‘On 16 June we commenced a campaign to get the candidates in the Labour Leadership Election to issue what we called “Manifestos of Intent”,’ says the website, run by Dronfield Labour Party discussion group.

‘We are now able to present these manifestos or provide relevant links to the candidates’ own web-sites where they have previously published this material themselves.’

You can view them here: http://dronfieldblather.blogspot.com/

The current edition of New Internationalist (NI434. July/August 2010) tackles what I consider  to be one of the most crucial problems we face today, perhaps the most crucial. Headlined ‘Life beyond growth’, it deals with the conundrum that economic growth is not environmentally sustainable and causes a crisis in resources, yet if the economy does not grow, it collapses.

The resources nations depend on, such as oil, are drying up, and extracting such resources is less and less sustainable. This threatens the lifestyles all of us expect to lead. Furthermore, the reckless use of oil and other resourses to feed our lifestyles and habits has brought about a climate crisis which may be irreversable.

The Co-operative group is supporting the Transition movement and the Permaculture movement. I commend this decision because in these grass roots movements can be seen the beginnings of a different way of looking at our lifestyle expectations which take into account the depletion of resources and offer practical, collective ways forward.

The beginnings of the Transition movement are similar, in some respects , to the beginnings of the Co-operative movement, people coming together to address a common need.

Last November Co-operative members sponsored a joint Co-operative/Transition conference in Slaithwaite, West Yorkshire, attracting 200 delegates. There were speakers from both movements who spoke of the need for a co-operative approach to meet the challenge of the oil and climate crisis.

For more information about Co-operative campaigns: www.co-operative.coop/membership

For more about the Transition movement try: www.transitionnetwork.org or http://transitionus.org for a US slant.

For more about teh Permaculture movement: www.permaculture.org.uk

Jennie joined the ILP in 1942. She was taken to an ILP Summer School in Bangor by her aunt, Anne Hambley. Anne had been a member for many years and the visit to Bangor was a reward for Jennie gaining a first class honours degree in music from Cardiff University. Jennie realised that the principles and values of the ILP were right for her and so she joined then.

Jennie met Bill for the first time at an ILP Summer School in Durham one year later but it was not until 1944 that they began to form the attachment that lasted until Bill’s death in 2000. They were married in 1947.

Following their move to Cardiff in 1950 they played an active part in the local branch and, while Bill was also active in the printing union, Jennie developed her career as a music teacher.

Socialist ideals were always at the heart of their lives and in later years both became active in the Labour Party in Cardiff North. Bill died in 2000. Until very recently, Jennie helped out in election campaigning.

Although Jennie now lives in a residential home, she continues to take an active interest in politics. She was particularly proud when her oldest son (Jeff) was elected to the National Assembly for Wales in 2003 as the Labour Member for Caerphilly.

We all join in wishing Jennie a very, very happy birthday.

Saturday 7 August, 2pm
People’s History Museum
Left Bank
Spinningfields
Manchester M3 3ER

FREE ENTRY

Historian Dr. Richard Baxell lectures on the day-to-day experiences of the British and Irish volunteers in The Spanish Civil War, during the early part of 1937.

The lecture will include audio and video clips from some of the interviews with Brigaders and will cover the formation of the battalion, its baptism of fire at Jarama and its subsequent recovery and rebuilding before returning to action at the Battle of Brunete in July 1937.

As Baxell says: ‘The period of training – let alone combat – must have been an immense culture shock to the members of the battalion, almost all of whom spoke no Spanish and had rarely travelled, even within Britain. Factor in an unfamiliar diet, woefully insufficient and often sub-standard weaponry and a general lack of appropriate military experience and you begin to understand the scale of the appalling task facing the British Battalion in their first experience of combat.’

Richard Baxell, with Jim Jump and Angela Jackson, compiled the ANTIFASCISTAS exhibition for the International Brigade Memorial Trust (see below). He is also the author of British Volunteers in the Spanish Civil War, the history of the British Battalion in the International Brigades.

More details of Richard’s work can be found at www.richardbaxell.info

In addition, Civil War songs will be performed by Manchester group The Maddonnas.

For more details of the event contact: Dolores Long: 0161 226 2013 or Hilary Jones: 0161 224 1747

To book a place, please telephone the People’s History Museum on 0161 838 9190 or email: info@phm.org.uk

ANTIFACISTAS

Antifascistas is the exhibition commissoned by the International Brigade Memorial Trust (IBMT) on the British and Irish volunteers in the Spanish Civil War and will be at the People’s History Museum from 6-31st August.

For more information on the work of the International Brigade Memorial Trust
email: secretary@international-brigades.org.uk
tel: 020 8555 6674
web: www.international-brigades.org.uk

Despite prime minister David Cameron’s claims that the budget would somehow “protect the poor”, and Osborne’s now infamous remark that “we’re all in this together”, the Institute for Fiscal Studies revealed that the measures will hit the least well-off 10 per cent of the population five times harder than the richest over the next five years.

We shouldn’t be surprised, of course, for we have been here at the hands of Tory governments before, at the hands of coalition governments too. Far from kick-starting “a new politics”, the ConDem coalition has embarked on a depressingly familiar course under the depressingly familiar cry, issued most recently by Osborne, that such measures are “unavoidable” and “fair”.

In a cogent commentary on the budget, Guardian columnist Seumas Milne referred to “an iconic Labour movement cartoon from the early 1930s, when when another coalition came to power in the wake of a financial crisis and slump”.

