Thatcherism | ukwatch.net

Back to class

JamieSW — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 21:27:09 +0000

Class-determined inequality of opportunity has reared its terrible head once more in the British education system, an unforeseen effect of the expansion of higher education under New Labour. A survey of students graduating in 2006 showed that 40 per cent had not found any employment six months after graduating, 12 per cent were not in any kind of employment, education or training, and a further 22 per cent were working full-time in menial, non-graduate jobs such as waiting, bartending, data entry and even sex work (Higher Education at Work, DIUS, 2008).

Under New Labour, government rhetoric has shifted dramatically from a focus on providing ordinary people with a decent living, to the belief that people and their skills are quantifiable as ‘products and services’. A recent government report concluded that the current crisis in higher education can be reduced to the fact that: ‘The market won’t buy products and services that don’t suit its purposes. The current culture does not, in general, engender confidence in the markets in higher education’s ability to deliver effectively courses and services that bring clear, direct benefit to the employer and employee’ (Higher Education for the Workforce, DIUS, 2008).

Graduates, it seems, are now simply an industrial input whose value decreases or increases depending on their particular skill set. The government believes it has a socio-economic duty to provide ‘the market’ with the raw materials it requires, in the form of employees. It is hardly surprising that the concept of dignity in work has all but disappeared from contemporary British parlance, especially for young people entering the workplace.

A degree is not enough

The popular careers website prospects.ac.uk sets future graduates straight about exactly what three or four years of hard struggle and financial strain have won them: ‘A degree is not a guarantee of a good job. In selecting employees, employers will look at what else graduates have to offer, including their skills, work experience (providing desirable commercial awareness) and overall potential. Quite simply, a degree is not enough on its own.’

Final-year students are caught in a bind: their degrees are not yet fitting them out for appropriate employment in Britain’s emerging tertiary sector economy, leaving them to make up the deficit in training and knowledge by themselves – but they still need a degree to progress beyond junior level in most professions.

The current university skills crisis is plain to our political leaders. According to skills minister David Lammy: ‘Britain’s future is as a knowledge economy, creating high-value products and offering innovative services. Low and unskilled work won’t disappear, of course, but our competitiveness depends on a sophisticated workforce who are world-leaders in finance and IT, in engineering and the creative industries. The skills dimension to this new reality requires us to raise our game, and to operate differently … to ensure sustainable economic growth.’

Since higher education is no longer entirely state-funded, most students graduate with a great deal of debt – but the scale of that debt and the impact it makes on their future lives varies hugely with social class. While local education authority (LEA)-sponsored student loans are still low-interest and need only be repaid when the student is earning a decent wage, many students without subsidies from wealthy parents find themselves with overdrafts and ‘career development loans’ to pay off as well. This drives many students from poorer backgrounds into immediate low-level employment in an effort to assuage their creditors. These students, whatever their talents and drive, cannot afford to devote the extra funding and hours of free work (‘work experience’) needed to develop a graduate career, to enhance the skills their degree has given them, or to pursue postgraduate study.

Rhian Jones, 26, grew up in the former mining community of Tredegar, in south-east Wales. ‘Academic research is always what I’ve been best at,’ he says. ‘This led me to get a first from London, and I then went on to do two postgraduate degrees at Oxford, where I focused on popular protest in 19th-century Wales. In order to enable myself to go to Oxford, because I had no means of support or income other than working part-time, I took out a professional studies loan of £25,000. The loan covered my tuition and college fees over three years and in order to pay my rent and bills I worked six part-time jobs over that time.

‘If I hadn’t had to do that work,’ he continues, ‘I would have been able to spend far more time and energy on my research, which would have allowed me to gain the funding I so desperately needed. As it was, having failed to gain sufficient funding to complete a doctorate, I had to cut my degree short and immediately take up work to pay back the loan. Because my part-time employment had lacked a cohesive focus, the only jobs I could get were relatively low-paid.’

A premium on testicles

Hardworking female graduates could be forgiven for feeling themselves particularly worked over by an employment culture whose pretensions to educational meritocracy remain as hypocritical as they ever were. A survey found that the gender gap in earnings for recent graduates starts at 11 per cent and rises to 20 per cent by the time they are in their third jobs (Recent Changes in Intergenerational Mobility at Work, Sutton Trust, 2007). Women had lower average earnings than men in similar jobs and with similar qualifications, and were far less likely to use their academic qualifications to their fullest potential; only 30 per cent of female science and business graduates went on to gain jobs in the field using their degrees, compared to more than 90 per cent of men. The market buys those raw materials it considers of most economic value – and in the modern workplace a disturbing premium is still placed on the possession of testicles.

