The Demise of the Left
It's a campsite dear, not a movement.....
There's a vacuum where left-wing politics used to be, no ideology, no leaders, no big ideas. Well, what do you expect when a vacuum occurs.
Did you expect people in tents occupying the pavements. The 'intellectual' fraternity, those types who in their writing reference left-wing thinkers from the 60s and 70s, to assure us of their credentials, did not expect the Occupy Movement.
That is, they didn't expect it to be so vacuous. These deep thinkers are finding it hard to grasp what they describe as the serious ideological disarray represented by these Occupiers. They quote Felix Guattari, from his essay The Proliferation of Margins...., telling us it's just reflex, some kind of meme at work.
It's the Internet then, these Occupiers saw Tahrir Square, so without a thought and following no one, they set off for St Paul's and pitched their tents.
Another suggestion is that all these Occupiers, wearing their V for Vendetta, Guy Fawkes masks are just yearning for content, in a fantastical attempt to invent a purpose.
Someone once said 'nature abhors a vacuum', to that we might usefully add, so do intellectuals who will desperately spend every waking hour trying to fill it.
It might just be that the Occupy Movement is an exercise in pointlessness on a par with attempting to resuscitate the Euro - perhaps we are seeing the development of some kind of alternative new politics, where vacuity becomes the norm and we have no further use for people who talk of memes and reflexes.
Internal debates...
It may be some time before those who still consider the themselves on the Left of politics grasp how pointless traditional politics has become. Left-wing commentators continue their quest to discover what became of the Labour Party and how it morphed into New Labour
Owen Jones, on Labour List tells us....
"Some on the left offer a lazy critique of New Labour, effectively arguing that the Labour leadership swung to the right in the mid-1990s because a coterie of right-wingers (led by Tony Blair) made it that way. But New Labour was really the product of a whole range of factors: the rise of the New Right, the battering of the labour movement in the 80s, repeated electoral defeats producing massive disorientation and desperation, and the capitalist triumphalism that followed the end of the Cold War."
The mid-90s saw the end of Clause IV and its replacement by Blair's pop psychology about personal attainment. The end of Clause IV was a seminal moment. Its end enabled New Labour's aspiring managers and accountants to shift the Party's nominal focus away from the design of a society with social justice at its core to one where the individual took on the responsibility for their own circumstances, in which the Government's role would be limited to providing opportunity through social mobility to rise above the squalor.
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Clause IV (1918)
"To secure for the workers by hand or by brain the full fruits of their industry and the most equitable distribution thereof that may be possible upon the basis of the common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange, and the best obtainable system of popular administration and control of each industry or service."
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Interesting to note that there was nothing New about the New Right. The deregulation of business, dismantling the welfare state, privatization of nationalized industries and restructuring of the national workforce in order to increase flexibility in an increasingly global market just took the nation back two hundred years. Back to the time of Alexis de Tocqueville, who thought that equality was for the birds and that inequality was just perfect as an incentive for the poor.
A loss of pride
Lazy critiques aside, we need to go much further back than the 90's to discover when left-wing mainstream politics evaporated.
In 1983, with the election of Neil Kinnock as party leader, the Labour Party lost its pride, changed its identity and lost its right to claim any link with the achievements of the past. Re-branded under Kinnock, Labour had as much in common with the Labour Party of 1945 as Peter Mandelson did with his grandfather, Herbert Morrison.
From Kinnock through to Blair the plastic surgery was complete and by 1997 citizens had a new party to vote for. Gone the red flag, replaced by a red rose; gone Clause lV, replaced by psycho mumbo jumbo about self-realisation; gone the donkey jackets, replaced by mohair suits; gone the union money, replaced by cash for honours and gone the Militant agitators, replaced by the silence of the angora goats, unable to speak the word socialism ever again. The word socialism disappeared from Labour's manifestos after 1992.
Kinnock, Brown, Blair, and Mandelson, five star lunch guests with no ambition beyond self promotion. The re-branding was complete, gone the state socialist tag, replaced by more privatization, deregulation and the regurgitation of Thatcher's anti-social mantra "Heaven helps those who help themselves". Samuel Smiles 'Self-Help' (1859) was now bedtime reading for all the New Labour tory boys and girls.
Labour's 1983 manifesto sounded the death knell for conviction politics, one last attempt to take a principled stand on significant issues: the 37 page New Hope for Britain called for
unilateral nuclear disarmament, withdrawal from the European Economic Community, abolition of the House of Lords, and the re-nationalisation of recently de-nationalised industries like British Telecom, British Aerospace, and the British Shipbuilding Corporation.