The cartoon, titled ‘Equality of Sacrifice?’ (see below), shows four class steretypes on a ladder with a cloth-capped labourer at the bottom up to his neck in water. “Equality of sacrifice – that’s the big idea, friends!” says the silk-hatted figure at the top. “Let’s all step down one rung.”

Milne writes: “As the depression-era cartoonist highlighted, the idea that there can be any equivalence in belt-tightening for rich and poor is a nonsense. Even if the different income groups were paying proportionate shares, or the wealthy were actually shouldering a heavier burden, as Osborne claimed, the impact would obviously be far greater for those struggling on benefits than for beneficiaries of the boardroom bonanza.

“… the bare-faced deceit at the heart of the government’s claims has become brutally evident. Far from being a fair shares package that shelters the vulnerable, it’s now clear that the net effect of [the] announcements will be to hammer the poorest the hardest.”

That pre-war cartoonist was JF Horrabin and his image was first used on a poster by the Labour Party during the 1929 general election and, later, by PLEBS, an organisation connected to the National Labour College.

As for the Lib Dem leaders’ hand-wringing claims to have won concessions from the Tories, Milne hits that proverbial nail on its flattened head too, when he says: “In reality, an inexperienced Lib-Dem leadership has been taken to the cleaners.”

There’s nothing new in the Liberal and Tory parties combining to squeeze the poor, as an even earllier Labour movement cartoon makes all too clear. The ‘Political Washerwomen’ image (below) was first printed in an 1895 edition of the Labour Leader, organ of the early Independent Labour Party, and reproduced 90 years later in an ILP calendar, published at the height of Thatcherism.

Knowing there’s nothing new in the current government’s attack on the poor doesn’t mean we shouldn’t learn from history, however. The Labour movement can’t just sit back and wait for the Liberal-Conners to collapse, as Milne suggests it might, and the country to swing to the left. It took more than two decades and a lot of hard political campaigning from the birth of the ILP in 1893 to the formation of the first Labour government, and despite the depression of the 1930s it wasn’t until after the second world war in 1945 that Labour came back to power.

These old cartoons are a useful reminder that, in some ways at least, not much has changed, that many of the challenges that have faced the left down the years, still remain.

But much has changed too. The government’s social and economic attack on the poor and public sector is accompanied by an ideological onslaught built on three decades of cultural shift towards a consumerist and individualist society. After 18 years of Thatcherism, and new Labour’s timid response, persuading people that a small state isn’t the answer to a crisis will be hard work.

We’re in for some tough times under this Tory-Torylite administration. Yet, however bad the economy gets, winning the political battle will take more than wishful thinking.

—-

The Equality of Sacrifice cartoon has become a popular image with political bloggers in recent months, see:

http://peterhousehold.blogspot.com/2010/06/lets-all-step-down-one-rung.html

http://grayee.blogspot.com/

http://randompottins.blogspot.com/2010/05/new-age-of-austerity-but-not-for-some.html

“Any sensible person now would join an anti-capitalist organisation,” he says. “We have a duty to change our mode of thinking.”

Click here for Harvey’s RSA lecture in witty animation form (c. 11 minutes), thanks to the RSA Animate series.

You can also see the full lecture (c. 30 minutes) here.

Click here for more by David Harvey.

In a conference hall not so far away, the labour left gathered on June 12^th for the Compass annual get together. Launching this year’s event, optimistically titled ‘A New Hope’, Compass chair Neal Lawson set off on a slightly curious note declaring ‘we’re not rebel fighters, we’re building a death star’. If that was slightly off-key, much of the rest of the conference followed, exposing a Labour left that is only slowly getting to grips with the new politics of opposition.

Of course, Compass by its nature is a very broad organisation and its conferences are interesting partly because of this, a large (1,000 people), comradely forum for the exchange of quite divergent views. In fact, over time, two ideas seemed to form a core of opinion at the conference: that proportional representation is essential for the future of left politics and that Labour should be a ‘pluralist, not tribalist’ party.

The first of these is a long standing one on the left and has been central to the efforts of those – from Blair and Ashdown leftwards – to fashion a realignment of politics around the centre left. Current government plans for a referendum on the AV system, with Tories campaigning against, leave this aim tantalisingly out of reach for those who see it as essential.

The second pillar – for a Labour politics that is not tribal but pluralist – is becoming a frequent refrain in Compass, among Labour leadership contenders and among the wider commentariat.

Pluralism

But there are very different versions of this call for pluralism. At the level of party politics, one explanation is that it is a reaction to the perceived failure of Labour to fashion an anti-Tory ‘rainbow coalition’ in the wake of the general election. The ‘tribal’ interventions of David Blunkett and John Reid, both of whom came in for considerable stick over the course of the conference, were seen by many to represent an ‘old politics’ that we need to move away from in the new coalition-dominated future.

There were also those present on the Labour left who clearly feel some empathy for the small parties that are seen as more left wing than Labour – such as the Greens’ Caroline Lucas who, despite having defeated a Labour candidate in the general election, was given an enthusiastic reception by this clearly non-tribalist crowd.

However, it was Lucas who presented the least compelling case for pluralism and highlighted the limited vision of this variant of political pluralism. Teaching the assembled grannies to suck eggs, she pronounced on how remaining in the Labour Party meant many people had to make difficult compromises to accommodate the distance between their own beliefs and the Labour’s policy. No shit. Her solution, for a flowering of smaller parties (like her own in fact!), in which members can feel comfortable in their purity leads down a strange path, however. The left knows something about this, having taken the purity strategy to absurd People’s Front of Judea lengths in the past. But it also ignores the question of what then? What happens after this party pluralism has blossomed and PR has delivered a parliamentary mosaic of principled representatives? Presumably there are real issues of principle that necessitated the creation of separate parties in the first place? Don’t they then have to engage in the very same dirty compromises that she was lamenting a few moments earlier?

