Right wing FT columnist Janan Ganesh this morning summarises rather neatly, if inadvertently, just what the issue is in Labour at the moment by saying:
The question, therefore, is not whether Mr Miliband is tough enough to see off this bout of machine politics but whether he actually believes Unite's vision is wrong. It is a matter of ideology rather than character, and the signs are not encouraging.
The fight with Unite is not about seats, votes, or anything else. It is about whether it it to be a party serving the interests of ordinary people, or not, which is why I am concerned about this issue and all those with a concern for economic justice have to be.
As Mark Ferguson puts it on Labour List:
Today Ed Miliband will make a speech that could define his leadership of the Labour Party, and determine one way or another whether the Labour Party will be organisationally and financially able to fight the next election.
And as he continues:
By switching from "opt out" to "opt in" for trade unionist affiliations, Ed Miliband is aiming to bring millions of working people into the Labour Party. But this comes with huge risks - if not enough people sign up, and the party is no longer affiliated to millions of ordinary working people, it could be the end of the party not just in financial terms but also as a party of Labour too.
Like it or not, Labour is the only party to have won general elections for the last two decades, but the question now is whether it might even exist because it does not appear to know what it is for.
It should be, as I argued yesterday, the party with a bias to the poor, the party that ensures that all pay their fair share of tax to create a just society that embraces active government and fiscal policy (which, remember, embraces both revenue and spending) as a key component of any government's economic strategy. If it is not to be that then the question is why it does exist. That, quite literally, existential crisis appears to have arrived.
But if Janen Ganesh's view prevails - and it does in some parts of Labour - then Labour will be what my friend and colleague Howard Reed calls LINO - Labour In Name Only - and that will leave a void that will have to be filled in UK politics by a party that is really concerned about people, equality, opportunity and hope for the majority.
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An anti-neoliberal party then.
Great post, Richard.
I am now convinced that the “LINO” tendency in Labour is just too strong (in terms of numbers – particularly in the PLP – and also funding – c.f. the very well-funded activities of Progress etc.) to make a social democratic (or socialist) Labour party programme possible, and therefore I have reluctantly concluded either that a new left wing party is the only way forward. That could be a “Green Party Plus”, a new party based around the trade unions, or a coalition along the lines of Syriza in Greece. But I think it’s now the best way forward. Not an easy way forward and they will be walloped in the 2015 election. But then Labour were annihilated in the 1935 general election and 10 years later they were in government with a huge majority. So it can happen.
I would love to be proved wrong, and for Labour to emerge with a radical programme, but the 2 Eds’ capitulation on austerity in the face of right-wing pressure from inside and outside the Labour party means that it’s not going to happen.
I’ve just been catching up on your blogs for the last three days, Richard. Interesting and thought provoking stuff, as usual, and lots of very well argued and insightful comments.
I agree entirely that this is an ideological issue dressed up as procedural/managerial, which, I have to say, is how – in various forms – the ideological divide has been dealt with for years by both Labour and the unions/TUC. I think it was always inevitable that once Miliband’s policy blueprint started to become clear – as it has these last few months/weeks with the commitment to continuing austerity and other neoliberal tinged announcements/briefings, for example, – the ideological tensions would out. And now they are, yes, the options for resolving them are not particularly attractive for the short term (i.e. the the 2015 election), with the Tories presented with the opportunity for a majority government (or a coalition with UKIP). God help us all then!
But that’s the problem isn’t it. Because in reality Labour (New Labour, One Nation Labour, etc) have been LINO for years. Indeed, I’ve recently been doing some work on establishing the causality (source) of a range of policies that have a clear neo-liberal bent and they all – across a range of policy domains – have their genesis, or received a significant boost with Labour.
The upshot is, that while I accept Polly Toynbee’s argument that Labour did a lot of things that benefited the ordinary citizens of this country, that cannot and should not mask the fact that they advanced the neo-liberal project by a significant and damaging degree. In fact, I’d argue that for a variety of reasons the extent to which that occured did not become clear until we began to see how easy it was for the Tories to graft their policies onto what already existed.
So, while I entirely agree with you about what a party of and for labour should be about (its ideology), given the number of people who were central to the New Labour neo-liberal project who are still influential in or around One Nation Labour it will never happen. For that reason I take the view that the choice is between a LINO Labour party, pursuing a slightly lighter shade of neo-liberalism than the Tories, or a split, with all the uncertainty that creates.
I think it might be better in the long run if Labour would just own up to the fact that it is the party of capital and has been since Blair was leader. For pete’s sake, that was nearly a generation ago and the sooner people faced up to the fact that Labour is not for REturning to anything like its old namesake the better for anyone who has any hope or ambition for something completely different. The Greens look on paper to have the policies that old Labour might have adopted once upon a time and apart from the fact that their logo is a bit tarnished [albeit unfairly] by widespread notions of tree hugging CND campaigners a probably the best [and sadly faint]hope for the most disadvantaged and probably even for the famous squeezed middle. It’s just a shame the unions seem reluctant to accept this fate.
Very soon the “state funded political parties” theme will rise to the surface.
It has been quietly gaining ground, largely unreported.
Maybe that is behind Ed M’s attack on UNITE. That or he resents their implication that the “selected” candidate is another “never done a days work” shoe-in.
However, maybe there is another thing worth considering:
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2013/07/a-bad-dream.html
?