Part 3: the 1950s and the 1980s

The 1950s

Mark Wickham-Jones argued that some important reasons why Labour did not do so well in the 1950s have been neglected. Apart from a team at the US embassy at the time, producing monthly 60-page reports, there was no research undertaken on the party’s policy. This stressed that policy-making was highly pragmatic, based on notions of trial and error.

The party was also highly insular in its outlook, adopting a patronising and dismissive attitude to other social democratic parties. It was slow to take seriously the Coal and Steel Community (the first moves to European unity) and when it did so, it declined to participate. It reserved its praise for the United States. There is no evidence that it looked at Sweden’s sophisticated model of social democracy. The party’s highly empirical outlook meant that it was not interested in theoretical issues of this kind. In sum, the party was insular, nationalist and a-theoretical, and it drifted along in a piecemeal fashion.

Pat Thane looked at why Labour stayed in opposition in the 1950s, set against the bitter divisions between Nye Bevan and Hugh Gaitskell. The Labour Party had difficulty in coming to terms with mass affluence and women voters. It was slow to notice that the Conservatives were not presiding over mass unemployment. It was hostile towards affluence and saw consumer goods as a betrayal. It attacked hire purchase, fridges, cars, vacuum cleaners, televisions, supermarkets, and singled out washing machines, in particular. Opposition to washing machines may have done more to alienate women voters than anything else.

The party only saw women as housewives. Yet until 1951, working class women were more loyal to Labour than working class men. Meanwhile, in 1955 the Conservatives introduced equal pay for public sector workers. Having resisted equal pay at the time, Labour included it in its 1959 manifesto.

As a result, the 1950s was a decade in which women’s support for the Conservatives grew, particularly between 1955 and ‘59. Middle class women swung against Labour’s austerity. The party’s anti-pleasure rhetoric – which offered no counter-attraction – alienated many. Herbert Morrison was perhaps the only leader who understood what affluence meant for working people. Others retained a lofty hostility towards materialism.

Labour’s discomfort with affluence is understandable. By 1951, the party leadership was exhausted and found it hard to adjust to the new realities. It was Anthony Crosland who, for good or ill, nudged the party into an accommodation with affluence and markets.

Discussion on the 1950s

Anne Perkins, journalist and author of a biography of Barbara Castle, said the party in the 1095s was unwilling to raise its horizons. It did not try to lead opinion, even on issues like ending the empire.

Dennis MacShane, MP for Rotherham, argued that one of Labour’s great unspoken problems was the Communist Party’s political role and negative influence in the trade unions. In Sweden, the trade unions defeated communist attempts to become a hegemonic force.

Another speaker said that in the ’50s, while all was not lost, Labour lacked a strategic sense of where it was going. The Tories, however, looked at the impact of affluence on Labour voters. Labour’s supporters did not shift to the Conservatives but they did become more instrumental in judging competent governance.

David Howell said that by 1959 electoral homogeneity begins to break down. During the 1930s, Labour did better among the affluent working class which was most unionised.

Mark Wickham-Jones argued that affluence posed complicated questions for Labour. What was notable was how quickly the party plunged itself into turmoil following the fight over prescription charges. There was no attempt to unify the party in these years.

The 1980s

Gerald Kaufman and David Owen were asked to address the question: Why was the 1980s such a bad era for Labour?

Gerald Kaufman pointed out that over the last century Labour have been in office for only 33 years. The real problem for Labour is that the Tories will do anything to get back into office because they are less in interested in politics than power. He described himself as being on the left and a former member of the Tribune group.

Since the 1950s (when he was first actively involved with the party), he has seen the party engaged in unnecessary turmoil. For Labour the post-1970s was a period of phoney ideological turmoil. It saw Tony Benn’s discovery of the working class as a kind of ‘noble savage’. The election of Michael Foot – itself a sign of the growing split – made it impossible for Labour to win the general election. His preoccupations were based on genuine convictions. He was a great scholar but not a party leader.

As a result, this was a period of utter chaos in both the shadow cabinet and the Labour Party. Labour MPs were so scared of their constituency parties, which were dominated by the far left, that they were afraid to speak their minds. His own CLP, Manchester Gorton, was controlled by the hard left. Yet the clashes were about next to nothing.

Later he added that the party became embedded in factionalism and produced barmy policies. It put its own political convictions ahead of the party’s electoral fortunes. The key moment was the deputy leadership election (when Benn stood against Healey) with corrupt and capricious trade unions, and hard left constituencies making the running. In one of his final remarks he said that the day Labour caves into pressure to restrict immigration is the day that he leaves the party.

David Owen said the question to ask is how the Labour Party and Ed Miliband as leader (who he supports) can win next time. The lesson of the 1970s is that it takes time to recover from economic recession. Labour lost in 1979 long before the ‘winter of discontent’, when it supported 17 per cent pay rises for Ford workers. This raises the question of the trade union links with the party which need rethinking. The unions played a constructive role in terms of incomes policy for three years and Jim Callaghan should have been more flexible about low paid workers.

Michael Foot was a disaster for the party, he said. This could have been avoided if Callaghan had stood down earlier to allow Denis Healey to be elected. The agreement with the unions over the party constitution – one member one vote and the electoral college for electing the leader – was a fatal error.

Labour now needs to consider how it can win the centre. Ed Miliband has considerable potential and has shown coolness and steadfastness under fire from the Conservatives.

In response to a point made by Mark Wickham-Jones that Michael Foot was more a symptom than a cause of Labour’s problems, Owen said that was a fair criticism of what he had said. The right of the party had shown slackness by placing too much reliance on the block vote to give them support.