Some even asked whether you would want to see a majority Labour government again, with the clear implication that if your answer was ‘yes’ then you were obviously still wedded to the ‘old politics’. But what is so inherently progressive about having to make deals with the David Laws of this world? or in giving concessions to Alex Salmond’s narrow, particularistic, nationalist demands?

Rather more convincing and carrying greater potential, is the idea of a pluralist politics that connects the Labour Party and parliamentary politics generally in a more open and constructive way with non-party groups and campaigns. A party that is active on a local level, engaged and engaging, and at the forefront of campaigns around opposition to cuts would indeed help reinvigorate Labour’s internal politics. Such ideas are clearly having some purchase on leadership candidates debates with both Milibands arguing for a revitalised, active campaigning party. Even here there may be dangers however, and the Blairite dream of a dissolution of party memberships into looser networks of supporters, clearly still has some adherents. Internal party democracy still ought to matter, and for that to mean anything then membership has to become again something real.

A progressive alliance?

On other issues the conference veered wildly in its reading of the contemporary political scene. Throughout there was a persistent sense of denial about the formation of the ConDem coalition which clearly shocked some speakers quite profoundly. Compass’ political strategy, such as it is, has centred on the formation of ‘the broad progressive coalition’ and one feels that the group still has to come to terms with the fact that this notion has been blown out of the water by the Liberals’ post-election choice. The continued adherence to PR and pluralism does look a bit less convincing in world in which a Lab-Lib coalition is no longer the central element.

Even so, Compass also continue to reject the Blairite notion that the country is essentially conservative with a small c. Their, and much of the left’s, argument against New Labour centred on this claim. Where New Labour used the ‘conservative’ nature of public opinion as a reason to move rightwards, those further to the left argued that this reading of the public’s values was mistaken. A different option that neither takes, is that New Labour was right on its assessment but wrong in not seeking ways – long term, hard and slow – of shifting that opinion. Lawson even commented that over thirteen years in government Labour did nothing to build a progressive movement. The left, one suspects on this evidence, would now rather take the easier option of thinking that the country is with us and build a political strategy on that assessment.

Indeed, several speakers cited the combined vote for Labour and Liberals as evidence of a ‘progressive majority’ in the country. Yet much in Labour and the Liberal manifestos was anything but progressive: both argued for substantial and damaging cuts, neither gave a convincing case for the public sector and against the private, neither presented a convincing critique of the financial sector, both indulged in anti-immigration gutter politics to pander to the ‘bigoted women’ (and men) of the country. Most amazing was New Statesman political editor, Mehdi Hassan, who cited the polling that 1 in 4 LibDems were unhappy with the coalition as evidence of a progressive opportunity, seemingly ignoring that that means 3 in 4 are happy with rampant expenditure cuts, the dismembering the public sector and the creation of a two-tier schools system.

In a warning that ought to give Compass and all on the left pause for thought, John Harris argued that ‘if your argument is also the one you are most comfortable with, it is probably wrong’. Maybe some in Compass fall prey to reading from the political landscape what they are comfortable seeing – a country that is ‘with us’ and a political strategy that seamlessly mobilises a coalition to bring the progressive majority into power through PR.

Coalitions and cuts

Opinions also differed markedly on the prospects for the ConDem coalition and what the appropriate response to the cuts should be. In a seminar on the cuts there was much debate over the appropriate balance between raised taxes and reduced expenditure. Only one speaker made a serious case for limiting cuts, arguing that the widespread austerity policies now being enacted in Europe would trigger a renewed recession. Some contributions from the floor were predictably simple – ‘we say no to cuts!’ – but in the main Polly Toynbee, who chaired the session brilliantly, did not allow simplistic answers, or questions, to go unchallenged.

A more serious omission was of any quid pro quo that the left should ask for in return for reduced public expenditure. If cuts are to be something other than a process of making the poorest pay for the sins of the financial sector, then they must be accompanied by some attempt to challenge the power of financial markets over the longer term. Several speakers cited ‘market reactions’ as a key reason why cuts were necessary, yet none signalled any discomfort with that situation. The irony that the very credit ratings agencies who acted so irresponsibly in the build up to the crisis should now be arbiters of what the government should or shouldn’t do did not seem to register with the speakers. Next to that, all the talk of a ‘Canadian-style’ consultation over the cuts, even democratic politics, comes to nought if markets have the final say.

How soon these questions bite will in part depend on the fate of the governing coalition. Here too, opinions differed. The coalition was, Lawson said, ‘the thing none of us expected’, a claim that betrays a certain lack of foresight if nothing else. Yet both he and John Harris were, rightly in my view, alert to the changed terrain that the coalition may bring into being, an ‘audacious grab’ for the centre-right ground that shared considerable continuities with Blairite policies and which could leave the left looking very isolated. Others, notably Mehdi Hassan of the New Statesman, were more hopeful of a quick end to the coalition, calling it ‘a strategic disaster for the Lib Dems’.