For a time, rapid economic growth did a little to kick the sand over the inequality of opportunity that was reasserting itself in higher education. More and more graduates were churned out across the country as higher education expanded to meet New Labour’s target of 50 per cent in university by 2010, but most of these graduates were able to find lowly jobs to cover the bills, even if these jobs were traditionally ‘non-graduate’. Economic expansion and heavy public sector borrowing meant that firms across the tertiary sector could afford to take on and train graduates, and new jobs were relatively easily had in metropolitan areas, to which school and college leavers accordingly flocked.

The ‘credit crunch’ (a concept it’s impossible to pronounce without baring the teeth) has put a stop to that. For the classes of 2007, 2008 and 2009, the glaring inequalities and inefficiencies of the graduate employment world in which 43 per cent of our young people are now involved are becoming all too clear.

Corporate agenda

The function of a degree has perceptibly shifted from a rigorous course of academic and intellectual training to a necessary ticket into a certain class of ‘graduate’ professions – many of which would not have required a degree even ten years ago. As this shift has occurred, colleges, departments and university careers services have aggressively pursued a corporate agenda.

In 1989, Matthew Salusbury observed in Thatcherism Goes to College that ‘Bristol University’s history department was proud of the number of bankers and financial service personnel they had produced, using the fact to justify their continued existence. They would not have recognised the argument that a life in the stock market was as much a waste of a history degree as a lifetime’s unemployment.’ Two decades on, it is the received wisdom that, with a history degree from Bristol, you should have your sights set on the City. How the course makes one more qualified for a career in finance than three years working as a trainee bookkeeper in your hometown, is a question rarely asked. A degree is now a mandatory entrance ticket for higher-paying jobs in most employment sectors, with graduates being expected to find and finance their own targeted training outside study hours.

The onus on graduates to use their own initiative to train themselves through work experience, part-time jobs and postgraduate and vocational courses would be far more acceptable were it not for the regressive nature of student debt. The student loans system and the removal of universal grants have created what is in effect a graduate tax that hits the poor and aspirational far harder than the sons and daughters of the rich.

Simple privilege

Let’s look at this picture from the other side. I’m no slacker. I was raised in the sure knowledge that if you believe in your dreams, trust your heart and follow your star, you will still get beaten every time by the kids who worked harder than you. I was lucky enough to win a place at, and eventually a degree from, an ‘elite’ university. But what has made a difference to my career since is not talent, nor motivation, nor even my degree: it is simple privilege.

At 18, I inherited a sum of money from my grandmother, and that money has meant that I’ve been able to put in hours working for free, holding down only part-time paid work and concentrating on gaining extra qualifications and work experience, while many of my more talented and deserving classmates still find themselves paying off debts in jobs way below their personal and educational capabilities. As the possession of a degree becomes less and less of a social leveller, the privileges and opportunities conferred by wealth continue to differentiate graduates entering the job market, entrenching the very social inequalities that Labour’s notion of higher education for all was meant to erase.

The dialectics of progress are changing in the UK today, and our education system has not yet adapted itself for the transition to an economy based on tertiary-sector employment. Our higher education machine does not deliver the skills and training needed for the 43 per cent of young people who now graduate from university to enter the workforce with ease. However, the aggressive expansion of higher education under late Thatcherism and New Labour has meant that a majority of employers looking for ‘skills’ still require a degree as an entrance ticket to ‘knowledge-based’ careers – leaving graduates with no choice but to find some way of making up the deficit themselves.

The apparatus of post-Thatcherite market ‘meritocracy’ has destroyed the vestiges of social democracy that allowed a minority of our parents’ generation to overstep the economic barriers of their class. It is now harder than ever for new graduates to escape the dictates of their socio-economic background, as a degree loses what value it had as a social leveller.

Alex Salmond and Thatcherism

Alex Doherty — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 13:00:19 +0000

Sir Angus Grossart is to head the Scottish Futures Trust (SFT), which will be responsible for attracting private capital bids for public infrastructure projects. His appointment reveals a great deal about the social and political character of the Scottish National Party (SNP) administration in Edinburgh.