Greg Rosen said that the main reason why the party was in opposition was a divorce between the aspirations of Labour activists and Labour voters. The party moved in a direction which many voters were not prepared to support. The party was also on the wrong side of the argument about council house sales, something it had earlier looked into introducing itself.

Labour was both too radical and too conservative at the same time. The left’s alternative economic strategy failed to answer questions about how to achieve industrial growth; it was not workable. Benn’s support for worker co-operatives, like Meriden, was a failure. The fratricide and hatred reached its peak in the 1980s. The SDP was pushed out of the party and then condemned for leaving.

However, while the left did at least point out the economic problems, the right did not even recognise them. The lesson for today is to look at Labour’s record to see what did and did not work.

Postscript

The conference did raise important issues about Labour’s history, not least the contexts for its internal conflicts. The array of informed speakers was impressive; the performance by the two politicians rather less so. Indeed, by the time we reached the 1970-80s, the level of analysis deteriorated – ‘blame the left’, was Kaufman’s rather bitter, simplistic message.

I don’t think it’s unkind to say that, having learned nothing and forgotten nothing about the period, Kaufman had next to nothing to teach. What was wholly absent was any consideration of Labour’s record in office, let alone, any assessment of how, in responding to the UK’s economic decline, it acted as the midwife to Thatcherism. However, some of us, who were also active during the period, were allowed to respond and given a hearing.

During the 1980s, the ILP often argued for a different direction to the Bennite left. That said, the speakers made no mention of the paternalism, condescension and contempt shown by Labour’s leading parliamentarians towards party members. Not only was the Labour Party highly undemocratic and unresponsive to the wider party, but the parliamentary leadership was manipulative and anti-democratic. For example, when Labour Party conference voted by a two-thirds majority to abolish the House of Lords (sufficient for inclusion in the party manifesto), Jim Callaghan stopped it by threatening to resign.

Sure, they were difficult times. Sure, there was an overreaction, but when people’s voices go unheard for long enough, that’s what happens.

Mark Wickham-Jones is professor of political science at the University of Bath. He is writing an about of Labour’s relationship to social democracy in the postwar period. He wrote Economic Strategy and the Labour Party: Politics and Policy-Making, 1970-83.

Pat Thane is professor of contemporary British history at King’s College, London. She has written on the history of the Labour Party, inequality, and women and citizenship.

Sir Gerald Kaufman has been an MP since 1970. He is known for his description of the Labour Party’s 1983 manifesto as ‘the longest suicide note in history’.

Greg Rosen is a public policy consultant, a columnist for The Scotsman and chair of the Labour History Group.

This is part 3 of Barry Winter’s report. Click here to read part one, and here to read part two.

For a lively, amusing and pithy assessment of the day’s proceedings, read Harry Barnes’ very fair report: http://threescoreyearsandten.blogspot.com/

Part 2: the 1930s

David Howell disagreed with Hobsbawm’s notion of Labour’s continued forward march during the 1930s; the pattern of support was more complex.

Electorally the ‘terms of trade’ were changing radically. The party’s performance in the north and Scotland was uneven and it lost its outposts south of Nottingham, except London (where there was support for the London County Council led by Herbert Morrison).

Labour’s share of the vote in the 1929 election, in which it came to office as a minority government, was reduced in 1935 when it lost to a coalition. In 1937, it gained Coventry, a growing industrial city. Yet, in nearby Birmingham, for every Labour councillor there were five Conservatives.

Labour’s support was not class-based but based on particular occupations and communities. Elsewhere Labour was seen as the outsider.

The 1931 general election saw a clearing out of a generation of Labour MPs born in the 1860s or earlier. The second generation, born in the 1880s, saw the party’s former leader, Ramsay MacDonald, as an anathema. With its own political style, the new generation shared a mistrust of intellectuals. Labour leaders Herbert Morrison, Hugh Dalton and Stafford Cripps were among those who were stigmatized in this way.

The 1930s was a period of political splits and divisions: the Communists emerged as a third party on the left; Oswald Mosley led a breakaway to the right; the ILP sheered off to the left. As a result, trade unions were seen as rescuers of the party, such as the transport workers led by Ernest Bevin.

At the outbreak of the Second World War, Labour was far from office. Had there been an election in 1939, the Conservatives under Chamberlain would have won.

What changed the situation were:

1. the military failures which destroyed the credibility of the government
2. Labour joining the wartime coalition and the growing legitimacy of planning and Keynesian economics which exorcised the demons of the 1931 economic crash
3. the geographical mobilization involved in war in which a generation moved to the left favouring social reform
4. the growth in trade unionism associated with the war effort and the revival of communities as a result of which Labour politicians were seen as natural leaders. In the armed forces, for example, there were long discussions about politics and political leadership, as illustrated by a letter from a young army officer which describe a debate on political leaders ranked Roosevelt first, Stalin second (supported by the fitters), and Churchill third.

Andrew Taylor looked at the other side of the equation, the nature and predominance of Conservatism as a political and ideological formation and how it responded to developments

It’s important to remember that although the decade was known as ‘the hungry ‘30s’ that experience was not universal. It was also a time of rapid development and a prosperous new economy. As well as industrial decline in south Wales and Tyneside, there was growth in towns like Luton and Coventry (based on the car industry). This helps to explain Conservative successes.

The Tories were anxious about the prospects of Labour’s forward march at the time, sufficiently so that they contemplated introducing proportional representation to stop Labour.

The core problem for Labour was how to go beyond its traditional areas of support. For the Conservatives, it was how to secure its heartlands and to expand to win seats in areas such as the depressed, industrial town of Stockton-on-Tees (which they did).

With the rise of Stanley Baldwin as party leader there was a less hostile attitude towards industrial disputes and trade unions. He took the critically strategic decision not to destroy Labour but to domesticate it. While he liked to be seen as the steady and reliable ‘Uncle Stan’ to the working classes, the other Baldwin was to use state power to defeat the 1926 miner’s strike.