Leadership election

How well Labour responds to the coalition will depend on a revitalisation of the Party’s politics and so far the leadership campaign has not revealed any clear direction either. At a hastily arranged hustings, a packed hall listened to the assorted Eds, Milibands, Burnham and Abbott set out their stalls and answer the predictable questions on PR, cuts and schools. While the greatest cheer during the opening statements came for Diane Abbot, a walking embodiment of tokenism in this election, enthusiasm for her waned as the debate proceeded, possibly reflecting the vacuity of Abbott’s politics. More encouragingly, both Milibands and Andy Burnham emphasised revitalisation of the party and its membership as key aims though as yet none as spelled out a convincing programme of democratic reform of Labour’s internal structure.

Showing some in Compass what might have been, John Cruddas rounded off proceedings with a forceful and at times powerful speech. His attack on the ‘sour, shrill, hopeless politics’ of attacking the poor and immigrants was a direct and timely counter to those arguing that Labour lost the election by not being tougher on immigration. Cruddas’ alternatives, of a thorough ‘1987-like’ policy review, a revitalisation of Labour’s values and culture and a politics based on progressive English nationalism, are clearly based on his energetic campaign against the BNP and his view that Labour has fallen into a ‘moral and intellectual coma’. Whatever the shortcomings of his politics, Cruddas showed a passion and vision that is lacking from much of the race so far and his absence from the contest clearly disappointed some in Compass.

However, Lawson’s recognition that ‘the time perhaps is just not right’ for his kind of politics was an appropriate acknowledgement of where Labour and the left currently is. Looking rather more like a rebel band that has just taken a thrashing at the hands of imperial stormtroopers, the Compass conference was nevertheless an energetic and welcome moment to reflect on the options facing the left.

‘A New Hope is Forged’, a report of the Compass conference on its own website, is here.

For news of the Labour leadership campaign and information about the candidates, go here.

“Something is profoundly wrong with the way we live today.”
Tony Judt, historian, Ill Fares the Land

Introduction

We live in increasingly uncertain and unstable times. After decades of ruthless, unrestrained economic growth, combined with raging social inequality and serious environmental damage, the world now faces economic crisis. That storm has not abated. Even if conditions do not deteriorate further, most people could be paying the price for the financial meltdown for decades to come. Meantime, political, financial and business elites strive to return to ‘business as usual’, offering minimal reforms to a capitalist system that has wreaked havoc.

Effective political challenges to this process have yet to be developed. Efforts to improve the quality of life for all face enormous and probably unprecedented challenges. We have a world of great plenty and technological progress, yet it’s scarred by growing political instability, gross inequalities, warfare and corporate excess. While these conditions present both dangers and opportunities, they understandably leave many people feeling confused and fearful.

For those of us on the left, the present condition raises many questions:

• Can glaring levels of inequality give way to societies where the majority benefit?
• Can we restore confidence in a new politics of hope and build tolerance towards cultural diversity?
• Can we find ways to encourage co-operation and a greater sense of a shared community?
• If so, how can we bring about such changes, and who might make change happen?

Any progressive change will have to overcome many and varied obstacles, not least those vested interests and institutions that perpetuate privilege, injustice and inequality. In the process, we will need to have the honesty to admit our mistakes, to listen to dissenting voices, and to reflect upon our failures as well as our successes. Striving for social justice is a struggle to change the balance of power in the interests of the many rather than the few. In part, this involves a battle of ideas but one that has to be conducted in an exemplary fashion; to progress, it has to secure people’s trust and, hopefully, their engagement.

There are no instant or simple answers to all these questions but we can learn from many of the campaigns and struggles, both past and present, through which people have sought to make a difference to their own and other’s lives. Some examples are fleeting; others more long-lasting; many deserve our attention. Sometimes they may seem localised; sometimes they cross continents; and they can take a rich and wide variety of forms. We should never underestimate the creativity of human beings whilst not being too blinkered to admit when things go wrong.

For some, the temptation, particularly in hard times and in the face of complexity, is to resort to fatalism, the belief that little or nothing can be done. Some think we can ignore what’s happening and just look after ourselves. Others may seek quick fixes, supposedly easy solutions, whether religious, political or personal. Still others want to surrender themselves to political demagogues who promise to solve their problems. All too often, the temptation is to blame those who are the greatest victims of injustice as the cause of society’s ills. The most self-defeating of these ideas – and probably the most destructive – is the dream of returning to a time in the past when all was supposedly well. There never was a golden age.

Any review of the past suggests that the route to a better society is littered with good intentions that turned out badly. This leads some to argue that it is better not to try, that conscious intervention simply makes matters worse. We disagree because such political cynicism is a shortcut to nowhere. But in seeking answers we have to recognise that our ideas and perspectives will always be flawed, our knowledge about the world can never be total, no matter how hard we try. But we do have to try.

A modest perspective

In formulating this modest statement, our aim is to reach out to, and connect with those who share or sympathise with our ideas and general outlook, or at least to make connections with those who would like to know more about what we are trying to say and do. The ILP comes from a long tradition on the left of the political spectrum that has sought collective solutions to the inequalities and destructiveness of capitalism. In the face of today’s problems, we seek to continue that tradition, to extend co-operative solutions to human problems by democratic means. It will take time, patience and perseverance.

Democracy

Our politics are resolutely democratic and the abiding pillars of democracy – of political equality and popular control – are central to any progressive, left of centre politics.

We know, and celebrate the fact that democratic practices take many forms and operate in many different and varied ways. Parliamentary systems of government form an indispensable part of this variety. The liberal principles that parliamentary and other democratic systems need to operate properly –political, civil and personal liberties, political equality and the rule of law – are crucial to any progressive future. In many parts of the world the struggle to establish these principles is a long and bitter one, and their achievement a major accomplishment. It is a struggle in which the left has, at times, played an honourable role. In our own country the defence and extension of these principles is an ongoing necessity.

