The Kurdistan region of Iraq enjoyed a head start over the rest of the country. Its 1991 uprising ousted Saddam’s genocidal forces which had murdered nearly 200,000 Kurds at Halabja and elsewhere. Its leaders started to build universities and lay down democratic foundations but it also endured a bloody civil war whose divisions are now healing.

Security is tight although there have ‘only’ been about 120 terrorist killings since 2003, 100 of these in early 2004, and overseas business people and diplomats rarely take special measures. Crime is very low.

There’s also been a development boom with homes and big infrastructure projects built in recent years. Workers don’t pay tax and work six hours a day. Unions are social partners and back the call for full union rights in the rest of Iraq, where they are restricted.

Iraq has the world’s third largest oil reserves but is only the 11th biggest producer. Kurdistan has plentiful supplies. Oil and gas provide virtually all Iraq’s revenues and diversification is vital. Agriculture was born in Kurdistan but liquidated by Saddam who razed thousands of villages and herded people into cities. Kurds have lost farming skills and its young people are not accustomed to rural life. Most food is imported although Kurdistan could become self-sufficient by modernising its methods through foreign investment. Tourism is another growth area.

Kurdish leaders seek UK investment and trade and are mystified that there has been no official ministerial trade mission while other European countries are making a beeline to the region. Britain is losing business opportunities. Direct flights to the UK and a wider visa scheme would boost commerce.

Kurdistan is wrongly overlooked in case UK engagement upsets Arab Iraq. This is not, however, a zero sum game. Kurdistan is open to business which is currently less feasible elsewhere. Kurdistan could become the gateway to the whole country and companies could expand as security permits.

Kurdistan’s leaders are open to international best practice. They don’t want to reinvent every wheel and have contracted British institutions to help them tackle corruption and administrative inexperience.

Secular opposition

Their Speaker asked us to outline the British political system and more than half their 111 MPs enthusiastically participated in two lively sessions. They were keen to understand our Official Opposition system. They now have one – Gorran (the Change). This breakaway from the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) took 25% of the seats in last year’s elections. The split is very bitter and Gorran has yet to find its feet. The emergence of a secular opposition is an important example for the Middle East.

Iraq has become a cold house for Christians but many have fled to Kurdistan and senior Christian leaders praised the government for building churches and protecting Christian villages.

Discussion in landlocked Kurdistan always turns to the neighbours. The good news is that frosty relations with Turkey have thawed massively in the last year, partly driven by extensive trading. However, Turkey and Iran are manipulating water supplies and one leading politician told us directly that Iran is not a neighbour but controls Shia Iraq.

The bad news is that relations between Iraqi Kurds and some Arabs have worsened considerably. This dangerous gap involves cultural and ethnic differences, resentment and fear and has come close to a shooting war. The Kurds suffered genocide directed from Baghdad but now embrace a federal and democratic Iraq. An independent Kurdistan including parts of Turkey, Iran and Syria is a popular dream but would almost certainly cause conflagration and is not on the agenda.

Kurds fear that Baghdad is building a centralised rather than federal state and it constantly delays implementing agreed constitutional provisions to solve problems. These include making Kirkuk and other disputed territories part of the Region, and establishing a reliable regime for oil production and sharing revenues.

Neutral statistics should underpin political representation and planning but they are not available in Kurdistan because the last census was in 1957. The Prime Minister, a Labour supporter-in-exile, Cardiff Barham Salih, told us they need UK technical assistance.

Improving Kurdish-Arab relations depends on the Iraqi parliamentary elections in March which could bring a new Iraqi PM with Kurdish support and reshaped cross-community alliances.

Iraqi Kurdistan has come a long way quickly but governance and human rights need improving. Its leaders and people most clearly desire deeper and wider political and commercial engagement by the UK, and others. It is in everyone’s interests that Kurdistan achieves its full potential within and for Iraq. The whole country would then stand a much better chance of working for its long-suffering people.

–

Gary Kent’s sixth fact-finding visit to Iraq, his fourth to Kurdistan since 2006, was with Meg Munn MP for the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Kurdistan. They were guests of the Kurdistan parliament. In five days they met the President, Speaker, Prime Minister, Interior Minister, other ministers, unions, women activists, Gorran, Christian leaders, plus British and Kurdish business leaders.

Labour Friends of Iraq

The USA can’t commit to meaningful cuts in carbon emissions; China and other developing countries refuse to budge before industrialised countries have addressed their historic legacy of pollution; the small island, least developed and African nations insist on the need to do something to avert threats to their existence; and the Europeans make positive but ineffectual noises from the sidelines. Wonderful Copenhagen in 2009? Yes, but you could almost be talking about any climate negotiation from the past twenty years – Marrakech, The Hague, Bali, Kyoto or Rio.

The depressing fact is that ever since the first climate change agreement – the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) – back in Rio in 1992, the main contours of international climate politics have remained stubbornly in place. Back then, US President George Bush Senior established the family tradition by declaring that the USA would not commit to cuts in CO₂ emissions and that America’s way of life was not up for negotiation. Back then, China, Brazil and other leading developing countries argued that principles of justice meant that industrialised countries had to cut their emissions before anything was asked of developing nations.

Today, the same standoff between principles of justice, the realities of self-interest and the ticking clock of environmental damage, remains. Now, as in 1992, the result was an agreement with no legally enforceable limits on emissions, roundly condemned by all and sundry.

True, the UNFCCC eventually give birth to its deformed, half-dead offspring, the Kyoto Protocol which did contain binding commitments from some countries. As is well known, the USA signed but never ratified that treaty and the large developing countries signed only because they had to make no cuts at all. It thus left the two largest global polluters (the USA and China) outside its remit. Even its most ardent supporters, the northern European states, have shown an inability to reach even their modest targets and the Kyoto treaty contains no effective mechanism with which to punish those who fail their obligations.

So what of the fiasco that was Copenhagen? In recent years, important shifts have occurred in climate politics, which raised hopes that Copenhagen might have delivered some kind of step forward. The science around climate change is much more well established, despite the spoiling noises of the oil industry and their media mouthpieces like Fox News and the dreadful dailies, Telegraph and Mail. And there is more widespread political agreement that something should be done.

However, despite these shifts, the pace of political change, particularly in China and the USA, is slow, leaving the two unmoving objects of climate politics – US Congressional opposition and China’s veto power – in place. Without significant change here, progress at the international level will be very difficult.

The USA

It is true that climate politics in the US have changed a great deal since Bush Junior’s much-criticised exit from the Kyoto Protocol in 2001. The USA finally has a president who takes the issue seriously and has brought the country actively back to the centre of international negotiations.

Nevertheless, within the US political system, the President’s freedom to act on the international stage is highly constrained by the need for Congressional approval, something environmental critics and other countries seemingly fail to register. George Monbiot even managed to note the critical importance of the US Senate then simply wished it away, singling out President Obama as the person to blame for the failure in Copenhagen. Such critics speak as if the President could freely choose to sign up to whatever he wanted. He cannot. More accurately, whatever the US President agrees to has to be ratified by Congress, something that has not escaped past US Presidents, from Wilson to Clinton.

While the politics within Congress, including the Senate, have changed, and there are now serious discussions around a US climate change bill, there is still considerable opposition. Perhaps more crucially, even those in Congress who favour binding emission reductions baulk at the prospect of the US agreeing to them without China and other large developing countries committing to some action as well. This was the crux of the Copenhagen impasse.

