Jeremy Gilbert | ukwatch.net

After New Labour

eddie — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 16:54:44 +0000

The credit crunch is a salutory reminder of two things: the weakness of governments and the power of governments. Governments failed to predict, prevent or prepare for this crisis; but they have also shown that they can, after all, make massive interventions in the globalised economy when they want to. Will this lead to great democratic and social reforms as the depression of the 1930s did? At the moment, it seems unlikely.

The key difference between today’s situation and the aftermath of the 1929 crash is the absence of countervailing forces to finance capital. Contrast this with the middle decades of the last century, when the threat of communism, the power of organised labour, and the strength and autonomy of municipal governments all posed serious challenges to the power of banks and corporations, making it possible for governments to implement the very high levels of regulation and socialisation typical of welfare capitalism. Today, globalisation and the difficulty of effective labour organisation leave governments of the left in a much-weakened position.

Despite this, the great Fabian fantasy – the dream of benign and omniscient government re-ordering social relationships from the centre of administrative power – maintains a grip on the imagination of both left and centre-left which is crippling in its consequences. On the one hand, New Labour tries and fails to solve social problems from the centre. On the other hand, its radical critics have consistently and correctly pointed to New Labour’s enthusiastic embrace of most of the neoliberal programme, but they also rarely address the broader question of the global political context and the constraints that it imposes. For example: can anyone really doubt that if New Labour had attempted to resist the international imperative towards privatisation of public services, as many wish they had, then the press and the City would have turned on them savagely, turfing them out of office after a single term?

The point is this: if we want a democratic future, then “what policies should government enact?” is almost always the wrong question to ask. The question for anyone interested in a progressive route out of the crisis is: “what alternative sources of power should government be trying to build up, to fill the vacuum left by the financial institutions which have ruled the world for the past 30 years?”

The right has often understood better how to think this way. The most brilliant strategic move by any government in living memory was Thatcher’s sell-off of council houses. The effect was to turn a generation of former Labour voters into small-time property speculators, creating a massive source of pressure on future governments to continue acting in a Thatcherite way. So even while real wages were shrinking, debt was spiralling and working-hours climbed ever-upwards, governments have been forced to pursue policy objectives (easy credit, high asset prices) which in the long-term only benefit the real capitalists.

New Labour has never had an equivalent strategy. It could have helped the unions to reinvent and renew themselves for the 21st century, instead of pushing hard to remove protections from workers across Europe: by now a revived labour movement would be a powerful ally in the face of recession and Tory revival. It could have thought strategically about how to encourage the development of a democratic media sector in the world of web 2.0: instead it has never ceased to cower before Murdoch.

Instead of allowing the PFI industry to erode the democratic accountability of public-service provision, it could have helped to rebuild local government as an ally in the effort to regulate capitalism. After New Labour, this is the path which any potential progressive government worth the name will have to follow.

“After New Labour”, the second debate in the “Who owns the progressive future?” series, organised by Comment is free & Soundings journal, will take place in London at Kings Place on November 3 at 7pm. Guardian readers can obtain tickets at a special rate of £5.75 by phoning Kings Place box office on 0844 264 0321 and quoting “Guardian reader offer”. For full details click here.

Striking a Chord: from Milibland to Johnson Land

Alex Doherty — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 10:16:51 +0000

What was extraordinary about the commentary surrounding David Milliband’s short, bland Guardian piece a couple of weeks ago was how little was made of its sheer banality. Beyond vague evocations of the need for change, his prescriptions were so resolutely non-specific that they could have been interpreted as justifying any policy programme from the wholesale privatisation of the NHS to the nationalisation of all major financial institutions. But what was depressing was not the age-old sight of a young and ambitious politician generating generic rhetoric in an effort to play to all sides of an argument, but the sight of commentators as intelligent as Sunder Katwala completely failing to call his bluff on it.

However, the content of Milliband’s statement does tell us something about the wider political formation. The fact is that any politician in the ‘developed’ world must make a predictable set of noises today. Whatever part of the political spectrum they hail from, they must offer to do something about the combined sense of political disenfranchisement and economic insecurity which any national citizenry must feel in a globalised economy; they must address the sense of a ‘loss of community’ which is so profound and so widespread, and yet impossible to diagnose within the terms of liberal political discourse; they must indicate that they know that something really has to be done about the environment. This is why David Cameron in 2008 sounds so much like Tony Blair in 1997. If your political position obliges you to acknowledge the various things which most humans inevitably find discomfiting about living with neoliberal capitalism, but without ever acknowledging that it is neoliberal capitalism which produces their discomfort, then there is not much else you can say (unless you plan to start blaming immigrants, the ungodly, or non-nuclear families). It seems very unlikely that any contender for the Labour leadership – least of all David Milliband – is going to do any different.

But still: the issue has been raised, so let’s have a think about it. Would changing Labour’s leader make any difference to anything? Could any of the touted candidates help, in however small a way, to shift the terms a little bit, in such a direction as to contribute to some eventual bigger change in the political landscape? Certainly not at the level of explicit policy or strategy. None of them have ever shown anything like the capacity to offer a coherent analysis of the crisis of political democracy and the catastrophic social consequences of neoliberalism, never mind developing or endorsing a policy programme which responds to these endemic issues. John Cruddas stands out as an exception, and although his potential candidacy is only for the deputy leadership, the quality of his political commentary in recent years (e.g. Towards a Progressive Immigration Policy) should be enough to make us pause and reflect upon what the Cruddas-Johnson ‘dream ticket’ might actually produce if were to become a real possibility.