However, we recognise that without other changes in society – such as greater tolerance, protection for minorities and the vulnerable, and opposition to concentrations of power – democracy will always be incomplete. In short, democratic practice needs to be accompanied by a political culture that actively seeks to realise the promise of its basic principles.

We also think that democratic principles and processes need to extend beyond the realm of traditional, formal politics. They should be embedded in all areas of social life. We take inspiration from those communities and groups, at home and abroad, who try to find new ways of changing their lives through democratic participation and action. They may be short-lived, or limited in their scope or purpose, but they help to shore up our confidence that a different kind of society is possible.

Examples such as the London Citizens’ campaign for a living wage may be limited in its focus. However, through its democratic and participatory practice, it establishes something of broader and more enduring value, an example of a new way of acting collectively, and new means by which power – whether political or economic – can be held to account. There are many other similarly inspiring initiatives.

The principle of political equality means that no group or individual should be given a privileged role in democratic life by virtue of ethnicity, gender, sexuality or faith. Sectarianism is never justified. While we believe some ‘cultural’ practices are not acceptable in a liberal society, the question of where we place the limits of tolerance is a difficult one, and there are no simple answers either in practice or in abstract principle.

Parties, states and governments

It is both fashionable and understandable that there is much popular scepticism about government and political parties. All too often, political parties fail to deliver. While many, though not all, go into politics with good intentions, these seem to get subsumed beneath the pressures of public office, re-election, careers or simply the difficulties of governing.

But there is a danger that such scepticism undermines the positive role that the formal political process, and governments at national and local level, can and should play. Frankly, a reckoning with this arena – of parties, elections and policy – is unavoidable. Sooner or later any campaign for change in society has to deal with the process of government, of how collective decisions, whether national or local, are made and upheld. And it is as well that we accept this with a sober and realistic assessment of what it might or might not deliver.

We have no illusions about the limitations of these political arenas. Even modest attempts at change are assailed on all sides by forces that make change difficult, although all too often political leaders don’t even try. The more radical the intended changes, the more the forces of conservatism grow. And the very processes of politics, not least elections held in a society that is hostile to many radical ideas, exert a powerful constraint on what can be achieved through these routes. Herein lies the importance of democratic movements from outside the formal political system which can act as a counterweight to the conservative forces.

There is also a more positive case to be made for the role of governments. Actions by national governments have a vital and potentially crucial role in addressing many of the problems we face, whether nationally or, by acting collectively, internationally.

The problem of climate change is one area where action by states is both necessary, and failing. And governments proved themselves ready and able to act in the face of the financial crisis of 2008-09, demonstrating the scope and efficacy that state action can have. While the right, and those in the financial sector, welcomed this action for a short time, they quickly reverted to type, denouncing state regulation even while accepting taxpayers’ money. But if the crisis showed anything it is, in Will Hutton’s words, that ‘states, government, and the public really matter’.

We agree that national and local states, parties and legislatures all have a vital role in progressive politics. We can also look to inspiring examples from around the world where political parties have sought to open out to wider communities, encouraging participation in the political process, and enhancing the scope of popular control.

Our own politics are rooted in the British experience and the modern ILP has an honourable record of engagement with the Labour Party. While many on the left wish to avoid the Labour Party, to denounce, live outside, or ignore it, we think this is a cul-de-sac. Any attempt to progress radical change will have to go through a social democratic agency. For the left in Britain that remains the Labour Party.

However, we have no illusions about the current political and organisational state of the party. Like the rest of the Labour left we have not been immune from the corrosive effects of new Labour’s dominance over the past 16 years.

The new Labour project was, in part, the product of successive election defeats and the deep desire of many to get the Tories out of office, regardless of the political cost to traditional left politics. In our view, this attitude was unintentionally assisted by the inability of some on the left to think creatively about the future.

Part heirs to Thatcherism and part its opponents, the Blair/Brown leaderships performed what Stuart Hall described as ‘Labour’s double shuffle’, combining a dominant neo-liberal strand of thinking with a subordinate social democratic one.

While Thatcherism encouraged an ideological shift in the ‘common sense’ of British society – to a greater acceptance of the market and individualism – new Labour proved unable, or unwilling, to challenge this prevailing culture. Indeed, the leadership’s uncritical embrace of the market model in general, and the financial sector in particular, plus its support for some aspects of American foreign policy, its timid attitude to the right wing press, and some of its domestic social policies, accelerated the long-term rightward trend in British politics.

To enable this to happen – and acutely conscious of internal challenges to previous leaderships – new Labour devoted a great deal of effort in its early years to reforming the party’s internal structures replacing long-established (and unsatisfactory) mechanisms of representation with lightweight forums more easily manipulated from the centre.

The party conference is now an echo chamber for pronouncements from on high, and in most cases the political choice given to members in the selection of parliamentary candidates is effectively non-existent. Partly as a result of this shift of power to the centre, party membership has diminished radically.

Indeed, the party has a void at its core filled, not by participating members, but by conformism, as the hunger for electoral success distances it ever further from its origins in the Labour movement. The ILP has long campaigned for participatory democracy in the Labour Party and in the coming period that need is more urgent and relevant than ever.

Now, under the impact of the financial crisis, and its own political tensions, the new Labour project has unravelled, creating, we hope, an opportunity to debate the future of the party itself in the new political landscape. We will endeavour to make a contribution to that debate.

