Posted in Ideology

Is Labour doomed? Not if we end austerity

jon cruddas with question markTucked away in a barely-publicised corner of The Telegraph’s web edition is this piece forecasting Labour’s possible extinction. There isn’t much to the article, the paper quotes Jon Cruddas (who else?) speculating about the possibility of Labour’s death before moving on to attack Ed Miliband’s pledge to introduce compulsory profit-sharing schemes.

Let’s come back to Cruddas. In the context of a discussion about the situation in Greece and whether Labour might not exist a decade from now, he reportedly replied “There is no safe ground for any orthodox parties and the stakes could be high potentially. They could just disintegrate in real time. And I include in that the party that I represent.” Unfortunately, I agree with Cruddas. The passing of the Labour Party is an outside possibility. The same is true of the Tories too. The difference is the Conservatives appear hell bent on hastening their own destruction, while there are very small signs Labour has glimpsed the precipice it’s shuffling toward and is pondering whether to turn.  Continue reading →

Scotland: the patriot game’s a bogey

braveheartby the collective editorial team of Uncivil Society

In the lead-up to the General Election, Scottish politics is constrained within the stifling discourse of who best represents the national interest. Whilst SNP billboards imagine a House of Commons complete with tartan benches, Jim Murphy has foisted a commitment to patriotism and the service of the nation into Scottish Labour’s constitution. Whether by reaction or design, Labour is now mired in the patriot game. It may as well impale itself upon a thistle. Continue reading →

Blue Labour and the Church of England: on class, ethnicity and politics

Archbishop of CanterburyThe recent pastoral letter of the Church of England bishops (Who is my neighbour?) is an effort to inject ethical considerations into a pre-election process in which they are seen to be in short supply. Jon Cruddas, head of the Labour policy review, wrote an article in the Guardian welcoming the letter in glowing and entirely uncritical terms as a “profound contribution” to political debate.

The bishops regret the sanitised, on-message and evasive talk which dominates current Westminster politics (and beyond). Instead they want a “… trajectory for a new kind of politics – one which works constructively with a ferment of different ideas and competing visions”:

  • They say that political life would be enhanced if we discussed openly not only the creative potential of markets but also their tendency to entrench inequality and diminish human sympathies.
  • They argue for the decentralisation of power where this leads to greater efficiency but add that it depends on the facts of the matter and should not be treated (as it is in Labour and Tory documents) as a panacea.
  • They want an adult discussion about immigration that recognises both our obligations and that there are legitimate concerns.
  • The time has come, the bishops say “to move beyond mere ‘retail politics’, where parties tailor their policies to the groups whose votes they need, regardless of the good of the majority” – and we can all think of examples of that.

Continue reading →

A slow-burning revolution is starting to overturn neo-classical economic orthodoxy

KeynesAs the world struggles to deal with threatening outbreaks of violence – most dangerously, in the Middle East and the Ukraine – another less dramatic and slower-burning revolution is getting under way. This revolution does not threaten violence – but it does promise change, and almost certainly change for the better.

The revolution that is gathering pace is a shift in understanding and increasingly in policy. What we are now beginning to see is the painfully slow and invariably reluctant abandonment – in the face of evidence that is now impossible to ignore – of an economic orthodoxy that has dominated the global economy for nearly four decades. Continue reading →

Backing Labour because it’s the lesser evil – right or wrong?

tweedledumdeedumdum2Unfortunately, this piece from Phil Hartup has been a common refrain among left wingers for as long as I remember. We have to keep Labour in because the Tories are worse. While obviously true, it would be nice to make a a good left case on the basis of the entirety of Labour’s programme rather than just highlighting those bits palatable for leftist consumption.

Yet we don’t live in nice world. We live in the real world, and that’s one whose politics has been blighted by the weakening of Britain’s labour movement and therefore a scaling back of socialist ideas and class consciousness. A world in which anxiety and insecurity preys on the minds of too many of our people, so that some lash out at scapegoats and find the rhetoric of stop-the-world-we-want-to-get-off populists seductive. And a world in which culture is highly individuated and individualised, where one is the axis upon which the rest of the world revolves. Continue reading →