Building the Good Society: Compass / DL21

From LabourList

Today saw a press conference on behalf of the UK’s Compass, and their counterparts in Germany, DL21 (which stands for Democratic Left 21 – the significance of the 21 remains unknown). The speakers at the conference were Labour’s Jon Cruddas and the vice-president of the SPD in Germany, Andrea Nahles.

In typical Compass fashion, the event began with a ritual reading of the Guardian. The document that the press release is meant to mark the launch of was also circulating. Entitled ‘Building the Good Society’, it is rather symbolic, in the sense that it is worded primarily in red and green, and carries a child on the front cover holding a windmill. Very cute. But the wind turbine next to her is significantly larger! The rather sleek website is here.

The document can be read on the Compass website here.

Jonathan Rutherford, co-author of ‘The Crash’ (which can be downloaded for free here), introduces the session.

He says that an initial meeting between Compass and DL21 took place in December, and that since then there have been many email exchanges about the future of the democratic left in Europe.

Jon Cruddas says that this is a novel process, as the speakers were in Berlin this morning, and held an equivalent press conference there. He says that the economic recession has widened beyond the financial sector into the rest of the economy and society. This is an opportunity to open up a debate about what issues we should discuss, and what we should revisit.

He mentions the launch of the Third Way/Neue Mitte document in Britain and Germany by Blair and Schroder ten years ago.

At the initial launch, Cruddas was working on labour market policy at No 10. He says that themes such as the compatibility of efficiency and social justice, an emphasis on the green, and the family have dropped away from the agenda, and that this means it’s time for the left to reconsider what it’s around. The democratic left must be about liberty, equality and sustainability; but the Blair/Schroder document was about cementing neoliberal leadership in social democratic parties.

The third way has not sustained itself. It was a brief bookend to the previous neoliberal binge.

So now we have a chance to reconsider it. What does the failure of it as both an economic but also an electoral idea mean?

We need to explore some other ideas in all of our parties. Difficult questions must be raised. This is the start of something, rather than the end of it.

This will be a wide and deep agenda that will go much further.

Andrea Nahles praises the good whether in both cities, and apologises in advance for what seems to be excellent English. She goes to German.

First all of, she says that it is unusual to participate in something like this from the point of view of the SPD. In autumn last year it was quite clearly noted that it wasn’t just a few banks that needed challenging. We need to challenge the whole economic order. The reaction that we need to display cannot be just to repair back to what we had before. People want to know what will happen now.

She thinks that this means that it is necessary to start a debate about how we live and work in the future. We want to live and work well. So what is needed in the future is the Good Society.

That’s why both Cruddas and Nahles feel that something new needs to be generated from the bottom up. It cannot be handed down by the political parties. That’s why the process of debate is essential.

To start this debate we need to look beyond the national level. Over the last few months the two organisations have debated a shared platform. Compared to Germany, the way debate is conducted is very liberal compared to Germany.

She does not like the phrase co-determination, simple because it sounds like something from The Terminator!

As parties and civil societies we are experiencing ‘a lack of orientation’. We need to give people so that we can fight populists/extremists back. How can we remedy this, but create a structure that prevents it happening again? We are allowing a vacuum to flourish.

Robert Taylor of the Smith Institute (formerly Labour correspondent for the FT). The Smith Institute will soon have a publication out on this. He says that the Neue Mitte and Third Way documents were different, as the New Labour document sought to cut out trade union matters from the booklet completely! He says that he is glad that the SPD is coming to together with ‘the social democratic wing of Labour, rather than the other wing’. With the Good Society, we need a good economy.

Jon Cruddas says that although this is not included in the document, there was a big discussion in Berlin about how manufacturing could be helped, and recommends that the Labour Party borrows the German strategy for maintaining high-skill manufacturing jobs.

Nahles says that Germany needs itself to discuss making some changes, but that in the UK there needs to be a concentration on manufacturing and industry as a whole. This will be the next big discussion between the two organisations. There is a ‘good work’ campaign I Germany between the SPD and Unions. It’s interesting that this has correlated with the Good Society document which Compass has produced. What will happen in the next year? Will the system we knew re-establish itself? Will we go back?

We do not want to go back, she says. We need another direction.

One person, an academic, says that the notion of distribution of income coming off of the political agenda was an important part of the Third Way and Neue Mitte. Is Richard Wilkinson right, in that a whole variety of ills arise from inequality? The speaker, a former banker himself, describes a link between inequality and the efficiency of markets. The housing market is a machine for redistributing income from the young and the poor to the rich and the old, who don’t need as much wealth. This is inherently inefficient. What about PFI/PPPs, he asks. One thing that is holding back the effects of fiscal stimulus is this.

Laurie Penny asks what the two speakers think of the prospect of a change of government. How influential can this document really be among those who will read it? What is there in this document that can persuade her to vote Labour in Haringey?

Another person asks what is specifically left about the document, as many Liberals and Tories would agree with its stated aims. Will it really prompt a re-invention of the political wheel?

