Everyone has diagnosed the problem for the British Left: it is a coalition between upper middle class social liberals and poor people, and that coalition has broken down. Here's a good little piece on the problem, but you'll have seen plenty of others in a similar vein, many quoting Orwell.
Fine. But how is that problem to be solved? Answers below.
One answer is this: there isn't really a problem. The British Left has always been that coalition, starting from the time when the Left meant Fabians and trades unions. The difference in outlook between, on the one hand, the labour movement that owed more to Methodism than Marx and, on other, living-in-squares-and-loving-in-triangles bohemians is every bit as large as the equivalent differences of today. That's why Orwell still crops up in these articles - because nothing much has changed. The right is also a coalition, between go-ahead international bankers, stay-at-home farmers, the super-rich and the shopkeeping respectable working class, and it's got its tensions too. The challenge for the British Left is simply a managerial one and a change of management is capable of producing a workable solution. The British right just has better management at the moment.
That's probably the right answer. We tend to have a bias towards regarding ourselves (our own time, our own place) as special: take away that bias and I see no reason why this election should be any different from the 1992 one. Get in a new Tony Blair, let the current government experience a few setbacks and where's the problem for Labour?
But if you think that the Left's difficulties run deeper than that, here's another approach.
If the problem today is different from the problem in the past that must be because something has changed. What has changed is the numbers. Once upon a time, the Fabians and champagne socialists were few in number: they knew that their place in the British Left was to provide an occasional officer class, not to be the rank and file. But the massive increase in higher education and the shift of the economy from the manufacturing to service sectors together mean that there are a lot more white collar, left-wing, well-off people than there used to be. And that includes people who identify as well-off liberal professionals, even if they are not that well-off (e.g. students, young teachers, people who read the Guardian). All these people now think that the Labour Party is for them. Which it isn't. It's for improving the material prospects and conditions of the poorest people in society, which is a far more noble aim (and which is indeed among the aims of the Conservative Party). The presence of these people en masse is unbalancing the movement and muddying the message.
I saw someone trying to explain to Americans the position that the Labour Party finds itself in along these lines: imagine the position the Democrats would be in if all of their votes in California went to Californian separatists and their north-eastern votes went to the Acela Corridor Party. That would indeed be a disaster in a presidential election. But we have a Parliamentary democracy. It's not a structural problem here. The Left in this country has the opportunity to make a virtue out of a necessity: it can split the informal coalition between the middle classes and the poor into a formal coalition between two parties.
This is how it would work. The Labour Party needs to return to its roots. It would become the party for the poor, for ethnic minorities, the traditional white working class, the North, Wales. It must try to become competitive in Scotland again. Meanwhile, the LibDems, who are already not at home to traditional religious believers (and therefore face long term difficulties in picking up Muslim votes), will become the party for upper-middle class city dwellers. That would allow each party to concentrate on its core message and brand, and thereby expand its appeal within its own constituencies. In the event of a hung parliament then they would have to work together. But that won't be much of a problem: the economic conservatism of the liberals will temper the spending plans of Labour, while the social conservatism of Labour will temper the transgenderism and the like of the liberals, and they will end up with a government much like Tony Blair's. It just means converting an implicit and muddled coalition into an explicit and carefully negotiated one.
Note that this takes the problem of first past the post (you need to have local strength to win seats - wide but shallow support is no good) and the problem of the British left (it has local strengths of entirely different kinds) and combines them into a solution: different parties for different areas.
Such a configuration would also produce masses of problems for the Conservatives. At the moment, all three main parties are governed by social liberalism. The Conservatives are perhaps slightly less liberal than the other two, but the party that brought you gay marriage and BoJo in a pink stetson is not your grandmother's small-c conservatives. That means that the Conservatives pick up the votes of social and cultural conservatives faute de mieux while remaining well within the pale of polite middle class discourse. Under my new proposal, things become more difficult for them. Think of the fuss about Muslim parents complaining about the No Outsiders LGBT school program: with all three parties on the side of the teachers, the Muslims have nowhere to turn. But when Labour becomes straightforwardly a party for the poor and for Muslims, it can take the side of the parents. "This programme was set up with the best of intentions," they can say, "and we fully support its aims. But" (and what follows the "but" is all that matters) "it needs to be adjusted for local conditions. In order to achieve the same aims." At the same time, of course, the LibDems stick up vociferously for the teachers. While both Labour and the LibDems consolidate support among their key constituencies, the Conservatives are left floundering - which of their constituencies do they want to offend least? Do they want to become persona non grata in London dinner parties by siding with the parents, or alienate cultural conservatives in the provinces by siding with a bunch of teachers who (let's be honest) will never vote for them anyway?
You see the point. Take the position of reversing the result of the Brexit referendum: that is a policy that was only popular (albeit wildly popular) among well-off city-dwelling liberals. Everyone else wanted to live with the result and get on with other things. Under my proposal, the LibDems would have got to own that position: that would have meant that the Labour Party would not have needed to straddle two horses on it and look silly, while the LibDems could have taken a more moderate position and avoided looking silly too. Here's another example: Labour leaders should never announce their pronouns, but LibDem leaders always should. And the Labour leader should always make fun of the LibDem leader for doing so (make fun gently, but loudly enough to signal a different cultural position). Both benefit as a result - and the Conservatives are put in a bind.
The LibDems also get to take up issues that run well in high-brow papers like the Economist but have little popular appeal: electoral reform, for example, or localism. That helps them maintain their branding as an upper-middle class party, and allows the Labour Party to maintain its brand as more of a salt-of-the-earth enterprise by roundly ignoring such distractions from the real business of fighting cuts and austerity. But differences of this kind would be easy to patch up in coalition negotiations.
Running a division between the parties in this way would take some work. The Labour Party might have to sacrifice some of its comfortable (and easily commutable) London seats: Putney springs to mind. It would require some careful thought about Scotland, where the LibDems are pretty competitive. But if there is a structural problem with the British Left then this is the kind of solution that is required; willing the end on this one entails willing the means.
Not that long ago, the Conservative Party was a pro-Remain party with a fractious pro-Leave faction. Only a few months later, after a change of leadership and some pitiless purging, it has become a unified pro-Leave force. That is the kind of ruthlessness that the Left need to emulate if they want to take power. If the Tories can sacrifice Ken Clarke and Nicholas Soames in order to win the North then the Labour Party might need to sacrifice Putney and Islington in order to win it back.
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