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Good Labour. Bad Labour

Published 19 June 2008

The efforts to divide Labour into two camps - "good" Compass Labour and "bad" new Labour - are leading the party forward to its past

Slowly but ineluctably, Labour is reverting to its binary nature. On the right, the Blairites with journals such as Progress and networks like the Policy Network. On the left, Compass and the comment pages of the Guardian denouncing Labour ministers. There is a wearying Seventies and Eighties feel to this. The efforts to divide Labour into two camps - "good" Compass Labour and "bad" new Labour - are leading the party forward to its past.

Today, there is a whiff not of revolutionary, but of reformist defeatism, as MPs and party activists talk of trying to hold an inevitable Labour ejection from office to a minimum loss of seats, as a springboard under a new leadership and a new programme for the reconquest of power.

Let's get real. If the Tories return, they will be there for some time. Right now, they are thin on policy and offer a Les Dawson approach to relations with Europe. But with the authority of the state behind them, the Tories will consolidate their hold on power. Labour is cursed by having to be a national party based on a class tradition. The Tories pretend to be a national party but always favour their class. The point is not that Tories are toffs, but the new Tory frontbenchers are wealthy, without mortgage or pension worries. They treat state education and the NHS as an excuse for seminars, as they send their children to private schools and use private medicine.

A Tory government will move swiftly to build a new alliance of class, just as Margaret Thatcher did, in contrast to Labour, which has to find a language for the businesses of Britain as well as the trade unions. Labour also has to find a language for public sector employees who have enjoyed a boost in numbers without precedent in recent labour market history. Yet, far from forging an alliance with the government that has delivered this increase in union membership, their unions use a language that is almost uniformly hostile, as if they imagine they will do better under the Tories. Jon Trickett MP, the shrewd former leader of Leeds City Council, issued a stern warning last week to Compass and the new union critics of Labour: "It is important that the progressive left does not lapse into an intolerant and strident opposition which is the hallmark of sectarians through the history of our movement."

The same is true of the aggressive language of the right, exemplified by the attack on the Fabian Society made by Phil Collins in Prospect. On the contrary, the Fabian tradition of patient, ameliorative reform is more needed than ever.

Let's reject the tired idea that there is only the state or the market. Between these two lies the individual. The disaster of the 10p fiasco was that no one worked out the impact on individuals, as attention was over-focused on the state's need for revenue. Yet the state today may be as much a problem for, as it is a solution to, what Labour needs to do. Every minister talks privately of sums of taxpayers' money spent on the state's projects with no benefit to the citizen. Can Labour de-stateise itself? Can a boost of citizens' spending power be shaped by cutting taxes paid by low- and middle-income employees?

In an important article in Foreign Affairs re cently, Robert Kuttner, doyen of America's progressive economists, examined the Danish model of high social welfare and full employment. He noted that Danish unions never go on strike, and that they support companies as they downsize and outsource. In exchange, Danish capital accepts a strong social welfare network. Kuttner further argued that Danish schooling and health provision embrace private money. "Choices are offered to accommodate individual preferences so that the model enhances liberty. Consumer choice also allows the discipline of competition to keep social providers on their toes and to retain the support of more affluent Danes."

But the language of choice, competition, private delivery of public goods and unions that reject strikes is anathema in the current debate on Labour's future. Instead, we can hear the drums beating for a return to a binary Hattersley-Benn or Gaitskell-Bevan Labour Party. My constitu ents deserve better. If Labour cannot fashion a new synthesis as powerful as the coalition that took shape 15 years ago, and then won power in 1997, we do not deserve to stay in office.

