The President and pressure politics

By Tom Miller / @tommilleruk

A couple of days back a fellow member of the Labour movement, albeit not from the same strain of it, spoke to myself and a few others. The person concerned was responding to this piece by the New Statesman’s Mehdi Hasan.

The liberal media (i.e. the likes of the NS and the Guardian, and in America organs such as the New York Times), frequently criticises ‘centre-left’ governments, or in Obama’s case, centre-left branches of government. The point my friend makes against this admittedly oft rehearsed criticism got me thinking about what it means to pressure politicians, particularly on the centre-left.

The person concerned makes at least one wholly legitimate point. Effective politicians always require some element of illusion on the part of their supporters. One would imagine that few standing at the gates of the Winter Palace foresaw the New Economic Policy, gulags or government by bureaucracy, and that even fewer Labour Party members thought that Blair might…well.

The person making it went on to claim that there was a kind of walk-on-water ‘star power’ politicians have before they hit the established base of power – “It morphs into respect for difference, it settles and challenges rather than admonishes with the familiar call of betrayal”.

The first point I would make in response to this is that in order for there to be any difference, there must be criticism. Disagreements must become apparent for it to be arguable that any really exist. In my experience, where there is disagreement, there is occasionally an accusation of betrayal, but far more often, an accusation of such an accusation; a crying of wolf on the part of establishment gatekeepers.

“The familiar call of betrayal” is a call which is all too familiar.

All organisations have their ‘loyalists’ (or ‘leadership loyalists’), and in all organisations outside of the processes of internal revolution, the ‘loyalist’ element is stronger. Hence the leadership remaining in place. That doesn’t mean ‘loyalists’ necessarily have a sensible or defensible disposition.

One of the arguments often used to counter calls to apply pressure to executives from progressive backgrounds is that once they are a government, such teams and individuals face pressures of the possible, and pressures from other stakeholders in the democratic process. I find that there is often a failure on the part of those who regard themselves as ‘loyalists’ to distinguish between those two phenomena. It’s quite legitimate to cite the former.

Imagine that (God forbid) the Lib Dems (somehow) secured an overall majority at the next General Election.

Frozen in opposition by the fact that they have nothing like the same access to the inner workings of the Civil Service that the Government and Official Opposition have, and the fact that only one of their politicians has ever served in any Government whatsoever, they would find that many of the things they promised simply would not add up.

Labour activists can already tell you that; but the senior stratum within the Labour Party actually knows it to be true. Given the circumstances they would walk into, like the SNP have in Scotland, the Lib Dems would fail to live up to a great many of their initial promises.

Rather than simply attacking them for it (though I am quite happy to attack their plans on this basis), I would stress that this is in fact understandable. A similar situation arises in the case of Obama; practically the whole of the staff of US Federal Government is composed of intensely party political appointments. Any incoming president has to deal with that.

Often one finds oneself bound by the failure of previous policies; results that cannot be built on because they don’t live up to scratch.

The pragmatic problems of circumstance are, however, rather distant from the politics of pressure, which are, bearing in mind that we still live in an epoch defined by the thought of the New Right, what I would argue should be the progressive priority.

Having pressure applied to you and not being able to do something are entirely different beasts. For a start, oppositions also have pressure applied to them. There are certain things they can’t say. Nor can they dictate the agenda.

I know myself the pressure that is applied to progressive politicians by business, the UK’s most powerful political force. For a short while I worked for a local government lobbying firm. Most of the campaigns we worked for were things I approved of, that nevertheless met local opposition; energy from waste plants, cardboard reprocessing facilities, supermarkets and distribution warehouses. Jobs. Transport links. Carbon reduction. Nice products, closer to those who needed them.

But my company also won a contract for a campaign to defeat the Manchester congestion charge, a campaign I did not personally support. The main contractor for the campaign was a company who owned a vast car-park, which would be affected by the zone. So it dressed up a campaign for something inherently reactionary in progressive language, began a media offensive, and levelled its sights on Manchester Labour’s local policy and politicians, using all kinds of pressure. Part of the campaign brought together some Labour people from the other local authorities concerned to oppose the charge. The campaign won, causing a referendum, which the pro-charge side lost. I believe that in the long term, it is the people who Labour should seek to protect who lost. The referendum indicates that many of them do not agree with me.

Witnessing the organised right’s enormous lobbying power and vast potential to create media criticism of politicians from a right-wing direction, this made me a more convinced left-winger than I had been before.

