British Labour…

Odd piece in the Guardian at the weekend by Martin Kettle. I’ve got to admit I’m following the leadership process with some amazement. The media’s efforts to close ranks around the more right leaning candidates is all too evident, as is its willingness to apply all too rapidly the supposed lessons of the most recent election – that being that the BLP must of necessity tilt more to the right and at all costs avoid a Corbyn leadership. I think the latter is probably still quite a remote likelihood, but… who can tell in these times of political churn and uncertainty.

But what is odd about Kettle’s analysis which essentially takes the LP to task for a cohort even envisaging such a course is its curious blindness to recent political history. Kettle argues that:

His [Corbyn’s] socialism, though, is more a matter of faith than a viable programme. He is not, as his three opponents are, a reformist who aspires to govern and get re-elected. He is not interested in making detailed policy choices or pragmatic compromises. Corbyn’s position is essentially made up of attitudes and slogans, not least about the place of the trade unions, many of them proudly unchanged for almost 50 years.

I wonder if that’s entirely true. To many of us further left than the LP it certainly doesn’t seem like an entirely accurate analysis. Corbyn is certainly more left wing than many, but he remains broadly within the confines of the BLP.

In a way though it’s not that that’s so objectionable in the analysis.

I grew up in a leftwing culture of this kind and we all felt very principled and even, in a sense, blessed because of our embrace of the true faith. But in the end, as Eric Hobsbawm recognised so honestly in his later writings, it is in many respects a religious approach to politics. It has very little to do with building an alliance, winning an election, forming a government or actually changing things. It is politics as being, not politics as doing.

The obvious problem is that as time goes on social democratic approaches – which are presumably what Kettle cleaves to – are voided of content as SD parties tilt ever more rightwards. And while there may be issues about sloganeering, there are equally problems about detailed policy choices or pragmatic compromises that are empty of all political or ideological moorings. Furthermore, as was clear from the LP’s predicament, it lost to its left in Scotland. How does Kettle attempt to square that? Well, he doesn’t.

He continues:

A former Labour frontbencher took me to task, pointing out, as Tony Blair did this week, that it was possible both to win power and to be principled. The ex-MP was surely right. Nevertheless Labour is unusual as a party because of the historic tendency of some of its members and supporters to think that being in government is a regrettable diversion from having socialist values, a tendency turbo-charged in the modern era by the anger and indignation of social media. The Conservatives have no equivalent hang-ups of any kind.

Really? Is he sure? Well within living memory I can think of two Tory leaders – those who arrived in that position after the election of Tony Blair to office, who were clearly wedded to an approach, a ‘hang-up’ if you will, of precisely this sort. How quickly they forget, but it took four separate leaders to arrive at one who could win elections for the Tories, and even then only imperfectly at first.

Then there’s this:

Three decades ago, a few months after bitter internal warfare and a weak leader produced Labour’s worst general election performance of the modern era, and with the SDP-Liberal Alliance still snapping at its heels, Labour’s newly elected leader Neil Kinnock called on his deeply divided party to rediscover what he called its common sense and realism. In a speech to the conference in Brighton that had just elected him, he asked Labour supporters to remember how dreadful it felt to have been smashed in the 1983 general election. Never again should Labour experience that. Party unity was now paramount at all times, Kinnock warned. It worked, in the end, just.

But this is the sort of argument that the US Democrats deploy time and again to corral support. But not being the Tories isn’t much of a platform. It didn’t win at the most recent election. Why should it convince in the future? And what of the damage inflicted upon – and I use these words tentatively, although as a former member of the British Labour Party I believe they have had some meaning in the past – Labour values, traditional Labour values, if the following is adhered to?

Unlike Germany, we will also have separatist nationalist parties to complicate matters still more, and we will still have a first-past-the-post electoral system to empower the unified centre right. The upshot, almost inescapably, will be a long, perhaps a very long, period of Conservative rule. Labour’s only way of preventing that is by competing in the centre, with a modern reformist agenda that can challenge the centre right. But that, it seems, may no longer be Labour’s priority.

A party that cedes ground to its right at every turn, that has done so for decades now, that even when it – as it did – apply redistributive measures, was unable to do so openly. Is that a serious prospect for the future, for the left? Surely it is the antithesis of what the left is and stands for? And this is the best Kettle can recommend?