The Sunder Katwala interview

Sunder Katwala is the General Secretary of the Fabian Society. He met Alex Smith on Saturday, 20th June, 2009.

AS: We’re at the Fabian conference 6 months to Copenhagen. What’s the purpose of this conference as you see it?
SK: The job of the Fabians is not to replicate what environmental campaigners and others are already doing. But even amongst a highly informed, highly engaged political audience there is no real sense that Copenhagen is a big deal. We need to think about what we can do about that. Copenhagen is one of the most complicated diplomatic negotiations the world has ever seen; it’s more complicated and more technical than any set of world trade talks. That can be quite disempowering politically, because people have to know the contours of negotiation towards a deal before the event. The deal that we get will absolutely depend on what the public pressure politics are – in Europe, in the US and in the developing world. So it’s a race against the clock, partly because it’s very late to do anything about climate change anyway, but also in terms of having an international movement around this moment. The risk of losing that now to the politics of recession or to a lack of salience is a challenge. So in our own space, the Fabians can try and link different ideas and coalitions together.

AS: But in these economic circumstances, will countries or international movements have the will or the ability to gain that deal?
SK: The recession has brought into sharper focus something that was already true: that you can’t achieve mobilisation in trade unions or in the developing world without bringing together the issues of economic prosperity, quality of life and the environment. The movement to put post-materialist green politics on the agenda was always a minority coalition, but now you’ve got a moment of profound economic restructuring where governments are investing in key strategic industries. So this is an opportunity – so long as you don’t waste the crisis, as people say – to invest in greener pathways. People now accept that a bigger role for government will be a reality, and governments understand that future growth has to be greener growth.

AS: Last weekend I attended your session with Phillip Blond, where you discussed Red Toryism. You said the Left remains uniquely placed as a force for progress. What is it that makes you think that’s still the case?
SK: Well, I like Phillip a lot, and I think he’s a very engaging and interesting thinker. But I thought part of the mismatch was that Phillip was trying to look at very high levels of political theory and the history of political ideas, when we’d been asked a political question: which side of politics is more progressive? The specific problem for Phillip Blond’s Red Toryism is that Conservatives don’t believe in progress.

AS: So it’s just a pretty label?
SK: Yeah, because it’s ground people feel they should have in politics. But Phillip was a bit coy about whether he prefers the 14th Century or the 21st century. Having read his stuff about New Medievalism, I’d say he prefers the 14th century quite strongly, and that’s not the progressive politics I subscribe to. While the vote, freedom of speech and the printing press were important tools and important ideas for progressive politics and important historic achievements that we of course defend, you also need to think about the future. The Left will have a claim to the progressive banner as long as we’ve got an overall mission, an animated ideal that speaks to that message of progress – for me, that’s the idea of human emancipation, substantive freedom to decide what happens in your life and your society. I don’t think it’s an individualism versus collectivism thing.

I think to a large extent, progressive conservatism – which I really welcome if it’s about accepting the need to look at the interests of the poor or that our society has changed and we don’t want to change it back – is a response to the progressive changes that the Left has driven. That’s what I want to give conservatism credit for: it does move with the times so it can stay conservative and not be reactionary. To some extent, David Cameron proves that New Labour has achieved something, because he’s had to shift the position of his party quite considerably. So the paradox here is that New Labour has done more progressive things than it is prepared to advocate.

AS: If progress is a constant struggle, what are the main challenges we face today?
SK: It’s still an argument about whether we’re a more equal and fairer society. It’s still about the fact that we have high levels of child poverty, we have immense chasms of educational opportunity and inequality in death chances as well as life chances – that’s what gets progressives out of bed in the morning. But finding a strategy for doing that is complicated. If you want to break down class disadvantage, you need a cross-class coalition to do it; if you want to break down ethnic disadvantage, you need a politics of the common good that engages people from every community. So we know that the challenge – a substantive equality of life chances – is the defining domestic issue. Internationally it’s the same idea: we believe that every human being has worth and value and equal dignity, and that’s an argument about fundamental human rights and fundamental human development. So there’s still a need for global social democracy and increasingly you can’t have a domestic social democracy without a European social democracy and a global social democracy. The idea that there are no great progressive causes left is wrong: international development is one of the very good thing the government has done, though the broader liberal internationalism agenda has got us into a lot of trouble, especially in Iraq. But actually there are some things that have worked: take the intervention in Sierra Leone – that’s one of the things we can be proudest of. If I choose two others things, the politics of red-green has never happened and there can be no choice between a social agenda and a greener agenda – it’s not a trade off. There’s also now a crisis of politics and a sense that the crisis could be useful to create a more participatory democracy.

