Some early, not-very-comprehensive and not-entirely-thought-through thoughts and I may come back to revise and/or add to them, but
I’d like to know what people think ...
How far Labour has hollowed itself out was clearly shown
this weekend when the carcase imploded.
It is no alternative to a Conservative Party which knows the
price of everything but has never in my lifetime shown it knows the value of
anything - even conservatism - and has prostituted a nation before the corporate
kerb-crawlers of international business.
Labour under and since Blair has lost both its heart and its
core voters, most of whom despise it and from whom it runs scared. It has forgotten its founding principles - socialist principles - of solidarity, mutual obligation and duty to others that also lay behind the creation of the Welfare State. Complexity has replaced simplicity, but the principles remain sound even though the world has moved on. Sadly, Labour has been so desperate to catch up that it's forgotten them altogether.
As both ballast and compensation it filled the vacuum left by its departed socialism with a shallow, mawkish and far from progressive language of social rights as claims upon others, a barely-disguised transcription of market consumerism as social policy. Victimhood has been the only thing Labour has nationalised since the 1970s, not least in the long years of fruitless opposition. It enshrined it in a
bureaucratic managerialism that turns the stomach whether you suffer under it,
work in it or just rage at it from the outside. A belated effort under Blair to link "rights and responsibilities" just pointed up the poverty - no, the absence - of Labour's conception of society.
Most of Labour’s traditional and potential voters, like most people in Britain and beyond, and including many socialists, are and always have
been conservative with a small ‘c’. Corbyn mustn’t ignore that. People like
to live in a reasonably predictable world; they like a sense of continuity in
their communities; they like to know on what terms they deal with other, and
they like to have a say about how it’s done. They aren’t on the whole racist and believing all the above things doesn’t make them so. Above all, far from being mere economic units, they have a
pretty honest sense of what’s fair and what isn’t.
Many have turned away from Labour because they think
they are unfair; that they have forgotten, ignored or perverted the principles I
mentioned above. Because of this sense of unfairness, and joyously egged on by other
clarions of victim culture like The Daily Mail, many who would once have
voted Labour have retreated into a nasty, defensive and sullen nationalism. Others have been seduced
by small-minded organisations like UKIP or overtly racist ones like Britain
First. The Scots have simply told Labour to eff off, good God!
Britain has indeed become a notoriously unfair
society which the historical dominance of the Conservative Party has
done so much to create. We have the biggest and most visible discrepancies in wealth of any
major European nation; an often squalid public environment for which many people have ceased to care and behave accordingly; low aspiration
(even after all these Tory years - think about that next time a Government spokesman laments its absence in Corbyn's programme!); spectacular social cleavages between the
well-educated minority and a badly educated majority; often appalling and
preventable health problems. As a people we have been long and unlovingly prepared and indoctrinated for a
low-skill, low-aspiration service economy while our major European competitors
still actually make things – and by God it shows.
That the nation’s
outrage should therefore be directed against foreigners and other Europeans instead of
our own ordure is the most obvious testament to Labour’s failure to offer real opposition.
Corbyn can at last open up a debate and set out a clearly different
approach. That’s to say an approach that doesn’t require Labour first to find
out what the Conservatives want to do so that it can then make a few policy tweaks
and then try to sell it as something fresh and different.
He can point up
the real unfairnesses: BANG! BANG! BANG!
- it won’t be hard! He can direct our attention away from a narrowly economic to
a broader quality-of-life approach (one of the great illusions, as I am starting
to appreciate, is that happiness necessarily begins at a certain level of
income – especially if you can cook).
Anyway, here are some ideas that I think might bring people
back to Labour, and that may be compatible with what Corbyn believes, or might
come to believe:
- Commit to membership of the European Union: we
have much more to learn from our neighbours than we like to think and much to lose
if, as for too long, we refuse to do so. This is no time for hair-shirted,
insular British socialist exceptionalism: that is and has been part of the
problem up to now.
- Commit to remaining in NATO but not to renewing
Trident: they aren’t dependent on each other and the money can be better spent
on the public and wider environment, and on start-ups for groups and businesses
that can carry this work forward.
- Commit to the principles behind the original welfare
state, which was based on contribution not unconditional access except in
clearly stated cases, and explain clearly why this is. Nothing incompatible
with socialism there!
- Commit to welcoming genuine refugees at the same
time as (1) working internationally to resolve the Syrian
and other wars and the disputes that give rise to them and (2) having, along with European partners, a clear exit
strategy: that is, for refugees’ to return home when it’s safe to do so except
in clearly defined and reasonable cases.
- Make the rich pay more tax, for no better reason
than that they can afford it and it is therefore FAIR.
- Nationalise the railways, for God’s sake, and do
it properly. If in doubt, ask the French.
- Have a school system that isn’t afraid to value
what both academic and non-academic kids can offer and achieve, even if this
requires streaming and even an element of separation. Because you don’t have to
be academic to be a craftsman. If in doubt, ask the Germans or the Dutch.
- Support that last one with a return to MAKING THINGS.
And at this point I must hand things over to the economists, if
he has any. I certainly haven't.
