How "Left" is Labour Now?

I have always instinctively eschewed political labels. “Left”, “right”, “centre”, “extremist”, “moderate”, “conservative”, “liberal”, “radical”, “reactionary” – not only do they generalise and pigeon-hole people in a way that consigns the necessarily complex and interdependent facets of political idealism to mutually exclusive silos, but the lexicon always seemed to me to be organised in such a way as to create an instinctive notion of good guys and bad guys, when political discourse should really be about the relative merits and demerits of honestly-held opinions.

Nevertheless the current Labour Party leadership contest, or more precisely the controversial participation of Jeremy Corbyn therein, has inevitably ignited the debate between what is commonly understood to be the left and right of the party.

Not that many in the Labour Party would claim for themselves the “right-wing” epithet. Instead the argument has broadly played out into one between those who would build a movement based upon sound principle which would then set about seeking power, and those who argue that without power principle is impotent and that pursuit of power is therefore the primary goal, after which the party’s universally-held objectives can be realised – undeterred by the fact that on the one occasion when Labour has had the opportunity to put such a strategy into practice, in 1997, it manifestly failed to do so.

Unwittingly, I have been drawn into this debate on the various social media platforms that I use. In that debate I would identify myself as a progressive, but the terms “left” and even “socialism” leave me a tad uncomfortable – possibly, I do confess, as a result of my own distant political background, as well as my various unpleasant experiences with the Labour Party on a local level, which conspire to make it difficult for me to see any good in it whatsoever as an organisation.

CENTRE GROUND

But even for those who like to use them, the terms “left” and “right” can mean very little unless we have a firm idea of wherein lies the centre ground. Furthermore, we need always to be mindful of the fact that the centre ground is not firmly rooted in one particular place in perpetuity. It moves, and what once might have been considered a right-wing position may today be thought of as centrist.

In social terms we live in many respects in a more enlightened age. Equal marriage, a greater understanding and acceptance of cultural difference, a rejection of bigotry and of stereotyping – these are all aspects in which what was once considered left-of-centre or liberal thinking has become mainstream. Yet there can be little doubt that in economic terms the centre ground in British politics has shifted rightwards over recent decades. This is without doubt the legacy of the Thatcher era. So when Jeremy Corbyn is vilified by the right-wing press for his left-wing “extremism”, it needs to be considered in the context of the age. In the 1970s Corbyn would have been said to have been of the relatively moderate left. It is difficult indeed to imagine him being dragged away from a picket line, kicking and shouting, by a brace of burly policemen.

It was with this in mind that I first hit upon the idea of looking at what passes for the centre or even centre-left within Labour today, and comparing it with the moderate pre-Thatcher Conservative administration of 1970-74 (that is pre-Thatcher in the sense that it was led by Edward Heath – Thatcher served as Education Minister during that administration). For perspective it soon occurred to me that one needed also to look at the immediate post-Thatcher Conservative administration of John Major, which was routed by Blair in 1997, paving the way for thirteen years of unbroken Labour hegemony.

In January 1970, as Leader of the Opposition, Heath hosted a brainstorming meeting of the shadow cabinet at the Selsdon Park Hotel in Croydon. Its brief was to formulate policies for the Conservative manifesto in the approach to the general election of that year. The outcome was a radical free market agenda which was blasted by the then Labour Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, as evidence of an “atavistic desire to reverse the course of twenty-five years of social revolution”, coining the term "Selsdon Man" as a pejorative reference to those who bought into it. However shortly after being elected Heath abandoned the manifesto in his efforts to seek a more consensual relationship between his government and the trade unions.

This did not prevent Heath from introducing the Industrial Relations Act in 1971, designed to reduce union power. Striking dockworkers were imprisoned for illegal picketing under legislation described by Wilson as a “legal monstrosity”, and after confrontations with the miners which led to the misery of the three-day week his four-year administration famously ended abruptly in February 1974 after his “Who Rules Britain?” general election was met with a curt, if numerically less than emphatic “Not You!” by the British electorate. His government introduced cutbacks on sickness benefit, prescriptions and school meals, including the infamous “milk snatch” under the direction of Mrs. Thatcher. The travel firm Thomas Cook was privatised under Heath, as were a number of pubs in Carlisle which had been taken into public ownership in 1916, at the height of the First World War. Surprisingly there was also at least one nationalisation, that of Rolls Royce, taken into public ownership in order to save it from collapse.

