Why the left rarely wins

So, the 99% movement.

I don’t write about movement politics much, because it’s not my area of speciality. I’m an evolutionary not revolutionary socialist, and my chosen path for attempting to affect societal change is through the Labour Party. Party politics isn’t perfect, in fact it’s frustrating as hell sometimes, but in my long experience, it is the best way to achieve a majority of your objectives.

But the collective nature of Parties, the slow rate of change and the hierarchical structures don’t appeal to, or work for, everyone. Those who believe in revolutionary change, those focused on a single issue, those who prefer to work outside of traditional democracy.

So we have among the broad left, two distinctive traditions, which for brevity’s sake I shall refer to as the political left and the civil left.

Unlike Anthony Painter, I don’t feel that the most constructive way for the political left to engage with the civil left is to sneer them into submission. I agree with him (and with Sunny Hundal) that these movements can tend to elitism and internal division, but that doesn’t mean that all those involved in such movements are wrong.

I don’t know about Anthony, but my first instinct when faced with a large group of people willing to give up their Saturday afternoons to politically engaged action isn’t to mock them, but to wish they – or at least some of them – were doing so for the Labour Party. I don’t believe that belittling the action they are currently taking is the best way to do that.

For the most part, I (and I think Anthony) want what they want – a fairer world with better systems to manage that fairness over the longer term. I am concerned that the vagueness of such demands may mean that protests like this are lead to eventual disappointment and disillusionment. But unlike Anthony, I hope that isn’t the case.

This is not to say that all campaign movements achieve nothing. There are a list of legislative achievements that were brought about – at least in part – by people protesting creating the energy and space that supported politicians in getting legislation through. From the Poll Tax to the recent debacle over Forestry  the political Left have been aided by the Civil left kicking up a stink about issues close to their heart. I have been told by former ministers when trying to pass challenging legislation on Climate Change that the noise of the protesters outside their windows pushing them to go as far as possible helped shore up support within the system. That’s a good example of the political and civil left coming together, bringing all their strengths to a common cause.

It is also worth remembering that protest doesn’t simply belong to the left – despite the stereotypes in Anthony’s article. Some of the most successful protests of the New labour years were organised by the right wing against high fuel prices and road charging. The Countryside Alliance march may not have stopped the ban on fox hunting, but I suspect it had a considerable amount to do with it being one of Blair’s major regrets. And that regret will impact on other potential policies. I suspect several other measures were quietly shelved that might otherwise have found a champion.

However, just as I don’t agree with Anthony’s attitude to the protesters, I equally can’t agree with Sue Marsh’s response. Her attitude to the political left is as scornful and demeaning as Anthony’s to the civil left. It denies the demands of democracy and the paradigm within which politicians must operate, and berates them for not living up to an ideal that the paradigm fails. Politicians are far, far from perfect. But so are protesters. They both exist within different restrictive structures and change what they can.

So now we have a face off between two sets of people with broadly similar objectives but very different methods. If the right want a reason to be cheerful, it’s this: That instead of pooling our effort and resources – or at least working together where we can – we’re at each others throats over the methods we use.

But here I offer something that Anthony and Sue might both appreciate: A third way.

Labour should not try to own the protests. It speaks too much to the easy stereotypes of our party in opposition. But neither should we condemn them. I haven’t seen the Boulton and Co Interview in which Ed is reported to have said “protests aren’t the solution to the problems out there’” so I don’t know if it followed with a cheery “but good luck to those raising these issues” or a continued condemnation. If the latter that’s a shame, because getting political activists out on the street is a tough ask and we in the Party could do with more of them.

The civil left and the political left need to stop wasting their firepower on each other and concentrate on what unites rather than divides them.  If the civil left continue to push away those who could help them –  that’s a shame. If the political left deny itself a possibility to build up its activist base, that’s a shame too.

Because if both sides are too busy sniping at each other to actually focus on the civil and political battles we need to win, that’s a tragedy.