THERE IS TALK in the press, following the Labour Party’s defeat in a general election it ought to have won, about a ‘struggle’ for the party leadership. Candidates are said to be ‘embittered’ at a ‘stitch-up’ and one of them, Bryan Gould, is reported to have ‘unleashed his pent-up fury’. Such passion between those whose political differences are about as wide as this page provides the final post-election Mogadon.
Some people apparently believe this is ‘politics’. Swathes of newspaper are devoted to it and to similar institutional games, whose rules insist that journalists, politicians and assorted ‘experts’ promote each other’s agendas. This is known as the ‘mainstream’.
Anything that intrudes from outside this ‘mainstream’ is likely to be blocked or suppressed. Take the sacred cow of ‘defence’. To my knowledge, only one newspaper commentator (Ian Aitken) pointed out that John Smith’s tax proposals could have been funded from Britain’s annual military budget of £24 billion, without dismantling the country’s defences or frightening away voters. Aitken’s revelation was published after the election.
The election ‘image’ over which Labour’s general secretary agonised last week was, in fact, just right. The party looked and sounded conservative in every way. The language was right, too. ‘Modernising’ and ‘choice’ and other Tory euphemisms so limited the national political debate that the perversity of their impact was minimal. Moreover, during the election campaign, it was widely agreed that ‘convergence’ had taken place between the principal policies of the parties. These policies reaffirmed the elevation of profit above people in almost all areas of life and derided the notion of common obligation as heresy. Labour differed from the official Conservatives only in tone. There was no suggestion that a Labour government would take away from the politicised bureaucracy its incentives to undermine the premises upon which a modest civilisation is based.
For example, it was made clear that pay beds in National Health Service hospitals were no longer a Labour concern; and there was no commitment to repeal the NHS and Community Care Act (1990) whose ‘reforms’ are privatisation by another name. Labour’s manifesto referred to ‘incentives to improve performance’, which is the language of the Tories. In education, Labour said it would ‘modernise’, not throw out, the hated national curriculum and that schools would be ‘free to manage their day to day budgets’, which the government has already decreed and which had driven out teachers and brought schools close to bankruptcy.
The success of Labour’s emergence as a conservative party has been much lauded. To date, this success has been expressed not at the polls, but in stirring victories over dissenters within the party. Something called ‘electability’, which Labour’s leading conservatives maintained would be the party’s reward for its conversion, has not materialised. Not surprisingly, the voters prefer the original, true blue to a paler shade.
Those who still mourn Labour’s defeat might consider their degree of disillusionment had Labour won. I recommend they cast an eye over the experience of the ‘modernised’ Australian Labor Party, which, in many ways, provides a model. Within days of taking office in 1983, Labor embraced a version of the City, known locally as ‘the big end of town’. Its complete conversion took about six months. Thereafter the Hawke Government oversaw the most dramatic redistribution of wealth in the nation’s history (from the wage-earning majority to a new group of rich spivs), the highest unemployment since 1930, the greatest number of bankruptcies since records were kept and the establishment of the most monopolised press in the democratic world.
Because Labour in this country has abandoned the policies that distinguished it, good political sense dictates that it, too, should be abandoned by those who last April gave it ‘one last chance’. This is not negativism. It is Labour that is negative. It is Labour that has given up trying to persuade, while moulding itself to what the opinion polls tell it. It is Labour that declares in effect that society is static and people’s consciousness cannot be raised. The party’s claim on many people’s loyalty is no longer tenable; for it is no longer a great mass movement, but a force of reaction that muffles any tentative suggestion of mass resistance. It is almost as if, by its very institutional aspirations, Labour exists to blunt people’s radical instincts.
There is a striking parallel with America in the 1950s. The great unspoken among the Labour leadership is its terror of the media. For all its sport with the Windsor family and the ‘morals’ of Tory ministers, the media lie in wait for Labour to deviate from its role as a reconstituted SDP. In America forty years ago, the media’s reaction to Franklin Roosevelt’s limited social reforms – which introduced measures hitherto unheard of in a capitalist society: graduated income tax, wealth tax, public housing and a welfare state – was almost uniform. The equivalent reforms in Britain – those of the Attlee Government – produced a more delayed, though similar, reaction, in the 1980s and today.
Both the Roosevelt and Attlee ‘new deals’ were at the core of an historic contract that allowed the powerless to consent to be governed. Of course, the deception that radical change was on the way was smothered in what became known in Britain as ‘consensus’, and which made genuine, popular democracy seem possible. In America in the 1950s, those who supported the legacy of the Roosevelt reforms were ostracised as dogmatists, sometimes as ‘communists’. Civil servants, teachers, broadcasters, trade unionists and others were cast aside. The media – newspapers and radio – became the means of hijacking ‘freedom’ on behalf of those who would suppress it.
This is broadly the pattern of events in Britain today. T. S. Eliot’s truth, that ‘the historical truth involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence’, has no place among the ‘modernists’ of the Labour Party. For them, there is no struggle to continue, no gains to be defended. Like Henry Ford, they believe history is ‘bunk’.
Fortunately, Henry Ford was wrong. And by letting Labour go its conservative way, and by ending the ambivalence and guilt that ties many to Labour, the great constituency of political activism in Britain is released to build upon the historic successes it has already achieved outside Parliament.
The point is people should not lose heart, or be defensive. It was the peace movement in Britain and Germany that made universal the principle that the nuclear arms race could be stopped only by bold unilateral acts. Mikhail Gorbachev embraced the principle. That Labour should lack the political and moral imagination to make capital of such an achievement, even to disavow it, says much about its new values. As we are entering a period of re-armament, the same movement is needed urgently.
Another popular force outside Parliament and the Labour Party was that which defeated the poll tax. In the field of criminal justice, a small, informed, vociferous coalition exposed a corrupt system. Some 800 miscarriages of justice have been brought to the surface. Independent journalists and lawyers, MPs and tenacious public committees have done this. The state honoured Terry Waite and the Beirut hostages for their undoubted courage in captivity, while the resistance of Mark Braithwaite, Engin Raghip, the Maguires and the Birmingham Six – victims closer to home – went unrecognised. They, and those who fought for them, ought to be among our heroes.
Addressing other issues of little interest to the ‘mainstream’ – poverty and race attacks – is a movement comprising those who have demonstrated their power to be heard, despite the media’s echo chamber. One thinks of battles waged with the analytical weaponry of the Child Poverty Action Group, the Runnymede Trust and the Campaign Against Racism and Fascism.
It is true that many people remain isolated and immobilised by the lack of a mass opposition. But as social Darwinism becomes government policy, resistance will grow. Nothing is surer. The riots in Los Angeles were distant gunfire in Britain. Before the next millennium, the noise will grow louder here and all over the world. Shortly after he left the Labour Party recently, the veteran black socialist Ben Bousquet said, ‘Ideas don’t die. What happens is that people corrupt the ideas, but sooner or later those people go and we have to start to rebuild all over again.’
June 1992 – February 1993