WELFARE SPENDING

In spite of the cuts it did make, the Heath government oversaw a significant increase in welfare spending. He introduced improvements to Widows' Pension, encouraged a program of nursery school building and committed long-term capital investment in other schools, made provision under National Insurance for pensions to be paid to elderly people who had been excluded from pre-1948 schemes, and introduced Attendance Allowance for those needing care at home, rent allowances for private tenants and Invalidity Benefit for the long-term sick.

Despite the horrors of Bloody Sunday which took place on his watch, Heath’s government entered into unofficial talks with the Provisional IRA long before the idea had suggested itself to Major and Blair. His willingness to do so may at least in part have been down to his barely disguised loathing of the Ulster Unionists. He sacked Enoch Powell after his notorious “rivers of blood” speech and reportedly never spoke to him again. And, in 1973, he took the United Kingdom into the European Economic Community, now known as the EU and detested by many of his political descendants, at a time when much of his Labour opposition was sceptical.

In October 1973 Heath ordered an embargo on all combatants in the Yom Kippur War. He refused to permit US intelligence gathering from British bases in Cyprus. He also refused permission for the US to use any British bases for resupply.

Amusingly, many years later during the invasion of Iraq he telephoned Tony Benn and asked “How are we going to get rid of Blair?” Both had earlier flown out to Iraq in an attempt to mediate, fearing that the UK was being drawn into a war which threatened its national interests by making it a satellite of the United States. He also maintained strong and cordial diplomatic links with the People’s Republic of China. Upon Heath's death in 2005 Tony Blair, then Prime Minister, described him as “a man of vision, principle and integrity”.

WINTER OF DISCONTENT

Industrial confrontation didn’t end with the Wilson/Callaghan government, indeed it intensified, culminating in the Winter of Discontent. Finally, in 1979, Thatcher assumed power with a large majority and, after an uncertain start, became the defining period of the late twentieth century with the following election won on the back of a patriotic war against Argentina for the Falkland Islands, the crushing of the miners, mass privatisations and the widespread sale of social housing stock which brought working class and hitherto Labour-leaning voters into property ownership and imbued sufficient numbers of them with the “I’m All Right Jack” mindset of rampant, unfettered capitalism to shift the epicentre of British politics rightwards and to create the neoliberal presumption which has underlined our politics ever since.

Less successful for Mrs. Thatcher was the Community Charge, more commonly known as the Poll Tax, and demonstrations without coupled with unease within led to her overthrow at the hands of her own party which, after tottering on the verge of replacing her with the left-of-centre Tory Michael Heseltine, settled upon the compromise candidate that was John Major.

Set against the backdrop of Thatcher’s time in office Major was always going to be regarded as a moderate, but his record in office was a mixed bag. He abolished the hated Poll Tax, if for no other reason because it was damaging to his party, and appeared to spend most of his time in office fending off a loony fringe within the ranks of the parliamentary Conservative Party which seemed to despise all things European as well as, in certain cases, accepted norms of dress sense. And he privatised the railways. He supported and participated in Gulf War One, but where Bosnia was concerned he was reluctant to commit.

When Blair was elected with a landslide victory in 1997 things, we were told, could only get better. Weary of opposition, his whole party had been more or less complicit with a new strategy which, members had been led to believe, involved assuming power by donning the clothes of the enemy and then using that mandate to achieve positive change from a position of power.

MINIMUM WAGE

And the government of Blair and of his successor Gordon Brown achieved some notable successes, such as the introduction of the national minimum wage, Sure Start and income tax credits, the banning of fox hunting and the signing of the Social Charter. British Aerospace was nationalised as was, later, the Northern Rock building society. As with Ted Heath and Rolls Royce, the latter was purely a move to rescue an ailing company.

Within the Labour Party itself Blair amended Clause Four prior to becoming Prime Minister, which had stressed Labour’s commitment as a party to public ownership, replacing the words associating it with such with sundry anodyne references to “the means to realise our true potential” and “a spirit of solidarity, tolerance and respect”. In so doing the commitment of Labour to socialism and the principle of significant wealth distribution were formally brought to an end.

