Solidarity is dead – long live solidarity

The Labour Movement column
By Anthony Painter

A couple of years ago I started penning this column and this is my last. The first one was a piece about the crisis of trust in politics, the impact of economic hardship, and how these elements were starting to combine, refracted through immigration and notions of the ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ into a hostile political environment. My warning was that the BNP were lurking. A few weeks later they won two seats in the European Parliament.

Luckily, the party itself failed to make any further gains in the general election and indeed lost any local council seats which it fought in 2010. It over-stretched itself and has largely collapsed in an organisational heap as a result. However, the wave of economic anxiety, identity insecurity, hostility to outsiders and ‘free-riders’, the decline civic and political trust, and fragmentation of class solidarity which gave the BNP an opening is all still with us.

A new element to this has been the growth of an optimistic version of nationalism north of the border. On Monday, the UK government announced its opening bid to persuade the SNP away from a more aggressive separatist agenda – more borrowing powers and more control over its taxation. Anything that stops short of full fiscal and financial independence is unlikely to prevent an independence referendum. It is a referendum that will probably be won by the unionists but by no means certainly – a poll last week showed the gap is just 8% with independence ahead in every age range below 45 years old. Even if the unionists prevail this time that age differential suggests this is not going away any time soon.

In many ways nationalism – of whatever kind – is a direct consequence of the end of a politics based on class loyalty (NB this is not the same thing as the end of social class!) When Eric Hobsbawm warned that the ‘forward march of Labour’ had halted in a piece in Marxism Today in 1978, he described how patterns of work were changing. In 1961, more than 50% of people were employed in workplaces of 500 or more. Well, the latest figures suggest that number is now actually nearer 20%. More than half of people work in workplaces of less than 100. This is a completely different social experience and it has political consequences.

Much was made recently of the fact that 75% of people consider themselves to be middle-class. To my mind that means as a cultural or political phenomenon, class is of incredibly loose significance. So what we have instead is a kaleidoscopic politics of personality, identity, drama, issues, narrative, and scapegoating flowing into the space that class used to fill.

As Hobsbawm put it:

“It seems to me that we are now seeing a growing division of workers into sections and groups.”

This was back in 1978. That trend has continued apace. Peter Flannery’s powerful 1996 drama Our Friends in the North had it down to a tee. It is the story of the decline of traditional working classes – some became wealthier, some became professional, some fell into dependence on the state, anti-social behaviour patterns, and even destitution, but few remained the same. New Labour was one response to this – it basically targeted disaffected Conservative voters and working-class support held firm for a while. Then it began to fragment. The working-classes themselves were fragmented. Politically they held together under the Thatcherite onslaught – it was pure defence. Once that threat was removed what was left of that solidarity sundered.

So I don’t buy this 5 million lost votes through New Labour betrayal thesis. What actually happened is that a fragile class solidarity no longer needed hold with a less threatening Labour government in office. So strangely New Labour relied on a working-class solidarity that was actually thin and temporary. It could only have held it together at a cost of retreating from electability and, in reality, probably not even then. This messy, fragmentary, confusing politics is the natural state for a country that is socially divided through post-industrial capitalism. Political coalitions will be more contingent and fleeting rather than loyal and dependable.

It remains to be seen whether the coalition will recharge this solidarity. I’m not sure it will – people now see what a post-industrial Labour government is like and they know it’s very different to the Labour party of the 1970s and 1980s. It must remain so if it’s to electorally survive. Ed Miliband’s speech on responsibility emphasises that he is also aware that modern Labour leaders must appeal to people’s values not their class. He will also come to realise – just as David Cameron and Nick Clegg have – that he must also speak to people’s identity. Indeed, he can do a lot worse than to seek to understand the appeal of Alex Salmond’s optimistic, civic nationalism as a mobilising political force.

I am hoping that the collective view of our leading political strategists is rather more constructive than the shadow cabinet member who guffawed with laughter last week when I suggested that Labour needed to develop a positive English case if it was to make a strong pro-UK case. But it’s not just about identity – it is also about aspiration, fairness, security, and the institutions that people hold dear both locally and nationally. The good news is that all the elements are there in broad discourse for Labour to build a relevant and principled post-industrial politics.

When I wrote that first LabourList column, I had not fully appreciated that the rise of BNP was indicative of deeper processes at play. Unfortunately, these can’t just be explained in terms of competition for work or for public services. It is something deeper. We are increasingly divided and yet we feel a yearning to belong. We open a newspaper, pull back the curtains, or go to work and we experience change. Yet we desire security and stability. This is not just in the UK’s case. It is across western democracies. It is why social democratic parties are struggling almost everywhere.

Over the last three to four decades this country has radically changed: first economically then socially then politically. There is no going back. That world has gone. It is this world in which the left must seek to win the trust of people to pursue the sorts of adventurous policies that can really give them control and power over their lives. Neither New nor old Labour is the answer anymore. How well we understand this environment will determine whether Labour is the answer at all. The good news? It’s the same for Conservatives. It turns out that national leadership in the post-industrial age is hard. And after two years of columns I’m not sure I’m any nearer to the answer. But it’s been fun and I intend to keep on searching and you’ll keep on hearing from me from time to time!