A broad church

It’s interesting the ferment in the British Labour Party. So many issues. There are those who would query how wide a party it should be – and I’m not talking about those who left for the TIG who are, by my reckoning, simply not left-wing at all.

There’s always going to be a bit of a flux at the margins of any political group, and of course within such groups. Ideological position can be difficult to pin down. I was talking recently to a former Labour TD who went independent and would be regarded as quite left-wing. I was surprised to hear them argue that their view was using the tax system as a means of rebalancing matters rather than nationalisation. Of course it’s not either or, and nationalisation isn’t the ultimate panacea either – I think a much broader range of forms of social ownership offers greater flexibility and is more important by far than taxation in transformative terms. And the tax system is crucial too – albeit it is one lever amongst many.

But the point is that a British Labour Party unable to accommodate such views and many more wouldn’t be much of a broad church. It’s one reason I’m cautious about deselection processes. On paper it sounds fine, and in certain instances essential, ensure that only those with congenial views are elected, and yet the reality is that it could leave a string of seat losses and as we know the position of the Labour Party in the UK is far from robust. Indeed I tend to the view that a slightly more diffuse approach, of the sort that finally saw the TIG depart, is better than full frontal assaults. There may be those who the latter approach is more appropriate. But one interesting dynamic is that local CLPs often seem to tolerate MPs because they are able to be elected (I saw that in the WP too come to think of it). That’s a problem, but one has to wonder short of a massive change in the UK electoral system is there any great choice in the matter.

A lot, naturally, depends on what we consider the baseline positions of the BLP. I was a member during the last of the Kinnock years, and in all truth it was, whatever ones views on his leadership, reasonably left-wing in that period. Less so than my own position, but still clearly so. I felt that was largely true up to the advent of Blair. I wonder how I’d have felt were I involved in the early 2000s. I suspect that it would have been difficult to remain in the party during that period. Yet people, many very genuine and sincere and some very left-wing did, precisely because it was the largest and most diverse formation. And that was an enormous strength when as was inevitable the Blair project began to fall apart – and just on that I think one can easily argue that it took a good decade for that to finally disintegrate.

Sometimes it seems that there’s a view that there’s a sort of uncontested terrain that is the platonic ideal for a political formation, and yet look at how concepts and issue such as nationalism, republicanism and so on deeply divide political formations on the left and further left on this island. Which perhaps is another way of saying there are no easy solutions and sometimes acting as if there are weakens the very formations necessary to achieve them.