Whether we apply pressure to progressive politicians, or whether we trust them to make the right decisions on their own seems to me, therefore, to be a metaphor for another question. Do we let the right have a virtual monopoly on the application of both grassroots and superstructural pressure on the political centre, even when we are in office? Or do we fight them back? Even if that means pressuring one of our own?

Dennis Skinner once argued that there needs to be a Thatcher of the left. I think he’s profoundly correct. We need people who are prepared to stand up and be counted, to put themselves behind a comparable call for a seed change.

This was what Barack Obama half-represented in his election campaign. A change in the acceptable limits of policy debate. Like Thatcher, he appeared to be riding the crest of a movement which had sprung up as a reaction that which went before. Like Thatcher, he was an outsider to his own party chiefs in a social sense, and an outsider to the wet, triangulating centrist consensus which had dominated the party previously.

In Mehdi Hasan’s article he bemoans some of the retrograde steps taken by the administration. The US system of checks and balances is inherently in favour of conserving a status quo, a deliberate barrier to radical change. At some level there will always be some frustration.

But congress is Democractic, and won’t be soon, so the question has to be asked; if not now, then when?

The real problem for Obama, whatever he thinks it is, is not that people will criticise him.

This was something that Blair and his most loyal acolytes constantly expressed annoyance with here. But without that pressure, Blair was powerless to break the neoliberal consensus that held the UK financial services industry, alongside our unbalanced industrial strategy, to hold far too much sway.

He and Brown wouldn’t have agreed that there were these possible shortcomings anyway. Almost as much as the Tories, whose proposition at the time was not to ‘fix the roof while the sun was shining’, but in fact to take it to pieces, New Labour’s instincts where in the wrong place. Scarred by the long departed 1980s, they were trapped in an ideological panic room of their own making. It took recession to put the door ajar

The difference with Obama is that the whole point of him was that he wouldn’t be like that. To avoid it becoming the story of his presidency, and to shift his country leftwards, back towards both growth and civilisation, he needs to be able to show the population that there is a popular and credible mood against right wing policies, and that he needs to respond to that more than he does the Tea Parties.

In the UK, any such coalition would instantly be greeted by many within the Labour Party as suspicious. Guilty. Guilty of creating disunity and vulnerability, of unreasonably raising the straw man spectre of ‘betrayal’, and no doubt as being composed of ‘Middle Class liberals’ (which to many within our party acts as a kind of political shorthand for ‘something I don’t agree with, or dislike because it’s not our current policy’).

This closed mindedness is exactly the sort of thing rightly opposed by revisionists like Gaitskell, Crosland and the Gang of Four in the 50s and 60s. In today’s terms it represents a profound urge to disconnect from changing opinion, to shut out all from outside the favoured institution that is The Party. It is a kind of mental suicide.

I’m not against criticising liberal philosophy and some of its implications. I just think we should take what we can from it, and deal with the rest in a more substantial way than slinging names. In any event, being a member of the Fabians, reading the Guardian or even being in the LRC does not make one by definition a liberal. In the case of the left of the party in particular it often precludes it.

Labour is the only party with a combination of the material backing and community connections to change Britain, to remove the soggy consensus that has formed around Thactherism. This is a fact.

It is also a fact among other facts. It needs pressure upon it and within society to change the nature of the constraints that one (large) wing of the business lobby and their loyal guard of fellow travellers places upon it.

In that sense, whether in office or not, the left, that part of society that is not naturally inclined towards the social status quo, is sometimes in office, but always in opposition. For me, rather than making it harder to do what you want, a reason many loyalists make for the rest of us shutting up, it makes it far easier. That should be obvious to anyone. You get to make laws. You have much more press clout. Governments take an awful lot of criticism for not doing things that they could have done at the click of a finger, had they chosen to.

The job of those on the left who aren’t elected MPs, in my view, is not only to support the re-election of our candidates, but also to change the situation of being in ‘opposition’ to the world as it stands as profoundly as possible. You can do that by tackling those opposing you and taking responsibility when you fall short, or you can do it by shrinking from your original stated purpose and values, in an effort to find accommodation.

Politics for the left can’t by definition be about constantly evaluating the limits of the status quo and placing oneself within them. Our politics is about creating a world, a town, a neighbourhood that we want our children to live in, to coin a phrase, a ‘Good Society’. It is about adequately critiquing the bad society, and eradicating it. Our politics must not be about identifying constraints, but finding solutions. Democratic left politics is about finding a dream, finding the reality, and building a bridge.

The job of politicians who join movement-based parties like ours is to judge how far the public have moved with change in our direction (i.e. leftwards), encourage it in whatever way to go further, and go with the flow as far as possible.