China

Like the USA, China has belatedly begun to recognise that it has some interest in having cuts to carbon emissions, partly for reasons of energy security, partly because of the likely effect of climate change on its agricultural sector and coastal cities. However, this is tempered by the view that action against climate change, in the medium term, should be the sole responsibility of industrialised countries. There is some justice to this argument: climate change has largely been created by rich countries and in terms of per capita emissions they still dwarf China’s.

But there is also a heavy dose of self-interest in China’s objections. If oil is part of the architecture of the US economy, for China it is coal. No less than the US, China’s current stance is formed with its eyes on economic growth and nurturing its global power. There are many countries that pollute much less, and will suffer much more, than China, and are ill-served by its obstructionism.

On top of this, China’s opposition to any meaningful verification measures, without which no international treaty has ever been successful, served both to meet its aim of avoiding any verifiable binding commitments at all and to protect the regime against the ‘intrusion’ of independent scrutiny of its internal affairs, something the Communist Party has never accepted.

Together, these concerns put China in the extraordinary position, in the final hours of Copenhagen, of insisting that any significant targets on limiting temperature increases or emissions be removed from the final declaration. As reported by Mark Lynas not only did China not want to sign up to commitments for itself, it didn’t want other countries to make any commitments either, for fear it would lead to increased pressure down the line on China to adopt binding targets. If this remains part of China’s strategy, it is difficult to see any possibility of progress beyond a series of broad, voluntary, individual and unverifiable promises.

While criticism of the politics around climate change in the US is entirely apt, China’s stance is extremely risky. As well as using up scarce borrowed time, environmentally speaking, it may also squander an opportunity to make limited but real progress. In a dangerous game of chicken, China seems to calculate that if it continues to play hardball, the US will eventually give in.

But current political circumstances in the USA might be as good as they will get for some time: there is a President in favour of an international agreement on climate change and the Democrats control both houses of Congress. This will not last. In all likelihood the Democrat grip will be severely weakened by the Congressional mid-term elections later this year and a second Obama term is far from certain. Whatever the issues of justice, the developing countries may have missed an opportunity to strike a limited, pragmatic deal with the US in Copenhagen.

Lessons

For their part, the Labour government strove to make Copenhagen a success, and Ed Miliband is credited (though some wouldn’t use that word) with ensuring the final declaration was in fact agreed. Gordon Brown, too, has been forceful in arguing for large financial transfers to the less developed countries, though as ever, some argue more could and should be done. The weakness of the government’s position, and that of the EU more generally, is that their domestic performance on cutting emissions is so poor, particularly when placed against some of the grander statements that both the UK government and the EU have made. It will take more than gimmicky boiler scrappage schemes to convince other nations that the UK is serious about achieving the huge cuts in emissions that it says it wants to see.

Another lesson to take from Copenhagen is that it is high time for western NGOs and other commentators to recognise that their traditional understanding of international politics (in short and with little simplification, ‘industrialised and western = venal and bad; developing and rural = noble and good’) will no longer wash, if ever it did. The very grouping together of developing countries – in this of all issues – looks increasingly anachronistic, though it serves political purposes for various governments (allying with China provides leverage for the weakest states, siding with the least developed provides ideological and moral cover for China’s intransigence). Whether this alliance will prove tenable in the long term, remains to be seen. It is hard to see how China’s refusal to cut emissions can really benefit those who will be hit first and hardest by climate change.

But perhaps the key lesson, and what is weakest in the NGO-environmentalist criticism, is any attempt to reconcile the gulf between arguments of justice and the realities of international politics. It is no good acting as if the latter simply did not exist. Certainly, it is important that arguments about justice – whether couched in terms of historical responsibilities, or in terms of per capita CO₂ emissions – are made and reiterated. But an international emissions regime in which there is an even distribution of CO₂ emissions per head is simply not attainable in the near future. It is politically, not to mention physically, unachievable in the short term and possibly never this side of a technological revolution. Moreover, because of their volume, climate change cannot be curtailed without cuts in China’s rate of emissions, regardless of issues of justice. Nor is the international political landscape – multiple states acting in their own self-interest – likely to alter anytime soon.

As ever with progressive politics, what is needed, and what is most difficult to achieve, are steps that deliver tangible progress but which also begin an inevitably slow process of bridging the gulf between present day realities and environmentally effective and socially just outcomes. Some elements of this are beginning to feature in the negotiations – large transfers of financial resources to assist the poorest countries adapt to climate change are an essential first step, regardless of any other actions. An agreed goal for mitigating climate change – whether 2^oC or 1.5^oC – signifies some progress from 20 years ago, when a vague goal of avoiding ‘dangerous’ climate change is all countries would commit to.

Beyond this, further progress will probably require a division within the developing country block, and the larger, heavily polluting countries will have to give some ground while protecting the interests of the least developed and most vulnerable. In this context, developing countries’ insistence at Copenhagen on keeping the Kyoto deal in play, looks like a major mistake.

But the really serious work will involve looking for some limited common ground between China and the US. While something may be achievable through better handling of international negotiations than was displayed in Copenhagen, the real battles will be fought in the internal political environments of these two powers, as well as others. When states’ national interests are as deadlocked as they currently seem to be – when there is only limited agreement about ends, never mind means – then international cooperation will be similarly limited. It may take much more sustained campaigning on climate change, as well as wider economic and technological change, to change governments’ views of what is in their national interest.

This account of the ILP in the 1930s begins with an outline of the party’s history during the seven years between leaving the Labour Party and the outbreak of war. The second chapter looks at the disaffiliation itself and the remaining chapters – apart from the conclusion – are thematic, covering aspects ranging from membership and organisation, relationships with the Communist and Labour parties, and the ILP’s international involvements.

This structure has both merits and drawbacks. On the positive side we get to view the ILP from a number of different angles and in varying perspectives, although, inevitably, given the short period the book covers, there is a lot of repetition as the same events, groupings and individuals turning up in different contexts.

The ILP’s crucial role in the foundation of the Labour Party meant that, until the end of the First World War, it functioned as the main vehicle for individuals to participate in the larger party, locally and nationally. However, the introduction of Constituency Labour Parties after the war presented the ILP with a dilemma – where should it be going and what should its relationship be with the larger entity?

Cohen claims the ILP in the 1920s, under the chairmanship of Clifford Allen, was developing into a ‘think tank’, but it was surely much more than this. For a start, it was much bigger than most organisations designated in this way today. At the time of its disaffiliation in 1932, it was more than five times the size of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), as we are reminded in the very first sentence of the Introduction.

Cohen rejects the view that disaffiliation was simply an act of ‘insanity’, although he is clear that most ILPers preferred to remain affiliated and the majority who supported disaffiliation did so with the greatest reluctance. As late as the beginning of 1932, the year of the breach with Labour, six of the nine ILP Divisions, accounting for about 80 per cent of its members, voted to remain affiliated to Labour. Yet, quite shortly afterwards, the decision to disaffiliate was taken, with the result that about a third of members departed.

So, why, if there was so much reluctance to part company with Labour, and so much opposition to doing so, did the delegates to the crucial ILP conference resolve to leave the Labour Party?

Conflicting orders

There were groupings, notably the Revolutionary Policy Committee formed the previous year, which had their own reasons for supporting disaffiliation, but Cohen is clear that the key feature was the conflict over the standing orders of the Parliamentary Labour Party. This went back to 1929 after a period when the more militant ILP MPs, notably James Maxton, had been fierce left-wing critics of the Labour leadership and, from the latter’s point of view, had signally failed to display the loyalty it expected from its parliamentary supporters.

