It's time to stick up for tribalism
Published 30 October 2000
Are you a tribalist? Well, shame on you - that is the message of the week. Let's start with the big picture. Think of a different kind of government - one that spent more on education and health; that raised income tax a bit; and that was much more liberal than our present rulers when it came to asylum, freedom of information and private lives, - a government, in short, more "old" than "new" Labour.
Am I talking about a government of the Labour left? No, this was the programme that Paddy Ashdown believes would have materialised had Tony Blair followed his instincts and gone ahead with the coalition he had promised to Ashdown before the election. As the Ashdown Diaries, serialised this week, make clear, the embryonic coalition was destroyed by two things: the huge Labour majority of 1997 and, yes, Labour's "tribalism", which made it impossible for Blair to fulfil his promises. He couldn't deliver the Browns, the Prescotts and the hundreds of lesser figures.
And yet this coalition, had it happened, would have brought with it many of the more progressive policies favoured by the left. A coalition government may well have been a lot more daring than what we got. The Lib Dems are, despite their tactical protestations, well to the left of new Labour - and the natural allies of the very people most hot under the collar about doing business with them. It seems, does it not, about as classic a case of the stupidity and short-sightedness of tribal politics as one can imagine?
Now turn to another recent event: the elevation of Michael Martin to the Speakership of the Commons. "My most fervent hope is that the House of Commons doesn't descend into tribalism when it comes to choosing the new Speaker," one loyal Blairite told me. Well, bad luck. After a day of time-wasting farce, the Commons did just that. Martin, the new Speaker, is not eloquent or notably talented, but he is most definitely "one of them" - the northern, working-class MPs who, for too long, have felt that the Labour Party was leaving them behind. So they ignored the pleas of the leadership to elect the urbane gent, Sir George Young, and jeered at claims that, after Betty Boothroyd, it was time for a Tory to have a turn. No, Labour's massed ranks wanted one of their own in the chair, and that is what they got. It was their small, but significant rebellion. Michael Martin's mafia extends from Scottish and northern male bar-room MPs to the Catholic anti- abortion contingent in the Labour Party.
His opponents claim that he has already shown a degree of favouritism to his mates when deputising for Betty Booth-royd, and they expect much worse. Now he faces the uphill task of proving his critics wrong. He won't be helped by the commentators who seem to disapprove of his election, not only because of the archaic way it happened, but also because he owes his victory to "tribalism".
So, it is time to stick up for tribalism, or at least to question the glib assumptions of all those who attack it. It comes down to what it is like to be inside the Labour Party at its best, to know the smell of the local school halls where constituency meetings take place and to have tramped wet streets with all sorts of people - allied to you because of what you all believed - to know the warmth of the tribe. It feels, no doubt, very similar for the Lib Dems fighting you, or the Tories, in Pennine towns or West Country housing estates.
In a world in which we are living more and more alone, or with only a small family around us, the tribe is becoming a forgotten and too easily dismissed pleasure. More importantly, without it, there would be no coherent, disciplined political parties in this country and therefore no representative democracy. The day when the Labour and other tribes finally fall apart and scatter into the cinemas, pubs and snooker halls is the day the other great powers - the media barons, spin-doctors and polling gurus - will have won.
You have only to look back at Donald Dewar's funeral in Glasgow. It was a truly tribal occasion, in the best sense. There were people from other parties there. Blair, not a tribal elder in Scotland, turned up. But it was Gordon Brown and Dewar's Glasgow friends who rang the emotional bells. Scottish Labour was burying one of its own; the echoes of John Smith's equally untimely death resonated, and the tribe was in mourning.
But let us go back to Blair and Ashdown. Blair is not a tribal politician. It is the reason why - as Michael Meacher told Ashdown back in 1995, and it still holds true today - Blair has the party members' heads, but not their hearts. But it is Blair's failure to recognise the importance of tribalism that led him so far down the road with Ashdown, when, in reality, there was little chance of taking his comrades with him.
Blair may indeed have more in common with Ashdown than with the left wing of his own party, as Ashdown asserts. But this does not mean that the chance for a grand realignment of British politics is just around the corner. Blair's dream of attracting scores of new members to each local Labour Party simply hasn't happened. The transformation of Labour from tribal clique to mass party was yet another dream that never materialised.
The Labour Party led by Blair is, by and large, the same old party that it always was. Thank God. Hurray for the tribe. You need the loyalty, passion and commitment of the tribe for party politics to happen at all. Yes, you get angry hostility to other tribes - but you cannot have a decent circus without the elephant dung. The dream of "non-tribal" politics is really about parties mattering less, with small elites attempting to control public opinion through the media. It may sound more rational. In fact, it is an anti- democratic fantasy. Long live tribalism.
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