In response to the first question, Nahles says that it is true that there is dissatisfaction and division in society. This did not originate under Blair or Schroder, but neither have they got smaller during their periods of office. How can we share the burden? A key issue is fairer taxes.

It’s not about criticising Blair or Schroder. What we want to do is create an appetite for talking about what will happen in the next decade. This needs an open spirit, and incentives to go beyond what happened in the past. We don’t need a magnifying glass to see how many times either premiere appears in this document. We need to liberate ourselves from obsession with their legacy and find a new politics. In dealing with the financial crisis we need to sort things out and be stricter in the future. We must avoid living on other countries’ debts, and close tax havens.

Cruddas says that the hallmark of the Blair/Schroder document is the sense that economic balances are resolved. The economic situation of the last decade would have suggested that capitalism had become self correcting, and that there was no cycle. The financial crisis smashes the consensus that this was true.

The more equal the society, the happier. There is less obesity, self harm etc.

This document is unquestionably a text of the centre left. It is meant as an explicit questioning of neoliberalism and what that means, alongside the battering of the structure of class. He talks the person who asked the question through the document. Present governments are firefighting, but the real task at hand is to be a new system that is resilient, secure and has social justice at its heart. More specific policy frameworks will be delivered eventually, but we need to return to the fundamentals of political economy and what it means to be a social-democrat. The politician that we should first ignore is that with an easy answer. We need to take in a wide scope of ideas and resolve them.

The third way was a series of compromises which meant it did not turn out to be anything particularly transformative, it is temporary.

In response to Laurie, he says that this is not about handing down a manifesto, it’s about asking you to get involved.

We can’t go back to the third way. In the last 20 years we have seen a redistribution of both wealth and power to the top.

A question is asked about how Nahles feels about Die Linke. He says it is rooted in the concept of a good society, and asks why the SPD is so strongly opposed to a relationship with them. Why should the left be divided?

She responds. When we talk about a social Europe, it cannot be based on a US economic or Social Model. We need a new Social Democracy. What we need is another regulated form of capitalism.

Die Linke is an expression of a kneejerk anti-Europeanism. We need a modern left which is forward looking, not a mad one. Their last party congress was ‘hair raising’. We cannot turn Germany into an island. If the SPD goes with the Good Society concept, Die Linke will lose influence. The questioner says that thanks to PR, we need an enemy on the left if our values in Government are ever to stay routed there. Nahles responds by saying tat Die Linke divides the Labour movement.

Jon Cruddas warns Labour of the progress of the CNWP and other similar projects. If they win, there will be a sense that the centre is hollowing out.

Someone from C4 news asks how much of this is already resolved at the G20. He says that the countries are different, and asks why SPD politicians attack fiscal stimulus from the right and hedge funds from the left.

Nahles says that the Germans fear inflation most, while the British fear employment most. There are historic reasons! This is why, as part of the paper launched today, we tried to strive for a joint position in terms of economic programmes and financial markets. Perhaps this could help the parties come together? The G20 has already showed some movement by each country. Brown is now much friendlier towards the regulation demanded by Germany. She is anti-Jersey: Britain needs to get a lot tougher on tax havens.

Germany does not want a bailout programme, but has gone for stimulus such as subsidies for car scrappage. This is a stimulus policy.

We need to look at what we can do now, and what we want to do. It might be an idea to approach Spanish and Swedish social democrats to join the process going on between Compass and DL21. In Germany, the SPD is moving towards a wealth tax. Where the public sector has been more restricted than the UK, that may well change.

We want our ideas to become part of party platforms as widely as possible.

Sunny Hundal says we don’t seem to have an immediate agenda, and says that although there is a lot of energy, there is no united left of centre agenda. What do any of these campaigns mean in practise? Do we need strengthened shareholder rights? Should the government attack monopolies? How do we deal with pollution. This is too vague. Cruddas says that next week Compass is releasing a tax justice document. The week afterwards, there will be specific policy proposals on housing. He refutes the argument that this is a vague or vacuous document, because it is an initial critique to underlie a process of thinking about specifics. It is part of the product which makes hard policies rigorous and sustainable.

Frankfurter Allegemaine asks if Britain should borrow proposals about the European Central Bank for the Bank of England. Cruddas starts by talking about the Euro. He says that the pound is vulnerable due to the Dollars role as a reserve currency. He worries that we might be forced to join the Euro without being in a position to choose. He calls for a debate on it. Is our own Bank of England too focussed on fighting inflation? He cites the late nature of interest rate cuts in response to the faltering economy, and says that (TIM?) Blanchflower should have been listened to.

The remit of the bank is a product of benign economic times which are gone.

Laurie Penny asks how much of a split there is between people who want to tweak the third way, and people who want to completely leave it behind. How divided will the party be?

Cruddas rounds off. All of the main parties are split between neoliberal elements, who say ‘get back to normal’. Orange Book liberals are pitted against their social brethren. The split also exists in Labour and the Conservative Party. He is for ‘no turning back’. The fact that an epoch is ending necessitates these splits; a pluralist discussion in each party is the only thing which can resolve the contradictions.

Blair/Schroder was an attempt to close a debate. Now it is time to open one.