Grossart is the founder, chairman and majority shareholder of investment bank Noble Grossart, the former vice chair of the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) and the director of numerous companies in the UK, US and Canada. Described by the Times as the “doyen of Edinburgh’s financial community,” he is an owner of a sixteenth century castle and holds a place on the Sunday Times rich list. His nephew, Hamish, is the deputy chair of Scottish-based oil and gas exploration group Cairn Energy.

While in opposition, the SNP under Alex Salmond made great play of being opposed to the Public Private Partnerships/Public Finance Initiatives (PPP/PFI)—a means of backdoor privatisation used by successive Conservative and Labour governments to transform social and infrastructure spending into lucrative and long-term revenue streams for private capital.

However, the Scottish Futures Trust is simply a repackaging of PPP/PFI in line with the needs of the financial sector in Scotland. The Scottish government is unable to issue its own bonds, the SNP’s preference, but the SFT will seek to create consortia of local authorities, private operators and the SFT to sell bonds for specific projects along with other means of finance.

An example of the sort of return being generated by PFIs can be seen in the scheme to rebuild Hairmyres Hospital, near Glasgow. For an outlay of £8.4 million, building company Kier and PPP investment specialist Innisfree expect a return of £145.2 million over 30 years. Innisfree has £715 million worth of investments in more than £8 billion worth of PFI deals in 18 hospitals, 17 education projects, and 5 prison and court projects in the UK.

By contrast, the local health authority, NHS Lanarkshire, made a loss of £15.6 million last year, and was forced to sell £20 million of land to clear its debts.

Grossart’s appointment, hailed in the media as a “coup,” represents a seal of approval from the Scottish financial elite for both the SFT and the SNP administration.

Numerous finance houses and banks are headquartered in Edinburgh. Grossart’s job will be to fix deals with the big operators such as RBS, one of the world’s largest banks. RBS has its own PPP arm, Royal Bank Project Investments Ltd. Douglas Fraser, political editor of the Glasgow Herald, noted approvingly that “the challenge is now for Sir Angus to make the anti-profiteering rhetoric into an attractive package for profit-seeking financiers.”

The SNP’s subservience to the financial establishment is not exactly new. Salmond was an oil economist at RBS for years before becoming SNP leader. The SFT deal comes only a few months after the SNP government attempted to push through a £1 billion golf resort for magnate Donald Trump in defiance of local planning laws and public opposition. The SNP’s central demand is that an independent Scotland should be able to emulate Ireland as a low-tax investment platform.

Yet for many years, the SNP has sought to dress this pro-business agenda up in social democratic garb—a presentation that was only possible due to the right-wing lurch of Labour and the services rendered to the nationalists by the middle class radical groups such as the Scottish Socialist Party, Tommy Sheridan’s Solidarity Movement and the Scottish Greens. All these groups have claimed that an independent Scotland is the means through which socialism can be realised long-term and that an independent capitalist Scotland under the SNP is a first step in that direction that must be supported without precondition.

With the Labour government imploding, Salmond believes that the SNP will be the main beneficiary in Scotland. Consequently, he has become more open in speaking about the real aims of the Scottish administration.

In a recent interview with the Total Politics magazine, Iain Dale asked Salmond, “Ten years ago, the Conservatives were seen as a terrible enemy by the SNP, and they saw you as very left-wing. It seems to me that you have tried to change that and create a very big tent for the SNP.”

Salmond replied, “I suppose I have tried to bring the SNP into the mainstream of Scotland. We have a very competitive economic agenda. Many business people have warmed towards the SNP. We need a competitive edge, a competitive advantage—get on with it, get things done, speed up decision making, reduce bureaucracy. The SNP has a strong social conscience, which is very Scottish in itself. One of the reasons Scotland didn’t take to Lady Thatcher was because of that. We didn’t mind the economic side so much. But we didn’t like the social side at all.”

The SNP—along with much of the political establishment in Scotland—has always sought to distance itself from Thatcherism and its perspective of unbridled free market capitalism and assaults on workers’ social gains.

“Thatcherism” has been portrayed as a peculiarly “English” affair, at odds with what is routinely portrayed as the more just, socially aware “Scottish” national consensus.

Salmond’s incautious admission that he “didn’t mind the economic side” of Thatcherism “so much” blew the gaffe on such claims. Notwithstanding his absurd attempt to separate Tory economic policy from its social consequences, his statement exposed the degree to which the fundamentals of Thatcherism—the gutting of social provision for the personal enrichment of a fabulously wealthy elite—has been embraced across the entire official political spectrum. That is why the next morning, Salmond took the unprecedented step for a First Minister of phoning a radio talk show to claim that he had been misinterpreted.