Quantum Politics

So the issue is Alan Johnson. But let’s be clear what this means. The issue is not Johnson the man, or Johnson the political theorist or even Johnson the minister. The issue is Johnson the potential Labour leader, and there is no point in denying that the first job of a political leader in Britain in 2008 is to connect with voters through the medium of television. A tiny proportion of the electorate is actually swayed in any way by the perceived televisual personality of a party leader, but all the evidence suggests that is precisely those voters – middle income, middle England – in marginal constituencies, who are the only voters who really matter in a UK general election, who are swayed by such issues. Let’s be clearer still. When I say ‘swayed’, I do not mean ‘duped’. Rather, I mean that such voters make up their minds on the basis of a complex set of factors which are not easily quantified or rationalised, and hence tend to be mistrusted by political scientists (or their students, as most political journalists have been at one time), dismissed as ‘amorphous’, ‘irrational’, ‘emotional’.

The language of liberal political theory is quite incapable of grasping the reality of the complex cultural and social resonances between different groups and individuals which produce political identifications and decisions in a context like postmodern Britain, and this is pretty much the only language which the Anglo-Saxon political classes – journalists and politicians alike – ever get taught (just go look at the curriculum for an Oxford PPE degree or a Kennedy School programme). Hence they are generally incapable of grasping the complexity of those cultural resonances which political showmen like Blair can understand intuitively and the occasional political genius – Thatcher, for example – can figure out for themselves. Hence their habitual resort to the most unimaginative technique for trying to map such currents of emotion and sensation: the focus group.

It is perhaps no accident that Thatcher was a chemist by training: the logics of molecular matter are closer to the real processes of aggregation, disaggregation, stabilisation and dissolution which give rise to political identifications than are the rational calculations of liberal mythology (this is one of the lasting insights of the great French radical, Félix Guattari).

Contemporary politics is a quantum phenomenon, but mainstream political thought is stuck with Newtonian preconceptions, falsely imagining its basic units to be self-contained little atoms which bounce around in a vacuum, or else members of clearly defined groups which act together all the time. If that analogy is too confusing, then try thinking of politics like music. Ordinary English already has a phrase to capture the reality which I am trying to pin down: a politician must ‘strike a chord’ with her constituency. This is different from saying that she must look exactly like them or persuade them to think exactly as she does. Rather, she must offer something which is in harmony with the aspirations and self-images and daily experiences of voters. Harmony is not unity, but a sympathetic, non-discordant vibration between two distinct but compatible wavelengths. The politician need not be an object of identification or adoration, but must indicate, somewhere in the distance, a point of potential convergence, some sense that she is going in a direction which will not create obstacles to the voters’ ability to travel in the direction that they want to go in. This is not necessarily – although it could be – the same thing as offering herself as a competent manager or an intellectual heavyweight. It must often involve the politician presenting themselves as someone who is not so unlike the voter as to be entirely alien, but they need not be identical, and sometimes their differences can be inspiring rather than frightening. Above all, it must involve the politician convincing the voter that their desires are either shared, or mutually compatible. This is what Brown has so signally failed to do, and what we must ask is if Johnson could do.

Does this all sound far-fetched? Then reflect that not only was Thatcher a chemist: Tony Blair was an aspiring rock musician rather than a diligent scholar of political ‘science’ during his time at university, while John Major was the child of a music-hall artist and never went to university. They all understood something that the bright boys from the policy unit have never been able to get their heads around.

For while it all may seem very abstract, I think that this approach can help us to understand the strange parabola of the Brown premiership. Brown came into office with a cacophony of mixed signals, explicitly promising to continue and intensify the Blair project, while clearly implying that he had other intentions. He skilfully rode the long wave of anti-Blair feeling – which had never really died down once Blair had hitched his fortunes to Bush’s – and did much to encourage the general sense that he was a figure whose moral purpose would orient the country in a different direction to that in which had been driven by the exigencies of consumer capitalism. It is easy to forget now, but Brown was popular even with Southern English voters until his policy agenda crystallised to the point that it became apparent that it would, indeed, be ultra-Blairite. It may or may not be true that Brown’s heart is social democratic while his head his astutely pragmatic, but either way, this turn of events caused his public persona – previously always somewhat vague – to come into focus in a particular way, and it was a way that the public did not like. Either Brown was a coward – ultimately too scared of the CBI and Rupert Murdoch to follow through on his promise to change course and seek consent for such a change at the promised 2007 election – or he was a snake, having deliberately undermined Blair for years while actually having no alternative policy agenda at all.

Despite his lack of telegenic charm, despite even the growing nationalist fracture within the British political psyche identified by commentators such as Gerry Hassan and Steve Richards – Brown had the chance to tap into a generalised dissatisfaction with neoliberal outcomes and start to orient it in a more progressive direction. If ever there was a moment for a new Roosevelt, then this year – which finally saw some of the key elements of the post-New Deal financial regime come crashing to the ground – was it. But FDR knew that he had to mobilise the unions and the public against the speculators, and Brown showed nothing like the nerve for such a fight. He blew it, and now there is no reason for anyone to trust him again. It isn’t entirely surprising. Brown would have had to take an almost Churchillian heroic stand in order to persuade the public that his type of serious political intellectuality, a character trait which few of them share, was something which they could admire enough to harmonise with for the long-term: caution and transparent political calculation was never going to do it, and the result has been terminal for Brown and possibly for an entire generation of Labour politicians.