After 1926, however, the Conservatives showed relative restraint towards the unions. Rather than any attempt to crush labour, Baldwin sought to build bridges with trade union leaders, including the General Secretary of the TUC, Walter Citrine.

The party also developed as a sophisticated, highly organised, political machine. It was good at propaganda, with Baldwin’s close, intimate ‘fireside chats’ on the radio. He was replaced as prime minister by Neville Chamberlain, an unimpressive speaker who had been a reforming minister of health.

What stands out about the Conservatives in the 1930s was their ability to adapt, to turn themselves into a popular and attractive party to the wider electorate. Labour did not display the same ability.

Hester Barron reviewed election results in the north as a case study for examining the claim for ‘the forward march of labour’ in the 1930s. She noted that in the 1931 general election Labour lost seats to the Tories and National Liberals, including mining seats in County Durham. Sedgefield, for example, where miners were 34 per cent of the male electorate, voted for a Conservative with mining links. Consett, where 55 per cent of male voters worked in mining, was won by a National Liberal. In Jarrow, the Conservative candidate overturned a 9,000 Labour majority.

Most of the recently enfranchised miners’ wives voted Conservative or National Liberals. In Stockton, Harold Macmillan regained the seat he lost in1929 with an appeal to women voters. This was at a time when 19 pits had been closed in the first half of 1931 because of the recession.

There was no such thing as a safe Labour seat in the 1930s. The working class was not Labour’s natural constituency: their vote had to be earned. It was a very volatile period and the 1931 election itself was conducted in an atmosphere of anti-Labour hysteria. Later she added that it is important to remember how new the Labour Party was as in the ’20s and ’30s.  It had not had time to work through the ideological issues.

Discussion on the 1930s

David Howell agreed that the 1930s was very volatile. The political career and changing allegiances of Oswald Moseley demonstrates this. Constituencies changed hands between the three parties. Political identities were being remade. There was economic orthodoxy in each party; there were iconoclasts in each party. The ideological spectrum on economic issues was spread across the parties, including support for Keynes.

Labour voting by men was determined by their workplace experience. Women’s political formation was more domestic and more privatized, giving the Tories the advantage here.

Andrew Taylor said that the Conservatives first used an advertising agency in 1929. It ran a sophisticated campaign, targeting property owners, calling for safety first – but it lost. However, it was a sign of the changes taking place. Labour was bedding down. Its underlying support was stable but it was not widening its support. The Tories were also bedding down and they had ‘loads of money’.

His work on the Yorkshire coalfields suggests that, at best, Labour was a shadow organisation and the closeness of the party and the unions led to tales that the party was ‘full’.

David Howell teaches politics at the University of York. Among his many publications are British Workers and the Independent Labour Party 1888-1906, MacDonald’s Party: Labour Identities and Crisis 1922-31, and Attlee. He also wrote the ILP pamphlet, The Rise and Fall of Bevanism.

Andrew Taylor is professor of politics at Sheffield University. He has written extensively on trade union politics, including the National Union of Miners. He jointly edited Labour, the State, Social Movements and the Challenge of Neo-Liberal Globalisation.

Dr Hester Barron lectures in history at the University of Sussex. She wrote The 1926 Miners’ Lockout: Meanings of Community in the Durham Coalfield.

This is part two of Barry Winter’s report. Click here to read part one, and here to read part three.

Harry Barnes’ report on the event can be read here.

First, I have to state that I am a member of Labour Party, a candidate in the upcoming local elections, a Committee member of the NUS Black Students’ Campaign and an elected representative of Kent Students’ Union. I would never act in a way to damage the reputation of any of these organisations as I am proud to contribute and participate in them and I am conscious that at this protest I represent all the students who elected me locally, nationally as well as fellow residents in my local Labour Party.

What I witnessed and experienced at Parliament Square was absolutely horrific, and the levels of police brutality and indiscriminate violence were made all the more shocking due to the fact that a very large proportion of those who attended the march from Malet Street to Parliament were young, either further education students or school students, and a very visible and large number were Black students.

The protest started absolutely peacefully, and I joined the march at Trafalgar Square and made the short journey to Parliament at around 1:30pm with other Kent students. I made my way to the front of the demonstration and as students were pushing to make their way closer to Parliament, made sure that students that wanted to move to the back were allowed to do so, as well as making sure that people were not being hurt in the push.

I think it is important that we demonstrate as close as possible to Parliament as we can, as MPs were in the Palace and hopefully would’ve been able to hear our chants calling for them to not betray students and future generations by voting for the removal of the current cap in favour of variable fees of up to £9,000 a year. The atmosphere was wholly positive, with impressively creative placards, chants and a real strength of diversity in the trade union and student union banners, from the CWU to Unite to LSE, from SOAS Unison to Manchester Met, and many others.

After more than an hour, after discussing with other friends at the demonstration it was thought that we could pop out for a bite to eat and come back to whatever action is taking place. So at around 2.30 to 3.00pm we went to leave, only to find that we had been ‘kettled’ in by the police and exits were sealed. SOAS university students quickly erected a ‘Kettle Cafe’ where those trapped could get some food and drink.

I had made it very clear to students from Kent who were going to attend the day that there was a strong likelihood that the police would use the kettling ‘tactic’, and they freely choose to come. For anyone who does not know what kettling is, it is basically where the riot police surround a group of protesters to ‘control the situation’. What is conveniently forgotten in the official description is that kettling often lasts for hours, with some school students having to endure the freezing cold for nine hours just for being there. It is a collective form of punishment, where those who are kettled, no matter how peaceful or well intentioned, are denied access to food, water, shelter, freedom to move, as well as access to clean sanitation. This tactic has come under increased scrutiny, yet it is continually used. I would argue it acts as a catalyst to anger people and does nothing to ‘control the situation’. Instead, it provokes and sets up an ‘us and them’ scenario between the police and protesters.

