Dear John
8th September 2009

Let’s not call this exchange “Can Labour win,” because we both know it won’t. Soon I will be liberated from the weary responsibility of treating a well-meaning but tired government fairly, and you from being disappointed by it. Unconstrained, we can make for the sunny uplands of opposition, where everything seems possible and nothing in fact is. Except thought.

So let’s call this, “Thoughts about the future of the left” and here are some of mine. But first let me try and cut through a predictable misreading of recent history, so that we aren’t basing our discussion on false premises. The government just departing was not in thrall to some evil thing called neoliberalism. The idea that Tony Blair or Gordon Brown, with their overwhelming emphasis on state-funded services and the role of government, were mad neoliberals was always a leftist (or occasionally a rightist) fantasy. Many of the things they tried to do are still the objectives of any good progressive.

But this is 2009, not 1997. In a recent issue of the New Statesman, political theorist Stuart White set out a useful taxonomy of progressives. He discerned four strains of reform thinking: left communitarianism, left republicanism, centre republicanism and right communitarianism. The latter consists of Phillip Blond-type “red Tories.” I see you as suspended between the first two—epitomised by the increasingly eccentric Neal Lawson and the more staid David Marquand. I’m sure you’ll put me right.

I found myself mostly defined by White’s description of centre republicanism, with its emphasis on dispersal of power, enhancing fairness and maintaining freedom, while embracing modernity. I mean by that a position which doesn’t regret (as communitarians do) the revolutions in technology, communication and mobility that have brought the world together, but understands that the consequences have to be managed.

The better world does require that we abolish unjustifiable inequalities, gross unfairness and barriers to human fulfilment. We can agree that progress cannot be measured entirely or even mostly by GDP. Of the alternative ways of gauging the just society I am most convinced by Amartya Sen’s idea of capability (see James Purnell’s article, p42)—a less restrictive concept either than equality of income or happiness, since it takes account of the different ways in which people want to lead their lives.

In the Sen tradition, German political scientist Wolfgang Merkel lays out five priorities for a just society: preventing poverty; enhancing education and training; labour market inclusion; maintaining social security, and more just distribution of wealth and incomes. Measures to address climate change and gender justice would fit into this last principle.
What is critical here is that justice crosses national borders. The new world must be open. We must ask ourselves what is fair or just about exporting unemployment to poorer countries, or denying any right to improvement to people because they are foreign born.

Where Labour (and everyone else) has failed most spectacularly is in political engagement. This situation deserves the description of “crisis” and it partly emerges from a failure to notice how democracy has been transformed. In The Life and Death of Democracy (Simon & Schuster) John Keane argues that representative democracy has evolved into what he calls “monitory” democracy (in which hundreds, if not thousands, of formal and informal bodies and procedures monitor, restrict, comment on and affect the operation of power). This should be the beginning of a new discussion. Reforms aimed at lowering the barrier between citizen and participation are only a part of how we need to change. A complete revolution in the everyday language of politics is also required, so politicians can be honest with voters, instead of feeling they have to dissemble and hide.

A word now about the snares and delusions that can abet our debate. The communitarian assault on individualism and consumerism (and, often, on internationalism) leads nowhere, except to the right. A hankering for downshifted, make-your-own-entertainment communities, served by 1950s-style public services, is pointless. It is as absurd as imagining that you can have social justice without economic growth. I am not saying that we couldn’t seek to emphasise the values of kindness and caring over egotism—we could. But village life circa 1932? Nope.

If this sounds abstract, let me explain. It means agreeing that demographic shifts and wide dispersal of money and knowledge are fundamental realities, not trends to be resisted. It rejects as right-wing (or unjust and unprogressive) policies such as cutting inheritance tax, the Liberal Democrat pledge to save money by reducing planned participation in higher education (the polar opposite of what we should be doing), the abolition of property tax (which would favour the old and wealthy over the young) or Frank Field’s increasingly troubling anti-immigrant campaign.

People from other parties might sign up for much of this prospectus. But it is in the Labour party where the next struggle over such ideas will take place. Or so we hope.

Yours
David

***

Dear David
10th September 2009

First, a word about our apparently departing government being in thrall to neoliberalism. Things have been more complicated than that—but if people on my side complain about new Labour’s kowtowing to the free-market right, we have good reason. One of the articles of faith for the centre-left was the apparently reasonable idea—partly rooted in Tony Crosland’s model of social democracy—that the stoking of economic growth would provide the resources for transformative social programmes. But this was turned into a mish-mash of beliefs that only entrenched the changes wrought by Margaret Thatcher. High finance was left alone, Britain became something close to a tax haven, and there was no arguing with “flexible” labour markets. Among the upshots is a sobering fact: that a Labour government leaves office with the inequality gap wider than when it took power.

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