The parties then took incompatible decisions. The ILP resolved that all its MPs and candidates should formally undertake to support the policies determined by its conferences, while the PLP introduced new standing orders which precluded MPs from voting against its decisions. This might seem an issue of concern mainly to the ILP Parliamentary Group, but when Labour failed to endorse ILP candidates at by-elections and, subsequently, at the general election of 1931 – 19 of them at the general election – there was widespread resentment and anger among ILP supporters.

Nevertheless, at the regular ILP annual conference in 1932 delegates voted against immediate disaffiliation and resolved by a very large majority to re-open negotiations with Labour on a compromise solution. This was, says Cohen, ‘a victory for the politics of Micawber’. Labour had already made it crystal clear that it was not prepared to give any ground and this hope that something would turn up to rescue the ILP from its dilemma was doomed to failure. A special conference in July 1932 bowed to the inevitable and took the decision to disaffiliate.

It would have been interesting to hear more about how the decision to call the ‘disaffiliation conference’ was made and to better understand how the Labour Party could contemplate the loss of the ILP so calmly, especially so soon after the MacDonald defection and the disastrous 1931 election when the number of Labour MPs reduced from 287 in 1929 to 46.

One outspoken supporter of the ILP line was the veteran ILPer, former MP and minister, Fred Jowett. For him, at issue was the electorate’s right to elect MPs who would honour pledges made during the campaign, and in the case of ILP MPs the relevant policies were those determined by the ILP’s conference.

Again, it would have been very interesting if Cohen had explored these arguments further. Jowett had a long record as a critic of what passed for representative government, going back to well before the Great War. He had doggedly pursued the celebrated ‘Bradford resolution’ for years and continued to advocate replacing cabinet government by a committee system – although he had served in MacDonald’s first cabinet. It is clear from Fenner Brockway’s biography that Jowett’s position on the PLP’s standing orders debate was closely related to his more general stance on democracy. How far these concerns were reflected in ILP attitudes more generally at the time of disaffiliation is another area that could have been examined in more detail.

Loss of members

The book presents a more nuanced picture of the decrease in ILP membership than the usual account of inevitable and precipitate decline. Significant fluctuations in membership were new neither to the ILP nor to other left-wing parties – the CPGB, for example, suffered much greater loss in percentage terms during the same 10-month period immediately following the ILP’s disaffiliation.

More worrying for those ILPers who remained was that membership continued to fall by slightly larger proportions in the following two years. As a result of serious declines in old strongholds, such as Lancashire, Yorkshire and Wales, less ‘traditional’ areas, where membership decline had been slower, came to carry greater weight within the organisation. The picture was not one of universal decline, however: some areas saw substantial growth in membership and branches, and the ILP achieved some modest election successes in some of its strongholds.

It also became more consciously orientated towards the trade union movement, although its impact here was patchy and modest, as was its appeal among women. One of the features of the early ILP, back in the 1890s and 1900s, was its far less ‘masculine’ tone than its rival socialist organisations, notably the Social Democratic Federation (SDF). At the time, women played a relatively large part in the organisation at all levels and in a variety of roles. Katherine Bruce Glasier, for example, took over the editorship of the Labour Leader for several key years either side of the end of the Great War.

However, in the post-disaffiliation period only three women were on the National Administrative Council (NAC), two of whom, Dorothy Jewson and Jennie Lee, lasted only until 1934 and 1935 respectively, leaving Kate Spurell as the sole female member. Separate representation for women, already declining in previous years, was brought to an end with the support of the ILP’s ‘revolutionary’ element soon after the breach with Labour.

This ‘revolutionary’ wing also had an impact on the organisation of the party. Since its inception, the ILP’s ruling body (between national conferences) had been the NAC. The name was deliberately chosen to suggest a body that would not behave in the authoritarian way attributed to many, if not all, executive committees. This was very much in accord with the times: there was much debate, for example, about whether the ILP should have a ‘president’; and the Clarion, weekly rival of Labour Leader, leapt on any pretensions to ‘leadership’ among notables in the party and was prone to spot the slightest sign of incipient bureaucracy.

But in the 1930s sterner attitudes came to the fore. In 1934, against the objection of many, notably Jowett, the ILP adopted its own version of ‘democratic centralism’ creating not only of an executive committee but also the rather sinister sounding ‘inner executive’.

The latter was supposed to enable the party to function ‘underground’ should the ILP be made illegal, but by 1935 it consisted of three MPs – Maxton, Campbell Stephen and John McGovern – who met in a committee room of the House of Commons (rather than the Doge’s Palace as the name might have led one to anticipate). It became a controversial force, and was accused of dictatorship, especially in relation to the ‘Abyssinian’ crisis. I would have welcomed more from Cohen about the arguments on both sides of the democratic centralism debate, and subsequent criticisms and defences of the new structure.

Distinct groupings

The key chapter for explaining ‘the failure of the dream’ is ‘Divided We Fall’. It is always difficult to draw a line between constructive critical debate and destructive factionalism, a point exemplified by what took place in the ILP during the years in question. Apart from those wishing to remain affiliated to the Labour Party, who helped form the Socialist League, there were at least three distinct groupings within the ILP pulling in very different directions.

The Revolutionary Policy Committee’s (RPC) notion of a ‘revolutionary’ policy did not correspond to the interpretation of other would-be revolutionaries in the party. Among other things, it stood for closer co-operation with the Communists, nationally and internationally, an approach which seemed to flourish for a couple of years before events in Spain and, particularly, Barcelona put the two organisations at loggerheads. Soon afterwards, the RPC left en masse to join the Communist Party.

In the meantime, unimpressed by the progress being made by the RPC, the CP infiltrated the ILP’s youth movement and the ILP itself. Its central committee set up a Committee for Affiliation to the Comintern within the ILP. Those who had been ILP members in 1920 and 1921 must have recalled the attempts of the ‘Left-Wing of the ILP’ to secure the party’s affiliation to the Third International. This time, however, the ILP also attracted the attentions of Trotskyists in the shape of the ‘Marxist Group’.

These moves were opposed by a ‘Unity Group’ whose title was not intended to be ironic even though most of its members left to form the Independent Socialist Party in 1934. The group was committed to ‘ethical socialism’ but again it would have been good if this had been explored more fully by Cohen.

He does supply some interesting examples of the ILP’s social activities though. To some extent, by the 1930s the ILP had become a sort of residual legatee of the pre-Leninist radical left, including elements of the Clarion movement, the Guild Socialists, the syndicalists and perhaps even the old SDF, alongside the ILP’s ‘traditional’ features. Its opponents within the party represented more recent trends from other, wider, contexts, which we are now more familiar with.

There is a great deal of fascinating detail and many helpful insights in this book. But I wish important elements, notably the move towards democratic centralism and the nature of ethical socialism, had been unpacked and explored a little more.

—-

Ian Bullock is a Visiting Research Fellow in the History department of the University of Sussex. He is co-author, with Logie Barrow, of Democratic Ideas and the British Labour Movement, 1880-1914 (CUP) and author of The Myth of Soviet Democracy and the British Left. He co-edited Sylvia Pankhurst: From artist to anti-fascist (Macmillan) with Richard Pankhurst, and is working on a project about the ILP between the wars.

The Failure of a Dream: The Independent Labour Party from Disaffiliation to World War II by Gidon Cohen, is published by I.B. Tauris, 2007. 262pp.

