Come together
In 2007, Tony Blair gave a speech at Blenheim Palace in which he claimed that “the real dividing line to think of in modern politics has less to do with traditional positions of right versus left, more to do today, with what I would call the modern choice, which is open versus closed”.
On the face of it, this sounds quite neat and obvious, and you can see what Blair meant. He was saying – with some justification – that the forces of conservatism in the early twenty-first century seek to defend people from the winds of globalisation, and retreat to a national or domestic comfort zone, while the forces of progressivism embrace the opportunities of an interconnected world and the cultural and economic benefits they can bring.
But it’s also easy to see how this rather neat way of separating the world into two camps was ultimately storing up trouble for the future. Telling people that their justifiable concerns about a rapidly changing world are due to them being closed-off, or narrow-minded, is at best patronising and at worst deeply alienating. There are reasons to worry about globalisation. Technological change means people’s jobs require a whole new set of skills or, worse, are rendered obsolete altogether. The life of a town or village will inevitably change if new people arrive there from different countries, with different cultural backgrounds and often speaking different languages. These changes are not inherently bad – in fact I would argue that in the long run they are largely positive – but you cannot just tell people that they are not allowed to be bothered by them.
Nowhere is this more obvious than when it comes to immigration. New Labour welcomed, and trumpeted, Britain’s growth into an open, multicultural society. This is good and should be applauded. But, by using Blair’s “open versus closed” way of looking at the world, it did so in a way that told a lot of people who were less sure about the pace of change that they were bigoted or wrong. The New Labour rhetoric closed out the space in which people could honestly say that they were uncomfortable with what was happening. They never got to air their concerns, and so those concerns never got heard or taken seriously.
Instead of allaying people’s fears, we ignored them. Which meant that it was only a matter of time before someone like Nigel Farage came along and played upon those fears instead.
Tony Blair was right that “left versus right” is no longer a useful way of looking at the political landscape. But “open versus closed” is not particularly helpful either. And yet the fact remains that, like it or not, we do need dividing lines in politics. We need to know how one party differs from another; how each side defines itself against the other.
And so I would suggest a new way of setting out the choice: between the politics of the individual and the politics of the community.
Ever since Thatcher, the Conservatives have successfully painted themselves as the party of the individual, in ways that make this seem sensible and appealing. They want to help people help themselves; they are for the entrepreneurs, for the people who “pull themselves up by their bootstraps”. They want government to be about getting out of your way and letting you get on with your life.
The reason this all sounds so attractive is because the Tories not only picked their own side, but they also chose Labour’s terms for them. So in the Conservative narrative the opposite to “the individual” becomes “the state” – great, clunking institutional structures that want to force everyone into uninspiring mediocrity and to tell them in precise terms how they should live, right down to what they should eat and how much (or how little) they should earn.
This is a reductive, simplistic and wholly unfair representation of what social democracy is all about. But it has too often gone unchallenged and so it has stuck. Voters think that the Tories trust them to get on with things, and that Labour does not. This is wrong, and dangerous, and we have to fight back against it.
Because we are now seeing what having “the party of the individual” in power can mean for a country. It means a lowest common denominator approach to politics in which as long as you individually are OK then it doesn’t matter much about anyone else. It means policies designed to turn sections of society against one another, to determine who is “deserving” and who isn’t. It means telling people that their neighbours are a burden, and that other people’s misfortunes are their own fault.
The answer to that is not to fight back by being the party of the state. It is to fight back by being the party of the community.
I do not believe that people are fundamentally selfish, or narrow-minded, or that what they want most of all is to be left alone. I think people find their greatest happiness in their friends, their families, their neighbours and their colleagues – and that what they want most of all is for those people to be OK. They want their children to do well at school. They want their parents to be looked after in their old age. They want their friends to have good jobs, and their colleagues to be well looked after in the ones they have.
All of this is not just compatible with progressive politics; it is what lies at their very heart. Because following the Tories’ individualistic approach to its logical extreme doesn’t empower people; it alienates them. It turns them against one another and actually diffuses power. It means that a country’s whole can never be more than the sum of its parts.
But the way of dealing with that is not to pull all the way back from the level of the individual to the level of the entire nation and then try to impose a one-size-fits-all Soviet approach to making the country run. It means coming back up just one or two levels – to the family unit, to the group of friends and neighbours, to the village or town or city. Because it is at that level that people can work together, collaborate and cooperate while still retaining a sense of control and choice. It is at that level that most people think when they define themselves as being part of a community. And it is also at that level, back at the end of the nineteenth century, that the Labour party first emerged – congregations of people being brought together in urban centres for the first time and realising that they were more powerful when they acted together.