Economy

Capitalism by its nature is driven by the need to make profit, and this leads to societies characterised by inequality, corruption and, in its modern form, rampant consumerism and individualism. The world, shaped above all by more than two centuries of capitalist development, is unequal in ways that ought to offend humanity. Similarly, the very processes of democratic politics that we hope to extend are perverted and misshapen by the characteristics of capitalist economies. As David Miliband wrote in Reinventing the Left, ‘The left exists today, and needs to exist, because advanced industrial societies are corrupted in fundamental ways by inequalities of income, opportunity and perhaps, above all, power.’

We agree with the BBC economics editor, Paul Mason, when he argued that we need ‘an explanation of why the market system keeps producing these abuses: why mismanagement of banks is endemic, why regulation always seems to stoke the boom and reward failure…’ ‘If you are a critic of the capitalist system,’ he went on, ‘you must have some explanation of why it goes on producing power elites who stand in the way of attempts to control it.’ He also makes the point that capitalism in recent years has taken the form of an ‘abrasive, selfish, unequal society’, and we would add that the evidence suggests that the greater the inequality, the greater the social fragmentation that results.

The history of attempts to replace markets completely suggests to us that markets of some kind will always be necessary. However, we must seek ways to lessen their negative effects, and have more control over the role they play in our lives. In part, this means defending the role of the state in regulating, redistributing, coordinating and meeting needs. But it also means looking for new ways of organising economic life. There are no simple blueprints, but we hope to contribute to this endeavour, to seek to explain and to think about possible alternatives.

We recognise the historic advances in human development brought, to some, by capitalist development, in terms of life expectancy and material well-being. But we also recognise that this comes at a colossal price, paid in inequality, social upheaval, political oppression and environmental destruction. We support ways to make social and economic development more democratic, socially equitable and environmentally sustainable.

As well as reacting to immediate problems, and opposing the wrongs we see around us, we also recognise that without some vision of the kind of society we want to create, any process of reform, not just economic reform, can be easily blown off course. We must seek ways – slow, gradual and uncertain though they may be – to move towards an economy that is less unequal, less corrupting and more sustainable. As part of this we support the extension of cooperative forms of organisation in the economy and humane, socially just and sustainable alternatives to the destructive inequality of capitalism.

Beyond our borders

Many of the problems we face, such as environmental destruction, poverty, and economic inequality, demand international, collective action. Yet, in international politics there is no overarching authority, no government endowed with the ability to effect global change. Indeed, despite the existence of some fanciful and grandiose plans, the experience of empire suggests that we should not seek one. But nor should the scope of such problems daunt us into inaction, or into a denial of the role and efficacy of national states. Instead, real change at the international level has, in large part, to be built from the bottom up, through national states. Although the global problems we face are real and pressing, progress will be incrementally slow and difficult, and we need a considered understanding of the scope and limitations of existing international institutions.

Nevertheless, it is right that people and governments should try to achieve progressive change internationally. Part of this involves extending and defending universal human rights, and standing against tyranny and authoritarianism. While the right to self-determination is an important one, the very means by which different political communities can give expression to their collective will, we cannot support attempts by despots to turn it into a defence of their right to oppress. In cases where a state fails to protect its citizens from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity, the international community has a responsibility to act.

However, any action by the most developed states comes tainted with the many deep injustices they have inflicted on the rest of the world. While the most powerful capitalist countries have made many progressive achievements possible, their interactions with less powerful countries have had a dark and bloody side. Thus, while recognising that not everything powerful states do in international affairs is necessarily wrong, we are against the coercive use of power by the wealthiest states for their own ends.

Our ability to exert influence is tiny in the face of such power, but we hope to contribute in small ways, to build bridges across national divides, to identify and support action where there are commonalities of interest.

Cynicism and individualism

As the 17^th-century poet, John Donne wrote ‘No man is an island’. That applies to every family, community, political group, and nation state. We are all interconnected in a myriad of ways, historically, culturally, and socially.

Yet our societies are characterised by a heightened individualism (or ‘dutiless individualism’, as one perceptive commentator calls it) encouraged by a rampant consumer culture. Ever more areas of life, even childhood, are turned into arenas where everything can be bought or sold, and we are encouraged to pursue our own ends regardless of others. To an extent we are all, to a greater or lesser degree, complicit in this process. Part of building radical politics involves recognising this and trying to move closer to shared and co-operative ways of living and resolving difference.

We share Will Hutton’s view that, ‘A life lived well is not just about having a more valuable house next year … designer clothes next year, trying to be a celebrity. A life lived well does require some capacity to express oneself in concert with others.’

In doing so, however, we should not be seeking collective uniformity. We want to encourage social individualism. Variety and debate should be valued; they are the lifeblood of learning. We seek to encourage human creativity and recognise the importance of trial and error in our attempts to reshape society. No simple answers for the whole of humanity exist, or can exist, but that is not to say nothing can or should be done. Indeed, we would argue the opposite: social experiments in improving the human condition are vital; they can indicate ways forward and give us the shared confidence to keep on trying.

Political action

We hope to continue a political practice that is strategic, that is, beyond reactive, technocratic tinkering. Tony Blair’s mantra of concentrating on ‘doing what works’ merely begs the question of ‘what works for whom?’. But we also need to be strategic in terms of opening out longer-term possibilities for change rather than vociferous, fleeting but futile gesture politics. Ours is a politics that recognises the inevitability of short-term compromises but only in order to establish the basis for a longer-term direction of change.

