Is Labour dead?

Jon Trickett, Shadow Minister and Deputy Party Chair, reviews Downfall – the new publication from Compass – which looks at the deep structural challenges the facing the party and offers ideas about how the party can be transformed.   

Labour needs to determine whether or not the causes of our defeat in May are narrowband or broadband. Almost all of the debate about why we lost thus far has been confined to a narrow range of short term personal and tactical judgements. Was Ed Miliband the right person to lead us? Did we get it wrong on our approach to the business community? Or did we insufficiently deal with the question of the deficit and the Labour Government’s role in creating the deficit?

Without doubt these matters are important and need to be addressed as part of the ongoing post mortem. And there is no doubt that Labour has strong residual roots in the British culture.  It was absolutely remarkable for me as Deputy Chair of the labour Party  to see literally thousands of activists right across our country working hard to rid the nation of this hideous government.

Equally remarkable has been the fact that about 40,000 new members have joined in recent weeks. My own constituency party has increased by 25% since March.

But what if there is a deeper, more profound and long term malaise which is undermining social democracy itself and means that the whole Labour project is facing existential challenges?

If short term, tactical factors played the decisive role in our defeat then we will no doubt have to do some soul searching, but reasonably quick fix solutions are at hand. But if social democracy as a historical response to a particular form of capitalism is no longer appropriate then we face a distinctly different order of problems.

Before Labour presses forward with the assumption a change of Leader and a revamp of our policy orientation will secure us an election victory, it is worth hesitating to ask the bigger question. We would be letting down those thousands of activists who were out on the streets night after night if we didn’t address this.

Neal Lawson has written an interesting analysis of Labour’s Predicament. Downfall  starts by asking ‘Is Labour dead?’  He argues that there should be no going back to either New Labour but equally that we ought not to resurrect a model based on 1945.

Iconoclastic as ever, Neal makes a series of arguments which will annoy, intrigue and stimulate in equal measure. He is right to say that to win Labour ‘must carry hope of transformation and the notion that history is on its side. That in turn requires a sense of agency and a programme to make change happen.’

But our party has not captured this hope of transformation sufficiently strongly to deliver a mandate for change. And it is clear that there have been a number of historically important shifts which are damaging to Labour. Here are 5:

1) When, for example, the national boundaries of both the economy and the state were effectively coterminous then the Left’s idea that you could utilise the state to mitigate against the worst effects of the market was a realistic proposition. But the globalisation of capital meant that the Left’s objective of using the nation state to protect consumers and workers was severely limited.

2) In any event, the world of work has been transformed in recent decades thereby damaging – perhaps beyond repair – the traditional ways of organising used by the Labour Movement.

3) Society is much more fragmented. How people identify themselves is as much informed by chosen patterns of consumption as by inherited socio-economic status.

4)  With the splintering of class has come the arrival of new forms of political representation. There are now significant political parties to Labour’s left for example offering new choices to left of centre voters.

5) Furthermore, the whole Left notion of capturing centralised state instruments and using them to achieve the common good is challenged by a zeitgeist which is all about networks and no longer about central direction.

Of course there are other  changes also which the reader can identify and which are damaging to the Labour Party. Looking to other countries there is a powerful case to argue that traditional social democracy is facing a deep crisis. It is not only in Scotland where we face a problem, but also In Ireland, Greece, France and Spain for example political parties which are part of the socialist international face

But there are equally new opportunities which give cautious grounds for what Lawson calls ‘radical hope’. The emergence of new social movements enabled by the instantaneous and horizontal communications systems now available by the internet offer an inspiring source of energy and counter cultural resistance.  They also offer models of radical egalitarian models of organisation.

Such is the challenge which faces us that only a clean break with the past, and with obsolescent ideas and models of organisation is likely to allow us to break through in the New Times we inhabit. Fortunately the possibility of new forms of successful resistance to injustice and inequality are at hand. The question is: do we have the courage and foresight to recognise the moment?

Downfall: is Labour dead and how can can radical be rebuilt? by Neal lawson is published today by Compass with Open Democracy and can be downloaded here.