That would be my pitch for a new way of looking at the world as the Labour party struggles to find its place in it. Let the Tories be the party of the individual. We will be the party of the community – whether that is on the grandest possible scale, arguing for a truly United Kingdom to keep playing its role in a European Union of peaceful, like-minded countries; or whether it is down at the level of a family and their friends in a small town, all working together to make their lives that bit better.
Did the Left win the twentieth century?
That rather provocative question was the title of a debate I attended last week, in honour of the New Statesman’s centenary. It culminated – shock, horror – in a London University lecture hall packed full of New Statesman readers concluding that, on balance, the Left really did carry the day (or, rather, all 36,542.2 of them).
What I found particularly interesting though, and what ultimately informed my brave decision to abstain, was the extent to which everyone was speaking at crossed purposes. Helen Lewis gave a compelling run-through of the Left’s great social victories: women getting the vote, the creation of the NHS, homosexuality being legalised, rights enshrined in law for those from minority backgrounds. Tim Montgomerie replied with an equally compelling account of how no one could really argue that Communism as an economic system had triumphed by the year 2000; in almost every corner of the world, free market capitalism was firmly established as the way in which civilised countries conducted their business.
And the question I was burning to ask, should any of the roving microphones ever have roved their way over to me, was this: could any of the panellists give me a convincing example of anything that the Right had won socially, or that the Left had won economically over the course of the century? I’m not sure they could (though kudos to Simon Heffer for gamely trying to co-opt Margaret Thatcher, arguing that she was left wing economically).
To me, the twentieth century was a 1-1 draw. Or, if you prefer, a triumph for Liberalism: we were socially more liberal as a nation, and indeed a world, in 2000 than we were in 1900; and national and global trade had been liberalised beyond recognition in the same period. I can’t go as far as Philip Collins did and say that this is wholly a good thing – 7 years after the end of the century, in spectacular style, Lehman Brothers and the rest showed us why a complete liberalisation of the market was perhaps not such a good idea.
But I do think that this ‘score draw’ way of looking at the debate is the best way to answer the question. And I think the majority of people were content with that state of affairs. I’d wager that most people, in Britain at least, as the century drew to a close would say that they liked a state of affairs where broadly speaking if they worked hard they were rewarded with a salary that could be spent on a wide range of goods, and were simultaneously safe in the knowledge that they were less likely to be discriminated against for their gender, race, religion or (dis)ability than their grandparents.
Most people would have accepted that as the status quo, which goes to show that “victory” in this sense – and to venture into the arch-Blairite territory of triangulation – is about claiming the centre ground, to such an extent that your approach begins to be seen as the norm, and just “how things are”. In this respect, we can see that social ‘norms’ were much further left at the end of the century, just as economic ‘norms’ were significantly further right.
But this is not an inevitable state of affairs, and nor is the direction in which things moved over the twentieth century. It’s more just a snapshot of where things happened to be when we ticked over from 31/12/99 to 01/01/01. Like a global game of ‘pass the parcel’, it’s more about who was holding what when the music stopped.
And already, I’d argue, we can see the potential for things to move in the other direction. The crash of 2007/08 and the subsequent depression have shown that entirely unfettered capitalism might, just possibly, have one or two flaws. And I don’t agree with Tony Blair that this “has not brought about a decisive shift to the left“. I think there is real scope for a re-evaluation of capitalism along more social democratic lines, and I think that Ed Miliband is making some headway in doing so.
On the other hand, certain social issues – most notably immigration and welfare – are seeing the general public turn sharply to the right. I do not agree with Iain Duncan Smith, but it’s hard to argue that he hasn’t done a powerful job of harnessing (and increasing) that rightward movement. You could even begin to draw a parallel with the banks: decades of increasing liberalisation (be it capital, freedom of movement or social security) have perhaps gone as far as people are willing to allow, and the pendulum is beginning to swing back: to the left economically, to the right socially.
That is where I see the big challenge for the Left as being in the early years of this century: how do we make advances into the Right’s territory economically, seizing the post-2008 mood, while holding on to the victories achieved over the last 100 years (where the post-2008 mood is turning away from us)? To what extent do we try to occupy the centre ground, and to what extent do we try to move it? By the time we get to 2100, we will be able to claim victory both economically and socially?
Can we go from a 1-1 twentieth century into a 2-0 twenty-first?
the unfinished article 
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