To read Christopher Hall’s review, click here.

The left wing pressure group Compass has an impressive record of campaigning on a wide range of issues, attempting, with some success, to challenge the neo-liberal agenda that shapes much of government policy. Whatever the outcome of the next election the organisation will undoubtedly be at the forefront of the debate about the Labour Party’s future.

In its recent pamphlet, The Last Labour Government, Compass raises the prospect of a Conservative government reducing the number of parliamentary seats by 10 per cent – with a disproportionate effect on Labour’s urban representation – and renewing the Tories’ historic attack on the unions’ financial support for Labour at a time when the party constantly teeters on the brink of bankruptcy.

Add the prospect of an independent Scotland no longer sending MPs to Westminster and the future begins to look desperate for Labour, hence the title of the publication – which does not even include a question mark.

The authors argue that only a commitment to hold a referendum on proportional representation – the Jenkins Commission’s Alternative Vote Plus is the preferred system – on the same day as the general election can save the party from disaster. They believe this would alter ‘the likely outcome of the next election from a comfortable Tory win into the terrain of a hung parliament’. They call this ‘a game changer’ which is an extraordinary claim to make given the general public’s lack of interest in politics, especially its more esoteric aspects – and proportional representation is surely one of those.

However, Compass argue that proportional representation would open up ‘the political system to new voices and end the tyranny of middle England which concentrates every message on a few fickle voters in a handful of swing seats’. This, they argue, would force the left to ‘build a consensus for lasting social democratic change’.

That is as may be, but it was recently reported in the Guardian that senior ministers were having serious talks with Gordon Brown about legislation to ensure a referendum on electoral reform six months after the election. Brown is said to be interested in the idea, although of course he is often interested in ideas that end up going nowhere.

Perhaps this pamphlet is closer to the way some Labour people are now thinking than we might, at first, imagine. Desperate times, desperate measures.

The Last Labour Government – Why only a referendum on electoral reform can save the party now is available to download from the Compass website.

The history of the Independent Labour Party from its foundation until it was disaffiliated from the Labour Party has been well documented. Yet, coverage of the ILP in the 1930s after disaffiliation is sketchy, at best.

The Centennial History of the ILP, edited by James, Jowitt and Laybourn, is a fascinating volume but it barely covers the ILP in the ’30s, while Left in the Centre: ILP 1893-1940, by Robert E Dowse, has only a short chapter on this period. James Jupp looks at the ’30s in more detail in his British Radical Left 1931-1941 but only covers the ILP as one of various left wing parties around at the time. We get glimpses of the 1930s ILP in biographies and autobiographies of major ILP figures, such as James Maxton, Fenner Brockway, John McGovern and Jenny Lee, but until now there has been no attempt to look at the role of the disaffiliated ILP in detail.

The ILP disaffiliated from the Labour Party in 1932. It had decided earlier that year that its MPs should refuse to vote with Labour in parliament if this went against ILP conference decisions. The Labour Party made its displeasure clear and the ILP decided to leave. As a result it became a separate political party, and remained so until 1975.

From this point on the ILP went into rapid decline, losing any remaining national significance after the late 1940s. Keith Middlemass, in The Clydesiders, called it “suicide during a fit of insanity”. I believe this view has coloured previous accounts, and meant this fascinating period in the ILP’s history has largely been ignored, until now.

Gidon Cohen rightly points out that the majority of ILP members wanted to remain in the Labour Party, but not if it meant ILP MPs had to vote against ILP conference decisions. They reluctantly accepted the decision not to contest disaffiliation from the Labour Party but they were confident the party would grow and even challenge Labour as the major party of the left.

There were several reasons to support such optimism: the ILP still had a small parliamentary presence; it had councillors in towns and cities across the UK; and several members were high up in the hierarchies of the trade union movement. Membership stood at over 16,500 and, in James Maxton, they had the most charismatic leader of any party. On the far left the Communist Party was tiny, with only a few thousand members.

Yet by 1939, Cohen tells us, ILP membership had collapsed to less than 2,500. So what went wrong?

Factions
The main problem was that different groups in the ILP had different views about the sort of party it should be and what policies it should pursue. The ILP had always been a broad church and allowed members with divergent views. However, this openness was the seed of its own demise as certain groups attempted to dominate and force through their own policies.

First, there were a number of ILP branches that refused to accept disaffiliation and wanted to remain in the Labour Party. By 1935, Cohen says, a quarter of branches had gone, including some major ones such as Manchester Central. Most of the ILP’s elected local councillors left, in many cases despite their local branch being in favour of disaffiliation. In Nelson, Lancashire, for example, all the Labour Party councillors were ILP members, but none of them left Labour. In Glasgow, 40 of the 44 Labour councillors were ILP members, but only six stayed loyal to the ILP. The ILP compounded this problem when it instructed its members to refuse to pay the trade union political levy, meaning it lost all influence in the unions.

Cohen makes a good job of guiding us through the labyrinth of internal ILP politics. Free to follow its own socialist policies, the ILP was soon riven by warring factions who either got their policies accepted, or left the party when they failed to do so.

One of the most powerful factions in the early years after disaffiliation was the Revolutionary Policy Committee (RPC) which reached its zenith at the 1933 conference when its motion in favour of a revolutionary policy was successful. In 1935, however, its influence waned and around 60 RPC supporters left to join the Communist Party. Later, after the RPC was disbanded, some former members, who had stayed in the ILP, formed the Marxist Group which in turn was joined by several Trotskyites. They then left the ILP after failing to win support at national level (although they did have some influence at local level.)

Throughout the 1930s the ILP looked to work with other left wing parties while keeping its own policies. During this time the Labour Party refused to join any campaign organised by the ILP, although individual party members and branches often worked together, and at local level electoral pacts were sometimes agreed.

The Labour Party’s intransigence meant the ILP was drawn into working with the only other left wing party available – the Communist Party. Cohen describes their often acrimonious working relationship and describes several instances when the CP aimed to infiltrate the ILP and convert its members. He shows how the ILP’s youth organisation, the Guild of Youth, was taken over by Communists before the ILP totally re-organised it, expelling several branches and members.

Later, the ILP took part in joint ventures with the Socialist League, an organisation within the Labour Party known to include many ex-ILPers. This partnership was short-lived as the Labour Party threatened to expel Socialist League members if they continued to share platforms with the CP or the ILP.

Many ILP members were alienated by its revolutionary policies and the party’s relationship to the Communists. This was most striking in Lancashire, where, as Cohen states, around half the branches left to form a separate political party known as the Independent Socialist Party. At a national level, ILP MP Richard Wallhead also left. Many influential middle class supporters deserted too, and falling membership left the party’s finances in a parlous state.

Actions
In the 1935 general election the ILP put up 17 candidates and four were elected, all of them in Glasgow. In parliament the ILP MPs became a small vocal group who strongly supported the hunger marchers and condemned the rise of fascism.

For me, this is the most interesting part of Cohen’s book. John McGovern and Bob Edwards, leading members of the ILP, took part in the hunger marches and each led a contingent. ILP branches provided the hunger marchers with accommodation and food, and many ILP members were involved in anti-fascist demonstrations, in particular, the ‘Battle of Cable Street’ in east London in 1936.

Internationally, the ILP joined a ‘new international’, called the London Bureau, a group of mainly small, left wing parties. They denounced the Moscow show trials of old Bolsheviks; supported their sister party, the POUM, during the Spanish Civil War; and refused to take sides in the Abyssinian crisis of 1935-36.

