‘Labour needs ideology – and that’s why we are relaunching Renewal’

It’s a confusing moment for social democrats.

Here in the UK, we are arguably in a stronger position than we have been in years: Labour is in power with a commanding majority, and is implementing ambitious social democratic policies on education, housing, climate, and workers’ rights. But despite the solidity of its mandate and the promise of its programme, the beginning of Labour’s tenure in government has been uneasy, and the government often appears to lack ideological direction. 

Beyond the UK, political momentum is with the right and far right who continue to capitalise on rampant social, cultural and economic alienation, and on the political disaffection of electorates. As the liberal order crumbles, gangster capitalism and populist ethnonationalism operate in increasingly close alliance, while technological revolutions controlled by oligarchs have drastically changed the mechanics of public discourse. We thus face global threats that are not only geopolitical, but ideological.

To confront this perilous political moment, social democrats in Britain need both ideological self-confidence and new intellectual resources to draw upon. It is for this reason that we believe Renewal – a journal of social democracy has an increasingly important role to play.

Renewal is a quarterly journal first founded in 1992 by soft-left modernisers associated with the Labour Coordinating Committee. Our core belief is that ideas matter to politics, and we have therefore always provided a space for constructive discussion and debate within the Labour Party. Bridging the worlds of politics, think tanks, journalism, and academia, we publish incisive essays and analyses exploring the possibilities and challenges of social democratic politics, offering new paradigms and approaches for activists and politicians to adopt. Renewal is re-launching with a new publisher – the pressure group Compass, whose executive director Neal Lawson was one of Renewal’s original co-founders – while preserving the journal’s editorial independence in full.

‘Social democrats must carve out a space of our own’

When Renewal was first founded, it was as a “journal of labour politics”; although we have since 2007 been subtitled “a journal of social democracy”, we remain a Labour publication. Under successive editorships, Renewal has been a critical friend to New Labour under Blair and Brown, to the Ed Miliband project, to Corbynism, and finally to the current Labour leadership. Indeed, it has often been in the pages of Renewal that key ideas and strategies associated with different leaderships have been developed and fleshed out – whether “predistribution” under Miliband, the “institutional turn” under Corbyn, or “securonomics” under Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves.

Going forward, we aim to help provide the Starmer government with new ideas and approaches, and with greater ideological clarity and direction. As part of this, we expect to provide a space for critical – and at times very critical – analyses of the policies and strategies it pursues. The critiques we publish, however, will be constructive and fair-minded – designed to strengthen the party by helping it correct its errors, rather than weaken or delegitimise it. We won’t indulge the kind of lazy and disingenuous commentary that pervades much of the media, monstering versions of Labour that bear little or misleading resemblance to our party as it actually exists. Whatever its problems we believe that Labour is the only serious vehicle for the advancement of social democratic politics in Britain.

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However, as embedded in Labour as we might be, our vision of social democracy is not one that limits itself to party politics or to the technicalities of policymaking. Rather, we believe in a holistic social democracy capable of speaking to all aspects of our public and private lives – as a moral creed, as a democratic philosophy, and as a social ethos. Indeed, an overly narrow focus on policy making and electioneering has all too often allowed social democrats to cede ground ideologically – to hectoring and individualistic liberalisms, to closed and nostalgic conservatisms, or to performative cultural radicalisms, all aided by attendant media organisations and hyperactive online influencers.

Within our increasingly chaotic and degraded public sphere, social democrats must carve out a space of our own, distinguishing ourselves from – and when necessary criticising – those to both our left and right. It does us no credit to outsource sections of our political thinking either to a sclerotic liberalism preoccupied with abstruse and inaccessible language games, nor to authoritarian leftisms with cynical and outdated geopolitical ideas and a dogmatic, anti-pluralist ethic. These people can be our allies in the fight against the global far-right, but their politics are not ours, and it does us no credit to delegate sections of our political thinking and positioning to them.

What Renewal believes is that a re-invigorated social democracy is now more necessary than ever. We understand our creed not as the ambivalent shrug of the centre-left, but as a distinct and storied ideological tradition – informed intellectually by Marxist, Fabian, communitarian, and ethical-socialist thought, and practically by the longstanding and ongoing efforts of socialist parties and labour movements the world over. Under our editorship, Renewal will demonstrate the continuing relevance and radical potential of this tradition by fostering a space in which social democratic ideas can be debated, honed and re-adapted, and creating the intellectual conditions to put a politics inspired by them into practice.  

You can subscribe to Renewal by visiting our website and take advantage of our limited time re-launch discount.

David Klemperer, Morgan Jones, Jack Jeffrey, and Lise Butler are the co-editors of Renewal.

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