PFIs, or Private Finance Initiatives (the use of private capital to fund public projects, inevitably with a profitable return for the investor), which had come into being under Major, flourished under the New Labour administrations of Blair and Brown despite them having earlier been described by Labour as “half way privatisations”. With the rise of UKIP as an anti-immigration force more or less within the political mainstream, Labour began to compete. Brown’s slogan “British Jobs for British Workers” was lifted verbatim from the literature of the far-right National Front in the 1970s. Even Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron promptly pointed out that such a commitment was illegal under EU law.

From the very beginning of the so-called “War on Terror” by George W. “Dubya” Bush, Blair faithfully followed US interventionist (read dollar imperialist) foreign policy. In 2003 he took the UK into an illegal invasion of Iraq, claiming to have been in possession of intelligence which suggested that Iraq had at its disposal Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs) which could have been unleashed upon British forces within 45 minutes. This “intelligence” later turned out to have been entirely bogus. Over 100,000 Iraqis perished, and several British lives were lost, as a consequence of the invasion, and the vacuum which was left created ideal conditions for the rapid rise of Islamic fundamentalism, and yet no apology was ever forthcoming.

Blair later became Godfather to one of Rupert Murdoch’s children.

COALITION

In 2010 Labour lost the election and a Conservative-led coalition assumed the reins of power. One of its more typical deeds was to privatise the Royal Mail, an idea which had originally been mooted by Labour’s Lord Mandelson during the previous government. Labour stood by and uttered not a word. The coalition government also embarked upon a program of “austerity”, ostensibly as a means of cutting the budget deficit but in practice as a vehicle for further redistributing wealth from the poorest in society to the well-heeled. Labour’s response was to draw up its own, alternative austerity proposals.

Blair and Brown both oppose Scottish independence, the latter having been wheeled out by a Conservative-led coalition of interest during the referendum in 2014 to make the case for the union, including a number of promises which he was not in a position to make and certainly not to deliver. Following its second consecutive election defeat, in May this year, Labour descended into a heated leadership contest to appoint a successor to Ed Miliband, who had led the postmodern Labour Party to defeat. As I write that contest is under way, with three “official” candidates who are loyal to the new postmodern agenda and a fourth Jeremy Corbyn, from the more traditional left.

It is because there are protestations, myopic and absurd though they are in my view, from some supporters of certain of the establishment candidates as to their “left” credentials, that I felt it would be an interesting exercise to take a look back at our recent political history so that we may better, and more accurately, place them on the political compass of our time. Far from being on the political “left” by any sensible measure, it could fairly be argued that Yvette Cooper, Andy Burnham and certainly Liz Kendall would not have been on the left of Edward Heath’s Conservative government of 1970-1974, had they been a part of it. And would they even have stood out as radical voices within the government of John Major?

Cleggbama and me - witnesses at the birth of this new Coalition of Hope

by Suzanne Moore, Independent parliamentary candidate for Hackney North and Stoke Newington. Reproduced with acknowledgements to Mail Online.


Do you remember the time long ago before Cleggbama walked amongst us?

Amazingly it's less than two weeks. This Election was shaping up as deathly dull, with Brown and Cameron both flatlining.We sat through the near-death experience that is Brown's campaigning and watched bemused as Cameron failed to hide his exasperation that he just wasn't being handed what was rightfully his.The depressing arguing over cuts and the 'disappearing' of all significant women except dutiful spouses - now cast as fashion-conscious carers - made it even harder to engage.

My own frustration with the lack of choice bubbled over and my solution was to stand for Parliament myself as an Independent. Party politics had produced this stasis.

Rash, I am sure, but my form of direct action.

Even I, though, am not daft enough to think individuals can shift the system, simply that we can draw attention to its flaws. This is something most Independents have in common.

Having already expressed my preference for a hung parliament, my feeling was that the electorate was also in no mood to give one party a mandate. Such an outcome would be a way of ticking a 'none of the above' box.

This was before the TV debates. It's not that people just changed their vote on the basis of 90 minutes of telly, more that an attractive, articulate figurehead had been found for their rumbling discontent.