Cohen shows that although total ILP membership declined, new members did join, some branches grew, and new branches were formed. New councillors and MPs were elected but once an ILP councillor had been defeated the seat was lost forever. The small vocal group of MPs, and the energy of its members, meant the ILP often had a national presence that was far greater than its actual membership warranted.

Unlike other commentators, Cohen’s view is that the decline of the ILP was not an inevitable consequence of disaffiliation from Labour, but, rather, resulted from the rise of factionalism within the party. I think he just about wins this argument.

I would have preferred more statistical data, although that’s a personal preference and many readers might disagree. The absence of any photographs was a little disappointing too, and at £35 the book is not cheap.

But overall I found this a fascinating and informative account of a much-neglected period of ILP history.

—–
The Failure of a Dream: The Independent Labour Party from Disaffiliation to World War II by Gidon Cohen, is published by I.B. Tauris, 2007. 262pp.

Christopher Hall’s Not just Orwell’: The Independent Labour Party Volunteers and the Spanish Civil War is published by Warren and Pell.

Read another review of this book here.

Read more about ILP history.

It’s now over a year since the world’s financial system went into meltdown in the wake of the collapse of Lehman Brothers in September 2008. At the time, there was much talk of a transformation of the financial system, of a revolution in state regulation of private finance, the end of neoliberalism, even a transformation of politics. Yet, as the crisis passes and the world economy starts to make its way up the long slope from recession, these bolder claims have been pushed to one side.

Instead, the political consensus among governments of the leading economies focuses on much more modest ideas: a tweak to the regulatory architecture here, a word or two against bank bonuses there, a broad but toothless declaration in favour of international stability over there. And, shamefully, the weasel words of the private financial sector, briefly silenced in shock at the scale of the crisis, now re-emerge warning against any actions that might restrict competitiveness, of the need handsomely to reward ‘world class talent’, of the need to be vigilant against burdensome regulation. The job of dealing with their past failings meanwhile falls to ordinary tax payers, public service users and the newly unemployed.

In the UK, with a Tory government waiting menacingly around the corner, the debate is all about the burdens of the public sector, the need to cut government expenditure and the failings of the political class. And in the USA, the shell-shocked political right, which looked down, if not quite out, after twin blows from the collapse of the American economic model and the Democratic triumph of November 2008, has now regained its feet and rails against the expansion of ‘big government’.

It is in this context that it is worth reflecting on what we have been through, the underlying dynamics of our financial system that lie at the heart of the crisis and the political challenges we are left with.

Financial crises old and new

Although, quite rightly, the recent financial crisis dominates our thoughts, it should be remembered that financial crises of one kind or another are recurrent features of the economic landscape. Since World War Two the dominant view has been that the problems underlying the 1930s bank crisis and Depression have been addressed, and that governments and central banks know how to avoid them.

Yet we’ve had a succession of crises over the last 20 years, including the stock market crash of 1987 and recession of the early 1990s; a prolonged economic slow-down in Japan, from the early 1990s onwards; a financial crisis in Mexico in 1995, and then in Argentina; the Asian crisis of 1997, spreading from Thailand to Malaysia, South Korea and Indonesia; a crisis in Russia in 1998; and, in 2001-2, another crisis in Argentina. In addition, we have seen recessions in the US and other leading countries in 1981-2 and 1990-2; the debt crisis in Latin America in the 1980s; and more recently the dot com bubble and burst at the turn of the century followed by another recession in the US in 2001.

Indeed, you could hardly say that financial stability has been a hallmark of recent economic history. And, as Barry Winter rightly points out in his article ‘Lies, Hubris and Neoliberalism‘, at every juncture before a financial crisis we have had displays of unguarded hubris – pronouncements on the underlying strength of the economy and assurances that market fundamentals are sound – not least, Gordon Brown’s too-often repeated claim that new Labour had abolished boom and bust.

Two views of financial markets

As the economist George Cooper argues in his excellent short book The Origin of Financial Crises, mainstream economics contains, broadly, two contrasting views about how financial markets work. Here, I am primarily referring to asset markets (stocks, shares, property, etc) and debt markets, and the relationship between them, albeit in very simplified terms.

First, we have to remember that in any sophisticated economy, and certainly any modern industrial economy, credit plays a crucial and central role in enabling a much higher level of economic activity than would be possible if people and businesses only spent and invested what they already owned. An economy without credit would provide a much lower standard of living than one with credit, but this also implies that an economy with a credit industry needs to be regulated in some way.

Traditionally, what banks are prepared to lend to individuals and firms is based on the collateral (assets) that the borrower owns and the borrower’s likely return on investments – less collateral and higher risk mean higher interest rates, and vice versa.

Recent problems centre around this process because it means lenders must estimate the value of assets held by borrowers, and the prospects for investments or purchases, which in turn are also based on expectations about asset prices in the future. This is particularly clear in the case of mortgages, which we’ll come back to.

The first view of this process, the dominant one in economics, policy making and banking for many years, is that asset prices – the prices of stocks, shares, property, etc – are a true reflection of their value; that is, that asset markets are ‘efficient’ mechanisms. If the stock market is going up, that is because businesses are worth more, will be generating more income for shareholders, and thus are a reflection of the underlying strength of the economy.

On this view stock and share prices, property prices and company balance sheets will all be taken by banks and other financial institutions as sound evidence that lending can be increased. Generalised across the economy, it supports the view that expanding levels of debt – held by businesses and individuals – are ok, if asset prices are going up, because they are taken as an indication of the underlying strength of the economy.

However, the alternative view, one held by Keynes and the economist Hyman Minsky (who I’ll come back to), among others, is that asset markets are not efficient, that they operate in a quite different way to markets in goods and services, and in particular that they generate self-reinforcing but alternating cycles of growth and contraction.

On this view, in the boom phase, an increase in asset prices leads to increased lending, which stimulates the asset market, which in turn justifies increased lending, and so on. However, in this kind of self-reinforcing cycle, asset price increases are not simply a reflection of the state of the economy. They are themselves inflated by increases in credit and as such become a cause of economic growth, generating a false picture of overall health in the economy and of the credit-worthiness of borrowers.

What inevitably happens is that a self-reinforcing boom becomes a self-reinforcing crisis. The economy ‘flips’ (the trigger varies in different crises), confidence in borrowers decreases leading to a contraction of lending, forcing sales of assets to pay off inflated loans, leading to a further decrease in asset prices, leading to further loss of confidence … and so on.

Minsky moments

Named after Hyman Minsky, a post-Keynesian American economist, Minsky moments are not an economist’s version of Perry Como, but the points at which economies turn from boom to bust. Minsky was relatively neglected by policy makers and bankers during the years of neoliberal dominance, as indeed was Keynes’ view about the inherent instability of financial markets. Yet, back in 1974 Minsky noted:

‘A fundamental characteristic of our economy, is that the financial system swings between robustness and fragility and these swings are an integral part of the process that generates business cycles.’

It follows from this is that financial crises – even in the view of these fairly conventional economists – are not driven by individual misbehaviour, greed, exuberance, or the absence of enough women on the trading floors. Instead, they are, in George Cooper’s words, ‘hard wired into the system’. (It’s not that the behaviour of traders is unimportant just, in his view, that the problem is more fundamental than that.) ‘Let’s be honest,’ Cooper wrote, ‘a static stable equilibrium has never been observed anywhere in financial markets.’

