all of which is too statist and authoritarian.

For me, that all basically makes him of Labour’s soft right, whilst accepting, and pluralist. It also makes him a revisionist – there is everything right with being able to acknowledge your mistakes, change your tack, and move on. This was true of Kinnock, early Blair, early Brown (to an extent), and can equally be true of Ed.

The real thing that David’s lot are concerned about is not whether they have a candidate with an open mind. I can’t speak for the candidate, but his very narrowly drawn backers are mostly interested in selecting someone with  closed one.

Ed Miliband has tremendous ability to unite the party across the whole spectrum, Blairite to some parts of the hard left. He has the ability to do it with policies and approaches that are new. this in turn has the potential to create a really dynamic campaigning and media force, as well as one that broadly does the right thing.

This doesn’t make him a rabid Communist liability, unless you’re viewing the whole thing from the position of John Hutton. It makes him someone with a rational head and a bit of presentability who can take us from New Labour as it was to the next stage, Labour as it can be. The squeal goes up that he has union backing – a lot of those unions are solid, right-wing unions, the anchor of the Labour Party throughout its history. The other candidates have failed to adequately pitch to democratically elected union leaderships, and that really isn’t Ed Miliband’s problem to deal with.

You all read the manifesto. It was hardly Chomsky, was it? If anything, I agree with Ed Balls in that I thought it was a bit far to the right on public spending. But I would say that, eh?

All in all, despite their bizarre levels of factionalism, this makes me wish we were more like the Australian Labor Party. I have often departed from this, given the conditions, but we could really all do more to get on, and as a result, even more to ‘get on with it’.

Morton’s fork – Labour’s non-choice

Logic fans out there will be familiar with the concept of ‘Morton’s fork‘, that is to say, a choice between equally unpleasant alternatives.

That, in my view, is the broad situation of the Labour Party; though it is one that can be overcome.

Two key bits of blogging successively paint the problem, and the solution. The first is Gerry Hassan’s contribution on OurKingdom, which in my view, basically sums up the dilemma. I respect Gerry greatly. His book ‘After Blair‘ pointed out some pretty sensible ways forward for the left. But in my view, his piece is both sin and salvation.

I find the start of it intellectually offensive. Hassan’s language about ‘comfort zones’ and such like is reminiscent of the Blairism he declares by the end that he would like to vanquish.

The tone of it is along the same lines as that recently taken by Compass, which led to my leaving the organisation. My gripe there was about tactical voting for Liberal Democrats, but I saw it to be symptomatic of a wider logical problem for an organisation seeking to represent, alongside others, Labour’s centre-left.

The problem is utter abandonment of class and of materialism. These are an important context within which to view social reforms that do not initially appear to have wider financial or political implications, and they are left behind when someone calls for votes for right-wing liberals, more so than any call for votes for Blairites. In the same way, Hassan’s piece is littered with easy liberal truisms, priorities in complete ignorance of material reality. Millions of jobs being lost outside.

When lampooning Labour for retreating to ‘old comfort zones’, Hassan writes that the party is:

“viewing itself in opposition to what it calls a ‘Tory Government’ and opposing public spending cuts which it is seeing as the return of Thatcherism.”

Gerry, do you get the Parliament Channel?

How could this be anything other than a) a Tory government, especially on the biggest issues of the day, i.e. the economy, and b) a return to, if not a multiplication of Thatcherism? All of it is simple, concrete fact.

Perhaps Gerry’s objection to this logic is that the Lib Dems are in government. Quite why this bit of ubiquitous party-political trinketry is supposed to matter to the people whose lives are affected by policy changes, I don’t really know.

Surely any social democratic party, or party of organised Labour (and I would like Labour to be both) should oppose these voluntary impositions on the part of the neoliberals with every weapon at its disposal?

Seeing itself as an opposition to this mass callousness is actually very welcome, and proves that somewhere inside, the heart of some kind of Labour Party still beats.

Gerry mentions the excesses of New Labour:

The curtain can be drawn on some of its worst excesses: Iraq, 90 days detention, ID cards and the DNA database.

Well, quite. But once again, the major issue of the day is the economy. Bigger cuts to spending proposed than ever before. A gaping maw of well toothed inequality. An economy of wide joblessness and despair.

I like neither, but I would carry a million ID cards for these people to have jobs, not as a question of false dichotomy, but one of real political priority. One is clearly more important than the other, yet the objections Gerry raises to New Labour could have been thought up in a bubble made of 24 hour news and Comment is Free pieces, floating free and independent of the real impending suffering in the decaying estates below.

I may be reading too much into this, but it smacks of an approach that is basically disconnected, confused and irresponsible.

These are all problems.

But what John McTernan says below essentially sums up every single thing that has been wrong about the Labour Party for the last decade.I’m not going to get into the details, for there exists for too much ribald neanderthalism for anyone to ever fisk with propriety. But it is nothing short of a disgrace, something I’m sure Mr McTernan would be very pleased to hear people like me say.

Which is why they must be removed.

As Gerry correctly points out,

“This experience was similar in its feel and tone to meeting a vulgar Maoism or Stalinism of the hard right: a revolutionary politics of fervour which captures the inner psyche and mindset of New Labour.

In an analogy that I am sure would find favour with McTernan, New Labour were a force of counter-revolutionaries who have found their utopia ill-conceived and unworkable; it is time to completely defeat their discredited ideas and begin developing the post-New Labour era.”

That’s more like it Gerry!

Now, here’s the dilemma. I want to do this. Further, I believe that most of these people are pig obstinate ’stop the world’ types. We can’t look only to defeating their ideas. We need to defeat them internally, with proper politics. As far as I am concerned, they are Conservative Party entryists, on contested political turf (i.e. the Labour Party).

However, if we replace political relics like John McTernan with people who think along the lines laid out by Gerry, or indeed the leadership of Compass, in it’s current mood, where our political outlook is founded on the priorities of Lib Dem sympathising Guardian readers rather than the people losing their jobs, we might as well pack up and go home.

ID cards, internment, the lot. It’s all bad. It should change.

But for god’s sake, we need a social democracy that is actually rooted in communities and actively responds to the biggest contemporary concerns within them – not one that thinks change begins with palling up people high within various political parties, doing a bit of lobbying, writing a CiF article and sending a few emails. That may be what the ‘professional left’ wants to do, and it has great skills to offer, for all its secondary foibles and mental insulation.

But if you want to create change, look to the primary concerns of those who are disadvantaged by the status quo. Right now, it starts at the Job Centre.

Surely there must be more than a choice between lightweight liberal niceness and John McTernan style madness? If not, one needs to be built.

So where is the place for people who think like us? And on that solution I mentioned, who is the candidate?

* An affidavit – I don’t believe that Blairites should be kicked out of the Labour Party, or any of that nonsense. But they (and their ‘ultra’ wing in particular) have been limiting the influence of all other strands of Labour thought for years, and I think it’s time we saw a better balance, and a more pluralist, fluid space.

Given their level of unified uncompromising obstinacy among ultras, this means the proportion of them in senior positions must be reduced before such conditions are reached.