We were denied access to the above-mentioned rights, despite the police and media portraying that they were available for a combined total of eight hours on a chilly winter’s day. A tarpaulin was set up in the form of a cubicle so that men (not women) could urinate on the grass, turning it in to a slurry of mud and piss. I could find no portaloos, nowhere to access food and water, and the riot police were not responding to requests for these requirements to be met, nor to the basic request to leave the area. It is no wonder that people became agitated and furious with their treatment by the authorities. Calmly requesting something from a riot police officer is often as productive as drawing blood from a stone as you are deliberately ignored. Sometimes officers will suggest they cannot hear what you are saying, despite being able to have conversations freely with nearby officers.

Eventually, the exits were fully manned by riot police, with police on horses charging young students and using full riot gear, meaning truncheons (a blunt club weapon), specialist helmets and riot shields. I witnessed an officer repeatedly using his riot shield to hit a ‘Robin Hood Tax’ hard hat off the head of a protester before then hitting the unprotected protester for good measure. I also witnessed a young, smartly-dressed woman, who could have been no older than 16, being hit with a truncheon to the head, to much shock. She posed absolutely no threat, was not being verbally abusive, nor physically threatening, yet she was smashed across the head indiscriminately, her head drooped and she was taken back in to the crowd to be treated by St. John’s Ambulance staff.

At one point, many protesters broke through and made it to Whitehall, it looked like we could get out as well and during the several attempts of the crowd to push, with hands in the air the police beat us back violently holding riot shields horizontally and hitting at the crowd. It was at this point I was first hit on the back with a truncheon, having been pushed to the front with my back turned. I did not react, did not say one word of abuse, and maintained my composure. The second and third time I was hit with a truncheon across my forearm and shoulder was when I stumbled across a young man whose head had just been cracked open and was gushing with blood. His light-coloured hoody was distinctive against the vivid red of the blood coming from him. Again, I kept my composure and was then kicked with no reason, with my hands in the air, silent, and the kick was so hard that it has left an imprint of the sole of the shoe on my leg. This not only happened to me, but to many others, young people as well.

The logical question to ask is ‘how did you get to the front’? ‘Why risk being hit and injured?’ These are absolutely valid points but I will say this: I am not prepared to stand to the side and watch young students, many from ethnic minorities, and particularly young women who perhaps might have of been pushed to the front, having their heads cracked open. I would rather it was me than have to live with the thought that someone else was seriously injured when I could have taken the hit much better.

Seeing young students kettled, treated inhumanely, and stained with their own blood is an appalling sight, and something I would never wish anyone to see as it is hugely distressing. The people at that demonstration could’ve been my 19-year-old sister protesting against cuts to her EMA, or my 15-year-old cousin who dreamed of going to university but could never pay off their £9,000 a year fees. I firmly believe that older demonstrators have a duty to protect those who we have encouraged and helped mobilise to protest, and there were many more experienced activists helping younger people out. The vast and overwhelming majority of people were armed with words, not weapons, not truncheons, not riot shields, and definitely not heavy duty protective clothing and specialist helmets. The brutality of the police at this demonstration has to be exposed for what it is, absolutely despicable.

During the coming hours, students set fire to placards for warmth, and shared food and drink, as none had been provided. Later, SOAS students kindly sprayed disinfectant on my small cut from the riot shield. At around 8.30pm, after much back and forth and conflicting information from non-riot police who had entered the kettle, it was established that we would be released soon. All through this, I was polite to every single police officer and I saw none of the ordinary unarmed police officers subjected to any harassment or intimidation.

Eventually, we were allowed to leave the kettle, escorted across Westminster Bridge following a line of police who were slowly moving back until we stopped at the end of the bridge. We were anticipating that we would then be allowed to disperse in three separate directions, perhaps through a bottleneck, however were treated with silence for an hour. We had been stopped in our tracks. In the cold, dark night, thousands of protesters were held on Westminster Bridge, with no access to toilets or water and were packed like sardines with barely any space to move. It was then announced by the police that there were not enough riot police to handle the departure of those who had been trying to leave for hours. Eventually, another hour later at 10.55pm, we were allowed out, in single-file, surrounded by riot police. We were told that section 60 was in action, and that we should move continuously towards Waterloo station.

After hours upon hours of being kettled, we were finally free to make our way home. However, it is important to remember that many of us had been booked on coaches which had fixed departure times, so many had to make their own way home, potentially leaving young members vulnerable as we edged towards midnight in the capital. If students had been allowed to leave, as the vast majority had requested and many had queued up to do, then this situation could have been avoided entirely.

I wrote this to explain my experience of the demonstration and to condemn the police handling of the event. It was excessive, brutal and unnecessary. Kettling has to be stopped as it a violation of basic human rights and does nothing to control the situation, only inflames it.

I have to give special thanks to Kent union staff and leaders who managed to get our coach to wait, although it ultimately couldn’t wait long enough, as well as for their support on Twitter, via text messages and calls. They handled it all very professionally and I thank them for doing what they could in a very difficult situation.

I would also like to thank Zain Sardar, Jonathan Buckner and Andy Hewett for their company and support as we spent most of my time in the kettle together. I would especially like to thank Maham Hashmi-Khan, another Black Students’ Committee member, as she was exemplary in helping to remove hazards, helping students leave, giving advice, standing witness at the front to the violence inflicted on the demonstrators by the police, and making sure students were as safe as she could. And a further thanks to all the re-tweets, all of the messages of support and the calls from so many different people – it made a lot of difference knowing people were working on the outside to pressure the police and spread awareness of what they were doing to us.