Hype springs eternal

The other important thing to note is that most policy makers, central bankers, politicians and financiers have not held this latter view of inherent financial instability – which carries with it a necessity for financial authorities to closely monitor and control the expansion and contraction of credit. They have instead held the view that asset and debt markets are efficient and tending towards equilibrium.

It is only because of this that we can understand how, shortly before every single financial crisis, we hear those hubristic declarations of economic health. Thus, before the dot com bubble of the late 1990s turned to bust we were told that the boom was a sign of a fundamentally new kind of economy based on perpetual growth. Similarly, in 2005-07 we were told that houses weren’t over priced, and that record levels in stock market prices were a reflection of sound fundamentals (and sound management) of the economy. And, in August 2007, we were told by the US Treasury Secretary that problems in the housing market had ‘largely been contained’.

Even as late as summer 2008, Bill Emmot, former editor of The Economist, wrote in The Guardian that this wasn’t a crisis, ‘it’s just a kerfuffle’. As Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman noted dryly, in credit-fuelled booms, ‘hype springs eternal’.

The unfolding crisis

So how did the crisis unfold? As we know its roots lie in the sub-prime mortgage market in the US.

In the late 1990s, the US and other leading economies experienced a boom and then a crash in investment in internet-based businesses, the so-called ‘dot com bubble’. In response to the downturn which followed the dot com bust in 2000, and to limit the economic shockwaves from the 11 September 2001 attacks on New York, the US central bank, the Federal Reserve, aggressively cut interest rates to pull the US economy out of recession. On the face of it this seemed to work, as growth in the US economy quickly resumed.

However, the policy pursued by Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan allowed large increases in the level of credit, most notably in the US housing market, and the dot com bust was followed by a housing boom. The end of the housing boom, from 2007 onwards, had a devastating impact – a world-wide ‘credit crunch’, a financial crisis which threatened the existence of some of the world’s biggest banks, and a deep recession. The reasons for this lie in the particular way banks handled lending.

Banks and other lending institutions had been lending increasing amounts to homebuyers, stimulating demand for houses and pushing up prices, leading to further lending – precisely the kind of asset boom described above. Low interest rates meant this lending spread from relatively lower-risk customers to ‘sub-prime’ borrowers, mainly people on lower incomes, many of whom were offered short-term, cut-price interest rates on mortgages as an incentive to sign up.

For banks and other lenders, such mortgages were inherently risky but this risk was mitigated by low interest rates and what seemed to be sustained economic growth. In addition, they protected themselves against this risk by selling mortgages on to other investors (banks, investment institutions, and so on). This process of ‘securitising’ loans, selling loans to other players in the financial sector, ensured that the risky loans were spread throughout the financial system.

In the face of increasing signs of inflation in the US, and concerns that some sectors such as housing were overheating, the Federal Reserve began to increase interest rates, from one per cent in 2004 to more than five per cent in 2006. This affected borrowers in many sectors but particularly those with sub-prime mortgages who saw their monthly payments rise rapidly. Many were forced to default, and because ownership of the loans was now spread so widely, the effects of mortgage defaults were felt by institutions that were, on the face of it, far removed from the US housing market.

Furthermore, because of the complexity of the financial instruments that had been created, no one was clear how much ‘bad debt’ was in the system as a whole and how much was held by each bank. Banks had to make provision to cover their own bad debts and were increasingly reluctant to lend to other banks because they weren’t sure how exposed they were. As a result credit rapidly dried up.

First effects

The first effects of the crisis began to show in summer 2007 when New Century Financial, one of the main sub-prime lenders in the USA, went bankrupt. The first effects outside the US showed when French bank ParisBas had problems. In response, central banks in Europe, USA, Canada and Japan began to pump more money into the system as banks became increasingly nervous about lending to each other.

In the UK, the run on Northern Rock in September 2007 exemplified some of the problems to come as uncertainty about the bank’s exposure to bad loans prompted savers to withdraw their money, fearful that the bank would collapse. At the same time, US banks started to reveal the extent of their exposure to bad debt – Merrill Lynch, for example, owned nearly $8bn in bad debt.

By winter 2007, the inter-bank lending rate (the interest rate at which banks lend to each other to fund their day to day transactions) reached then record levels, a particular problem in the UK economy given the UK banks’ reliance on wholesale lending markets (day to day borrowing from other banks) which grew from zero in 2001 to over £650bn in 2007. The end result for Northern Rock was nationalisation, in spring 2008, and in the USA the investment bank Bear Sterns was absorbed by JP Morgan Chase in a deal brokered by the Federal Reserve.

Despite these signs of restructuring, the underlying problems of the mortgage market remained. In summer 2008, UK house prices fell for the first time in 12 years and the US government was forced to bail out two of its biggest mortgage lenders, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, who together owned up to $5 trillion in home loans. In September 2008, amid increasing turmoil, Merrill Lynch was taken over by Bank of America and AIG Insurance was kept afloat by a rescue package from the US Federal Reserve.

However, that was also the month the US government declared it would not step in to save the investment bank Lehman Brothers which was forced to file for bankruptcy on September 15th  – the biggest casualty of the credit crunch so far. Shortly afterwards, the US government’s US$700bn package to rescue the financial system – its largest intervention in the markets since the 1930s – was held up by Congress, causing worldwide panic. The crisis spread rapidly to Europe, with a collapse in Iceland’s banking system and desperate efforts to shore up banks in other countries, including the UK, Germany and Ireland.

Throughout autumn 2008 we saw a succession of government and central bank interventions of increasing magnitude in the USA, UK, Iceland, Ireland, Germany, and elsewhere; a partial nationalisation of some of the UK’s leading banks; and interest rates slashed in an effort to stimulate inter-bank lending. By winter 2008, the US and Eurozone officially went into recession and the UK followed in January 2009. Even China saw a sharp decline in exports and growth.

Responses and lessons

The G20 meeting in April 2009 managed to reach some agreement about stimulating the world economy, and some commitments (largely lived up to so far) not to create further problems through trade protectionism and the like. However, more far-reaching proposals for financial regulation have been harder to achieve. Ongoing challenges to the USA’s world leadership (see my article, Superpower Headaches), divisions between Europe and the US, signs of recovery and a re-activated financial lobby have all curtailed some of the more far-flung rhetoric of March-April 2009.

Yet, the underlying risk of repeated boom-bust cycles has by no means gone away. The basic economic model, especially in the UK where the City has long dominated economic policy, remains susceptible to the dynamics of instability identified by Keynes and Minsky long ago. Most of the signals from the UK government point towards a reconstruction of the existing system, with limited changes, rather than fundamental reform. Even the nationalised banks are being packaged up to resume their former role, as if nothing had gone wrong.

Chancellor Alastair Darling even stated, in one of his more extraordinary moments, that nothing was fundamentally wrong with the system, we just need ‘better people’ in the boardrooms. If anything could demonstrate the paucity of vision, acquiescence with the status quo, and absence of radical ambition at the top of the Labour Party, this is it. ‘Never let a good crisis go to waste,’ Obama’s chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel is reported to have advised. It feels uncomfortably like we already have.

This is an updated version of Will Brown’s talk at the ILP’s round table seminar, Crunch Times: Politics and the Crisis. To read a report of that event and link to other contributions click here.
To read other articles on the economic crisis, click here.

