You can be cynical if you like when Philip Stephens writes this in the FT:
The beginning of wisdom for parties of the left – and, for that matter, of the moderate right – is that populism can be beaten only from what is best called the hard centre. Globalisation cannot be wished away but nor can it continue to distribute all its gains to the richest. Closing borders will impoverish everyone but communities need help to cushion the social upheaval. Patriotism is to be celebrated but not allowed to bleed into xenophobia. Global corporations must pay taxes, and boardrooms curb the excesses of executive pay.
Oft-drawn parallels with the 1930s are at once inexact and unnerving. Too many people have lost faith in the system. And something has gone seriously wrong when voters in the rich democracies consistently report that they expect their children will be worse off. Populists feed on such pessimism. What politics needs is the optimism of a muscular centre.
You can say what does the FT know about the left?
And you can speculate that this really just means more of the same that we've had for 35 years.
Or you can read this as something else. You can see it as a hint that others are saying that the time for real new thinking has arrived, as I have been doing here and here.
Global corporations paying tax and curbing excess pay are not enough to keep people happy; not by a long way. But maybe, just maybe, the realisation is dawning that unless people do share in the opportunity that democracy and a mixed economy can provide then something much worse is on offer.
And it is time to build bridges with those who share that understanding.
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Wouldn’t that be marvellous, but when the likes of ‘Saving Labour’, ‘Labour First’ and ‘Blue Labour’ all decided not to participate fully in Labour’s recent day of action on the NHS, then I think such an outcome is fanciful at best.
The Skwawkbox blog has all the wretched details (it’s good that he’s back blogging again as he did so much to expose the unfounded statistical basis for the Mid Staffs NHS “excess deaths”).
https://skwawkbox.org
You might care at look at Owen Jones’ piece in the Guardian today. He has been one of Jeremy Corbyn’s main supporters. He argues that campaigning on the NHS alone will not save Labour and that we have to be willing to confront other issues.
Of course
But it cannot be ignored either
If Labour are going to campaign for the NHS in the same way they have campaigned about their alternative economic ideas then we’ve had it I’m afraid.
Labour’s NHS campaign, like the one about education, is perfectly fine. Nothing wrong in highlighting an important issue. In themselves these initiatives are perfectly reasonable political activity.
The problem is that there doesn’t appear to be any new thinking around these issues. Sure we want a properly funded NHS and first class education for all, but how do we get there? how do we manage health and social care? how do we fund it adequately?
New thinking is exactly what Labour desperately needs. It’s one thing to say that you are against something, the tricky bit is offering a viable alternative, and to do so in an appealing and constructive manner.
There are elements within the party who are starting to think about how we modernise our offering. Its early days, but at least a conversation is going on. Goodness knows its about time.
Steve
‘Perfectly fine’?
If so why I have I not heard anything about it then?
And how can it be ‘perfectly fine’ if as you admit it (if ‘it’ exists at all) there is no new thinking?
Nature abhors a vacuum. That’s why the Right rushes in to fill it. Every time.
And State support for its citizens us running out of time too. Now.
Tell your ‘elements’ in the party to get their fingers out please.
When I see the term ‘moderniser’ my heart sinks. Like ‘flexibility’ it’s a euphemism coined to mask the anti-social consequences of neoliberal market economics. The modernisers’ solutions usually involve privatisation or outsourcing of public services, paying workers less to do more work, neutering trade unions, imposing a target-driven culture, paying senior managers huge salaries, employing more unqualified and fewer qualified staff, making service users pay or pay more for what was previously funded by the state – the list is endless and it makes me sick.
There is a simple ‘solution’ to funding education or the NHS. Allow the practitioners to create sensible structures (i.e. not based on ‘free market’ or ‘choice’ ideology and raise levels of funding – let’s hit the percentage of GDP spent by countries like France and Germany for a start.
This post (& FT excerpt) has raised a good talking point. Richard offers 3 ways of interpreting the excerpt and opts for the 3rd.
I would opt fot the 2nd and do so sincerely (not as a posturing gesture or expression of attitude). I would “speculate that this really just means more of the same that we’ve had for 35 years”.
There are some who say that the difficulty with getting rid of neo-liberalism is in its adaptability. When circumstances require it will compromise but concede no more than is necessary. When the pressure is off it reverts back to its usual self and pretends that nothing had happened.
Phillip Stephens in the FT talks about curbing the excesses but we’ve heard this all before. When the GFC hit there was a lot of talk about historic change and righting the fundamental wrongs. In practical terms they amounted to very little. The bad guys got bailed out, took a couple of hits and slithered back to their bad old ways despite the fact that GFC had never been fully resolved.
The FT was (is?)among the many who would have us believe that secular stagnation was actually a recovery. The new normal as it were. Now that the mainstream have been hit by the shock of Brexit, Trump etc. They are suddenly conceding that there are problems and changes need to me made. Problems they hadn’t noticed a few months ago when the threat of the dreaded ‘populists’ wasn’t so apparent.
On reflection, there is a lot that is objectionable in Stephens’ suggestions. To begin with the ‘hard centre’ is an obvious contradiction in terms and I’m not sure that ‘populism’ per se, needs to be ‘beaten’. Bernie Sanders was said to be a populist, so was Corbyn, Podemos in Spain and Syriza in Greece among others. Whatever their failings may be I’m sure there are many among us who would prefer their ideas to those of the ‘hard centre’. A common dislike of neo-fascists need not put us in close alliance with the established order.
Beyond that I would also note that:
Nobody is literally ‘closing borders’ and there is no reason to assume that any restaint on globalisation is going to ‘impoverish everyone’.
Saying that “Globalisation cannot be wished away” (somewhat typically) implies an historical determinist fallacy where optional, man-made arrangements are portrayed as the inevitable way of the future, where communities are had to believe that they don’t have have economic choices, sovereignty or control over their destiny.
As for the idea that ‘too many people have lost faith in the system’, I would suggest that ‘too many’ is still not enough (depending on what system his referring to). And finally, ‘the voters’ who ‘consistently report that they expect their children will be worse off’. That’s not ‘pessimism’ it is a logical conclusion that is well supported by facts and statistical trends.
I, for one, do not want a ‘hard centre’ that will modify neo-liberalism. I would prefer a transformative regime that openly opposes it.
I think I have made clear that neoliberalism cannot be part of any such agenda for one very good reason: it does not work