Salmond has attempted to recover political ground by unveiling the SNP’s proposals for a local income tax to replace the current council tax. Levied by local authorities, the council tax is based on property values. The housing price bubble over the last years—coupled with cuts on social spending—has meant that this tax falls disproportionately harshest on working people.

The SNP has said it intends to abolish the council tax entirely and replace it with an income tax levied at three pence in the pound. It argues that this will save the average family between £350 and £535 a year and has challenged the other parties to veto the measure.

The proposal has to be seen in the context of the growing moves in all the major parties and the business establishment towards some form of greater financial independence for Scotland, so-called fiscal autonomy.

The intended income tax is not a local tax as such. It is a tax set centrally in Edinburgh, which is then parcelled out locally, reducing local authorities to mere conduits for state funding. More fundamentally, the SNP has made clear that the purpose of the new tax is to further ratchet up tensions between Edinburgh and London, in order to serve its strategic goal of independence.

Some £2.5 billion is currently raised under the present council tax, but the SNP’s proposal will bring in just £1.6 billion—a £900 million shortfall. Almost half of this is to be recouped through unspecified savings. But the SNP is also demanding that Scotland continue to receive some £400 million from UK central government that is currently paid in benefits to those too poor to finance the council tax in full—even though the tax will be abolished.

In other words, the SNP’s “redistributive” tax is dependent to a great extent on the UK government and taxes raised on working people in England and Wales. Salmond calculates that this is a win-win situation for his administration. If London agrees, the SNP will reap the benefits in terms of strengthening its popularity. And should London refuse, the SNP believes it will lend credibility to its demands for complete independence in Scotland and even help stoke up anti-Scottish sentiment south of the border.

In the same Total Politics interview, Salmond made clear his preference for a bonfire of national vanities. Asked if he agreed that there “is a resurgence of an acceptable form of English nationalism,” he replied, “I have huge sympathy with the political argument. As you know, by choice, SNP MPs have abstained from every vote on English legislation that does not have an immediate Scottish consequence. If you’re asking me should people in England be able to run their own health service or education system, my answer is yes. They should be able to do it without the bossy interference of Scots Labour MPs…. Because I believe in independence for Scotland, I also believe in independence for England.”

Over the recent period, the Conservative Party—still concentrated predominantly in southern England—has begun to flirt with English nationalism. Sure enough, the right-wing press in England made hay with allegations that with the income tax reform, Scotland was again being subsidised by English taxpayers. In response, Prime Minister Gordon Brown signalled that the Labour government is prepared to concede greater fiscal autonomy to Scotland. In a speech to Scottish business leaders earlier this month, he said there was a “problem” with the fact that the Scottish parliament was not more accountable for its spending.

Searching for the Left

eddie — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 18:25:00 +0000

Faced with a Labour government which is resolutely set on ensconcing itself as a centre right nationalist party, it is time for the left to start making new connections.

Compared with its counterparts in Continental Europe, the organised left in Britain has been unusually stable. Founded in the late nineteenth century, twenty or thirty years before the British Labour Party, most European socialist parties underwent at least three great convulsions in the twentieth century: they were split by the Bolshevik Revolution, driven underground by fascist dictators and reinvented after the collapse of Communism. In this sense these parties have a history written into them, which acknowledges that the world can change and that political formations are not immutable. Even now, the map of the European left is shifting, with realignments under way in both Germany and Italy. Britain, however, remains an exception to the European norm. Here the left has revolved around a single political formation, the Labour Party, which has been largely untouched by any of the convulsions, partly because of its late formation and partly out of simple contingency.

The mirror image to Labour’s stable position on the left is that of the Conservatives on the right. For almost a century, Great Britain has been a two-party state in which power alternates between left and right. Indeed, if one substitutes Liberal for Labour, this system has dominated British politics since the mists of time. The first-past-the-post voting system has reduced other parties to electoral impotence, whilst the ‘broad church’ posture of the two main parties has neutralised, if not absorbed, the extremes on either side.

