Utopianism, liberalism, and the left.
| Author | Blackwater, Bill |
| Position | Essay - Essay |
A strain of old-fashioned conservatism is becoming fashionable once again in British politics. There is a certain consensus of criticism spanning the Progress wing of Labour, Cameron's Conservatives, and Clegg's Liberals: an assertion that New Labour has betrayed in itself the old faults of the utopian left, believing that even the most intractable problems were amenable to state intervention.
Such criticism is potentially devastating to left-wing politics: if even New Labour is fatally undermined by flaws which are genetic to the left, then perhaps this is the final end of the road for left-wing politics. Perhaps the left really is doomed to failure, perhaps it is time to give up the very attempt to transform society through state action?
In truth, the failings of New Labour should not disguise the ongoing existence of chronic problems of social injustice and cultural poverty, nor the need for a left-wing politics to address them. Post-war social democracy ran into the sands at the end of the seventies; New Labour is doing the same three decades later. This is not the end of the road, but a new turning point for the left.
But in order to understand which way to go next--and such a debate is sure to be reignited after the next election, even if Labour manages a narrow and improbable victory--we need to better understand the utopianism that is the lifeblood of the left, and New Labour's relationship to it.
Making sense of New Labour
In Fantasy Island, Larry Elliott and Dan Atkinson produced one of the sharpest critiques of New Labour in power, homing in on the leadership's failure to face up to hard choices, its tendency to back itself into corners as a result of believing its own bullshit (Elliott and Atkinson, 2007).
To a certain extent, this refusal to face up to the inevitable trade-offs involved in any policy is shared by all mainstream parties in contemporary democracies. In New Labour, however, it is possible to see the influence of historic left-wing versions of this mentality. There are at least two currents of thought involved.
One is the kind of utopian outlook that has forever spanned all shades of the left: a basic faith that what ought to be, will be; that what is morally right will be vindicated in fact, and that its rightness will be the cause of its success, almost as if there were a Divine Legislator at work.
Eric Voegelin, the German conservative philosopher, analysed this element of left-wing attitudes as a variety of magical thinking. Memorably, he wrote about how the instinctive response of many left-wingers to crimes of genocide or imminent national danger was to pass a resolution condemning the actions as morally unacceptable, in opposition to taking the responsibility, and accepting the accompanying moral compromises, of doing something about it themselves--and quite often in active opposition to others doing something about it either.
The second influence comes from the old Fabian faith in the ability of politicians to transform society through capturing and manipulating the levers of power. In a pamphlet written in 2003, Angela Eagle gave a first-hand criticism of such thinking (Eagle, 2003). Writing about her first spell in government after 1997 she said she had been disabused of her former idea of what being a minister meant; the levers of power were clumsy, inertia-bound instruments, with often inadequate, unpredictable, or perverse effects. That she could make such criticisms shows this mentality had been alive and well in 1997; still alive enough for her to want to criticise it in 2003.
On the surface it might seem as though these criticisms are striking a wrong note. New Labour can hardly be accused of having an exaggerated faith in the power of the state to run things; it has been built on an intellectual rejection of statism. But here is where we can really decode New Labour, understand its approach to government. Yes, it has absorbed the new right's criticisms of the state. But it is still utopian, it still believes that it is possible to transform society through political action.
It has transferred its utopianism to a neo-liberal faith in the raw power--the dynamism, the innovation, the ability to escape bureaucracy and harness the energy of individuals--of the private and voluntary sectors. Meanwhile it has retained the same old Fabian faith in the controllability of social outcomes via manipulation of the levers of power. It's just that these levers are devoted to devolving, and incentivising, and enabling; shaping the raw power of the market and individuals to predictable and socially beneficial ends.
Thus the Blair-Brown mode of government: to set targets, announce entitlements, award responsibilities. The ought-becomes-is utopianism then kicks in with the faith that setting a target is tantamount to achieving it. Leaving aside the debate on whether targets actually improve performance or lead to perverse outcomes, there is an incredible castles-in-the-air quality about New Labour in office; it talks so big, the Blair-Brown vision set on distant horizons, with choices to be made of world-historical proportions, but yet the centre off-loads responsibility onto everyone--businesses, consumers, families, learners, communities, public sector workers--to deliver it all. New Labour's philosophy of government is to set the standards, provide the vision, but not actually to plan and enact things in any detail; to leave all that to the genius of history, the innovation of the market-driven individual.
In all this New Labour reveals its ideological core: Thatcherite neo-liberalism infused with left-wing sentiments and animated by left utopianism. As Grahame Thompson has analysed it, neo-liberalism has embedded itself within the dominant concept, spanning all shades of mainstream politics, of the style in which government should operate:
The key aspects here are to stress the responsibilisation of autonomous agents; the production of 'freedoms' that this engenders for economic agents and the encouragement of self-governance and self-reliance on their part; and the institution of mechanisms of indirect 'governance at a distance' rather than direct interventionism. Furthermore, it means organising the 'conduct of conduct', which involves the production of benchmarks, standards, targets, norms, etc. that are set for agents and that can be audited--rather than the use of hierarchical administrative means of governance. (Thompson, 2007) The New Labour twists on this neo-liberal 'mode of governance' are comprised by the earnest desire to redress social injustice, and the gigantic level of ambition--and often blind enthusiasm--for the potential of the state, working through these at-a-remove means, to instigate such redress. It is a fascinating--and dysfunctional--combination.
New Labour philosophy in practice
Let us briefly consider New Labour's approach in four key areas: poverty, the environment, housing, and education.
Child poverty
This government has carried out significant programmes of redistribution, tax credits being one flagship example; even more important has been the sheer investment in improving the quality of public services. But it never talks about redistribution and rarely talks about poverty. Where New Labour explicitly names poverty as a target, it is framed specifically as child poverty, since this is the acceptable face of redistribution: investment in the coming generation, to give them more of a chance to compete.
The target to end child poverty by 2020 (and halve it by 2010) has both a utopian component--the stirring sound-bite promise to abolish poverty!--and a Fabian component--the working content of the target, defined around children living in households earning less than 60 per cent of median income. To begin with, the government...
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