Labour at the crossroads--yet again.
| Author | Fielding, Steven |
Simon Hannah, A Party with Socialists in It. A History of the Labour Left, Pluto Press, 2018
Richard Seymour, Corbyn. The Strange Rebirth of Radical Politics, Verso, 2017
Mark Perryman (ed.), The Corbyn Effect, Lawrence and Wishart, 2017
Tom Harris, Ten Years in the Death of the Labour Party, Politicos, 2018
Andrew Hindmoor, What's Left Now? The History and Future of Social Democracy, Oxford University Press, 2018
Richard Jobson, Nostalgia and the Post-War Labour Party. Prisoners of the Past, Manchester University Press, 2018
Soon after the 2005 general election I stopped doing serious research on the Labour Party. Conservative leader David Cameron had accepted New Labour's tax and spending programme and even described himself as a 'progressive'. If I had misgivings about some of Tony Blair's enthusiasms I thought his government had established a largely benevolent post-Thatcher consensus. As a relatively pragmatic social democrat I believed that was as good as it would get, at least for the foreseeable future. So, with real politics having reached such a settled and even boring state I focused on studying how it was represented in fiction.
How wrong I was. The 2008 financial crisis turned politics upside down. Cameron did a reverse ferret and argued that Britain's economic difficulties lay in the government's irresponsible spending. The coalition government elected in 2010 committed itself to rolling back the state under the auspices of 'austerity'. In opposition, Ed Miliband agonised over how to respond in a moderately left-wing manner to Blair's legacy, and to the impact of the banking crash. The 2015 election exposed the shortcomings of his attempt. If some argued this meant Labour needed to return to a centre-ground strategy, Jeremy Corbyn's election as leader showed members wanted something very different. And then came the EU referendum, soon followed by the 2017 general election, in which an 'unelectable' Corbyn nearly became prime minister.
British politics in general--and the Labour Party in particular--is now many things, but boring it is not. Could any writer of fiction have created a more dramatically transformed and unstable landscape? How to make sense of it all and, in particular, how to understand what is going on in the Labour Party now it has entered one of its periodic existential crises? Fortunately, the publishing industry has supplied us with a Corbyncopia of books, most of which are enthusiastic about Labour's radicalisation: all supply useful insights. Most of these emphasise, with some enthusiasm, the possibilities of the present moment for a hitherto marginalised transformative socialism while warning about how it could all go horribly wrong. For if Corbyn's leadership of the Labour Party has opened some doors, many of the accounts discussed here believe that, if any of them are to lead to socialism, Labour has to be turned upside down and the people's relationship to politics recast.
Assuming the long view, Simon Hannah reminds us in A Party with Socialists in It that Labour has always contained those hoping it would replace rather than ameliorate capitalism. John McDonnell provides the book with a foreword, in which he claims that the moment for such people has finally arrived: Labour, he asserts, is now 'a genuinely transformative party'. Hannah might, however, disagree, for his is a 'critical history' of McDonnell's predecessors, and one written from a firmly orthodox Marxist perspective.
The author presents Labour as having been from the outset divided between two implacable and eternal forces: the transformative and integrative. Hannah claims the latter tendency, associated with the right, has always been concerned to maintain the status quo. Even Clement Attlee, with whom some ill-advisedly compare Corbyn, used nationalisation to shore up, not challenge, capitalism. Hannah is, however, also alert to the shortcomings of the party's left-wing transformative tendency. Thus, while describing the Alternative Economic Strategy advocated by Tony Benn as 'a crowning moment of Labourite anti-capitalist thought', he criticises it for still relying on the private sector to provide much of the growth on which its success would have depended.
Like most on the further reaches of the Labour left, Hannah sees the party as fundamentally flawed because it lacked the right kind of radicalism at the top. If only the leadership had been of...
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