The current national political scene might, superficially, suggest that this two-party system remains in full flower. However, this is not the case. The high point of two-party dominance was in 1951 when Labour and Conservatives between them polled 98 per cent of a popular vote of over 80 per cent of the electorate. Since then there has been a slow but steady erosion of their position. In 1966, the Labour/Conservative vote totalled 90 per cent of the total, taking 97.8 per cent of the seats on a 72.9 per cent turnout, whilst comparable figures in 2005 were 67.5 per cent, 85 per cent and 61.4 per cent. Two stark conclusions follow. First, it is now possible for a party to obtain a clear parliamentary majority with the votes of little more than one-fifth of the adult population. Second, the gap between the aggregate share of the vote of the two main parties and their share of seats won has grown significantly. The stability of the two-party system has become precarious.

In a parallel development, the broad-church nature of both parties has also diminished. The Labour Party shows this more obviously, with its socialist left component reduced in both numbers and influence to humiliating obscurity, but the Conservative Party has also become much narrower in its political spectrum, both to the left (where Labour has hoovered up any spare ‘wets’) and to the right, where both the BNP and UKIP have taken over. Again the effect is to destabilise the two-party system.

The great political achievement of the Blair/Brown regime has been to impose the policies of neo-liberal Thatcherism on the Labour Party whilst retaining electoral power.(1) I want to take this as read and to focus on the current political problem faced by the new leader, Gordon Brown: how to manage the shift in political position required to cement Labour as the dominant electoral force in Britain. In particular, I want to consider three ways in which the political base of Labour has moved, and the implications of this for the left. These concern, respectively, the diminished strength of British trade unions, the decline of the socialist tradition and the hollowing out of the British state.

The shifting context for Brown

Historically, trade unions have played a more prominent role in the British labour movement than in Continental Europe, where their support has been welcome, but not decisive, for the parties of the left. They have performed two distinct functions: as a politicising agent within the working class, and as a prop for the Labour Party leadership, which, for most of its history, has been to the right of most of its members. These roles have often been contradictory, but until the last two decades most of the left, both inside and outside the Labour Party, has argued that the ruling right wing could be defeated if grass roots trade union members were properly mobilised. In the mid-1960s, this was a realistic prospect and was, indeed, pursued with some success; forty years on, it has vanished. The unions are, numerically, much diminished. Their previous grip on large parts of the private sector has all but disappeared and continues to decline, whilst their membership is ageing. Union density is now amongst the lowest in Europe. This is a long-term trend which began in the Thatcher years, but has continued unabated throughout the whole period since 1997.

That this is a tragedy for British workers is undoubted. However, the political implications of this long-term decline have yet to be assimilated – at least on the left, for it is clear that Brown and Blair had long taken them on board. Nowadays, the unions do little more than service their dwindling band of members and their support for Labour’s leaders is largely undiminished, unchecked by countervailing pressure from below. Hence, any left project which involves attempting to shift the unions to the left has effectively disappeared. If anything, the political issue has reversed; the left now needs to find ways to assist unions to recover something of their previous vigour.

The second shift in context is more subtle but, in its way, more important. In the mid-1960s, the Labour left held on to a broad moral and intellectual hegemony both inside the Party and also outside in the wider left. This ascendancy was based around ‘socialism’ as it was then understood. In Eley’s words:

For roughly a century between the 1860s and the 1960s, the socialist tradition exercised a long-lasting hegemony over the Left’s effective presence … If the Left was always larger than socialism…socialist parties also remained at their indispensable core.(2)

Eley writes of the European left. In Britain, much of the membership of the Labour Party plus that of the Communist Party was the essential socialist core of that broader left.

In 2008, this central hegemony of socialism as the normal language of the left and as a sheet-anchor on the ultimate practice of Labour’s leaders has disintegrated.
Again in Eley’s words:

Socialist languages of politics, socialist models of organising the economy, socialist projections of the good society, socialist ideas in general have all been catastrophically delegitimized … Socialist ideas now have a more embattled and less legitimate place in the public discourse than one might ever have anticipated even two decades before (ibid).

I am not arguing that this is a good thing; I am simply stating a fact about the place which socialism now has in political discourse even on the left. It has no pull, even a residual one, on the Labour leadership, who are now evidently free to pursue whatever policy seems most fi tting their own designs; and it has little attraction within a wider activist left. Yet, and this is something that becomes startlingly obvious as one moves around the various public debates centred on the Labour Party, the left within that party as well as various fragments of the old socialist groups seem largely oblivious to this fact.