Our political action must uphold the principles by which we stand: that the character, actions and morality of political movements prefigure the change they will create. Social movements are a vital component of securing change but they have an obligation to act with morality, honesty and self-criticism. The use of violence – by state and non-state actors – to deliberately terrorise non-combatants is never justified.

For our part, we make no claim to a privileged knowledge of the truth. We recognise that efforts to elaborate blueprints have often been deeply flawed and we remain steadfastly open to debate, dialogue and doubt. Our actions must embrace and encourage human creativity and pluralism.

Our aims are tempered by the recognition that a politics of the left, even the very idea that there may be a different way of doing things, enjoys limited support in the wider world. Progress will depend on a combination of parliamentary and extra-parliamentary struggles and campaigns, each needing the other.

So, our vision today needs to be wide while our achievements are likely to be modest. We should certainly try to make the world a better place but issues and challenges will always emerge. The hope expressed here is that we can start to lay the basis of something better than we have today; that we can tackle a self-destructive society that wrecks, neglects, isolates, damages, devalues, divides, and even destroys, so many of its members.

We want to work with others, individuals and organisations, who share some or all of our desire to remake radical politics with a joyful, human face, in open, imaginative and collective ways. Let us know if you think similarly.

ILP National Administrative Council, May 2010

This week’s major intervention in the election campaign has surely been the call by the Institute for Fiscal Studies for the major parties to ‘come clean’ about their strategies for reducing the public sector debt, if elected. The IFS report has chimed strongly with the overall public attitude in this campaign, which is that politicians are all devious and untrustworthy. The media response to the report has therefore been to pander to this attitude by unthinkingly echoing the IFS position. The Guardian asserts that the IFS is “the leading economics think-tank” in the country, clearly implying that its views must be accepted without question.

But why should the IFS be beyond criticism? Is cutting the public debt really an objective economic necessity, or is it actually a deeply political stance, reflecting the interests of the business and financial élites?

To answer this question, we have to look closely at the history of debates about the public finances over the last forty years. During that time, the theory and practice of economic policy has shifted markedly from mainstream Keynesianism of the early 1970s, to the unchallenged hegemony of free-market neoliberalism since the early 1990s. Although there have been many elements in this overall shift – notably privatisation of state enterprises, deregulation of financial markets and attacks on trade union rights – the public finances have consistently played a critical role.

There were two key campaigns in particular that have affected the UK: the first during the ‘stagflation’ crisis of the mid-1970s, and the second during the sharp recession of the early 1990s. Both were paralleled by related shifts in policy prescriptions all across the world economy.

In the mid-1970s, Britain suffered especially sharply from an unprecedented combination of high inflation and the return of mass unemployment. Attempts by successive governments to address these problems started under the 1964-70 Wilson administrations, and continued through the Heath years to the return of Labour in 1974. In the decade from 1964, restricting public spending might be necessitated when sterling was under pressure, but was not seen as the key to macroeconomic stability. Instead, the predominantly Keynesian policy mainstream favoured state initiatives in the form of incomes policies and indicative planning, aiming to reconcile the conflicting interests of employers and unions through the good offices of the state.

But by 1976 these efforts had ended apparently in abject failure, although Keynesians could argue that inflation was significantly the result of factors outside British government control – notably the breakdown of the dollar-gold link in 1971 and the oil shock of 1973. The result was the emergence of two policy platforms standing to left and right of the mainstream. On the left, Labour and the unions flirted with an Alternative Economic Strategy which centred on a radical extension of state intervention in the modernisation of British industry. On the right, the monetarists led by Milton Friedman offered an equally radical alternative diagnosis of stagflation, blaming it on the fiscal and monetary indiscipline of the government.

Following a sudden dip in Britain’s trade balance in 1976, a run on the pound forced Chancellor Healey to turn to the IMF for help. The public spending cuts that followed signalled an early victory for the monetarist right, and the end of the road for both mainstream Keynesianism and the leftist Alternative Economic Strategy.

Mrs Thatcher’s election success in 1979, followed by Reagan’s in the USA, heralded the return of pre-Keynesian economic and social conservatism.  In Britain, the fierce monetary and fiscal squeeze that ensued put manufacturing to the sword, while the abolition of exchange controls allowed the burgeoning wealth from North Sea oil to be invested largely abroad. Subsequently, while the Third World was devastated by the debt crisis of the 1980s, the UK and US financial sectors pressed forward with deregulation at home and expansion abroad, laying the basis for their joint dominance of global financial markets.

Breakneck expansion eventually led, as it always does, to unsustainable credit growth, overheated markets and a new round of inflation. When the bust came in 1990-91, coinciding with the fall of communist regimes across the Soviet bloc, the free-market right once again blamed excessive public spending. The result within the European Union was the strictures of the Maastricht Treaty, first negotiated in 1991 and finally enacted, after some resistance, in 1993. In relation to public finance, from now on all EU member states were enjoined to limit their fiscal deficits to 3% of GDP, and their aggregate public debts to 60% of GDP. Limits along similar lines had, by then, become a central feature of Third World aid packages from the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank; they were also imposed upon the post-communist ‘transition’ countries. The hegemony of neoliberalism was now complete.

What is most striking, and highly relevant to the assessment of this week’s IFS intervention, is that at no point did the monetarist economists – or their neoliberal successors – explain why any particular limit to public deficits and debt was economically necessary. Instead we are offered, then as now, an entirely circular argument. We are told that deficit cuts are necessary because international bond markets require them. So why do international bond markets require them? Because they think that cuts are necessary. And why is that? Because the economic experts say so!

