Unity – not uniformity

I think many of us wilol remember the article Mr Wilson wrote for LL a couple of weeks ago, and we will probably all form our own conclusions  based in part on that article.

I think too many “debates” on the topic of (yet more) “reform” will put off more voters than it attracts.

 It’s lazy and frequently incoherent. There’s the moronic line that ‘to be in government means winning Stevenage as well as Sedgefield’ – as if we didn’t depend on a core Labour vote in Stevenage (and Sedgefield is getting a little marginal under the bounary review too).

There’s the insistence on the practicality of the Durham miners, only a few pages after he approvingly quotes Richard Fynes saying exactly the opposite. There’s the refusal to allow for any nuance in his presentation of history.

There are the daft strawmen. There’s the mixture of vague proposals and unworkable reforms – as if anybody ever actually chooses whether to vote Labour based on our internal organisation.

And overarching it all, there’s the bewildering insistence that his ‘My Labour’ was the only form of Labour there ever was, that Labour didn’t exist in southern towns in those years too. I don’t recognise the Labour of his youth – Trimdon may not look it did then anymore, but very few places in the south ever have.

There are some interesting things in the pamphlet and the germs of one or two good ideas. But I’m sceptical it has much relevance outside Sedgefield CLP and other northeastern coalmining seats.

Bloody hell, what happened to my paragraphs? They were there – but vanished when I posted the comment! I’ll try again & maybe the moderator would be good enough to remove the one with no paragraphs.

It did it again. Can anybody post an explanation of what one needs to do to keep a bloomin’ paragraph in the correct place on here nowadays?!

I think best bits are not on the Labour-Union link but on recognising that Labour has to support aspiration; the reference to right-to-buy and the recognition that working people aspire to better themselves and want a government that will support them.

Later in the report I think he falls into the same trap of looking at the world through a historic lens; he refers to present housing issues and again refers to council housing right-to-buy and the need to re-invest the proceeds in new housing.

That may have applied in 1980 but in 2012 council housing right-to-buy is largely an irrelevance!

Sure working people still aspire to owning their own homes but they don’t live in council housing anymore as it was sold off. Today’s aspiring generation are stuck in private rental and have no right to buy and either cannot afford or cannot get a mortgage to buy.

The rich vein of aspiration and votes it still there but the situation has changed and so are the policies required to tap it.

Phil Wilson’s 32 pages deserve far more time than I can really give them at the moment, but I will make a few very general points.

First we must take his document in the context of the time it has been released. Up until just a few months ago the Blairite wing of the party was flexing its muscles to make Ed Miliband feel very uncomfortable. That he wasn’t the choice of the majority of the PLP was very obvious. Since then how things have changed. As Lionel Bart wrote fings, definitely, ain’t wot they used to be. The Ed Miliband show has gone from to strength and those PLP supporters of his brother are being highlighted for disloyalty. I don’t need to go into how Progress and their supporters are now the ones feeling very uncomfortable.

So, it would easy to add Phil Wilson’s writings to Tony Blair’s re-emergence just as signs of the latter’s wing of the party fighting back. That would be a shame as we would miss something unusual in this case. What’s unusual is someone trying to put down in a readable fashion what Blair’s third way and New Labour stands for. See, what we usually get from them are soundbites and spin, and at that they are masters.

My second point would be to agree with Phil that Labour should be a party of aspiration. It’s not the main point of the party in my view but there’s nothing wrong with aspiration and yes, most working class parents would like their children to do better than they did. I certainly think my kids have done better than me so far and I hope my grandchildren do even better. Phil actually puts this in class terms of working class parents wanting to have middle-class kids, which is of course what Phil himself is. I’m not even sure I want to really argue with that. As parents we do tend to be greedy in what we want for our kids.

Where I would argue with him is I think the aspiration the Labour Party should be pushing isn’t that for individuals, but an aspiration that the whole working class moves upwards. You see once we allow the party to concentrate on the individuals like Phil we start to lose sight of those major issues such as equality. So at a time during the last few New Labour governments when we saw the upper and upper middle class doing rather well, we also saw measures of inequality showing a widening gap between the poor and the rich. We saw towns with a generation dumped on the benefit scrapheap by the Tories continuing into another generation under New Labour. Most of all we saw those middle class kids from working class families take over the leadership of the Labour Party.

Of course the party has always had room for the middle class, and we have found great leaders like Attlee out of that class, but up until the seventies we also had working class members of the PLP in sufficient numbers that they weren’t the exception to the rule. Funny enough the great encourager of grammar school boys from the working class in 1945 because of his embarrassment by working class MPs in the 30s and 40s, found that this action came back to bite him badly. That was Morrison of course who lost the leadership that he thought was rightfully his to Gaitskell, actually a public schoolboy. It should be noted that with the end of grammar schools our PLP is loaded in favour of independent and public schools now.

My last point for now is just a quick correction on how Phil talks about the sale of council houses. For myself the sale of council houses isn’t breaking some long held principle, although we should realize that no matter what the Tories say, owning a house, council or otherwise doesn’t automatically make you middle class in the correct use of the terminology. In fact council house sales at below market value could be a good way of pricking house price bubbles. What are wrong is council house sales without a house-building program to replace social housing stocks. Let’s be honest about what Thatcher did. Council house sales were a bribe to British working class to vote for her and it worked. That doesn’t mean Labour also should try to bribe them. That’s where the difference between the two parties comes in. Labour should always have a basic morality behind their actions. The Tories don’t need this which puts us at a disadvantage, but that doesn’t mean we can turn our backs on this morality, because if we do we are no better than the Tories.

And to sum this up, that turning of your back to morality, and to the morality of Keir Hardie that Phil writes about, is the problem with the Blairites. They were born out of the defeats that Phil also writes about. It was all about winning which again he writes about, but as much as they tell us of three election victories, they never talk about the 2010 massive loss. The ‘third way’ falls down when Blair says this loss was due to Brown, surely the very heart of New Labour, not following New Labour policies in the 2008 financial crisis, without, like Cameron and Osborne, telling us what those New Labour, or Tory, policies would have been.