So if the question is, “Could Johnson – the direct opposite of Brown, admired for his telegenic personality rather than his politics or his intellect – be the figure to rescue Labour after all?” – then any answer has to take account of Brown’s initial popularity. Today, it is evident that Labour is doomed to electoral defeat under his leadership. But it is not the Prime Minister’s personality or appearance that is in itself so rebarbative as to be the cause of this.

Steve Richards regrets the way Kinnock, and now Brown, are hated. But Thatcher was hated far more, and just as personally. However, many who loathed Thatcher voted for her because they continued to see her as “necessary” in terms of the deeper music. At first, many, including those who are now intending to vote Tory, also saw Brown as orchestrating ‘necessary’ change. Today, no one thinks he is needed. An Alan Johnson leadership would have to get down to the necessary – and set out a new relationship between government, the public and the wider world – as well as finding a way to make it resonate with wider popular aspirations.

Johnson to the Rescue?

The historical precedents are not encouraging. It is only 30 years since the last time Labour was led by a right-wing Southern trade-unionist who had become leader while in government during a period of international economic crisis, and 18 of those subsequent years saw the Conservatives in power. It must be instructive, then, to reflect that the Callaghan government made the catastrophic historical mistake of capitulating to the demands of finance capital while alienating its core supporters, desperately trying to shore up a failed economic model (subsidising failing nationalised industries), while opening the door to a new one which could only benefit its enemies (with the first turns towards monetarism and fiscal austerity). If a Johnson leadership were to have any chance of succeeding, it would have to take a quite different approach, and risk the effort of finding new points of resonance between the desires of the 5 million lost Labour voters – including social-democratic Scots – and the swing-voters of the Southern suburbs.

This could happen: it is conceivable. Whatever his personal political convictions, Johnson has come up through the union ranks, and so is presumably less ideologically programmed than Milliband and the rest of his PPE/ Kennedy cohort to reproduce the assumptions of public choice theory (which, whatever the question or social problem under discussion, seem only to give the same answer: privatise something – unless, of course, it is a major financial institution we are permitted to feel sorry for).

Johnson’s estuary accent, easy manner and admirable dress sense could line up with his fascinating biography to produce the image of someone who is at the same time the embodiment of labour movement values and an icon of middle English aspiration. This might even open up the space for such a figure to say publicly what so many already know privately, even unconsciously: that the neoliberal project has gone as far as it can go while offering any benefit at all to consumers and citizens, that a new politics which harnesses the dynamic and democratic power of the collective (without nostalgia for the social democracy of the 1940s) must be found to tackle the challenges of the new century, that building such a new politics will demand direct confrontation between communities and state institutions on the one hand and corporations on the other.

That this all sounds so unlikely is indicative of just what a parlous state contemporary British politics is in. It is highly improbable that any of this will happen, or even that it really could without some much wider revival of coherent and explicit hostility to neoliberalism and the threat it poses to democracy and the ecosystem. But it is worth reflecting on the outside chance of such a scenario materialising, if only as an indicator of the kind of thing that democratic forces must try to imagine making possible in the years, and probably decades, to come.

What Boris Johnson Signals for the Left (Part 2)

eddie — Wed, 28 May 2008 00:26:27 +0000

Part 2 of an essay on the significance of the election of Boris Johnson as Mayor of London, both for contemporary politics in general and left in particular. Part 1 is here

Boris and celebrity capitalism

Anti-political sentiments tend to be bound up with a belief in the power of individuals and a concomitant scepticism about the power of collectives – be they nations, villages, or organisations – to achieve anything much. At the level of popular culture, its obvious manifestation is an obsession with the doings of celebrities: those pure ‘personalities’ whose notable achievements in any meaningful field are negligible. Famous for ‘being themselves’, contemporary celebrities appear to make few compromises with the everyday demands of collective or civic life; let alone the commitments that working in groups demands of scientists, nurses, builders or even serious actors.

At the same time, the producers of reality TV shows go to great lengths to convince audiences that living together is impossible, and that competitive, selfish values naturally dominate all human relations. They fall over themselves to prevent or subvert attempts at co-operation when these emerge in contexts like the Big Brother House or the Young Mums’ Mansion, and they demonstrate a relentless invention in the introduction of arbitrary mechanisms and carefully-selected sociopaths to situations where any ordinary group of people would just figure out a way to discuss things and get on with the job of living together. The implicit message is clear: don’t believe in democracy, collectivity, or society; realise instead that the natural state for human beings is the mind-set of a neurotic, cocaine-addicted TV producer, whose colleagues of today will be tomorrow’s competitors for the next 6-month contract with Endemol.

Like it or not, these have been the defining cultural phenomena of our time. In this context, the belief that commerce and competition are the only legitimate sources of authority, and that fame and personal charm are the only real measures of value, is bound to thrive. Without any countervailing cultural force, the chief criterion for winning Big Brother – possession of a distinctive and likeable TV persona – starts to inform voters’ attitudes in selecting candidates, while “being political” comes to seem both incompetent and inherently untrustworthy. Within this universe of values, Boris Johnson appears as the one honest man: unashamed of his lack of principle, contemptuous of the whole political process, indifferent to the public distaste for racist language (although Boris the mayor, as distinct from Boris the candidate, is sensitive enough to this issue to have appointed a black deputy already).