The people on that demonstration were not violent or extremist thugs intent on hurting others, the vast majority were peaceful and youthful, yet angry at what the coalition government are doing. What kind of democracy do we live in, when young people are brutalised by the police outside Parliament, while inside a government votes through symbolically violent acts which amount to vandalism of hopes and dreams?

I will always stand side-by-side with those suffering such huge injustices and I invite you all to come to the next demonstration, which I am sure will be about saving EMA. As although we have lost the vote on raising the cap, we are in this struggle for the long haul, and it will take all of us to contribute in whatever way we can, through lobbying, industrial action, vigils, demonstrations and occupations because we have an obligation to leave a better legacy to the next generation, not a worse one.

Aaron Kiely is a Kent Union Ordinary Council Member, NUS Black Students’ Campaign Committee (Open Place), and a member of the University of Kent occupation.

This article first appeared on the Socialist Unity website.

Read Laurie Penny’s account here.

Read the Compass petition for ‘An education for people not profit’ here.

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.

Gary Kent argues that the global financial crisis makes the case for a Tobin Tax even more compelling.

Some ideas are nurtured for decades before they shoot to prominence usually to the surprise of those who have long advocated them. This could be the fate of the Tobin Tax, originally devised by the American Nobel Laureate James Tobin in the early 1970s to rein in short-term speculative trading and “throw sand in the wheels of global finance,” as he put it.

In the 1990s it was embraced by War on Want and others but was generally seen as marginal or utopian. It has now been given an astonishing boost by a very unlikely figure, Adair Turner, the chairman of the Financial Services Authority, in an interview with Prospect. Turner’s comments have caused a furore in the City but he is sticking to his guns.

French President Sarkozy says he will propose global taxes and caps for bank bonuses at the G20 summit later this month.

I first came across Tobin myself in the mid 1990s when the Commons Library was asked how much a tax on the flight of capital could raise – the Conservatives had just introduced a tax on airline passengers. The amount was so much one wouldn’t know what to do with the proceeds. This seemed ideal – a tax on the very few that would raise billions for the many.

To be fair, Tobin’s original aim was the stability of the international trading system rather than raising revenues. Since then, however, there has been a huge upsurge in the scale of international currency speculation, which requires some stabilisation and allows fundraising for socially useful purposes.

Before Mrs Thatcher lifted all exchange controls the traveller was restricted, from memory, to taking just £50 out of the country and this was recorded in their passports.

Now about a trillion dollars is traded every day. Someone once said that this sum was equivalent to the size of the Empire State Building, or maybe several of them.

Some on the left have objected to taxing speculation because it legitimises the trade – a tax on sin – and is reformist tinkering.

However, backers of the tax saw how speculation wreaked massive damage on many economies, regardless of the strength of their fundamentals, and how jobs and livelihoods were capriciously destroyed by currency traders only interested in making a fast buck.

One former trader says that he decided to sell or buy depending on whether the cranes outside his office were pointing east or west. This seems apocryphal but is still a telling indictment and campaigners have sought to minimise it rather than waiting for the system to be overthrown.

The Tobin Tax has had major support in France, including from President Mitterand, and it’s enjoyed support from smaller European governments too. It was also very nearly adopted by the European Parliament.

A delegation from War on Want, plus Labour MPs and MEPs (and myself) visited a Treasury minister to press the case, but they were not then biting.

Over the last decade, the rough edges of the proposal have been smoothed and the idea finessed by War on Want and others in the Stamp Out Poverty coalition, which campaigns for additional sources of finance to bridge the massive funding gap needed to bring the world’s poorest people out of poverty.

They have published research by the economist Rodney Schmidt that advocates a currency transaction tax of 0.005%, which would raise about £20bn a year.

The issue has been kept on the parliamentary agenda for a decade with occasional meetings and motions. Labour MP Dave Anderson tabled a Commons motion on the issue in April which briefly outlines the case for the tax.

It reads:

“That this House notes that the global financial crisis has made meeting the Millennium Development Goals by 2015 significantly more difficult and requires a substantial new source of revenue; further notes that recent moves to end the secrecy of tax havens signals a willingness to redraw rules in the financial world; recognises that the foreign exchange market has continued to grow and that market volume now exceeds $1,000 trillion a year; believes that it is an anomaly that currency transactions are exempt from taxation since all other parts of the financial market have attracted transaction duties in recent years; endorses the proposal for a currency transaction levy at a rate of 0.005 per cent, which is high enough to yield potential revenue of about $33 billion a year but too small to alter market decisions; further believes that this measure affords little scope for avoidance since this market is fully electronic, and collection automatic; recognises that a precedent for a currency transaction levy has been set by the UNITAID international drug purchase facility, which is mainly funded by aviation levies that are collected nationally and pooled internationally; and strongly recommends that the Government supports consideration of a currency transaction levy at the forthcoming G8 Summit in Italy where large-scale financing instruments will be discussed under the auspices of the International Health Partnership.”

This has attracted 45 supporters from the three major parties and two smaller ones. Shirley Williams has also been a keen supporter for many years and used to know James Tobin.

The usual argument against Tobin is that it would require international agreement to make it work and that this won’t be forthcoming. However, Will Hutton has put his weight behind Turner’s “bombshell” which he says “would reduce the volatility, volumes and general craziness while striking at excess bank profitability and huge bonuses” and also be “a nice source of income to finance global public good ranging from poverty alleviation to health”.