The Lib Dem leader was an unknown quantity. No more. Now we know his freshness makes both Brown and Cameron look stale.

He looked directly into the camera and connected viscerally with people's desire for a more direct form of democracy.

Arcane arguments about constitutional reform and proportional representation rarely excite.

But something happened visibly in the first debate: we could see the leaders of the two main parties were working overtime to maintain the status quo that Clegg was challenging.

Indeed the forces of conservatism on both sides have been ambushed by the urgency of those who now scent meaningful change. The Tories don't want substantial parliamentary reform and Labour only talks desperately of it in the dying days of its administration.

The Lib Dems may be wobbly on many issues but this is not one of them. It is wrong to suggest all have fallen in love with this party or that the Lib Dems are completely different from the main parties.

They are not. They are not clean on expenses, nor above using very dirty tricks when campaigning.

Surely the surge towards Clegg is happening because so many have felt locked out of the two-party system for many years. This sea change has been called a Diana moment and therefore irrational. But just as the outpouring over Diana reflected changes that had already happened and marked a break with a more buttoned-up past, so the Lib Dems' sudden popularity reflects years of the electorate feeling ignored by its leaders.

It doubtless helps, too, that Clegg embodies an energy and modernity that makes the twoparty system appear lethargic and creaky.

The prize now will go to those who offer actual change.

Brown can offer only more of the same as he floats among the wreckage of the latest job figures and lack of growth.

Cameron cannot hide his look of dismay that a new kid on the block may steal what is rightfully his. It's not in the script, yet it is written all over his face.

The unscripted Clegg, meanwhile, makes his success look entirely natural. You have to pinch yourself to remember that only weeks ago his party was deemed entirely unelectable.

The true measure of the Lib Dem insurgency is the reaction against it.

The unsettled mewlings about a hung parliament causing the end of civilisation as we know it emanate from those who have complacently invested in a Tory victory.

The City - that bastion of fairness and accountability - won't like it, they complain. Oh dear.

Well other countries cope and, actually, not all City people feel the same way.

Two unpopular wars, economic meltdown and huge inequality is the result of a party with a large majority. It is hard to imagine in what way a hung parliament could do worse.

I am biased obviously. I am not a Lib Dem but I share absolutely a sense that something has to shift and am excited to think it might. Standing as an Independent is part of pushing for a shift.

In my constituency other Independents have also come forward. Some good, some barmpots. I now find myself up against 'A Ripperologist'.

Well what did I expect? A clean fight? But what motivates most Independents is the same despair with our political system that Clegg is tapping into.

The practical problem for Independents, as I am finding out to my cost, is that without the teams and money that the big parties' machinery offers it is virtually impossible.

Last week, standing at a borrowed table wi th our lovely little flyers, we watched in awe as a bus pulled up.

Out got the sitting MP (Diane Abbott) and several of her staff.

They glared at us, dispensed their expensive literature and drove off. They must have stayed for all of five minutes.

Labour take my area, Hackney, for granted and clearly don't like being challenged in any way. Still they have the money to do wham-bam-thankyoumam campaigning.

No one at the top should take voters for granted. Something is shifting from the bottom up.

Brown is incapable of delivering the kind of change now being demanded.

Cameron provides only a change of leader and direction but no deep structural change of the institutions.

So forming now before us are two new coalitions.

On one side are those who want to reinvent the wheel of democracy, on the other those vested interests who like things just the way they are.

We have the progressives in the shape of Lib Dems, some Greens and many Independents now arrayed against the conservatives (small c) of the big parties. This is bad news for Labour, but they have had their chance.

Having been fed a politics of fear, something organic and long repressed is somehow manoeuvring us towards a politics of hope.

It is this coalition of hope - not Clegg himself - that is important. Such a moment may pass. But we shouldn't let it.

To witness the birth of a new political era would count as victory for many of us.

Innocent mix-up, or a new low in New Labour's war on the Worton community?

On Monday a local Somali community leader received an unexpected telephone call from the alleged Member of Parliament for Feltham & Heston, Mr. Alan Keen, inviting him to a reception that evening with the Prime Minister at 10 Downing Street. Evidently a spare ticket had become available at the last minute. A little perplexed, he nonetheless accepted and attended the event.