The Troubles have produced a vast library but this is the first major history of an overlooked but influential movement: the Official IRA and the Workers’ Party, dubbed the Sticks after ditching pin-on Easter Lilies in favour of adhesive backing.

Drawing on many interviews and official archives, it readably narrates this movement’s journey over three bloody decades from the priority of forcibly uniting Ireland to abandoning armed struggle and opposing terrorism but never decommissioning its weapons.

It also moved from opposing “the Communist menace” to embracing class politics with a distinct Stalinist tinge – their bookshops held the Irish franchise for Soviet literature and WP members were allowed free Soviet health treatment.

The authors write that the WP played “a large part in the death of irredentist ideology in the south” and “served as the training ground for much of the leadership of the present-day Labour Party and trade unions in the South. The revolution it struggled for, through violence and political activism, never took place; but the struggle shaped modern Ireland.”

That history was tainted by its military wing – the Official IRA (OIRA) which went from opposing the B Specials to becoming what was known internally as Group B and whose various “special activities” were justified by a “revolutionary morality”. Stalin was a bank robber too.

The book covers the then united IRA’s futile border campaign of 1956-62 to the rise of “the Army of the People” with increased social agitation – fish-ins at aristocratic

estates, attacks on strike-breakers, housing action and exposing corrupt “gombeen Ireland”. It details the emergence of the civil rights movement, the IRA split in 1969 (helped by the Irish establishment which feared the Marxists more than the Provos) and lethal rivalries with the Provos and others. Then to the explosive Hunger Strikes and the growing critique of “Provo- Nazis” and their “black, sullen hatred of Irish Protestants and Protestantism in Ireland”. It ends with the “flight from socialism” – the bitter debate following the collapse of the Soviet bloc on “the necessity of social democracy”.

Passion and bitterness

It is packed with anecdotes and vignettes which bring a sometimes bohemian cast of characters to life in all their camaraderie, passion and bitterness. In May 1972 the OIRA tarred and feathered a Belfast girl for fraternising with British soldiers. Feminist Dr Moira Woods shaved her head and picketed the party in Dublin. Her partner was OIRA leader, Cathal Goulding.

It quotes Gerry Adams, “the thinking man’s Provo”, as saying in Long Kesh, where Provos and Sticks were both interned, that he would “wade up to his knees in Protestant blood” for a united Ireland. Adams strongly disputes this.

The authors incorrectly allege that the New Consensus peace group (in which I was involved) took British funding but promptly gave an unreserved apology. I also worked with WP members in the 1980s and 1990s, and think the book underplays the WP’s influence on the British Labour movement.

The ILP was heavily involved in work on Northern Ireland and sent two delegations to the North as guests of the WP which insisted that we met all relevant parties rather than just taking their word for it. Some of us saw how their intervention, along with our own, helped change the terms of debate in Britain.

In 1985 the Sticks introduced their daily Irish Social Nights at Labour’s annual conference with left-wing songs, patter and a bit of craic. These events became popular with a wide audience, conveyed the complexities of Northern Ireland, challenged the Provisionals and influenced policy-makers. It helps explain why more British left became neutral on the national question, which helped Labour to conclude the Belfast Agreement.

The Sticks had to split in the end. It was increasingly untenable to maintain a Leninist regime and electoral credibility with a “little secret army” in tow. WP parliamentarians tried to purge the party of Stalinism and republicanism but narrowly lost and formed the Democratic Left which finally merged with the Irish Labour Party.

It’s a riveting tale, and resource, but key speeches and articles should have been included, and the index isn’t inclusive. It’s difficult to keep readers interested in the rhythms of a politico-military movement – paper sales, robbery proceeds, funerals, casualties, tit-for-tat murders, characters, splits and intrigues – but this enjoyable history does it well.

The Lost Revolution: the story of the Official IRA and the Workers’ Party, by Brian Hanley and Scott Millar, is available from Penguin for £20.
www.penguin.co.uk/nf/Book/BookDisplay/0,,9781844881208,00.html

Gary Kent’s review has sparked a long discussion on the Irish political site, the Cedar Lounge Revolution.

That’s the starting point for a Europe-wide online debate on the future of social democracy hosted by the Soundings and Social Europe websites.

“European social democracy needs a fresh start,” assert Jon Cruddas and Andrea Nahles in their introduction to the ‘Good Society debate’. “In the wake of the most severe economic crisis in decades it has become clear that social democrats have not paid enough attention to the development of a real political alternative to the dominant free market orthodoxy. When the demand for an alternative politics was there social democrats had very little to say.”

Cruddas, the Labour MP, and Nahles, a member of Germany’s SPD, published a paper in June called Building the Good Society to kickstart discussions across the continent. “This was meant to be the first point of reference in the debate that is needed to stimulate the development of a new social democratic identity,” they explain. “The ‘Good Society’ as the guiding principle for a new politics needs to be filled with life by a broad discourse that is truly pan-European in scope.

Supported by Compass and the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, the project will run for the next six weeks when some 70 thinkers, politicians and activists from across Europe will publish papers on the Social Europe Journal’s website inviting comments and responses. Some of these are already online, including contributions from Neal Lawson of Compass, Labour’s Dennis MacShane and the sociologist, Zygmunt Bauman.

The aim is to find what Cruddas and Nahles call “a new political narrative” combining “sharp analysis of the shortcomings of the economies and societies we live in with an authentic and convincing vision for the future”.

To read their introduction to the discussion go to:
www.lwbooks.co.uk/journals/soundings/social_europe/discussion.html

For articles and opportunities to comment go to: http://www.goodsociety.social-europe.eu

Click here for a critical report of Jon Cruddas’s Compass lecture given at the London School of Economics in September.

On Thursday afternoon (22 October) Hope not Hate are going to the BBC to deliver the Question Time presenter, David Dimbleby, thousands of messages of hope from supporters. “Your stories, your experiences and your belief in an open and tolerant society will send the strongest possible rejection of the BNP’s message of hate.”

http://action.hopenothate.org.uk/questiontime

Whatever else you might say about Compass, the Labour left pressure group, those people certainly know which way is north when it comes to publicity.

The coverage of Jon Cruddas’s Compass Summer Lecture on the Future of Social Democracy last week (Tuesday 8 September) was impressive and widespread, with pre-event articles in the New Statesman, the Observer, the Financial Times and the Guardian, followed by reports and discussions in all the broadsheets, the Mirror, BBC news, politics.co.uk, and a whole variety of Labour-leaning websites, not to mention the distinctly non-Labour Daily Mail, Spectator and The Sun.

No wonder the folks at Compass were pleased. The next morning they hailed the lecture’s high profile across the media as ‘a conversation opening on the future of social democracy’. And why not?

After all, how could anyone who sides with the left not be delighted to hear a Labour MP drawing on such icons of the movement as Keir Hardie, RH Tawney and Raymond Williams to bolster his call for the party to return to ‘our traditions, our language and our radicalism’? How could you not be drawn to his appeal for Labour to re-find its ethical heart and its radical roots as the best strategy for avoiding the likely catastrophe about to hit ‘not just the Labour Party but progressive politics in this country’?

Yet, while Cruddas’s hopeful ‘We can still win’ message caught most of the headlines, it was what he didn’t say – about how the left can win, what winning might actually mean, and how hard the task is – that was most revealing about the talk, and most worrying.

Cruddas has been held up by some as the left’s bright hope for a post-Brown leadership contest and, judging by the packed, 500-capacity auditorium at LSE, he’s obviously attracting somethign of a following, if not a fan-base. Indeed, he was introduced by Compass chair Neal Lawson as a man who’s ‘already a leader’, ‘a politician on a journey’, someone ‘in search of new ideas and a better future for the left’.

