Thanks to James Hamilton for the latest article in our series.
The topic is “What’s Left?”, so what is the role of the political left now, and what does it mean to be of the left?
James admits his article is not exactly “happy”, but I can say that it’s still an interesting and informative read.
===============================================================
What’s Left?
It’s not a good idea to be reading Stephen Pinker’s “The Blank Slate” whilst pondering the future of the left in Britain. It really isn’t. The effective trashing of the idea that nurture has a prevailing imperative over nature; the trashing of the idea that humans in an ideal environment live in harmony with nature and each other; the trashing of the idea that we are more than just biological machines and our faults aren’t permanently built in – all answer the question “What’s Left” with a sullen “Not much”. Or even a fruity, cheerful “Not Much!”, chirped at us from across an English provincial saloon bar by a red-faced man for whom all of this is good news.
Even without Pinker, I’d have found writing about the future of the left a challenge. Most of what I find most appealing about the left are among what it has abandoned, forgotten, assumed redundant and rejected. Principle amongst these is the great philosophy of internationalism, that suffered its worst blow in August 1914 as the workers of the world bit their respective shillings and schillings and waved goodbye to their women. But it survived into the inter-war world. Turning its back to the Thames and the Ministry of Defence is the Memorial to our fallen in the Spanish Civil War, crowded with the names of Everyman. The crumbling concrete runways from which American volunteers flew with us against Nazism in 1939 and 1940 still dot the flat Bedfordshire countryside where I grew up. And yet that was then, and there is an almightly chasm now between them and us. I wasn’t there when the coffin of internationalism was carried high past the approving gazes of Charles Kennedy and George Galloway by the Stop the War marchers, but I caught the celebratory mood of the marchers later that day on the London Underground.
Paul Anderson has said, “The left consensus at present is precisely that capitalism and American imperialism are the root causes of all evils in the world, that the war to topple Saddam Hussein was simply criminal…” and I can see little good coming out of the left until that view has been reversed. The nausea and sense of species-shame I felt on the day of the March has made much that I believe in intellectually morally repugnant to me by association. Things might have been different had any significant part of the British left organised to help Iraq in the post-War period, but no such emollient came. What’s Left, indeed, if we have all become Buchananite isolationists, writing off our fellow humans in other countries as too religion-raddled for our fellowship and assistance. Fifty years ago, similar things were said of Spain and Italy, but not by the Left. Something has changed, and not for the good. We were not always so reluctant to stand up to oppression, even when it had a religious face.
The Jarrow March of 1936 came through Bedford, and I remember poring over photographs of it in the Records Office there as a teenager. The streets themselves look much the same now, ivied walls, Victorian lamp standards, manhole covers that gleam when it rains. To see such tired, footsore, bedraggled men – and in such numbers – projected onto my own backdrop was a shock then, and put me in mind of another image, a painting seen in a book, of languid London clubbers smoking at windows as the marchers came by beneath, near the end of their unimaginable journey. The shape the march took is still familiar: banners leading, a column three or four people wide, but I don’t think there were chants being made, or whistles constantly blown. There would not have been street theatre: the dignity and silence of the men, and the hugeness and the futility of their gesture was theatre enough for those who wanted such things. The Left still has protest. Other people than me can decide if we still have it in the same way.
Jarrow is in the north-east of England. I grew up loving England – in the 1970s, it felt a safe, fair place to live, run by what looked through a boy’s eyes to be sensible, avuncular old men, pipesmoking types not to be hurried into daft decisions. That love came with me into my twenties, took first a Brideshead turn and then drew its pride from the comradeship of old socialists in London in the years immediately before our first landslide. I felt, therefore, the betrayal of an old and trusted relationship, on the day of the March, and my feelings for and about England and the English have never returned to the way they were. On the other side of England from Jarrow is Oldham. Platt’s Works, in Oldham, was one of the places found in a miraculously-preserved film archive, Mitchell and Kenyon’s “Electric Edwardians” collection. Much of the Mitchell and Kenyon collection has a happy atmosphere – showing seafronts, school treats in the park, busy street scenes and the like. Elsewhere they capture a sort of everyday ennui, bored people waiting for a gap in ceaseless horsewagon traffic so they can cross a road. Platt’s is neither of these things. Men lurch and stagger out from the works blank with exhaustion, black with dirt. The street is nothing but the heads of Platt’s men for hundreds of yards, and there is not one face smiling. Immediately outside the works, a stall has been set up. It’s selling beer straight from a barrel, pint after pint to men who seem not to have taken liquid in twelve hours of hot and dangerous conditions. The BBC tracked down the grandson of a Platt’s employee for their three-part series based on the films. He sits forward in his armchair in his comfortable modern room, still beside himself with anger at the hazards, the low pay, the filth and the futurelessness his ancestor had had to endure. That so much of that is gone is to the Left’s credit, and both the current government and the Trades Unions have done a lot of work to try to prevent the loss of these vital gains. Health and Safety remains to the Left, and while it isn’t a rallying cry, it is an area where real differences can be made to real lives, now. The plight of immigrant workers has become a matter for shame – we all remember when 23 Chinese people drowned for cockles in Morecombe Bay. If the Left doesn’t deal with it, no one will.
