Labour And The Kitchen Sink

The Left has never had much cause for optimism. For about three months in 1918 it might have looked like a genuine worldwide revolution could be about to start, but apart from that it has been chiefly a movement slumped in a permanent slough of despond, watching what governments it can get elected compromise their values until they are little more than pale imitations of their more energetically capitalist opponents, opponents who delight in the ease with which they can undo and privatise the meagre gains against capital the left can make. So it is with a great sense of familiarity that the Left now returns to internal feuding in the UK, a comfortable position of outrage and dissatisfaction that seems to exist in a world where getting a Labour majority elected is an easy thing, as opposed to something that's happened all of three times without the help of Tony Blair.

Everyone and their dog now has a diagnosis as to why Labour lost and what they should do next. I have plenty of my own, though I think at this point it is a bit irrelevant: the career politicians in the party have spent too long serving their time, jumping through the hoops and riding the conveyor belt upward to do the necessary thing and resign en masse now. That conveyor belt stretches all the way back to university - I have seen its start, which means I can see that the next few decades of careerists are already queued up. Everyone has too much invested in the game as it stands to get out of it, and while I'm sure those researchers and spads now feverishly putting out papers about why Labour lost have read John Harris and Jon Cruddas and understand the depth of Labour's problems connecting to its supposed base, I doubt that one of them has acknowledged that the correct conclusion from it all is that they should resign from the party and never run for so much as a parish councillor in their lives.

Harris in another article for the Guardian wrote about the decline of Labour with the line that may yet prove its epitaph : "To state the blindingly obvious, Labour is a party of the industrial age". This fact was staring the party strategists in the face for decades and they had no real plan to deal with it. The circumstances in which the party was founded were light years away from today, and now they have lost the union muscle and industrial organisation that underpinned their early strength they have nothing with which to replace it. Their long-term decline has been disguised partly by picking up ethnic minority votes, but immigrant communities went to Labour because they had nowhere else to go, not because of a deep sympathy with the labour movement. This has led to Labour slowly morphing into a loose coalition of the disaffected and unhappy, and frankly there aren't enough unhappy people in the country to win a parliamentary majority.

In short, the industrial age could provide an electorally significant population of industrial voters, and the post-industrial age can't. In addition to this, late capitalism can make enough people happy to outvote the unhappy. That means a critical mass of people who are doing well enough, who are old or read the Daily Mail or who live in suburbs, who have something to lose in a more equal society. They vote in huge numbers, and this is entirely legitimate. And my friends on the Left are entirely in denial about their existence. It must be false consciousness or media propaganda! But no, capital does provide quite a lot for these people. Labour's talk about the 1% has blinded them to what's right in front of them: a good 30% doing comfortably from the status quo that their own rhetoric has forgotten about.

In the Labour camp, on the other hand, there is that mix of disaffections. Could you provide an English nationalist story without alienating your BME vote? Is there a way of reviving the meaning of the word "Labour" amongst those communities who haven't even heard the words "trade union", or is it a lost cause? Is there any way of reviving positive left wing optimism in, say, the Midlands, while keeping the "aspirational" Mondeo men the current leadership candidates are so keen on?

The task ahead is so vast and varied, and the cacophony of voices crying traitor at all the others so loud, that I can't see much hope for progress on the issue. The scary possibility no one is talking about is not that the party needs to go left or right, but both. It doesn't need its base or swing voters, but both. Blair won three elections by throwing the kitchen sink at the Labour electoral problem: appear all things to all men, gather up right wing votes by sounding pro business, pledge high public spending, make just enough sympathetic noises to the white working class that you'd keep their vote. But there are only so many kitchen sinks in a party's kitchen, and I doubt a new attempt to go both left and right at the same time would fool many people unless it was sold with the kind of overpowering charisma and conviction that is so lacking in a party of spads.

Yet the kitchen sink is probably what is needed, even if that phrase implies a lumbering and obvious strategy. Rather, it should be nimble and responsive. A leader like Obama for the Democrats could offset pretty much any charge made against him in 2008: too high-taxing? A tax cut for 95% of families was his response. Not patriotic enough? His speeches were peppered with red meat patriotism. Too charismatic? He appeared in debates as professorial and calm. Labour doesn't have the leader that can pull off that slipperiness. But some concrete changes that sound fresh even while they obscure mutual contradiction would be a start to their narrative-changing plan to win back everyone in the whole country.

I'll end with my own suggestions, since there's a bandwagon that can still just about stand my weight:

1. Purge the careerists. Recruit a massive new tranche of community leaders and "commonsense" tradesmen to be MPs and publicise the search widely.

2.Reclaim Englishness and Britishness. Get nationalistic in the Billy Bragg/JB Priestly mode. There is nothing to lose by being shameless here.

3. Start being pro business in a pro small business way.  Talk about being pro market. Talk about how rubbish corporate governance and banking is. Sound like you enjoy talking about it.

4. Get your people seen helping with anti-austerity protests and strikes. The kind of community organising that allowed for E15 and Occupy could be galvanising, but stay away from union stuff to make yourself look new and fresh. Clone Stella Creasy and get lots more community campaigns going, preferably with the aid of Anglicans to confuse the media narrative even more.