But elements of the public must always be to the left of the government or the right of it for it to swing in any given direction and take the country with it. I would suggest that the function of a future Labour Party, and organisation committed to democratic socialism, should be to lead this process. For that to work, as well as being able to do media training and deliver leaflets, it must be free to apply pressure.

I am to the left of this Government, so it makes it difficult for me to pick a favourite minister. The composition of the Government depends on the Parliamentary Labour Party; in my view, the PLP requires a wide ranging generational and political change anyway.

But if I did have to pick a favourite minister, it would be Mr Ed Miliband of the Department for Energy and Climate Change (though surely it should be against climate change?). Harriet Harman comes in second, by virtue of the Equalities Act.

Mr Miliband operates under the material (rather than political) constraints described above, what policy is within budget, what science works, the lot. He also operates within cabinet responsibility, meaning that he presumably loses battles with colleagues. But he is also on record as repeatedly asking green activists to put pressure on him. For a start, as long as they avoid the ultra-left disease of crude anti-Labourism, it beefs up his capacity to argue and negotiate with cabinet colleagues. It also substantially improves his ability to argue and negotiate with interest groups such as motor manufacturers and power companies, insofar as their interests contradict what Mr. Miliband believes to be the public good. The other opportunity activists have is to change Miliband’s conception not what the public good actually is, and to bring violations of it to his attention.

He recently attended the Wave demo with the patently incongruous Lord Mandelson. I can’t remember senior Labour politicians attending demos in the whole of the 1990s.

I’m not claiming by any means that Ed Miliband is some kind of left-wing activist. But I think that his attitude to pressure, and to dissatisfaction with the status quo (Labour or not), is a much more healthy approach for the party to take. It is a key to freedom for this government, to move leftwards if the social consensus does, but also to freely admit when it has made mistake X or Y where it never felt able to do so in the rigid political culture of the late 1990s.

The problem is that Ed Miliband is pioneering this approach practically alone.

In the words of the former Editor here, Derek Draper, himself a child of New Labour:

“What New Labour did suits people in society who exert power in society not through the political system, or not through the democratic political system. It suits big business and it suits entrenched interests and it suits the status quo, those three things of course being those things the Labour party supposed to be a counter-force to. What happens is that big business gets to carry on exerting their power behind the scenes, getting their way, because there’s no countervailing pressure. Countervailing pressure is not going to come from 8 people sipping wine in Kettering.”

Despite his very public woes some time back, Derek frequently has the ability, when it comes to political opinions at least, to be bang on the money.

If we are constantly worried that our pressure might be interpreted as ‘betrayal’, or fear that there might be no point in applying it, because government would obviously do it if it was materially possible, we end up in a system which combines a heap of naivety with a note of defeatism.

In the face of the right-wing’s powerful lobby and media operations the left would disarm itself.

I would suggest instead that we help out Labour politicians by fighting them at all levels, inside government and outside of it. Reading a critical guardian article or seeing a vitriolic placard shouldn’t be a problem for any politician on the left. Where is the thickness of skin?

It should be a sign that those of us who believe in social-democratic values are still out here, pressing for the debate to change, trying to marginalise the right, talking to the people in our communities about our opposition to market fundamentalism, cascading and perpetual wars, unfair global trade & finance, and wanton environmental degradation.

Ministers! Those outside parliament, on the shop floors, cafes, and in the street… they define the left and right, the right and the wrong. People with different views are a good thing for Governments, if they want them to be. Besides, people don’t want to hear ‘the line’. In the words of Robin Cook:

“Our electors live in a defiantly individualist society which respects honesty, self-expression and originality. They simply cannot comprehend why politicians repeat the central line rather than speak their own minds.”

So, ministers. Your party and movement must be their conduit. You must make them your ally. If you’re from the left too, as long as you work that to Labour’s advantage, you avoid spending your time attacking whatever we believe in… you have an opportunity to become a force for a change the political consensus to a progressive one, a modern democratic left to mirror Thatcher’s ’79ers. And Policy Exchange. The laughably monikered ‘Reform’. Don’t forget Conservativehome, the TPA. Nor ultimately the shadowy but discredited global economists of Chicago School.

Democratic Party. Obama. You too Labour. Listen up.

We understand that you can’t do everything the broad left wants. You’re in government. But please understand why we say that we want you to. Political pressure on any government, left or right, cannot just be left to little Pinochets and climate conspiracists.

Pressure.

It’s our job. It’s your potential.