Citizens overwhelmingly rejected Michael Foot's left-wing stance and the Labour Party became unrecognisable as the party of Nye Bevan. Henceforward Labour's politics was not about big ideas anymore, not about Utopias; it was about 'to do' lists compiled in reaction to one crisis or another.
Economic realities
To some extent Foot, elected as party leader in 1980, was trying to turn back a tide of change already forcing Labour to adapt to economic realities. Under Challaghan the Keynesians were clearing their desks, making way for the monetarists; Keynes had no answer to the external forces buffeting the British economy; the OPEC cartel and failing international competitiveness.
Internally, Challaghan's nerve was being tested by the continued policy of wage restraint, designed to combat rampant inflation. And the policy was working, by 1978 the inflation rate had been reduced to 7%, down from 23% two years earlier. The unions, however, had had enough of wage restraint and this led to major industrial conflict - to some extent laying the groundwork for Thatcher.
However, as far back as Wilson in 1969, we see Barbara Castle putting forward her answer to union power: In Place of Strife, an early Thatcher style attempt to curtail trade union power. In the event, Castle's bill never passed into law - until Thatcher took power. Also, in 1969, had you been a student of economics at Cambridge, you would have been treated to Sir Alan Walters, later Mrs Thatcher's top advisor, espousing the wonders of monetarism.
So, it is possible to trace the shift within Labour, at first towards the right, away from the big ideas of the past, and away from the compact between organised labour and the government. But throughout the Wilson and Challaghan years Labour were still engaged with the idea of improving the lives and working conditions of British citizens. After 1979, notwithstanding Foot's efforts to reverse the trend, the Labour party began to disappear, all connections with a past socialism, that introduced a free National Health Service, was lost.
Labour-Now
New Labour is no more. The Labour Party is no more. If those who earn their livings out of the party had any guts they would find themselves a new name. The name is only retained for the sake of consistency at election time.
Voters might be forgiven for being confused though, if Labour-Now is not New Labour and not Old Labour, what does it stand for - it certainly has nothing to do with left-wing politics because that doesn't exist anymore.
Ed Miliband has been talking much about what the Labour-Now stands for, what it believes, what its intentions are... And how much more do we know?
We know that Miliband supports the Tory cuts, supports their pay freeze on public sector workers and he refuses to talk about the future... until it gets here?
What does Labour-Now stand for? Who does the party represent? He vocalises the answer, "the squeezed middle"... should that be middle-class? No, Labour-Now doesn't use the old tags. The middle in question is not a class that's conscious of itself.
Who are the squeezed middle?
They are a sizeable income group, around 11 million adults, families, whose income is stagnating, and probably going backwards. State handouts, in the form of tax-credits has kept the wolf from the door but the cut-backs are making life difficult. This group is not saving, half have only a month's income to fall back on. This group work for a living but they are not seeing the benefits of their labour. According to the Resolution Foundation (another bunch of time wasters), incomes for middle earners have fallen by £720 over the past three years.
Why target the squeezed middle?
This group are the most unhappy and have the most to complain about. And this group are most likely to vote for a party who takes their plight seriously. Ed's constituency (the squeezed middle) might find it difficult to take him seriously, unless he is able grab the popular imagination with something new and innovative.
Even Ed's support for the squeezed middle is not new. At the party Conference of 2011, Ed told us he was his own man, not Blair and not Brown. And yet his support for the squeezed middle is straight off of the page of Gordan Brown's 2009 Conference speech:
"When markets falter and banks fail it's the jobs and the homes and the security of the squeezed middle that are hit the hardest."
The Problem of the Squeezed Middle.
Study the data and you'll discover that the term squeezed middle is just a speech writer's hat stand... Ed should keep his hat on because those he espouses and champions are not, as he supposes, a political grouping that Labour-Now can elicit support from as if it contained a ounce of class awareness... as Old-Labour would have done.
Labour-Now's political survival is in the balance, the unions are mighty upset with Ed's support for Tory cuts, the party's traditional support is vanishing just as the traditions of Old-Labour have already vanished.
A Pointless Conclusion
The plight of Labour-Now is desperate not solely because it lacks a constituency but more so because it lacks a vision.
What Labour-Now stands for is unknown, who it represents is a mystery, it all seems a bit pointless... having an opposition that doesn't oppose?
Perhaps Ed is more in touch with the political zeitgeist than some commentators suppose, least ways he's got a lot in common with the Occupiers.