Denis MacShane is Labour MP for Rotherham

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4 comments from readers

krindlekrax
19 June 2008 at 13:17

New Labour is the past and is bad morally and electorally. Not only that; New Labour was created with exactly the 'Good Labour-Bad Labour' mantra that you so disparage. For fifteen years Labour has been dogmatic pro the market, even in cases where it fails - PFI, PPP, the railways - haranguing and driving away our 1997 coalition and our core supporters. We have neglected our social democratic and liberal traditions and the wealth divide has grown. I attended Compass Conference last week - and it was made quite clear by speaker after speaker that we do not want a return to the 1980s but a vision and radical ideas for now. As Neal Lawson of Compass has often said - the problem with New Labour is that it wasn't new enough and it wasn't Labour enough. Please refrain from misrepresenting that vital point.

Derek Bennett
19 June 2008 at 15:24

New Labour, Old Labour, what's the difference? They are both as bad, deceitful and as incompetent as each other.

What does Denis McShane care anyway, he wants us to be governed by the EU aristocracy.

left888
22 June 2008 at 12:01

Down with new labour; raise the red flag again or Ur done for.

As regards Denmark, may I advise you, Dennis, to please look at this article. http://www.marxist.com/denmark-public-sector-workers-strike....

100K public sector workers have been out on strike all over the country, from 16th March onwards (not sure whether its ended now or not).

They want pay rises in line with inflation, and they want to close the gender gap.

"The right-wing government is completely paralysed. The Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen refuses to utter a word about the strike. The reason for this is clear: although the right-wing gangsters would like to intervene and impose the 12.8% diktat on the strikers, they know that this is a very dangerous situation for them. With huge support among the population - a large and well-organized working class backing the strikers' demands - such an intervention at the present moment could spark off an explosion, like the general strike in 1985. "

And its interesting that Dennis idolises a government with openly xenophobic, racist and far-right elements.

gnuneo
01 August 2008 at 01:09

i fail to see what new-Labour has to do with Labour - this is not: "efforts to divide Labour into two camps - "good" Compass Labour and "bad" new Labour - are leading the party forward to its past.", this was an internal revolutionary clique who stole control of the social democratic party, and turned it into an neo-liberal party, a continuation of Thatcherite policies even further to the right than John Major was able to wander.

as for your analysis of Denmark: how very superficial. Danish society has been built for the last century and more on social democracy, they have an extraordinary pedagogic system compared to ours, the Folkehojskole system is simply unthinkable in the UK as it stands, they have a history of democratic involvement at the local level that has never been seen i the UK, and the cooperative based agricultural reforms led the general economy of 20th century Denmark to be very highly cooperative (and productive) in nature, as opposed to the ridiculously class-based feudal model of the UK.

to ignore all this, and look at the recent right-ward shift in privatisation, centralisation, and minority economic control as being what Denmark "is about" is to miss the entire basis for HOW Denmark achieved this exceptional society.

as a Danish friend of mine once remarked: "The biggest problem for Danish socialism, is that it achieved its goals too well." - it created the affluence that has undermined the People's support for the social mechanisms that *create* that affluence in the first place! And as the article linked to by left888 shows, the Danes are waking up to this - and also to the faux "War on Terror" that led so many Danes to vote for this racist Govt that you admire so much.

you want a program to end poverty, unite the People, and usher in social democracy, do not look to the xenophobic neo-liberal Rasmussen Govt, look back to the agricultural and social reformists, who turned a feudalistic, poor and socially backward nation into one of this world's most advanced nations.

the People do not want their land and companies owned by the State (with the inevitable cronyism that accompanies that), but they are also sick of their land and companies being owned by the ultra-wealthy and transnational corporations, with the inevitable grotesque profiteering, powerlessness and poverty that accompanies such feudalism. We do not want to be modern peasants working the land of Lords for their personal benefit, we wish to be modern citizens, owning our own land and companies, sharing the wealth amongst us, taking decisions between us, with the rights of the Individual held point-and-centre.

you want a vision that will unite the Party, and give it back electability? Then look above, the REAL question is whether Labour MPs actually have the guts to stand up and demand this for their constituents, or whether you're still the craven bunch that waved the white flag of surrender when B'Liar said he wanted to invade and occupy Iraq at the behest of Bush.

to be honest, i think we all know the answer to that.

say goodbye to political office.