Green Labour

By Colin Challen

‘Red’ Labour seems to be taking a bit of a hammering of late. It seems we in the Labour Party are so ashamed of our past that we have to rebrand ourselves every dozen or so years. New Labour had to be distinct from ‘old’ Labour, and the great test was ditching Clause 4. Idiotic really – Clause 4 never had much traction for ‘old’ Labour either. Ted Heath nationalised more than we did in living memory. But getting rid of it got Tony Blair a good press and New Labour was born, and the ‘Project’ trundled along towards the buffers.

Perhaps we’re ashamed of old Labour because Harold Wilson didn’t win enough elections – only one more than Tony Blair, that is. Perhaps we’re ashamed of old Labour because the memory of the 1970s, with spiralling inflation and industrial unrest is still potently stoked up by the likes of Cameron, Osborne and their friends in the media, who still prattle on about ‘winters of discontent.’ Such people have short memories, or perhaps weren’t old enough at the time to remember that Labour inherited runaway inflation from Ted Heath’s inept government, along with many other problems. The not-so-concealed subtext of today’s austerity measures is ‘we will not go running to the IMF like Labour did.’ No matter that the treasury of the day cocked up the figures and that the 1970s IMF bailout was unnecessary – who cares now about what historians have had to say?

The trouble with old Labour is that many people in the Labour Party have been prepared to believe what our opponents have said about it. We have been far too unquestioning of a myth. But another aspect of that very same myth is that old Labour was somehow ‘red in tooth and claw.’ That it was anti-business, anti-city, anti-banks. If only. The problem with old Labour was that it was guided by the same managerialist caution as New Labour. It was to coin a phrase not bold enough when it had the opportunity. It left the economy in the hands of those who sought maximum advantage for the few. New Labour was merely the continuation of old Labour, but learnt some better marketing tricks.

Another rebranding now is not what is required, nor for the conflicting reasons cited above is nostalgia or rejection. Rather we should recognise that the landscape is changing so fast, and has changed so dramatically because of globalisation and its consequences, that the Labour Party has to fundamentally redefine itself and what it seeks to do. That means the concept of international solidarity has to be revived, and for the first time a proper and profound embrace of environmentalism must occur. The two things go hand in hand. Too often in the recent past our solidarity has been heralded by the arrival of our armed forces on foreign soil, and whilst many fine words have been spoken (think Gleneagles, think Make Poverty History) our effort say in Africa was undermined by an inability to internalise the consequences of our love of trade liberalisation. We had a blind spot for the growing inequality in the world as well as in the UK.

The warnings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have been sidelined during the economic crisis. The heady talk of three years ago, when it was said that the best way out of the recession would be (finally) to invest massively in green technology has largely evaporated. We are now determined to get back to business as usual as quickly as possible. Both frontbenches are fixated with the monthly retail figures, a response as forlorn as George W Bush pleading with Americans to ‘go shop’ after 9/11. Gordon Brown’s first book after his departure – “Beyond the Crash” – plots a Global Plan for Growth to get us out of the recession. But globalisation was a global plan for growth, remember? The new spin we want to give to this highly volatile top will be our undoing, and the word ‘recession’ won’t come close to describing the misery we will face – if we fail to do as much about ecology as we do about economy.

‘Green’ was never Labour’s great strength. Sad to say, we have our vested interests too, putting a brake on real green momentum. Robin Cook came closest to understanding the potential synergy between labour and ecology, and perhaps in his memory now is the time to talk about Green Labour. Anyone up for that?