In 1998, I left the New Labour Party, more out of exhaustion than anything else. For two or three years, I had been at the forefront of the drive to modernise the Party through promoting internal party democracy, first as Deputy Chair and Founding Member of Labour Reform, and then as Coordinator of the Grassroots Alliance which took four out of the six seats on the National Executive Committee which were made available to the ordinary membership.
The Grassroots Alliance was supported by the Left of the Party but was not intrinsically Left since its only platform was one of improved accountability and democracy. Many of its activists and supporters were moderates and even Party ‘right-wingers’.
Whatever the truth, the Alliance was deemed a threat to the established order and a campaign of virulent opposition to it was mounted out of all proportion to its importance or size. Its success in winning the very few seats available was all the more remarkable and indicative of internal discontent at the Party’s centralisation and general approach to policy-making.
Freed of a tribal loyalty that went back three or four generations and (personally) some twenty-five years, I decided to explore my new freedom by meeting with, and entering into dialogue with, activists from other traditions than my own – not only on the Left but amongst Greens, amongst all classes of the euro-sceptical tendency and right across to the far Right. I wanted to see if I could find out how they ticked, where our differences really lay and whether there were any signs of a new politics for the country.
Nearly three years of exploration have brought me back to the Labour Party. There are no new politics out there. There were many lessons learnt and many interesting new friends were made but the most fruitful dialogue appeared to be between the democratic socialist Left and the democratic libertarian Right.
Both were anti-Marxist (in the Leninist sense) and anti-racist, both were equally concerned about liberty, accountability, transparency and radical democracy; and there was a surprising consonance of class origin – many libertarian democrats were of working class origin and were in revolt against the authoritarian aspects of trades unionism and Old Labour.
The following letter to Dr. Sean Gabb of the Libertarian Alliance takes up the story at the very end – at that point where it became clear that dialogue could go no further.
Dear Sean,
I was sincerely disappointed that ‘conversation’ between the different traditions was left to a surprisingly small group of free-thinkers on both sides. This conversation was, within its own frame of reference, very fruitful. One of the results has been an implicit and constructive co-operation on at least two issues: grass roots dialogue and potential mobilisation in the event of a Euro Referendum (which will clearly continue); and a growing shared libertarian critique of assumptions that social and cultural identity is fixed.
This latter led to a consequent respect on the Left for certain ‘ecological’ traditions and on the Right for ‘difference’ (both attitudes well within a shared libertarian tradition).
As we see with Nader and Buchanan-McCain in the US, the conduct of the New World Order and an elite top-down corporatist model of rule by an unaccountable professional political class are also shared concerns of both the radical Left and the radical Right – worldwide.
Unfortunately, the influence of revolutionary Marxism on one side and quasi-racist neo-populism (in Europe) on the other creates serious barriers to any dialogue that moves from the conversational to the organisational. There are still Left activists whose analysis is based on the tradition of Plekhanov, Lenin and Trotsky; and there are still Rightists who take Schmitt and de Benoist as a starting point but draw conclusions so illiberal that any self-respecting libertarian democratic Rightist should be scared.
Part of the problem is that politics is very much a minority interest (quite reasonably) and that most of those involved have fairly inflexible attitudes to the many ways in which their core values might be expressed. I know that I and, say, the Democracy Movement and, say, certain reactionary ‘ethnicist English’ activists and, say, certain anti-globalist Gramscian Marxists and, say, the activists of the Fourth International have very different core values.
However, I can envisage ways in which all but the ‘ethnicists’ and the ‘Trots’ might have co-operated on common ground and agreed to continue the fight over the application of principle in other areas. For example, anti-elitism, radical democracy, community responsibility for its own affairs, all seemed fair to bind activists rather than create difference.
The area of difference would have to remain the issues of redistribution and economic management. From the Left, some of the edge (though by no means all) of the latter issue is being taken off by the shift in the balance of power within the Party back towards redistribution.
In short, there was a great deal of progress on mutual understanding and respect (and this remains) but, at the end of the day, neither network could or would do more than talk and socialise. There was no organisational impetus to create a grass roots operation which might be adequately funded and mobilised. There was no journal in which the dialogue might be maintained more formally.