Hutton rightly suggests that such a tax is practicable because: “Settlement systems are ever more centralised, making evasion harder. Politically, western governments have given 10 trillion dollars’ worth of support to their banking systems. They can, like Sarkozy, just tell their banks to comply with the tax or else lose government guarantees and access to liquidity. None of the world’s top 20 banks would dare refuse.”

Avinash Persaud (chairman of Intelligent Capital, chairman of the Warwick Commission and a former banker) recently wrote in the Financial Times that “financial transaction taxes are not only commonplace, but have become easier to enforce” and the real question today is not their feasibility but their desirability.

He reminds us that most foreign exchange transactions are now settled in one place, the London-based CLS Bank, and concludes, “if transaction taxes were levied in these centralised settlement systems, they would be very expensive to avoid”.

He adds: “It is hard to argue that anything is not feasible today after governments have engaged in whole-scale bank nationalisation and credit guarantees, pushed budget deficits into double figures, become the buyer of last resort of assets they would not normally touch with a barge pole and threatened to legislate against private sector pay. Where there is a will there is a way.”

Will Hutton suggests political benefits too: “But just imagine how electrifying it would be if Gordon Brown made a speech along Turner’s lines, proposed a royal commission to assess what kind of financial services industry Britain now needs and committed himself to trying to find international consensus on a Tobin tax. Intellectually, the case is unanswerable. Politically, it would define the last months of his prime ministership.”

A Tobin-type tax is not a panacea by any means but could increase the stability of global markets and raise revenues for reducing poverty and tackling environmental damage.

I suggest that campaigners link up with think tanks and unions to work out how to turn this old idea into a new campaign that would, with other iconic issues, lift the morale of the Labour movement in the relatively few weeks left before the General Election.

With ministers, MPs and MEPs, they could give traction to a Tobin-type tax and the possibility of global markets providing some of the tax base for global social democracy.

Read Gary Kent’s update (15 November) on the campaign for a Tobin Tax in Tribune following Gordon Brown’s growing interest.

It is right that there is anger over MPs’ expenses, says Will Brown, but let’s not damn all politics.

The row over MPs’ expenses and the misuse of public funds have rightly been met with pubic anger and criticism. It is indeed indefensible that MPs should be making a fast buck from the public purse at a time of economic crisis.

However, there is a venomous and indiscriminate edge to the expenses row that should concern all democrats and especially all social democrats.

It is worth pausing for a moment amid the hullabaloo to think about how this scandal has changed the political agenda. Only a few months ago the focus of public condemnation were bankers. In the wake of bank bail-outs, and evidence of quite stupendous profligacy by private financial institutions, it was the business class at the sharp end of criticism and it was bank chiefs, departed or departing, who were hauled in front of Commons select committees to atone for their sins.

Wider political questions concerned the extent to which economic policy had to change, whether new regulatory architecture would be agreed, and whether a rebalance between the state and market was now needed. The death of neoliberalism and a return of Keynesianism were widely touted – with the usual hyperbole of the media.

Yet, for any rebalancing to have political force, we need a functioning and, dare one say it, trusted public arena; a democratic political agency to set against and tame the rampant market.

Whether by coincidence or design, the expenses row has thrown all that into doubt. Who now will argue that the correct response to the financial crisis is to enlarge the role for the state? Who now will dare suggest that the public sector can carry the interests of the people when those in charge are denigrated en mass?

What is most alarming about the current hysteria is the way it is being used to damn, not just all MPs (unfairly in some cases), but all politics. No MPs are spared, no sense of proportion is countenanced. There is no recognition that many, perhaps most, expenses – such as travel and secretarial support – are necessary if MPs are to representing people and holding government to account. Instead, the whole edifice is discredited and party politics itself called into question.

For social democrats the problems are even worse. The entire social democratic project rests on the viability of a democratic public sphere, of a state, political system, and public arena that can be an agency for collective social aims, and create a framework within which the market is the servant rather than the master. A collapse of faith in the parliamentary centre of this public realm is enormously damaging to left of centre politics, as the results of this week’s elections seem to show.

Of course, new Labour must share a deal of blame for all this. The new Labour project did little to make a sustained case for collective public action, and much to promote, indeed celebrate, individual aggrandisement. Add to that the way it entangled the private sector into every sphere of state provision, and integrated wealthy businessmen within the political elite, and the ground was laid for today’s scandals.

The left rightly draw attention to the way the interests of the few come out on top, both in the economy and in politics. It is tempting to declare a plague on both their houses – bankers and MPs.

But here the left should tread warily. Even the popular outcry at the failures of the bankers had a hysterical, individualising character to it, personalising the wrong-doing of particular executives, traders and the ‘greed’ they embodied, rather than serious analysis of the system itself.

The repetition of this in the MPs’ expenses scandal may obscure more than it reveals, and makes the reconstruction of a viable politics of the left ever harder. Only right wing demagogues and free marketers are likely to benefit from this cursing of the political.

–

These issues, and more, were discussed at the ILP’s round table seminar – Crunch Times: Politics and the Crisis – on 13/14 June 2009. You can read reports and articles from the weekend here.

The need to extend democratic practices within society, beyond the confines of the parliamentary system, has been widely recognised on the political left for some time. However, in a context of rising political apathy and a perceived ‘crisis’ of democracy, the issue is now of concern more broadly as well. Two recent pamphlets represent two considerations on the issue from leading groups on the left.

The first, Dare More Democracy, is written by Neal Lawson, chair of the left of centre group Compass which, as we have reported in previous issues of Democratic Socialist, has been making waves on the left of the Labour Party over the past couple of years.

Lawson’s central thesis is that new Labour has delivered an ‘over-enthusiastic accommodation with neo-liberalism and [a] continuing adherence to the culture and practice of Labourism. At its core new Labour’s goal is enlightened neo-liberalism and the means by which it seeks to achieve it is rooted in the old politics of command and control.’ The result, he argues, is a disempowerment of people as citizens coupled with a celebration of their empowerment as consumers (however unequal or fictitious in reality).