Unembarrassed by the personal privileges which he has exploited so effectively since leaving Eton, Johnson presented himself explicitly as a celebrity who had achieved little of substance and promised more of the same: his editorship of The Spectator, his most significant real achievement to date, was hardly one of the points on which he sold his candidacy to the voters of Bexley, and nor was his policy-light manifesto. Boris’ persona resonates with the sense that politics itself is a futile circus, that collective action is impotent, that media notoriety and personal wealth are the only really effective forms of power in contemporary culture.

However, this is not a situation which can simply be laid at the door of the evil ‘Media’, because the government itself has been sending out much the same message throughout the tenure of New Labour. Even in recent months, Brown’s self-defeating promotion of figures such as Digby Jones, Alan Sugar and David Pitt-Watson has manifested precisely this set of assumptions. More fundamentally, New Labour’s attacks on the core values of the public sector and its efforts to commercialise and privatise public services all work to reinforce the idea that the world of commerce, with its emphasis on competition and profit, is a fit model for every possible sphere of human endeavour and interaction. The PFI programme, foundation hospitals, city academies, retreats from collective pay bargaining and the massive outsourcing of various strands of service delivery all point in this one direction.

Indeed, such policies do not only imply that the values of the market are the only values that matter; they actively make this true by forcing public servants to play by commercial rules even when they do not want to and when their clients derive no obvious benefit from them doing so. In the process, relationships between service ‘users’ and ‘providers’ are re-engineered on the assumption that such relations must be inherently antagonistic, that only market disciplines can protect the interests of ‘consumers’ from the lazy, self-serving ‘producer interests’ (i.e. public sector professionals).

How can government and politicians expect to be trusted when they organise their entire policy agenda according to the assumption that all other public servants are untrustworthy? Johnson’s victory surely emerges from this matrix of assumptions. His persona resonates with these beliefs because of his unashamed privilege and contempt for the post-Macpherson anti-racist orthodoxy. Surely the reason the Tory leadership allowed Johnson – widely regarded as a political liability – to run at all, was that they recognised this, if only on an unconscious level (so much of politics, like the other expressive arts, is about intuition, inspiration and unconscious genius).

In voting for Johnson, some must experience the pleasure of letting go of their lingering resentments against the privileged caste to which he belongs and they never will. In doing so, they assent – blissfully – to the anti-political world view, according to which we shouldn’t worry at all about such issues as social justice, elite power, the divide between the publicly and the privately educated, the persistent realities of racism. To ignore the social politics of a figure like Johnson is a self-permission to accept that nothing can be done to alter a society which produces such anomalies,to stop worrying and get on with the business of running up credit-card debts.

The message that we don’t have to bother with politics, that it’s frustrations and compromises merely mask an empty reality in which individuals struggle for personal gain – just as they do in the workplace and on the high street – is comforting for people who can no longer relate to the idea of a positive public realm. The seductive message of Boris, the insouciant adventurer who finally made Ken seem earnest, however effective: don’t worry, it’s all nonsense, just have a laugh, have a drink and go shopping.

At the same time, for some a vote for Boris clearly meant a vote ‘for change’, however unspecified. Again, it’s an easy mistake simply to dismiss this as a generic effect of disillusion with Labour, or the consequence of the Evening Standard’s relentless anti-Ken headlines. Clearly these factors played a role, as did opposition to Ken’s radical cosmopolitanism, and the anti-immigration rhetoric of the BNP. But it is more important to understand this apparently empty vote ‘for change’ as a protest against the apparent impotence of the kind of democratic politics which Ken has come to represent, expressed in the anti-political values embodied by Boris.

Ken himself then compounded his vulnerability by failing to renew or articulate what had been his hallmark. Instead he traded on his “experience”, presenting himself to voters as a safe pair of managerial hands rather than as a campaigner for their collective empowerment. As a result, voter turn-out in those areas which backed him was significantly lower than in those which backed Boris. The enthusiasm with which suburban voters rejected the idea of themselves as cosmopolitan Londoners with a stake in the democratisation of society was not matched by any equivalent defence of this ideal by those with the greatest stake in it. Livingstone had made no obvious effort to mobilise such a constituency; but if he had tried, there is no reason to assume that he would have failed.

The Realities of Power

Overall then, a deplorable situation. Government and media elites collude to produce a culture which generates disdain for real politics and a veneration for irreverent celebrities. Mayor Boris is the result. But is that the end of the story? Here is where I want to depart from the chorus of voices on the ‘centre-left’ who have bemoaned the devaluation of politics in recent years. For while bodies like Demos, the Fabian Society, the IPPR and the Power Commission have produced reports diagnosing and deploring this state of affairs, they have almost entirely missed the central point. What most of these documents have in common is a narrative which blames government for failing to engage the citizenry, or sections of the public for failing to engage with politics. Incompetence on the part of government and bad faith on the part of journalists seem to be the usual imagined culprits. But major cultural shifts do not happen merely because of bad faith and incompetence. They happen also because someone, somewhere benefits.

The legitimacy of politics itself has been undermined from within and without, to the point where the most effective progressive politician of his generation can be defeated at the ballot box by a figure better known for his punch-lines than his policies. Who gains? The right-wing press, perhaps the most biased and under-regulated in the ‘free’ world, which New Labour has not made the slightest move to check after 11 years in power, is one clear winner. The other, most importantly, is the super-rich elite of ‘non-doms’, city bonus-earners, PFI-profiteers and public-school alumni, tied together by their involvement with key financial institutions, corporate media and the speculative property market. What would be required to work against this array of interests would be something much more than a few well-meaning voter-participation initiatives, but the rebuilding of social forces strong enough to challenge corporate power.

