Unless we transform wider attitudes, the left is sunk

I occasionally get a bit of stick from leftists who proudly sit outside the Labour Party. What the hell is a socialist like me doing in a party whose leadership is self-evidently not committed to socialism, they ask? Usually I mumble something about the union link. The clue is in the name: Labour was founded to give working people a political voice, and the party’s link with the trade unions gives the Party that potential, at least.

The second part of my defence is about the broader political context. There’s almost this sense that New Labour was a sudden, unexpected coup – rather than being born out of the battering the labour movement got in the 80s, the rise of the New Right, repeated defeats at the polls, and the neo-liberal triumphalism that followed the end of the Cold War. It wasn’t just Britain where the left went down the plug hole – it went belly up pretty much everywhere from the mid-1980s onwards.

The implication also seems to be that Britain is bubbling away with dissent, and the Labour Party is a kind of conservative deadweight that’s out of kilter with a wider leftish mood. Unfortunately, it’s just not true.

No doubt about it: the Social Attitudes Survey which came out recently proved depressing reading for anyone on the left. Over half of people thought that unemployment benefits were too high; the belief that poverty was an individual fault had grown. Depressing, but not unsurprising. Here’s the legacy of Thatcherism (which drummed into us that poverty and unemployment were not social problems, but individual failings); and the fact that those who are poor or without work are generally portrayed as scroungers with fifty kids living in mansions made out of widescreen television sets. The BBC’s ‘Poor Kids’ aside, there are practically no positive portrayals of poor or unemployed people.

And yes, it also has a lot to do with New Labour’s retreat from challenging Thatcherite mantra on social problems, and its failure to make arguments about inequality. The disappearance of these arguments from the mainstream has a real impact on people’s attitudes.

But we are where we are, and those on the left have a responsibility to do something about it. After all, if people feel that social problems are individual failings, then support for left-wing policies vanishes – hence the fact that support for redistribution of wealth fell to about a third in the Survey.

For a “Blairite cuckoo in the Miliband nest” like Dan Hodges, Labour should follow this shift. This would be a suicidal strategy, because if Labour helps to reinforce hardening attitudes, it will simply boost support for the Conservatives who will always be most trusted to crack down on the poor and unemployed.

In my recent article for the Independent, I called for a major campaign to transform public attitudes. It wasn’t a throwaway comment to fill copy. I meant it.

We have to create the political space that makes left-wing policies possible. As things stand, if Ed Miliband were to adopt the policies that I passionately support – whether that be redistributing wealth or standing against benefit cuts – he would standing against a large swathe of public opinion. It is self-deluded of me to think otherwise. There were always two types of Blairite: the “ideological” Blairite who really believed it all, and just used “what’s electorally possible” as an excuse; and the “pessimistic” Blairite who may have wanted progressive policies, but didn’t think they were politically feasible.

We need trade unions, community activists, socialists and NGOs – where politically possible – to make common cause. An imaginative campaign that exposes the reality of poverty and unemployment in Britain is desperately needed. In the face of a right-wing press that shamelessly seeks out the most extreme examples of unsympathetic “poor” people and passes them off as representative, it won’t be easy – and it will certainly need a huge amount of resources, strategic thinking and ingenuity.

Above all, it’s about voice. Unless unemployed and poor people are given a voice, their demonisation will remain unchallenged. That means organising people and forcing those with power to listen.

We need to hammer home that there are simply not enough jobs in Britain – there are now 5.7 jobseekers for every vacancy. Some communities are far harder hit: like Hull, where 18,795 unemployed people are chasing 318 jobs. We must make clear that, while 3 million families living in poverty have someone in work, there are 3.5 million families where someone has a job. We have to emphasise that benefit fraud represents less than 1% of welfare spending, and represents about 60 times less than the amount lost through tax avoidance.

Let’s have posters across the country exposing wealthy tax cheats. Let’s have viral videos revealing the reality of people thrown out of work through no fault of their own. Let’s force newspapers and TV programmes to cover the reality of communities that never recovered from the destruction of industry, and are being pummelled for the third time since the early 1980s.

Unless we transform wider attitudes, the left is sunk because our arguments won’t gain traction. Only then can we drag the Labour leadership – kicking and screaming if needs be – into a position of defending many of those it exists to represent. It’s not enough to wait around, presuming that as more people are hammered by recession, views will change. The left did not benefit from economic crisis in the 1930s or 1970s. We need a game-changer now. Unless we get organised, the right will remain our unchallenged political masters, even as millions are driven into poverty and unemployment. That cannot be allowed to happen.

(This post originally appeared at LabourList)