AS: What’s the alternative to the anti-politics?
SK: The type of representative democracy we have is too out of touch and too elitist, so it faces populist pressure. That’s a good pressure for substantive progressive change, but there’s also the possibility of a wrecking politics that breaks it all up. What’s fundamentally in question – more than this being a crisis of institutions or a crisis of the left – is that this is also a crisis of understanding what politics is about. Politics is the way we make collective decisions as a society, so everyone has a voice and a stake in the decision. That’s why it’s legitimate that you’re bound by a decision that isn’t entirely what you want. One of the questions in political space and political deliberation is how we put all these views in the room and have debates, deep disagreements and negotiations.

AS: Is the end game of that pluralism necessarily PR?
SK: I’m an advocate of electoral reform, although I’m a non-theologian about electoral systems. That theology of favourite systems is actually what gets in the way. One of the strange things about the electoral reform of the commons debate is that it’s exactly the same as it was 20 years ago when I was studying politics at A level, but everything else in the system has changed. There could be a case for a pluralist majoritarian system, like the AV, if there were lots of checks and balances. The Jenkins report is an excellent historical analysis of electoral systems and AV+ is a system I’d be perfectly happy with. I’m backing the electoral reform society’s campaign to get a referendum on election day, but I think actually it’s a debate at the moment among the reformers and it has therefore been too much about the strategy, tactics or outcome that a small reforming cohort want at their great moment. So it shouldn’t just be a campaign to have a referendum; it should be a campaign to win one.

AS: You’ve spoken of creating an international movement. Last year 80 Young Fabians went to Ohio for ten days to volunteer on the Obama campaign. Was that something that came from the Fabians or the Young Fabians themselves?
SK: The young Fabians put it together themselves and they had the energy to make it happen. I’m sure there must have been some nervousness in the States about having a lot of people from the Fabian Society knocking on doors in Ohio to help elect Barack Obama but they contributed a lot and learned a lot from it. The work the Fabians have done about cultural organisational change in the Labour Party, with the pamphlet by Will Straw and Nick Anstead recently, has helped us remake an argument that we were making a few years ago – that party politics has to be part of a movement politics. In 2006, the Democrats were not in a good position. They had no idea what they stood for, no energy, no movement – there was a political class bereft of momentum and energy – and they put it together. Obama, with his personal charisma and political skills, cut through many of the dilemmas they had, but he wasn’t a magical figure that came down from the mountains. He succeeded because a new infrastructure of progressive politics was created. So we’re now having that debate, this year while the government’s in power. That’s a very important thing to do. No one thinks you can translate wholesale from the US, but a lot of people here underestimate the possibilities. Every expert commentator wrote a column about why insurgency movements always lose the Democratic race or why black candidates will always fail, but actually it wasn’t true. You can change the parameters of what’s possible.