A society which lacks a strong labour movement – another situation which a Labour government has done nothing to remedy – also lacks a strong sense of collective empowerment and political possibility. It will need a revival of democracy, a genuine attempt to reconfigure and reinvent local government, trade-unionism and political participation for the 21st century, to reverse the trend which has so demeaned the very idea of democracy in contemporary culture. But such an effort could only be meaningful if it was led by politicians who recognised the obstacles such a project faces, and the fierce conflict with powerful vested interests which it would require. With the defeat of Livingstone, we have lost the last prominent British politician who understood this political reality.

Despite narrowly losing his election, Livingstone did much better at the polls than the Labour Party nationally, which suffered massive defeats in local elections across the country on the same day. He remains the most popular and successful radical politician of his generation, and Johnson beat him in part because he was even more populist, irreverent, outspoken and seemingly-authentic than Ken became in his last, more diplomatic years. The implication is clear: at least among the crucial swing constituencies of Southern England, the kind of ponderous self-righteousness embodied by Gordon Brown, his presbyterian purposefulness barely concealing his deference to hedge-fund managers and media moguls – is unlikely to convince anybody of anything. On the other hand, an uncowed populist Labour leader, willing to tell people the truth – that corporate profits do not equal social benefits – might yet be able to capture the imagination of voters as Johnson did last week.

The way to engage with the anti-political ‘common-sense’ which has brought Johnson to power is not to preach about the virtues of civic participation: it is to acknowledge that in fact the public is right to disengage from a process which does not offer it any scope for meaningful participation. Politics today is thoroughly corrupted, and democracy is often a meaningless sham, because those charged with administering it will not defend it from the encroaching power of corporations, commercial media and US militarism. We need politicians with the nerve to admit this, and to take on the vested interests which maintain this state of affairs. Only then will the voting public start taking them seriously again.

Jeremy Gilbert is Lecturer in Cultural Studies at the University of East London. His publications include Discographies: Dance music, culture and the politics of sound (with Ewan Pearson, Routledge, 1999); and Cultural Capitalism: Politics after New Labour (ed. with Timothy Bewes, Lawrence Wishart, 2000)

Also by Jeremy Gilbert in OurKingdom: Who is the Democratic Candidate for Mayor? (30 April 2008)

What Boris Johnson Signals for the Left (Part 1)

eddie — Sun, 25 May 2008 18:51:04 +0000

Part 1 of an essay on the significance of the election of Boris Johnson as Mayor of London, both for contemporary politics in general and left in particular. Part 2 is here

On 1 May Ken Livingstone – arguably the most intelligent political operator on the left in Britain and a bold, relatively principled and creative politician whose originality greatly exceeds that of Tony Blair – was defeated by Boris Johnson in a direct election to be Mayor of London. Johnson was known as an entertaining character (like ‘Ken’, he is usually known by his short given name), but one who was so unreliable he had already been expelled from the Conservative shadow cabinet. So how did he win?

It is surely not enough to evoke the ‘perfect storm’ of coincidences which the Guardian blamed for Ken’s political demise. The moment suggests an important truth about British political culture. Indeed may it mark a historic turning point. Usually, when the aspirational voters of the suburbs identify with the urban centres – and think of the cities as places they want to be, or have something common with – they tend to vote Labour. This is what happened during the ‘Cool Britannia’ episode which carried New Labour to power in 1997. When the suburbanites turn away from the cities – thinking of them as places that they fear, or envy, or simply cannot afford to live in – then ‘Middle England’ tends to assert its quasi-pastoral Tory identity, as it did following the urban unrest of the late 70s and early 80s.

The shift from Ken to Boris is an especially significant moment. On the one hand, it was the product of a classic desertion of Labour by the suburbs: Ken won far more support than Boris across the central London region – and the new mayor may well face considerable resentment there as his term progresses – but the strength of the suburban vote was enough to carry the day for the Conservatives. On the other hand, Boris’ election may mark the emergence of an urban, even a multicultural Toryism.

Political motivation and identification are complex things. The strengths and weaknesses of candidates’ images and styles are likely to connect with various constituencies in different ways. Some simplification is inevitable in any sketch of how they resonate with the wider culture in which their images circulate. But it seems clear that, as the New Labour experiment is sucked into the vortex of financial globalisation to which it pinned its fate, a new strain of British conservatism is emerging which is as at home in the city as the country house – a process initiated by the arrivistes of Thatcherism but now confirmed by the popularity of the David Cameron’s “Notting Hill Set”. A successful left response to this will take a lot of work, and will have to start from a much deeper understanding of what has happened to politics itself over the last decades than is currently on offer.