The third shift in context is the overall hollowing out of the British state and of the two-party system which has sustained it for so long. In the mid-1960s, Britain was a unitary state governed within the framework of a two-party system, historically largely dominated by the Conservatives, but with Labour the only credible and legitimate opposition and, within Labour, a socialist left which could visualise itself as being a government-in-waiting. This system has almost fallen apart. Scotland and Wales have started down paths of a legal national identity, whose future route is uncertain, but which has already given their nationalist parties a leading role. In England, a slow edging towards a more pluralist political structure has given a third party an increasingly prominent role, despite the obvious unfairness of the electoral system. All this has taken place against a background of growing disillusion with the political system as a whole, refl ected in the decline in electoral turnout.

The destruction of the socialist left inside the Labour Party, together with the effective demise of its socialist outriders, has left the British left leaderless and without any coherent political strategy. However, Gordon Brown, as he searches for the political base necessary for an extended period in power, also has serious political problems, despite his success as co-author of the project to shift the policies of Labour into the new centre ground of the neo-liberal hegemony.

The first is that the British state is slowly falling apart, with the effective separation of Northern Ireland, the slow-motion departure of Scotland and a slower, though still palpable, process in Wales. It remains uncertain just how these three national situations will evolve. None is near completion but each has acquired a momentum which will now be hard to slow, though it may well stop short of full independence. The formation of coalition governments where once there was effective single-party domination is one of the milestones along the line, a result of the various kinds of proportional representation which now exists in these quasi-states. This by itself offers a serious, if as yet muffled, challenge to the first-past-the-post system which now so distorts Westminster elections.

So far, Gordon Brown’s response has been to try to muster political support around the idea of ‘Britishness’, one of those weasel words whose real and surface meanings diverge. In this case, ‘British’ actually means English, a none-too-well concealed drive to give Labour the majority in England which it will increasingly need, but so far lacks, as the Celtic nations move towards greater autonomy. That he should adopt direct from the BNP the slogan ‘British jobs for British workers’ is evidence for just how seriously this issue of Englishness is taken by the Brown cabal.

The second problem is that the drop in electoral turnout, combined with the steady advance of third-party voting, threatens to become a crisis of political legitimacy if it continues much further. It should be emphasised that both these trends, and in particular the former, have been a feature of the Blair/Brown regime, notwithstanding claims that in 1997 it embodied the popular will.

The third problem is more complex but no less serious. Brown and Blair drove New Labour to adopt all the clothes of neo-liberal capitalism, so that now Brown’s central political position is essentially that of a right-centre (English) nationalist party. However, this terrain is already occupied by a previous incumbent who is unwilling to vacate it and still loosely ‘owns’ it. To appreciate this it is only necessary to note how often Labour is said to have outmanoeuvred the Conservatives by occupying ‘their’ territory. In other words, Labour is still seen as a party which has taken power, rather like a cuckoo, by stealing another’s nest. (David Cameron is now attempting to emphasise this by his refrain that Brown simply ‘steals’ his policies.)

The result is a political system which has shifted from apparent stability to one perpetually unstable, as potential voters swing from one centre-right nationalist grouping to the other, depending on which manages to push the right buttons at the right moment, whilst others simply turn away from voting on the entirely rational basis that there is no difference between the only two parties which can achieve power. The extraordinary shift in the opinion polls in October 2007, apparently because of one small policy claim on inheritance tax, is a vivid reminder of this. Neither to the left nor to the right is there a real alternative to this duopoly – at least not in England – though there have been lurches in specifi c constituencies towards both extremes (Respect, UKIP and the BNP), as well as towards independents like Richard Taylor in Wyre Forest, which suggest that there is some repressed desire to find one. The Liberal Democrats also waver around the centre, uncertain which way to swing as they seek to offer alternatives to both sides, sometimes taking away their supporters only to find them turning back as the specific issue that attracted them, such as opposition to the Iraq war, fades.

Brown’s central problem is that New Labour achieved power in 1997 essentially by offering a new take on Thatcherism. In this it had considerable success. However, sharing a house with another tenant means that, ultimately, the other partner will have their day. If politics becomes simply a struggle between the Ins and the Outs in which, inevitably, the labels are reversed at regular intervals, then New Labour is doomed to defeat; the only issue is the precise timetable. On this inexorable law Brown is now hung. His only way out is to claim legitimacy over the premises now shared with Conservatives and to move them out, something that requires them either to relinquish it or to be erased from it. In this endeavour he has two key advantages: fi rst, he has power, that is he has the ability to offer real political office and honour; and second, he leads a party which is, apparently, unsplittable, whatever policies are espoused. Ironically, given Labour’s history, the Conservatives are now more vulnerable in this respect because the internal structure of the party, whilst hardly democratic, does offer much more room than Labour for disaffected groups to organise into factions, and there are a number of issues – notably Europe, but also others on social policy and the environment – over which the factions are bitterly divided. The electoral fright occasioned by the rather absurd UKIP shows up this fragility. This factor may prove decisive, as the open disputes within the Conservatives in summer 2007 showed, even if they superfi cially united under the potential threat of a snap election. Brown’s great disadvantage is, of course, events – in particular, the rapid deterioration of the economy or any support for the USA over a new war, this time in Iran.

