Politics beyond binaries Jon Cruddas MP.
| Author | Butler, Lise |
After four wretched defeats in less than a decade how can Labour get off its knees? Has it the resources to move beyond the ever-present trap of political binaries - of young and old, remain and leave, urban and rural, culture and economy - that truncate the left, ensuring it only plays on one part of the pitch?
One route to reach beyond the binaries might be to excavate history; to revisit and reclaim progressive traditions absent from the modern conversation. A return to history might also help the party own its recent victories and dissect successive defeats. It's worth a try, not least to fracture an inert factional standoff. Almost to order, two new books turn up with numerous insights into our predicament with recourse to the history of ideas.
New Labour's lost histories
At its best New Labour would appropriate lost histories. Take the case of John Bowlby, the pioneer of human attachment theory. A key figure at the post-war Tavistock Institute, his focus, derived from working with juveniles, was the study of loss and suffering.
In March 1996, many key New Labour personalities - Blair, Mowlem and Jowell included - assembled at the Tavistock for a conference entitled The Politics of Attachment. They discussed mental and physical health, security and anxiety, and the conditions under which people turn on themselves - an obvious resource today to help diagnose the roots of the authoritarian populism upending liberal democracies.
The focus was on the qualities that govern good societies and good relationships, and influences included Mary Midgley's work on the 'ethical primate'. The conference also explored the neglected issues of uncertainty and trust in late modernity, in contrast to the 'survival of the fittest' doctrine of the Darwinian right of the 1980s, or sink-or-swim assumptions of New Labour a decade later.
From these conversations an applied politics emerged to support practices to manage conflict, insecurity and risk, and helped establish a standout policy from the Blair period - Sure Start - which was later bent into a utilitarian tool of the Treasury under the guise of 'Welfare to Work'. The conference spoke of place and belonging and the desire for - and dignity derived from - creative and physical activity. It suggested a politics of community and fraternity.
Michael Young's humanist alternative
Lise Butler revisits this neglected political terrain in her biographical assessment of the humanism of Michael Young and influence of the post-war social sciences. Young is identified as part of a state-critical moment in mid-twentieth century political thought. His interest in small-scale forms of political association, especially within and between families, created a rich radical communitarianism based on the application of individual and group psychology and sociology, in contrast to the statism and economism of traditional Labour.
Through operationalising developments in the humanities, Young sought to reconcile the two historic...
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