This essay, then, will take a three-fold look at the meaning of Boris Johnson’s assumption as Mayor of London. Firstly, it will ask, what were the qualities of Ken that Boris defeated? This question has real interest: in contrast to the obvious weakness and duplicity of Blair’s New Labour, which clearly helps to explain the rise of David Cameron, Livingstone was not unpopular (his core vote remained high despite his lame and tired campaign). His defeat despite the strength of his achievement is an indication of the novel quality of Boris’s appeal. To measure the latter we need to acknowledge the former – before considering what the rise of Boris tells us about UK politics. Finally, we must ask how democrats should respond to the situation

The Originality of Ken

In 1986 Margaret Thatcher’s government abolished the Greater London Council (GLC) which had been led by Livingstone since 1981. The move was part of her attempt to “destroy socialism” in Britain through the exercise of central power, and it left Europe’s greatest city headless, without any overall elected government. Labour was committed to undo Thatcher’s decapitation and after a London-wide referendum that endorsed its creation, a new Greater London Authority, the GLA, came into being in 2000. This was far from a simple return to the past.

The GLC had been a traditional borough-based municipal body that elected its leader in a parliamentary style. The GLA by contrast was to be much more limited in its powers but at the same time to be headed by an American style executive Mayor to be directly elected by London’s millions of residents – in its own way an even more extraordinary innovation in UK politics than Thatcher’s high-handed abolition. Indeed, it was a constitutional innovation that has put London politics on a par with developments in Scotland, Wales and even Northern Ireland, where devolution has released energies distinct from the damp and drafty pomposities of Westminster and Whitehall.

In the meantime, Livingstone spent 14 years in the parliamentary wilderness, isolated by the leaders of New Labour who detested his brand of leftist populism. Realising that his ambition to climb his party’s ladder was hopeless, Ken turned back to London and the lure of a Mayoral office. When the Labour machine deprived him of this opportunity too, despite the fact that he was obviously the best qualified candidate and remained popular across London, not least amongst Labour’s own supporters, Livingstone ran as an independent. His campaign destroyed the other candidates – including the hapless official Labour candidate, the previously popular Frank Dobson – and he romped home (a harbinger of the political weakness of New Labour).
Although his powers were limited, he nonetheless transformed London’s transport infrastructure in a short time. He introduced free bus travel to pensioners and young people. He has brought traffic congestion under control when most predicted that he would fail to do so. He managed to improve pay and conditions for some of London’s poorest workers. He brought the Olympics to London against all expectations. He has overseen a period of extraordinary expansion in the capital while social costs and conflicts have been minimised. He has kept faith with his most radical supporters while maintaining his famous political pragmatism. He personified the open, unprejudiced yet forthright spirit of the capital.

A sense of his achievement and the support it could generate can be discerned in this passage from an open letter in support of Ken against Boris, drafted by Neal Lawson of the Compass group (and signed by a wide range of the left’s ‘great and the good’) when he felt that Livingstone’s campaign was slipping to defeat:

From a newly created post and a new institution Livingstone’s record is impressive… certain decisions stand out. Not least the Congestion Charge, which was as brave a political move as anyone has made in British politics for years because it socialised the failure of private transport and offered a coherent and workable alternative to the car against initial public opinion. On this issue Livingstone made the weather against the odds. Millions now enjoy better and cheaper public transport. When we look around London we see a public realm that has been transformed with renovated squares, parks and river banks for everyone to enjoy and share. It is a London at ease with its multi-cultural identity, and Livingstone has played a decisive role in that. Not least because he opposed the war in Iraq. This is the politics of equality and real opportunity.

Yet Livingstone went down with hardly a whimper.

One explanation is that Ken was the victim of a relentless campaign by the Evening Standard, the only London evening paper apart from the free sheets. But ‘Our Ken’ has a unique record of withstanding tabloid assaults since 1981 and even benefiting from them. Another is that Livingstone himself failed to make the case for his distinctive politics and for the first time in his life failed to offer novelty and freshness. But this was the case in the London election in 2004 after he had rejoined Labour and stood as its official candidate. To explain his defeat, then, we must look more deeply at what Ken has stood for.

Ken Livingstone has meant many things to many people. But in almost all contexts, what he has ultimately represented is the possibilities, the potential, and the threat, of politics itself. His election as mayor in 2000, running as an independent after being a Labour MP, despite all of the efforts of the Labour leadership and when Blair himself was at the height of his influence, was a striking example of popular opinion democratically exceeding the limitations imposed on it by bureaucracy and institutionalised power. Earlier in his career, Livingstone as leader of the GLC drew the fury of the Right for daring to accept, even to encourage, the public politicisation of issues like race, gender and sexuality: issues which had previously only been addressed by movements cut off from the official political process. His promotion of gay rights, feminism and anti-racism as explicit policies of government was once seen as, at worst, dangerous extremism, at best lunatic idealism.

Very few political figures have ever been prepared to acknowledge themselves explicitly as racist, or sexist, or even homophobic. In this country, the dispute between radicals and conservatives on these issues has never really been about whether racism or sexism or homophobia were bad things. Almost everyone schooled in the British liberal tradition – which includes most Tories, as well as all of the ‘centre-left’ – has always accepted that they were. No, the argument has rather been about whether such bad things actually exist as distinct social phenomena, or whether they are merely accidental character defects, shared by an insignificant minority of individuals.

Historically, the country’s powerful have propagated the view that there is really no such thing as ‘racism’ at all in our government, instead viewing discrimination against non-white people as an unfortunate but unsystematic manifestation of the casual, ignorant prejudice of the unenlightened (i.e, normally, the working classes…). Until well into the 1990s, bodies such as the Metropolitan Police refused to entertain the legitimacy of ‘institutional racism’ as a concept, and certainly resisted any suggestion that it might be endemic within their own organisations. It may seem incredible from a contemporary vantage point, but prior to the publication of the Macpherson report in 1999, the Met – which every Londoner with open eyes knew to be guilty of routine and vindictive harassment of black people – insisted that police racism was merely incidental, the unfortunate peccadillo of ‘a few bad apples’.