In first, tentative steps, Brown has begun to lay out his stall. In policy terms he will stay rock-solid on the nationalist centre-right whilst, politically, beginning to offer a home to disaffected or possibly just bored members of both the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats. He will play tunes on the theme of being the big-tent party and hope that, at a suitably opportune moment, he can turn over the national unity card, split the Tories by filching a chunk of their MPs and possibly some of their leadership, and humiliate the Liberal Democrats by doing the same thing with them. Until the moment comes, he will continue to appoint non-party business leaders such as Digby Jones as junior ministers, and assorted Tories and Lib Dems in the hitherto unknown constitutional role of ‘government adviser’.

This will be a hard trick to carry off. If successful, it may come to be called in future political science textbooks an inverse Ramsay Mac. On the other hand, it could fail. Either way, it is a manoeuvre that Brown is almost forced to try as it offers a solution to all three of the political problems noted above. A centre party reorganised on such lines would almost certainly retain political legitimacy by securing a large share of the popular vote – at least at its first general election – and could thus fend off the tricky question of electoral reform. It would obtain such a margin most securely in England and would allow Scotland and Wales and their beleaguered Labour Parties to sail off to whatever destination beckoned, defusing the national question at least until specific and unavoidable demands for further national autonomy were tabled. But the one issue which Brown almost certainly ignores is how the left in his own party would react to such a manoeuvre, however adroitly carried through. The Labour leadership election debacle showed just bereft is the Labour left of any leader who might threaten defection. However, the political imperatives of Brown’s position may yet open up new possibilities for the wider left.

Where is the left?

The process of political hollowing-out discussed above, combined with the catastrophic, if partially self-inflicted, defeats of the 1970s and 1980s, have produced a left in Britain which is scattered, fractious and unable even to recognise itself except by largely meaningless labels of affiliation. The key, though apparently paradoxical, question is just what constitutes the left and where it can be found. It is, in other words, a process of self-discovery. There are many over-lapping answers to the former question of course but the following may serve:
The left encompasses those who believe:

that, in general, collective responses to general social, environmental and economic issues are to be preferred to individual ones;

that, in particular, market mechanisms are undesirable ways of providing public services;

that these public services include education, health, welfare, policing and national security, as well as some other areas, which might include some natural utility and transport monopolies and some aspects of housing;

that health and education should be free to all without discrimination;

that practical and functioning forms of democracy should exist in all areas of social activity, including the economy;

that forms of ownership other than private are preferable in many sectors of the economy;

that all citizens are entitled to receive a basic level of financial support from the state if they are without personal resources;

and that equality is a public good in its own right.

There is plenty of scope for the argument and dispute traditional on the left over these, and they could be expanded, particularly at the international level, but they encompass what most would think of as forming the broad left.

It should be clear that this left is wider than what, historically, was called the socialist left, whose core belief was that society operated under a general social and economic system called capitalism, which could and should be replaced by an alternative system called socialism, both systems being essentially defined by ownership. It needs to be recognised that a significant part of the left, as defined above, is resistant to the very idea of overarching systems and does not recognise any neat dichotomy into capitalist and socialist.

It also needs emphasising that much of the left now lives inside political areas which are by no means ‘owned’ by the left. There is left participation in areas such as nationalism, the environment, feminism, the peace movement, and a whole range of international issues such as resistance to Israeli oppression of Palestinians or the war in Iraq, as well as dozens of local and regional initiatives, but none of these are wholly of the left. The environmental movement is a key example. Although the left has a prominent role in the Green Party, it is by no means the only grouping there, whilst figures such as Zac Goldsmith have perfectly sustainable environmental credentials whilst being, politically, on the right.

