Losing the next election
Don’t know how I missed this at the weekend:
Almost one in four Labour supporters wants their party to lose the next election, according to a new poll which will provide ammunition for David Cameron.
In a sign that the leadership has become increasingly divorced from its own grass roots, 23 per cent agree that the Labour party should be kicked out of power to give it ‘a period out of office to rethink what they stand for and what their vision is for the future of the country’.
Why join the Labour Party if actually whether or not we win elections isn’t important to you? If discussion is what you’re looking for, then Labour really isn’t the place for it - join a drinking club or debating society. If you want to help change the world with no responsibility for making it happen and maintain your ideological purity at the same time, give some money to your favourite charity. But you’re a democratic socialist or social democrat or think you might be, and if you want to be a part of something that stands on a broad platform built (however tenuously at times) on shared principles and that might actually have a chance to put them into practice, then join the Labour party.
There are swathes of people who have no memory of life under a Tory government, and no conception of how bad it could be. Many of the people who advocate time in opposition are comfortably off (as am I), with secure jobs and housing, and the ability to get their children into good schools and support ill or elderly relatives. But the people who will get shafted by a Tory government are people without those resources, people who will be abandoned if we give up now.
Lessons from previous spells in opposition and the example of the Tory party’s last decade should warn us that opposition isn’t a quick fix, if indeed it’s a fix at all. The chances of a short four years out of power giving us a chance to renew ourselves and be all that we should before a real socialist sweeps back into Number 10 on a wave of public support and reverses the odd bad thing the Tories have done is a mirage, a dangerous fantasy, an indulgence.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m hugely disappointed in our party, and our government. Like most members these days, I’ve a shopping list of what I would change as long as my arm. We’ve not managed that elusive renewal of the party in power. But give up any ability to change this deeply divided and unequal world for the better? Believe that it is no longer possible to make a difference? Prefer passing motions at a branch meeting to fighting for Labour policies on the doorstep? Retreat to the comfort blanket of the eighties (some comfort)? It can’t be the answer.
I totally agree, but on the other hand, there are days when I think our government (not our party, just the MP’s) really don’t deserve to be in government, no matter how much worse the alternative is.
’Im hugely disappointed in our party, and our government.”
Im hugely angered by people like you who knock the best and most progressive government for years.
In a mainly right wing dominated country it is miracle we have a labour government and if you cant see that perhaps you should shut Ms Bance.
Well said, whatever happens the alternative is worse.
>>> The chances of a short four years out of power giving us a chance to renew ourselves and be all that we should before a real socialist sweeps back into Number 10 on a wave of public support and reverses the odd bad thing the Tories have done is a mirage, a dangerous fantasy, an indulgence.
Agreed.
But then, at the same time, I suspect the ‘a bit of time in opposition would do us good’ view is very much a reflection of a growing feeling that it may take an electoral defeat to break the stranglehold of the current party hegemon merely to open up room for serious debate, i.e. unless ‘New’ Labour is discredited by defeat the push from the top will continue to be for more of the same only better executed/managed.
The problem with that view is that even if we could break up the current elitist hegemony within the party, I’m really not sure quite what we would expect to put in its places - you’re right that we cannot revert to the 1980s nor, indeed, could we try to revive old school state socialism, attractive as some its propositions might appear on paper.
The world has moved on an yet we haven’t - what little philosophical outlook the party has left (which is not much these days) remains rooted in the 19th and 20th Century and in a model of society that no longer exists.
As a party and a socialist I think we desperately need to go back to first principles, revisit the philosophical underpinnings of socialism and the Labour movement and ask ourselves quite how these need to be reinterpreted in a modern context to restore to the party a coherent sense of purpose and philosophical belief.
To give but one example of what I mean, one of the things that seriously pisses me off is the periodic crowing by one or two right-wingers, especally from amongst the Christian Socialist wing, about how the party has turned its back almost entirely on Marx, as if to suggest then the entire sum of Marxist philosophy can be summed up in terms of Stalinist/Maoist state-socialism, which has been pretty much thoroughly discredited.
The fact remains that much of Marx’s work, especially his critique of inherent instabilities within capitalism, holds entirely valid to the extent that his work is widely accepted even by many of the most ardent right-wing free market economists.
Marx and his contemporaries may have been better at diagnosings problem than offering solutions, but the fact that his work remains influential amongst economists, even on the right, shows that simply writing his work off as no longer relevant and/or discredited is a dreadful mistake and that what’s need is for socialists to go back to Marx, separate the key universal principles from those facets of work that were very much of their time and which have now dated and lost their relevance, and look at how we can apply those principles to society as it exists today and what we can learn from that to help us shape policies for the future.
Our most serious problem seems to me to be a desperate lack of intellectual and philosophical rigor and genuine radicalism running right through the party, something that will take far more than 4-5 years in either government or opposition to recapture, making genuine party renewal a long-term project, during which its better we have a Labour government, even a unsatisfactory one, than see the Tories back in power.
New Labour is now in its tenth year in office, a tricky age for governments as it can be for marriages. On the basics, it is still in reasonably good shape. This government has presided over prosperity, which is the single most important reason why it has defied the normal laws of political gravity for so long. Is that nearly over? A YouGov survey last week put Labour just a few points behind the Tories.
It is not a reason for Labour MPs to panic that they have lost the next election. What they would be sensible to fear is that this reflects a growing mood among disenchanted voters that a stale government is possibly running short of steam, ideas and credibility. All of which can be fixed - the election is some years off yet. As any good scouser would say ‘calm down, calm down.’
PS - Antonia did you get me email?
Mark - that’s right, mate - the sum total of that post ranting about how Labour always is better in government than anyone else was in fact a clever disguise for my real opinion which is that we want the tories back tomorrow. DID YOU ACTUALLY READ WHAT I WROTE, IDIOT BOY?
Mike - sorry re email. Over 100 not dealt with yet in inbox, hoping to get time to wade through them tomorrow.
Supporters of a party believing that a spell in opposition would do the party some good… Now where have I heard that before?
When is Not So Very New Labour going to stop copying the Conservatives of ten years ago?!?!
Actually, at the risk of getting shouted at - why are you “hugely disappointed” at the government. I can think of a variety of things that have disappointed me - principally Europe - but “hugely” disappointed? Sounds like the usual failure on the left to recognise that purity is for the cloister of the convent or the monastry. Out here in the real world compromise with the system is how we actually manage to live.