The idea that ‘racial’ and similar issues can be considered as proper subjects for political intervention, is one that has had to be fought for over decades, and one which lots of people would still like to deny, given half a chance. Here, in an area much more important than traffic jams, Livingstone – almost alone amongst UK politicians – “socialised” the human injustice which millions felt everyday. But what comfortable white citizen or well cared-for husband really wants to be bothered thinking about their own potential complicity with a systemic culture of discrimination, when it’s so much easier just to sneer at any concern with such issues, dismissing it as ‘political correctness’ and insisting that anyone can succeed if they really want to, no matter what their gender or the colour of their skin?

Such sneering or mockery is often a way of trying to shut down public conversations on issues such as race, sexuality and gender. By contrast, believers in democracy – in its broadest sense – have always sought to expand the realm of politics: that is, the realm of public discussion and collective decision-making. This isn’t just a question of expanding the power of the state. Indeed, it very often means the reverse, when public opinion decides that long-held privileges of the state ought to be revoked. Rather, it is a question of expanding the range of issues which are up for grabs in our culture and our society as public issues over which individuals and groups can potentially be held accountable and about which proposals for change might be put forward, be they suggestions about how men and women might better share domestic chores or suggestions as to how government should dispose of taxes.

Ken has historically embodied this democratic willingness to politicise. As he put it in his account of his GLC years, those who formed the left group which he headed “shared a common belief that the personal was political and politics affected every aspect of our daily lives”. (p 93) Of course, everything should not be politicised. Taken to extremes, making the personal political becomes totalitarian and leave no room for personal life or the private: this is the kernel of truth which hides inside the myth of the ‘politically correct’ liberal conspiracy. But Ken was different from both the sectarian leftists, such as the Trotsykists with whom he associated, and from mainstream Labour culture, in his permissive insistence on people’s political right to be different. The left he led was distinguished, in its early days at least, by its view that “no one was allowed to set themselves up as the judge of who was or was not a ‘real’ leftwinger”, (p. 92) and his leadership of the GLC was marked by openness and remarkable decentralisation (“I believed that the wider and more open the decision-making processes were, the more likely we were to come to correct decisions” (p. 141). Livingstone protected difference rather than, in traditional Labour style, seeking uniformity. In this way he politicised the claims of the oppressed as well as the poor.

Resistance to such politicising comes for the most part from those who have the most to lose if existing arrangements become proper subjects for discussion. Both social conservatism and economic liberalism can be pressed into service towards this goal, maintaining existing power relationships – between rich and poor, white and black, male and female – and implying that any attempt to change them would be either futile or obscene. Today, at the level of formal politics, this conservative tendency most obviously takes the form of the desire to ‘roll back’ the welfare state – to reduce the power of state institutions to intervene on the public’s behalf in the economic and social spheres – while retaining the powers of government to protect private property and criminalise dissidents. At the level of everyday culture, it can take the form of an amorphous mistrust of politics in general, and a casual belief that things work better if people are largely left to ‘run their own affairs’. It is just such a general rejection of politics itself which Boris has tapped in to.

Also by Jeremy Gilbert from OurKingdom: Who is the Democratic Candidate for Mayor? (30 April 2008)

One more chance for the 'Progressive Consensus'?

jo — Mon, 09 May 2005 16:31:36 +0000

One thing that can be said with certainty about the election result is that New Labour has been punished for treating the left and its natural constituencies – trade-unionists, ethnic minorities, the public sector, liberal professionals, many of the low-paid – with contempt.

New Labours key strategic gambit has always been the assumption that these groups could be relied on to vote Labour in sufficient numbers to maintain a large majority, no matter how far policy drifted to the right. Although, as we keep being told, the governments majority is still impressive by historic standards, it is not so by the standards of governments of the past two decades, and its fragility is further highlighted by the very small share of the vote which sustains it. These facts, plus the significant swing to the Liberal Democrats from Labour, all add up to a situation in which disillusion with the government from the left is a clearly significant issue.

This is all that can be said with certainty, and what the outcome will be depends on many factors. Martin Kettle argued in The Guardian shortly before the election that it was foolish to believe that a radically curtailed majority would push the government to the left, instead arguing that the fear of losing more swing voters to the Tories would have the opposite effect. The Conservative leadership are certainly far more despondent at the result than they can admit, as Howards rapid resignation illustrates. Having done all they can to target key marginals, having done as much as they are able to redistribute a static share of the vote in favour of more elected MPs, they may well have gone as far as they can without some significant change in the political landscape. Many in the New Labour leadership will argue vociferously against offering them that opportunity by provoking such a change, as a marked shift to the left by the government clearly would.

So the future may not be rosy, or even vaguely pink, but there are some grounds for optimism. In a sense, the left has emerged as an active electoral force for the first time in a long time, crystallised by the anti-war movement to which a huge proportion of the public could be said to belong, and playing a variegated but significant role in the outcome of a national election. It should not be forgotten that this could not have happened without a combination of factors: the massive anti-war demonstration of 2003, which in turn could never have happened on the scale it did without the support of the Daily Mirror (as the Stop the War Coalition largely failed to appreciate), and the presence of a viable electoral alternative to the left of Labour in the form of the Liberal Democrats.