Now it is certainly the case that any individual government which accumulates debts that are very high compared to those of other governments will find itself subject to special scrutiny by the bond markets, as the Greeks now know only too well, and as many Third World governments found out already back in the 1980s. We should of course make allowance for the pernicious effects of speculators, for instance the role of George Soros in our own 1992 crisis that forced us out of the EU’s Exchange Rate Mechanism, or the flight of hot money from East Asia in 1997. But a reasonable case can still be made that governments should, in normal times, avoid excessive reliance on borrowing, especially to fund current expenditure as opposed to capital investments.

However, from the standpoint of macroeconomic stability, and especially that of maintaining full or near-full employment, our overriding concern today should remain that of Keynes: the need for governments to sustain economic activity at a time when savings in the private sector greatly exceed investments. This need is met by absorbing excess savings through the sale of government securities, the proceeds of which are then spent.

And because we now live in an integrated global economy, this Keynesian precept should be applied at the global level, not at the level of an individual country. Thus, the continued growth and prosperity of countries with chronic trade surpluses, like Germany and China, depends in conditions of global recession on the willingness of other countries like the USA and Britain to continue to run trade deficits. As a corollary – and this is really an economic fact – there will be matching outflows of capital from the former countries, and inflows into the latter. Given the current reluctance of businesses and households in the trade-deficit countries to borrow and spend, it is their government borrowing that keeps the world economy going.

We can see, therefore, that the International Monetary Fund, the Bank of England, and Chancellor Darling and Shadow Chancellor Cable, are right to urge that government deficits should not be cut prematurely, because that would risk a ‘double-dip’ recession. As long as global savings continue to exceed global private sector investments, governments must continue to absorb that excess.

But still, why this obsession with restoring the deficit and debt ratios to ‘normal’ levels, once the global recovery has reached the point where private sector investment has recovered fully and cyclical unemployment has disappeared? There is, after all, no economic ‘law’ that dictates the 3% and 60% levels, or any other numerical values. The level of aggregate economic activity is entirely unaffected by the proportion of demand that flows through the public rather than the private sector.

The answer to this question, now as in the 1970s, lies not in economics, but in politics, or more specifically, in class warfare. It concerns the privileged position of private wealth within our restricted form of democracy. After 1945 the propertyless in most parts of the world, West, East and South, made remarkable gains in their well-being and in the strength of their political voice. By the mid-1970s, the propertied classes, whether capitalists, usurers, merchants or landlords, or indeed the Soviet-bloc bureaucratic élite, found themselves on the defensive on many fronts.

Many radical nationalist governments in the Third World continued to press for reforms in the governance of the world economy, challenging the new forms of economic colonialism that followed independence. In the Soviet bloc, the Prague Spring and the first stirrings of the Polish workers’ movement threatened the bureaucrats’ highly centralised power. And in the West, not only had new social movements challenged the elites on issues of gender, race and the environment, but workers were also advancing new claims to workplace democracy and economic security that seriously threatened the power of big business and high finance.

The neoliberal counter-revolution was the concerted response. For more than thirty years, the ideologists of neoliberalism, with economists to the fore, worked assiduously to construct a new common-sense about the economy based on the old liberal mantra: property rights, individualism and the residual state. By the time the sequence of localised crises that began in Britain on Black Wednesday in 1992 culminated in the global credit crunch of 2007, that work of construction was very largely complete.

Faced in September 2008 by an imminent total meltdown of global finance, the business and financial élites had no choice but to sanction a massive and collective rescue programme by the governments of the leading economies. There followed a period  during which neoliberalism appeared to be in disarray, and in both academia and the media, alternative voices could once again be heard.

But within about six months, the neoliberals had regrouped. In Britain, as the debate over Darling’s 2009 Budget already showed, their ownership of the economic common sense allowed them to steadily shift the focus of debate from exacting retribution and repayment from the banks, to blaming governments for assuming the vast fiscal deficits that have kept capitalism afloat. Meanwhile. those who spoke up for real alternatives – for Green New Deals, for radical reform of the banks, for a new international financial architecture – have been pushed back to the margins of public attention. All that matters now, apparently, is to make sure that the state is cut back.

And to make absolutely sure that this happens, the IFS message comes with a chorus of attacks on the competence, work effort and dignity of public sector employees. The accompanying relentless demands for ‘efficiency gains’ have a double purpose. On the one hand, they are a euphemism for cuts in public sector jobs and pay, heralding an assault on the last redoubts of organised labour while undermining continued citizen support for nurses, teachers and soldiers alike. On the other hand, they undermine our confidence in the provision of public goods, encouraging a resumption of the shift to private sector providers initiated under Mrs Thatcher.

Given these attacks on working people and their communities, it is surely time to summon up our collective courage and reject the lies and misrepresentations that are being foisted upon us in this phoniest of all elections. For at present, it really doesn’t matter what combination of Libs, Labs and Cons cobble together a majority at Westminster. The Institute for Fiscal Studies are sadly right about one thing:  the government that emerges will impose massive cuts in public spending. But they are not, repeat not, economically necessary.

Hugo Radice is a Life Fellow of the School of Politics and International Studies, University of Leeds. His recent columns on the crisis in the Yorkshire Post are available via his webpage: http://www.polis.leeds.ac.uk/about/staff/radice

Contact the author: h.k.radice@leeds.ac.uk

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