AS: What is it about your background that attracted you to the Fabian Society? How do your politics fit into the Fabians’ history and traditions?
SK: I was always interested in history and politics and issues of identity. My father’s from India, my mother’s from Ireland, so I had to work through some issues about how everything fits together when I was thirteen or fourteen. I could never take things for granted. I remember a cricket test when I was fourteen very profoundly because I did support England, but my Dad didn’t. So I was politicised by the nature of having that background, and I needed to find out where things come from. By the time I was fifteen or so, I was interested in politics and ideas and I was Labour in a general sense. That’s why I decided to study politics at university. Then I came across the Fabians as a place with a history of ideas, a group that had always led and informed on ideas. I was probably in Sixth Form when David Marquand wrote the Progressive Dilemma book, and I thought that was a profound analysis of why the progressives don’t win. To some extent the Labour tradition is part of the problem, but it’s also the only vehicle we’ve got. The Labour movement is the thing that has brought about the biggest change in our society. And yet it loses more than it wins because it doesn’t mobilise all the progressive forces behind it and it’s too narrow. There was a very progressive argument to New Labour, coming out of charter 88, that was about political reform, that advocated a red-green politics and the politics of different issues that came out of the feminisation of the party and the debate over work-life balance. 1989 had happened and a lot of the old contours were fading away. Labour was much more progressive by 1997, even with its caution and its modesty, than it was in 2001 when it became a very narrow argument about particular models of public service reform.

AS: I always think New Labour began to fail at 9/11. That was such a huge global event that shook the nature of where the world was historically and forcibly refocused the government on foreign policy. New Labour’s biggest achievements came in that first term, but the party morphed into something else as a result of that crisis, something less bold.
SK: I think it’s complicated, but what strikes me is that New Labour told us it was a modest project that would get bolder and more radical. You now look at it and it has considerable legacy achievements, but nearly all of those came before the 2001 election. That ties into the idea that 9/11 and Iraq had an impact but actually we’d already lost a lot of momentum and energy in the way we fought the 2001 election campaign.

AS: Because of complacency?
SK: I think a lot of it was not being complacent. New Labour was always going to beat William Hague in 2001, but the only people who couldn’t believe that was New Labour itself. So we fought the 2001 election in the way we did because of the way we lost in 1992. William Hague ran on a very unpopular populism of immigration, Europe and saving the pound. Hague thought that was resonating, the Daily Mail thought that was resonating, New Labour high command thought that was resonating, and yet we were about to win a landslide. So we were nervous about making a strong political argument. We were still many years and a major crisis away from making an argument on the top rate of tax, for example. It’s partly for those reasons that it took the Tories another defeat to realise that we were winning those arguments against them. All of this is based on the experience of a particular generation that created New Labour and had the great achievement of getting Labour back into power after 18 years of opposition but was nonetheless scarred by the sense that the other side had the popular political argument.

AS: But we’re in exactly that same position now going into a general election. The party has no coherent message and so no one is certain what Labour stands for anymore…
SK: Yeah, and the reasons it’s been so difficult to articulate the vision is because New Labour hasn’t understood its own political success, which is that we had finally begun to convert the right and force them to engage with our causes. In the last two elections, the Conservatives have run on less spending, a smaller state, tax cuts, anti-Europe. Now we’ve beaten that, they’ve started talking in progressive language – though you can also see in their recession response where their comfort zone still is. So we have to test them and say: ‘if you really are progressive then why don’t you want to do the next thing that progressives would do?’ If they’re now about civil partnerships and social liberalism then what are they going to do about it? If they’re so committed to a work-life balance, will they change their position on the social chapter?

AS: Do you think Labour has the leadership to do that?
SK: Well, we need to get out of fundamental strategic debate used in the 2001 and 2005 election campaigns. Saying ‘we’re not the Tories’ was enough in 2001 and it was still just about enough to beat Michael Howard in 2005, but it’s not enough now. In fact, them saying ‘we’re not Labour’ is more powerful than us saying ‘we’re not the Conservatives’ because Labour is now marginally the more contaminated of the two brands. David Cameron hasn’t decontaminated the Conservative brand that much. He’s got them off the flat line and he’s decontaminated the Cameron brand but there is no real hope invested in the Conservatives – they’ve just become ‘the other lot’, the default option. There’s no way you can reconstruct the same broad anti-Tory coalition of 1997. So we’re currently in the position of fighting David Cameron’s empty call for change. Labour can only win if it can make clear what the difference is between us and them. To do that, we have to have an economic argument and a housing argument that speaks across the broad progressive coalition.