Review of the alternative, edited by Lisa Nandy, Caroline Lucas and Chris Bowers--how realistic is the alternative?.
| Author | Calder, Gideon |
| Position | Labour's Internal Politics - Book review |
The Alternative: Towards a New Progressive Politics, ed. Lisa Nandy, Caroline Lucas and Chris Bowers (Biteback: London, 2016).
Doctrine doesn't win elections--resonant stories do. Carys Afoko's point, in the concluding chapter to this book, shouldn't be surprising. It wasn't Chicago School economic models which worked well on the doorstep in 1979. It's not some wholesale popular conversion to this or that model of civic nationalism which accounts for the SNP's recent joys. It's not Nigel Farage's preferred philosophical framework (or whatever) which swung the EU referendum. The midwives of each of these successes are narratives that somehow won out. A coherent enough story, hooking up and chiming enough with what enough people had enough reason to be thinking. Simple stories can make for bad denouements, sometimes because of their simplicity--the Brexit vote may become a kind of mascot for this point. Even so, they're needed to get things moving.
Of course, the left--in its broad sense--has been split by doctrine, often definitively so. The elegance or rightness of one's commitments is no guarantee of buy-in, even from those one wants to impress the most. Yet only very rarely have progressives forged a single, compelling story about what needs changing and how. Could they, now? Should they? For the editors of this fertile and timely collection the answer is yes. The job of the book is to get us thinking how we might forge such a narrative, and acting on that. Its importance and value sit, in striking ways, in just the same place as its limitations.
There's much of promise in this project. Its starting assumption is that often, the differences between the parties of the broad left (for which, read, in order of Westminster size: Labour, the SNP, the Liberal Democrats, Plaid Cymru and the Greens--and presumably Sinn Fein and the SDLP, about whom we hear little here) are less than those within the Conservative Party. In early July, the Conservatives did that quasi-magical thing they do, in uniting almost spontaneously around a new leader, just as it looked like they had reason to splinter over Brexit. What progressives need is a similar, affirmative 'realignment of minds' (p. xvii). So we hear from partisans from Mhairi Black to Peter Hain, Sian Berry to Tim Farron, on what might bind them across party lines, and how working together might work. We find policy areas from trade to public services, migration to (of course) electoral reform. And...
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