The reason that a ticket had become available at such short notice may well have been because the name of Councillor Paul Fisher, Hounslow Council's Lead Member for Service Improvement and Community Empowerment, had mysteriously been erased at about the same time from the list of invitees.

Councillor Fisher had been invited to accompany one of the young residents of Isleworth's Worton estate who had recently received the Metropolitan Police Commissioner's Community Safety Peace Award for their work under the Duke of Edinburgh Award Scheme. Sadly the youngster concerned, Jamie Kempson, was understandably overwhelmed and did not wish to attend the reception without Councillor Fisher, who was refused admission at the door.

Lurking in the background when Councillor Fisher arrived was Mr. Keen, and his unsuspecting Somali accomplice.

Even by the standards of political pettiness and spite that have earned New Labour in Hounslow the notoriety they deservedly enjoy, particularly in Isleworth, it seems difficult to credit that they would stoop so low as to deprive a hard-working and community-spirited young member of the community the opportunity of a lifetime, to meet the Prime Minister and to have his good work receive the recognition and congratulation it deserved from the most senior political figure in the land. However there are a number of incidents which, whilst they may constitute nothing more than a series of coincidences, certainly give us food for thought.

One is that the Somali activist in question was one with whom Councillor Fisher and myself have been working very closely and constructively on a series of community cohesion projects. Part of New Labour's modus operandi in these parts is to try to overawe those in the community it seeks to use by impressing them with its importance and contacts. Residents of my own estate have been offered the impossible-to-refuse opportunity to "meet Ann Keen in person" (no less) in exchange for their acquiescence on specific community issues. If the gentleman in question was as shallow as New Labour assumes he and other members of the hoi polloi to be, he might well have been flattered enough to sell his soul to New Labour. In any event, inviting this particular guest has all the hallmarks of "getting one over" on the hated ICG and Worton community.

Another is that on the very morning following this incident, at 10:29 to be precise, this very blog was visited by somebody at the Houses of Parliament (thanks Statcounter). Don't they say felons always return to the scene of their crimes? There being nothing on here at that time about the incident, whoever it was only hung around for four seconds.

I sincerely hope that this incident was nothing more than an innocent mix-up, and that it was not the latest manifestation of New Labour's long-running hatred of the residents of the Worton estate (residents one of its representatives abused as "whingers" a few years back when they dared to oppose the Party's plans for their green). If this is the case, I promise to publish any statement from New Labour to that effect here on this blog . Should such a statement not be forthcoming people will draw their own conclusions, and those conclusions will no doubt differ from person to person.

In the meantime, all I can say is roll on the general election!

Georgia on my mind

Whatever the merits or otherwise of Russia's intervention in Georgia, the disproportionate ferocity of its military campaign must have brought back chilling memories to those of us old enough to have lived with the fear of imminent nuclear attack on our probably overactive minds during the latter years of the Cold War.

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has called for an immediate end to Russia's action, for which he said there could be "no justification" and which "threatens the stability of the entire region and risks a humanitarian catastrophe".

And he is probably right. However I wonder whether his postures of moral indignation are not tinged with just a hint of embarrassment, given his wholehearted support for the recent war in Iraq and that country's subsequent occupation by British and US forces?

The "justification" for that war, we will remember, was that Iraq was said to possess Weapons of Mass Destruction which if they were not taken out imminently would threaten the peace and security of humankind.

Anybody who knew anything about Middle Eastern politics knew full well that Iraq possessed no such weapons. Tony Blair knew it. Even I knew it. But it was the justification given for Britain's participation in the invasion of another country which even conservative estimates now tell us has resulted in the deaths of over 100,000 people, the large majority of them non-combatants. And when he finally admitted that the WMDs that we had gone to war to eliminate had never actually existed, he shrugged it off as though he had given the nation an erroneous weather forecast.

I am not a pacifist as such. I believe any nation, like any person, has a right of self-defence. But war is a truly terrible thing and the loss of innocent human life in pursuit of ideological or commercial interests is probably the most appalling tragedy that mankind has ever inflicted upon itself.

Our leaders could lecture those of other nations with greater moral authority if they were to set a better example themselves.