The living dead

However, the social basis for the old Labourist top-down form of politics has disappeared, he claims, as individualism, consumerism and marketisation has spread ever further through society. On this point Lawson echoes the late 1980s Communist Party magazine Marxism Today and its characterisation of ‘new times’, and he cites both Martin Jacques and Stuart Hall in support. Politically it means we are left with the hierarchical, centralised political structures of old Labour yet without the social solidarity, identification and political participation characteristic of previous eras. Indeed, Lawson argues that the Labour Party is reduced to a wreck of its former self – a ‘party of the living dead’ – denuded of political debate and democratic practice and ‘broken by the compromises of being in power on terms dictated by our enemies’.

Centralised, undemocratic political practice is now used by new Labour, he maintains, to accommodate society to the market. Government intervention is used to equip the population to cope with (rather than to challenge) the competitive nature and uncertainties of global capitalism but both democratic practice and more progressive politics are damaged as a result.

The disillusion Lawson feels with new Labour is reflected in Compass’s focus group research which underlies the perspective of this pamphlet. In those groups, voters who had swung to new Labour in 1997 vented their sense of betrayal. In many ways, Lawson appears to have travelled a similar journey. Indeed, Lawson’s view now is that there is a fundamental conflict between markets and democracy: ‘When I started [lobbying activity] around the formative years of new Labour, there was (and still is with some) a sense that we can have it all – markets and democracy, economic efficiency and social justice. My view now is that you can’t. The march of the market denies the space for democracy.’

Democratic renewal

Yet, while the focus group participants could see relatively little alternative other than a hope for leaders who ‘told the truth and did what they said they’d do’, Lawson argues for a programme of democratic revitalisation to combat the market. ‘Democracy,’ Lawson states, ‘has to be about competing visions of the good life and the good society – otherwise elections become merely the replacement of one set of managers, technocrats and administrators with another.’ For the left, the focus of this alternative vision has to be built on a public, collective ethic with which to confront the market.

On the back of this, he puts forward a programme for democratic renewal. The most conventional, and least inspiring, part of this is about ‘saving representative democracy’: a list of familiar constitutional reforms (proportional representation, written constitution, reformed second chamber, stronger select committees, and so on) as well as hints at something more radical (public involvement in legislation and the development of citizenship rights).

More interestingly, he argues for participatory democracy, especially of a deliberative kind: citizens’ juries, national issues forums, participatory budget setting, and deliberative opinion polling. He also includes a somewhat undeveloped case for greater economic democracy, arguing for the use of tax and other incentives to promote mutualisation, co-operatives, pension fund democracy and ‘stakeholder economic governance’.

Socialism, markets and democracy

As such, there is much to be commended and welcomed in this pamphlet. But there are two areas where his argument needs further probing.

One of these relates to the assertion, which is never really backed up by a detailed argument, of a fundamental conflict between the market and democracy: ‘capitalism and democracy do not mix and instead have a zero-sum relationship – more market inevitably means less democracy’. It is true that in one sense deliberate, authoritative public action on the one hand, and the market on the other, represent alternative mechanisms for making decisions in society. Indeed, Lawson does not differ from many others, including right-wing theorists, who share this view of a conflict; they just come to different conclusions about which is preferable. Whereas the right argues that the market offers a far more subtle, responsive and effective mechanism for people to pursue their wants than political systems (of whatever kind) which are always captured by vested interests, Lawson claims that self-management and autonomy can only be realised through collective, democratic means.

However, as Lawson himself hints, it is the way these two are related and, fundamentally, the social and economic context within which both markets and democracy operate, which is the crucial issue. In a context in which massive accumulations of private wealth and power go unchallenged and unreformed, neither markets nor democracy, nor any mix of the two are likely to deliver progressive social(ist) outcomes.

This relates to a second problem – Lawson’s view of social democracy. At times in the pamphlet – in the section calling for greater economic democracy, say, or in stating that capitalism is democracy’s ‘nemesis’ – Lawson comes across as anti-capitalist. However, at other times he appears to be a much more conventional, old-style social democrat. He says that: ‘Social democrats have always recognised the important role of wealth creation and indeed the place for consumerism’, for example; and later that: ‘Market mechanisms do empower people by lowering costs and providing choice and diversity. In many ways markets can and do make our lives better and more rewarding. And in a global economy we do need to compete.’

If one makes a distinction between markets and capitalism, these statements might be acceptable – one might envisage markets operating in a radically different social system to capitalism and fulfilling some of these aims. However, Lawson makes no such distinction and uses the terms market and capitalism interchangeably. For Lawson, it may be that social democracy of the radically democratic model he argues for, equates to something fundamentally different from capitalism. However, he also acknowledges that ‘markets cannot address imbalances in power relationships – they simply allow effective choice within the context of a given power relationship…’. But he doesn’t propose any means of altering this context.

Maybe when he talks about ‘democratisation of the economy’ he means altering the given power relationships in society, but the case is not made explicitly. Nowhere, as far as I can see, are issues of wealth distribution, private ownership and control of the economy, nor the wealth inequalities they create, addressed explicitly.

While Lawson may be right to argue that the left has too often been concerned with the social or socialist side of social democracy, and not the democratic side, there are still important reasons why we need to maintain some of the core claims of the socialist case.

Everyday democracy

Tom Bentley’s pamphlet, Everyday Democracy, starts from a somewhat different position. He shares Lawson’s concern with the declining legitimacy of political institutions and the ‘crisis’ of democracy they claim is the result. However, he is less motivated by the specific problems and challenges this poses for the left. Indeed, despite its origins in the old Communist Party, Demos – the think tank that publishes Bentley’s pamphlet – is resolutely democratic, not social or socialist.