The principal conversationalists were either bound by lack of time or by their roles within particular organisations. Members of one tradition, with exceptions, would seek to be anonymous in the environment of the other – as in the various Euro-resistance events. In addition, the ‘vanguard’ were individuals who carried their troops up to a point but, in their heart of hearts, knew that they could not carry them ‘over the top’.
And time in politics is not a luxury we ever have.
For example, there is a very vigorous tradition of democratic dissent in the Labour Party and this has been rather cast out into the cold over the last three years. That period and not later was the time to strike.
It is now more likely that New Labour will begin to respond to dissenter concerns, starting with the Prescott-Brown initiated debate about regional democratic government, acceptance of the need for a proper debate about Europe, signs that ‘excluded’ individuals are to be welcomed back into areas of influence, the rise of a new generation of urban-based and regionally-based politicians, increasing disenchantment at the very top with big business’s role in the near-corporatist model of 1997, and the relative weakening of ‘Blairism’ (as opposed to New Labourism) by scandal and the fall of Mandelson.
Equally important, the Trot element has decided to go its own way into organisations like the Socialist Alliance so that any alternative Left Party is not going to be ‘Naderite’ (Red/Green) but atavistic urban Marxist and dominated by ‘reactionary’ and sectarian interests. In short, the disillusioned democratic libertarian socialist tradition has little option but to return to a New Labour fold that sets fair to accommodate its concerns over time – albeit in part because no non-Tory alternative vehicle exists or is likely to exist in order to accept it.
Placing the opportunistic Liberal Democrats to one side, we now glance at the Tory conundrum. We see not only a complete busted flush politically but one which has become a spoiler for any ‘transvaluation of values’ in politics. It is like a dead-weight on political free thought, unable, in its three-year window of opportunity, to out-flank New Labour with a national welfare model and fully caught in the time warp of the period 1983 to 1992.
The Conservative Party has not recognised that sufficient of the electorate did not reject it because of scandal but because the Thatcherite model of society was unbalanced – the collapse of rail, tube, health, educational, cultural and social infrastructure is widely recognised to be the flip-side of right-wing economic revolutionism and New Labour cannot and should not be blamed unless it fails to do something about it all over the next decade.
The Tory Party would have to reject not the free market side (which Gordon Brown has absorbed) but the a-social side of the Thatcher Revolution to become electable – and its activists will not allow this to happen. From this point of view, Europe is a sideshow.
Clearly, Tory free-thinkers are frustrated as each and every populist movement of revolt – countryside alliance, hunters, hauliers, euro-sceptics – has given up on the Party, rejected it and moderated to accommodate itself to the political reality of liberal-left political hegemony.
In each case, the protest has been powerful, the Government remained rhetorically firm, the threat of street violence has receded and then a Middle Way has emerged of national accommodation. The Prime Minister’s speech castigating the supermarkets will (I believe) be regarded as central when the history of this period has been written: for the first time, the PM has overtly placed the nation before a specific corporate special interest with which he had been allied.
The Tory Party has sought to capture the European issue exclusively and failed. It has tried to make life more difficult for Left Euro-sceptics and failed. As a result, those who believe in something greater than mere Party in itself (such as yourself and myself and our friends and networks on both sides of the political divide) have seen no future in the Tory Party as repository of any value other than mere short term advantage for a professional political class that is largely cynical and metropolitan. At least New Labour, even if we disagree with it, is ideologically coherent.
Since you and your associates are determined to recapture your party for your values and our ilk feel that our values may well be respected if we are patient and hard-working on our side through normal political procedures, then we foresee a period of utter turmoil for the Conservative Party and every reason to hold the line and extend it in what would be set fair to be a Party of Government for some four to eight years.
In short, I deeply regret that dialogue could not be turned into a peculiarly English and tolerant form of welfarist and libertarian national populism but the time for radical change has past.
I hope that the dialogue across tribal lines will continue since there remain common concerns on many issues – and I now count as personal friends many democratic right-wingers alongside democratic left-wingers – but recapturing our respective parties for our core values now becomes more important than any futile attempt to replace them.
Despite our common views on some matters (and those of our networks), at the end of the day I am a democratic socialist prepared to undertake moderate redistribution in compassionate concern for the deprived (though I include all victims of globalisation such as farmers and hauliers) in the national interest – and so New Labour beckons me home.