If any progress does come from this election result, it will have been because of this whole complex of factors: mass action, support within influential sections of the media, and an electoral presence for progressive ideas. No one of these elements on its own will have been responsible. This is surely a lesson for the future.

One issue that has come on to the public agenda more forcefully than at any recent election is the disproportionate power which the election system gives to a tiny, but relatively homogenous, section of the electorate: the swing voters of that imagined constituency Middle England. This is a very interesting development for those of us who have always argued in favour of the need to introduce proportional representation for the House of Commons.

Traditionally this argument has been pitched in terms of the unfairness of vote share not being reflected in parliament. The argument that First-Past-the-Post allows one small section of the electorate to dominate the country, an argument predicated on the observation that the views of swing voters in marginal seats tend to be pretty homogenous whilst also being notoriously incoherent, has not played a very active role in debates on the issue in the past, but is one which could have a very broad appeal and prove generally persuasive.

It is also closer to the argument which has never proved sufficiently attractive to the parliamentary Labour party, but which has always been the most concrete and political argument for PR in this country. That is the view that in the long-term PR is the only way to cement the progressive consensus which Blair et al have always talked about, marginalising both the Tories and the Daily Mail-readers of Middle England forever. Perhaps the threat which the Tories still pose in many Labour marginals will finally concentrate minds on this issue. We can only try to ensure that is does.

Its worth thinking momentarily about the philosophical case for PR, or rather the case that is usually made against it. The argument that democracy depends on the sacred link between a single MP and his or her electors, and that the public prefers to vote for individuals rather than parties, is nonsense of a particularly revealing kind. It is based on a wholly individualistic conception of politics, or rather an individualistic conception of humanity which is simply anti-political in its implications. The myth that in voting for a politician we are voting for a personality is of a piece with the ideology of celebrity culture, which values trivial information about the private lives of the famous over any consideration of their views, values, or achievements.

The fact is that in voting for a politician we can never be voting for anything as complex and multifarious as a person. In truth we are only ever voting for that person insofar as they are likely to act in the very limited sphere of representative politics. As such, the only issue that really matters about them is the political ideology to which they subscribe and the means by which they propose to implement it along with others who share it: in other words, the political party they belong to. We can never have a mature democracy as long as our electoral system fails to take account of this. The ideological individualism of the British liberal tradition is built into our electoral system, and it is no surprise that it historically tends to work in favour of the political projects of liberal capitalism over any others.

History demonstrates that this is the case. PR (along with prohibition of alcohol) was one of the key planks of Keir Hardies very first Labour manifesto. By the middle of the twentieth century it had dropped out of the frame, with historically catastrophic consequences. The Attlee government by common consent the most successful social democratic government of a major Western power during that critical period in world history lost the 1951 election despite polling more votes than the opposition and more than it had polled in 1945. Not only had that government succeeded in implementing the most dramatic reforms of the British state and British society that any 5-year period has seen, but in the process it had successfully won more support than it had enjoyed to begin with.

Only the electoral system, and that appalling deference of the Labour hierarchy to British tradition which prevented any serious objection to the result being voiced, prevented the re-election of that government. Had things gone differently one can only guess as to the likely effect, but it is hardly beyond the bounds of reason to speculate that the UK in the 1950s, instead of being tortured by the death-pangs of the Empire, might well have become the largest and most confident of the emergent social democracies of Northern Europe. One can only imagine the global consequences if it had.

One of those consequences, which might still have come to pass had the 1974-9 Labour government had the foresight to reward the Liberals for their support by introducing PR, would have been that the UK would not have become the bridgehead for neo-liberalism in Europe. Indeed, a major manufacturing economy and a global military power, it could have been the strongest bulwark against it. The entire fate of the world might have been different. Instead, with the liberal social democratic majority split between the liberals, SDP, and Labour, Thatcher was able to demolish the post-war settlement and set the stage for its gradual dismantling across Europe and the world.

Could we really have a chance now, finally to persuade the Labour leadership to trade the prospect of one more term of majority government for a permanent left-of-centre coalition governing the worlds fourth largest economy? Probably not, but we have to try. In the end, it is the fact that the introduction of PR would inevitably mean that there would be fewer Labour MPs than there are now which has always proved the stumbling block to its implementation by a Labour government. However, at a moment when even many Labour MPs are disappointed and disheartened at how little a majority Labour government has been able to achieve and at how wide and deep disappointment with it runs amongst their own supporters, we may have a unique historic opportunity to press this case.

One issue which this new situation brings to the fore is the value of a strong progressive voice within the Labour Party, arguing for the progressive consensus as a more valuable goal than five more years of neo-liberalism casually mitigated by occasional concessions to the social democratic support-base of the government. As someone who quite recently scoffed at the naivety of any attempt to persuade the government to change direction, I have to say now that the project of Compass, the new pressure group aiming to co-ordinate the thinking left within the Labour party seems both timely and much needed (http://www.compassonline.org.uk/).

While it is clear that only mass pressure outside parliament and within the media will make any alternative future possible, such pressure will result in little more than further Labour marginals lost to the Tories, as despairing votes are cast for the Liberal Democrats and Greens, unless a strong voice can argue within Labour for an alternative, lending progressive Labour MPs the confidence to act on their convictions. Those of us who would hope for such an outcome, both inside and outside the party, should be prepared to give whatever support we can to such a project.