Nevertheless, Bentley shares Lawson’s concern for how ‘liberal democracy combined with market capitalism has reinforced the tendency of individuals to act in ways that reduce our ability to make collective choices.’ In the face of declining faith in party politics across Europe, declining turnout at elections, and a gulf between citizens and their leaders, Bentley argues that democratic choices must be re-connected to ‘people’s direct experience of everyday life and to extend democratic principles to everyday situations and organisations.’ Without this, he maintains, abandoning existing political institutions merely leaves bad politicians in place: ‘we get the politicians we deserve’.

As a result, Bentley is considerably less focussed on changing the central state and parliamentary system than Lawson. The emphasis on, and examples of the ‘everyday’ are a refreshing change from yet more worthy-but-uninspiring discussions of Westminster-focussed constitutional change. Valid though these may be, Bentley is surely right to point out that the problem goes deeper. Even in countries with elaborate PR systems such as Australia, apathy and cynicism reign, he argues. Bentley’s focus on the everyday seems more exciting and imaginative. He provides a series of examples, including ‘the democratic school community’, ‘a democratic media’, and even ‘the democratic family’.

This is not to say that Bentley neglects existing institutional structures. Indeed, he argues that ‘without institutions it becomes impossible to protect and create common social goods’. However, the challenge as he sees it is to combine organic, autonomous institutions with the exercise of public and state power. ‘For democracies to thrive,’ he asserts, ‘… we must stop discussing them as if “the public” could be herded back into a pen and convinced to follow the routines and obligations of a set of external institutions. Instead, the institutions must become endogenous – embedded in the fabric of everyday life.’

For all this imagination, however, Bentley, driven by his focus on the problems of democracy per se, has little more to offer than Lawson when it comes to the problems of private power. Like Lawson, Bentley sees a conflict between markets and public action, and suggests that the relentless championing of the market has done much to undermine the legitimacy of the public realm. Yet his claim that neither left nor right has found ‘a convincing account of how the public and private realms can be combined sustainably’ barely scratches the surface.

Blind spot

Both these pamphlets have much to add to debates on the left about how democratic renewal can feed into progressive social change. Both should be read as welcome contributions. Lawson’s perspective is far more closely tied to a specific political vision than Bentley’s – Bentley focuses on the process of democracy and how this can re-invigorate politics across the board, where Lawson is primarily concerned with the social democratic project.

However, while both are critical of the encroachment of markets on social life at the expense of democracy, neither really offers a convincing case for how radical democracy can be successfully combined with markets for progressive ends. Indeed, they share something of a blind spot over what might reasonably be seen as the most fundamental characteristic of capitalist economies – the vast social inequalities that they generate. Without a convincing account of how a project of democratic renewal can counter this, both essays remain important but partial contributions.

Dare More Democracy: from steam-age politics to democratic self-governance, by Neal Lawson, is published by Compass: www.compassonline.org.uk; Everyday Democracy: why we get the politicians we deserve, by Tom Bentley, is published by Demos.

The type of reform Labour envisages for the House of Lords is a side-show from grappling with the real problem of the relationship between the Houses of Parliament, the Scottish Parliament, the Welsh Assembly and a future working Stormont.

I wonder whether the relationship could be considerably improved by converting the House of Commons into the Parliament for England, and the House of Lords into the Parliament for the United Kingdom.

The membership of the UK Parliament could comprise an element of directly elected people (who are barred from being members of a devolved parliament or assembly), and representatives of the elected members of the three or four national parliaments or assemblies. Having a quarter of the seats for each ‘nation’ would give equality, and prevent England dominating if seats were allocated on a share of population base. It could also ensure that the real needs of the three minority nations are properly considered.

The UK Parliament would have responsibility for all matters that are UK wide, including budget, foreign affairs and defence. All current government ministerial functions which are not UK wide would be devolved. Each national parliament or assembly would have its own ‘general’ election. There would be a UK-wide general election for the elected members plus for the leading members of the UK government who have a UK remit, such as the prime minister, the chancellor and the foreign secretary. These posts would therefore be be based on a popular vote, not on the fact that they are the leader of the majority party, nor that they are chosen by that leader to be his leading ministers. The UK cabinet would be made up of these directly elected people and the leaders of the devolved parliaments and assemblies.

Yes, this may mean there are people from different parties in the UK cabinet, if the electorate vote different parties in at a devolved level. But it is not the same as being a behind closed doors cobbled together coalition government. If the cabinet did comprise members from different parties it might encourage the development of more constructive approaches to opposition than simply opposing for the sake of it. While the directly elected members to the cabinet would be free to resign, the devolved leaders could only do so if they also resigned their positions in their own nation.

All legislation going through the devolved parliaments and assemblies should have a two-thirds majority in favour. This would force ruling administrations to seek to ensure that legislation is built on a degree of consensus, and may reduce the temptation to legislate for the sake of it. The UK Parliament would have the right to scrutinise draft legislation which appears to have UK-wide implications. It could then either require the deletion of those implications or give approval by taking them into its own legislation.

To help ensure that legislation at UK and national level is kept up-to-date and relevant, there should be an annual Miscellaneous Bill. This would avoid delaying worthwhile changes to be included in some special bill, and end the current lottery as to which legislative changes can be made through the Private Members’ Bills procedures.

All elections would be held at the same time, and there should be an automatic requirement that a general election is held on the same date – for example, every three years. General elections could be called during those three years if the prime minister or the cabinet resigns, or if the UK Parliament passes a two-thirds vote of no confidence in the cabinet.

What do other readers think?

Sean Creighton