So where does this left now reside? Perhaps a division into five, overlapping sectors is helpful. First, there is a core of left-wingers within the remaining membership of the Labour Party, including some elected Labour representatives. Second, there is a left fraction of a number of other parties including the three nationalist parties, the Green Party and, yes, the Liberal Democrats and which will also include some of their elected representatives. Third, there are the members of those small socialist groups which still retain an explicit attachment to the Communist or Trotskyist parties of the past. Fourth, there is a body of individuals who have been members of the Labour Party as well as those Communist or Trotskyist parties, who retain left ideals but have detached themselves from active national politics. Fifth, and probably the most numerous, there is a body of individuals who are active in some form of political action, both local and global, and who regard existing political formations at least with scepticism and often with downright hostility. Some of these actions are descendants of the local campaigns once organised by Labour and Communist members but now largely detached from any organised political body. Others are part of wider and looser assemblies such as the anti-globalisation alliance.

Just how many people could be assembled under these headings is impossible to know; a personal guess would be around a quarter of a million activists, with the majority in the last two categories. In electoral terms, a left platform based upon the above principles might be able to get ten to fifteen per cent of votes cast in most constituencies. But numbers are, at least for the moment, largely irrelevant. The task faced on the left is how to fashion some kind of network from these disparate groups, in which they can acknowledge each other and engage in debate about political strategy, without attempting to denigrate the choices that have led to individual places of residence, but with the objective of developing some discernible impact on practical politics. This is not a new project. It first surfaced forty years ago in the May Day Manifesto group and re-emerged nearly thirty years ago in Rowbotham, Segal and Wainwright’s vision of a left Beyond the Fragments; and there were efforts in the 1990s to form some kind of red-green alliance which effectively amounted to a new kind of left unity. All failed, though not without some initial success. Why should any new endeavour succeed now?

The negative answer to this is that there is really no alternative. Efforts to work through the Labour Party have failed whilst the left outside the Labour Party has fragmented in all directions without any clear purpose. The positive answer has to be that Britain is approaching a general political conjuncture which, as the previous analysis argues, is unstable and likely to give rise to seismic movement as the great, colliding, tectonic plates of Labour and Conservative, moving over rather than confronting each other, fi nally give rise to sudden shifts. In this sense, the Brown project, which I described above as being essentially forced, may be precisely the political opportunity the left needs. The fi nal, explicit centring of Labour, the moment when the cuckoo tries to change into a blackbird, is the time when a clear left formation could emerge, just as a clear right formation may also develop as the
Conservatives split up.

The problem with this is that, although the broad idea of such a shift may be accepted, its timing and scope remain in the hands of others, in particular a notoriously secretive and manipulative other. Perhaps the key is that the next general election is likely to be both close and chaotic; chaotic in the sense that it will have a great variety of dynamic strands running through it whose interaction is very hard to forecast. Many on the left voted against Labour in 2005 on an anti-war basis and some of these have permanently changed their affiliation to other parties. Others will return to voting Labour on the age-hold grounds of keeping the Tories out. Still others will never have left Labour though retaining grave doubts over the New Labour project. Others have already voted for other parties such as the Greens or Respect. In Scotland and Wales, the formation of nationalist governments, albeit on a coalition or minority basis, means that old voting patterns are being dissolved, with many on the left choosing to fight their corner inside the nationalist parties. These are just the confusions and dilemmas existing on the left. The more Brown pursues his big-tent theme, opening up to all and sundry on the right, the more confusion will reign there too.

Organised and systematic tactical voting based upon simple criteria for being ‘on the left’ could have a swift impact in such circumstances. There is no possibility that these disparate elements can be reconciled into any common voting at a national level at least at the next election. However there does exist a chance that the electoral dilemma can be recognised and a common approach worked through locally in some cases, whilst the very process of recognition could be a major step on the road of reconciliation.

Where to begin? Perhaps the best approach is to change the metaphor used to describe left political action, which has traditionally been dominated by the quasi-Darwinian slogan that from acorns do big oaks grow – though only one acorn succeeds, crushing out all the other seedlings from failed acorns. Instead let us turn to the metaphor of rain-making by seeding clouds with silver iodide particles, no one of which is decisive but in which all are necessary. The left exists in Britain as a large amorphous cloud without measure and without purpose. Just what would happen if it could all shift in one direction is hard to know but it would certainly be spectacular. We should take as our alternative slogan that from many drops a flood can come.

This essay is a summary of a longer appraisal by David Purdy and Michael Prior on the definition and historical role of the British left, which can be seen at hegemonics.co.uk

Notes

1. A full analysis of this process can be found in Feelbad Britain, available at
hegemonics.co.uk.

2. G. Eley, forthcoming.

3. Ibid.