5. Confuse the narrative further by adopting radically different tax policies. You don't even need to shift the burden of taxation - just cut it massively in one area, say corporation tax, and increase it in property. Then you get to shout about being a tax cutting party and the traditional narrative (which doesn't help you) gets muddied.

6. Talk about the deficit differently. Don't apologise for high spending, apologise for it at the wrong time. Say we will save in good times and spend in bad. It's basic Keynesianism.

7. Do something radical. Take your pick, but keep Greens and LDs on board with a promise to scrap Trident or nationalise something big. At least it makes you look like you're moving somewhere.

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We Are All Congress Now

If you want a picture of the future, imagine a human face impotently shouting at another human face, forever. It is said that where America goes, Britain will follow, and looking forward to the next parliament, it might be true. Americans by now are numb to the rather scary fact that they've just endured two of the least effective Congresses in history in a row. Were I a US citizen, I feel I'd be a little perturbed that the central organ of my democracy had just ceased to operate. I'd be more perturbed still that with a Clinton presidency on the horizon and Republican dominance of Congress all but locked in for the next decade, the prospects of any major legislation being passed before I'm well into my thirties are near zero.

The drafters of the Constitution planned on checks and balances, not paralysis. They didn't have a plan for when two equal power blocks became capable of vetoing each other into submission for generations at a time. The last time that happened they had to fight a war, because the best-laid plans of mice and men oft lead to complete slaughter. The British constitution, by virtue of being whatever people decided it was at the time, shouldn't have this problem. It should at least be able to deliver commanding majorities that allow the process of government to go forward - and it has more or less done that since the Second World War.

That's not to say there haven't been minority or simply weak governments before. But in 1929 Labour was on the rise and the Liberals on the decline; it was an accident of timing that at some point there would have to be a three-way split in the vote. In 1974, the only other time before 2010 our system failed to deliver a majority, the weakness of the main parties was due to a moment that combined poor economic times with a briefly resurgent Liberal party, and it was temporarily resolved with another election later the same year, and more satisfactorily resolved with the appearance of Thatcher's winning coalition at the end of that decade.

There is no Thatcher on the horizon for us today, however. Assuming Scotland remains part of the UK, Tony Blair is probably going to be the last person to put together a winning coalition for decades. If the Tories couldn't manage after a massive recession against an unpopular Labour leader with an agreeable-enough leader themselves and the press on their side, when can they? And Labour has nothing to offer to the swing voters who made Blair Prime Minister, either. The Left is hobbled by not quite knowing what it's meant to be doing these days, and infighting, an infinite conveyor belt of career politicians and grassroots despair at capitalism's dominance will hobble its chances in the long term.

That leaves us with the possibility of a long succession of anti's draining votes from these two: anti EU for UKIP, anti UK from the SNP, anti-mainstream from the Greens, anti-the-other-two from the Liberals. The days when either of the two larger parties could attract those voters back to their column are almost certainly now gone. In an era of trade unions and Women's Institutes, there were the kind of large community groupings that could solidify a country around two political poles; in an era of Cold War, there was the sense of a larger ideological battle to pick a side of. Now we live in an era of endless choice and endless individuality. What future can Labour offer us? "Responsible Capitalism?" What the hell is that? And where are the Tories going to find the kind of numbers they'd need to rebuild Thatcher's coalitions?

I don't know if anyone has worked out how they're going to up the numbers voting for them in the long term. The problem is that no one has enough to offer: there's no socialist paradise and very few people actually want the kind of free-market country at the end of the Tory rainbow. This isn't the seventies - we don't need post-imperial resurgence, we don't need to tamp down the unions, we don't need to modernise our economy. What we need is a thousand things, and everyone has their own opinion on them, and the democratic result ends up being shouty incoherence. Even within the big parties there is so much ideological messiness that getting a small majority might end up as a slightly more painful form of paralysis.

So perhaps we are all Congress now. While the Americans suffer from two-party dominance allowing for total gridlock, we are going to suffer total gridlock from multi-party lack of dominance. The end result will be the same. A lost generation with nothing getting done. Nobody passing bold legislation because even a majority government would have to take too big a risk.

Is a lack of bold governance tolerable? We're in a better position than the US - we have a working healthcare system that only has to be funded to continue, and at least gridlock would prevent it from being dismantled. We have a growing inequality problem, as ever, but I don't know how much legislation can do more than tinker at the edges of that. So how about the UK just muddles on for the next couple of decades without its parliament having a great effect on the country it purports to govern?

and on and on and on and

It may be, after all, that by neutralising the power of its democratic representation through not agreeing enough the UK public has given itself some breathing space. We can go home on Thursday knowing that no one can do anything too radical. Apparently this is the most important election in a generation (funny, I remember the last one being that too- generations go so fast these days). But if nothing much is going to change because no one can muster the numbers, then it may be the least. We may not see an important election again for many years. We may just watch as politicians shout at each other, promise to do everything in their power to stop their opponents doing what they propose, and to their great surprise, always succeed.

That would give us a chance to go away and think up some new ways of achieving change. And if we do that, by the time the next winning coalition has been formed, it might look very different, and have community building skills and goals and attitude we haven't yet seen. The power of the people might get its greatest boost from the impotence of its politics.