‘I don’t think there has ever been a time when there’s more need to know where we stand and why,’ said Lawson.

According to Cruddas where we stand is in a place of critical uncertainty. Nobody seems to know quite what Labour stands for these days, he says. What we need is a fundamental re-examination of our identity, and to rethink the kind of society we want to create.

Sense of loss

Cruddas believes the Labour movement is suffering a profound sense of loss resulting from fractured class structures and identities; the absence of a central paradigm; and the submergence of its long-held optimism and sense of hope about the future of society.

New Labour, he argues, abandoned the party’s hopeful message about social change and the possibility of creating a better world, and turned its back on the movement’s optimist outlook on human nature. As evidence, he cites a leading cabinet member who claimed Labour’s central message, its mission, is to help individuals ‘earn and own’.

‘We assumed the worst of British people,’ says Cruddas. ‘New Labour reduced aspiration to acquisition, and optimism to materialism.’

Now the party, indeed, progressive politics as a whole, is heading for ‘a catastrophe’, a period of crisis to match those of 1929/30 and 1979/83. Cruddas argues that those two moments coincided with periods of profound economic and technological change – the Wall Street Crash, the emergence of neo-liberalism – as did Labour’s emergence around 1900.

‘History tells us that since our birth Labour has a terrible record at such moments,’ he says. ‘The stakes are pretty high because each time it took us 15 years to recover.’

At these points the tensions over Labour’s fault line between ‘orthodoxy’ and ‘radicalism’ come to the surface, tensions that arise from what Tawney identified as the party’s lack of creed, its ‘void in the mind … which keeps policy trailing tardily in the rear of realities’.

Much of this argument will be familiar to those who read Cruddas’s article in the New Statesman of 7 September. In the lecture, however, he went on to suggest what should be done.

First, the left needs to re-connect with the progressive line of liberal thought – not the pessimistic, ‘hollowed out’ version of liberalism that takes human beings to be essentially self-interested individuals, but the ‘fleshed out’ strains that are optimistic about the human condition, the social liberalism that influenced the pioneers of ethical socialism and early Labour thinkers such as Tawney, Cole and Laski.

The social technology that gives shape to the pessimistic side is available to us in the capitalist market economy, he says. The question is, can we find social technology to provide political and economic shape to the ‘generous and altruistic side of our personality’?

‘This is the main task of the future left,’ he says. ‘It means new political alliances.’

Such an alliance – essentially a realignment of social democracy and social liberalism – must be constructed around what he calls the four pillars of progressive politics: equality, community, sustainability and democracy. Under these banners he sets out what he calls ‘a programme’ for this new centre left.

Shopping list

Unfortunately, this is less a programme for social change, than a series of demands for leftish reforms, including everything from Compass’s much-trumpeted High Pay Commission to ‘greater tax justice’; scrapping Trident and the third runway at Heathrow; integrated transport; constitutional change and proportional representation; index-linked benefit levels, pensions and the minimum wage; an end to tuition fees; ‘radical economic democracy’ across the banking and finance sectors; an end to tax havens; a green new deal; and more.

What lies behind all these, he says, is a ‘principle of fellowship’ and a ‘spirit of mutual regard’. He quotes Raymond Williams:  ‘To be truly radical is to make hope possible rather than despair convincing.’

‘Many now feel despair,’ he goes on. ‘We feel great loss. The things that we took as given have abruptly gone – like growth. At such moments hope is key to avoid despair.’

But hope won’t get Labour re-elected. And, in the unlikely event that Labour did, somehow, form the next government, hope won’t make such a ‘radical’ programme of reforms any more likely. That’s not to disagree that the Labour government could, and should, have done so much more. And still can. But hope alone can’t construct the wider social and cultural support that such a programme would need.

This is the hole at the heart of Cruddas’s case, a void that is all too familiar from Labour left ‘programmes’ of the past 30-odd years, so many of which have produced similar ‘shopping lists’ of demands in place of a real perception of how to begin to bring about progressive social change. It’s no wonder, perhaps, for such a process is incredibly difficult to conceive, especially in the current climate of competitive individualism. But at least we should recognise the need to do so.

A lecture is a limited form, of course, it’s not a manifesto nor a full political perspective. Yet in this paper Cruddas fails even to acknowledge the scale of the task before us, the power and strength of the vast forces – political, cultural and economic – ranged against any attempt at social progress. Crucially, he also fails to consider how any form of left organisation can begin to build the kind of social and political movement necessary to inch towards a society truly founded on equality, community, sustainability and democracy.

These points were picked up by Professor Doreen Massey, the most interesting and astute of the four ‘respondents’ lined up by Compass to give immediate comment on Cruddas’s talk. The others were former cabinet member James Purnell, Guardian columnist Polly Toynbee, and Liberal Democrat MP Evan Davis. (You can read their responses on the Guardian’s ‘comment is free’ site.)

All four welcomed the talk, although Purnell – predictably – was most critical, asserting that equality is ‘not just about money’, and positing his belief that ‘empowered individuals are the long-term solution to equality in our society’.

‘The more powerful individuals are, the more committed they are as members of their communities,’ he claimed. He also argued that we shouldn’t be ideological about markets – ‘they are just a tool, just like the state’. So far, so Blairite.

Not surprisingly, Toynbee and Davis both focused on the demand for PR and welcomed Cruddas’s call to ‘re-unite the centre left’ – meaning a more radical Labour Party and a socially liberal Lib Dem Party.

Common sense

But it was Massey who was most incisive and relevant from a left point of view. Associated with the socialist magazine Soundings, she had no hesitation in supporting Cruddas’s call for radicalism and his critique of new Labour’s ‘intellectual and political timidity’, although she suggested he might not realise ‘just how radical his programme is’.

‘If we really want to do the things he enumerated here we would create enemies,’ she said. ‘This paper doesn’t acknowledge the enemies we will have to take on.’

Notions such as equality, community and democracy are so general that ‘anyone can sign up to them’. ‘We would have to identify and oppose those vested interests that will stand against them,’ she said. ‘If we really mean what is said here then it will be necessary to take them on. There needs to be a clearer definition of the political frontier.’

Massey also highlighted the ‘need to go beyond parties and parliament’ to build the kind of cultural and political movement necessary to bring about the wider and deeper social changes Cruddas believes are possible. ‘Labour has been so used to having a natural social base it has no idea how to construct a new one,’ she said.

‘Work has to be put in to establish a new common sense, because that’s what he is calling for. The current common sense took a concerted effort over years – not just the big set-piece battles but the drip, drip, drip of arguments and constant assertion.’

To give Compass its due, it’s an organisation steadfastly committed to winning arguments rather than battles for power – whatever Cruddas’s leadership ambitions may be. ‘The point of Compass,’ said Lawson in his introduction, ‘is not to take over and do what the Blairites did. We want to open up and have a dialogue.’

Cruddas has become an important voice within the dialogues and discussions now pouring out around Labour’s future. And, who knows, he may become even more prominent as the post-election, post-Brown Labour movement eventually takes shape. Let’s hope he is.

But for those of us still seeking a guide for the long road to more fundamental social change, the hard thinking is yet to be done.

–

The full text of the Jon Cruddas lecture can be found on the Compass website or on Labour List while both The Guardian and The Independent published abridged versions.