At the 1958 Labour Conference, Barbara Castle expressed the concern that the success of the post War consensus in bringing to an end the worst features of poverty were also bringing an end to the need for Labour. Labour had been out of power for seven years by then, and were far from a united party. Some of the debates between the factions then – over nuclear arms, for example – were as far away from the daily concerns of their voters as any modern New Labour initiative, and Barbara’s words might have come as a reminder. Five minutes’ walk from my flat is what she might have been reminding the conference of, had it been built then. It’s a classic sixties council estate, a mix of high and low-rise accommodation, one of a number in this otherwise affluent area. There isn’t the ethnic or religous mix of a North Kensington Peabody Estate, or the brooding intimidation of North Peckham – what’s left of it, deo gratias. But the concrete of the buildings could do with a wash, the grass hasn’t been cut and the fences are topped with barbed wire. Where concrete wasn’t used, a kind of fibreboard comes into play, now bowed with damp and showing mould from the corners. The buildings look inwards onto an open area, echoing some huge college quadrangle, but this one contains the carcases of bikes, and with the grass and flowerbeds so neglected, the whole looks more excavated than maintained. This is one of the fronts of housing need in Britain today. Those fronts have been pushed back by a Labour government. In 1994, just by knocking on a few doors in Earls Court it was possible to unearth large families living in single rooms, sharing their sinks and toilets with other families. Many of these were enabled to move up to better things by the minimum wage, but there are still children suffering temporary accommodation. Moreover, many estates of the kind I’ve described are, at last, being replaced by buildings fit for humans. But there’s not enough of it, and it’s not in the right places. A couple of years ago I interviewed Wally Cox, of the Thames Valley Police Federation. He told me that the same policeman’s wage could secure the rent of a flat in the south east, where his members worked (it was Thames Valley policemen who went into Hungerford largely unarmed to take on gunman Michael Ryan) but could carry a mortgage on a four bedroom house in North Wales. Teachers, nurses, librarians and others besides are all caught in the same dilemma. Is anyone other than us interested in finding a solution to this everpresent problem? Housing is Left, then.
Take a train from Sutton towards London Victoria, and five minutes into the journey crane your neck to the left – through a stand of trees, you’ll see a long view over lower ground, and, in the distance, a vast white building, almost impossibly bright against the landscape. You’re too far away to be absolutely sure what it is, and a map probably won’t help. It’s St Helier Hospital, built in the 1930s to serve Europe’s largest and best public housing project. The LCC built St Helier well, and the entire district is still in good condition if in the early stages of a depressing decline. The hospital, however, has had it. I was last there to have my hand bandaged after an incident involving a passing bus, and the hospital was sufficiently gaffertaped then, five years ago. Its successor is on the drawing board; let’s hope they remember to put the beds far enough apart this time. Health and transport, for good or ill, remain to the Left. In these instances, it’s not because we have any prevailing imperative: the Conservatives won’t touch transport again for a very long time, and what they want to do with health is too long for the political cycle and it is far from obvious that they have the nerve. We don’t know what to do either, and the story since 1997 has been of constant shifts in policy from government and babel from our interest groups. But it’s just as well that we have these issues, even if our ambitions have shrivelled. Because the bigger picture – the economy – hasn’t been ours for decades, and in all that time there has not been one single original piece of primary left-wing thinking on the subject. We are where we were left on day one of the Heath government. The Blair and Brown progressive-taxation-by-stealth tactic might be the best we can do.
Which is a crude means of bringing all this to the present day. On the present day, I’m in my local public library, a place that like so many others under the Blair government has refurbished itself from top to bottom. In front of me is the section on American history. It consists entirely of… well, the titles will be familiar to you; suffice it to say that it’s just that collection of hucksters, profiteers and rabble rousers who have used the crisis to sell books. The Left is meant to be the intellectual counterweight in politics, but of late we’ve been breeding monsters. Certain of our more prominent figures have perfected the art of making a fortune from the art of indoctrination. For intellect read conspiracy; for analysis read hysteria. I suppose that’s what happens when we assume that we’re clever but neglect the life of the mind. There has always been this air of wishful thinking about left wing intellectual activity; one long late evening of Finals revision was enlivened for me by a book with the absurd title Late Capitalism; you can find humour anywhere at three in the morning. Then you might refer to the Webbs turning their faces from murder in Stalin’s USSR, or reflect upon the sinking feeling as reopened archives confirmed that McCarthy victim after McCarthy victim were as guilty as charged. We are steadily losing our martyrs, from the Rosenbergs to James Hanratty. Society as a whole is following us into irrational thinking – weren’t you shocked to learn that 86% of doctors in Scotland were happy to refer patients to homeopaths? And we think we can laugh at American Intelligent Design…
If the left have not always held to their standards of logical, secular thinking in the past, it is essential that we do so now. We need to do this, of course, because of the threat from global warming. It is a frustrating and alarming time to be an environmental scientist. Enthusiasts on your own side want to exaggerate and lie to achieve policy change, but are too crass and unsubtle for their disrespect for intellectual integrity to do any more than queer your pitch. Others of your colleagues are more interested in the perceived opportunity to poke “capitalism” in the eye than they are in the actual science. Some of the best thinking on how to deal with the prospect of warming is ghettoised by scientists who are bright enough to know better. We need to sort this out, and we haven’t long to do it in. For the time being, absent techno-fixes, the environmental field is ours. When we failed before, in other areas of endeavour, there was always the opportunity to retreat and lick our wounds, to be socialists in waiting as you might say. But in this issue, it is up to us, and we won’t get a second chance. Are we up to it? I don’t really think so. I think we’re too wed to hysteria, blame and protest, too attached to the maintenance of our own ideological purity to try anything, to try new things, to take risks. I fear that in the future of the left there are no Keyneses, only Kleins; florid protests and policy impotence, bestselling books and films but no solutions or ideas. If I’m wrong, I won’t be embarassed, just surprised and delighted. And I’m often wrong; I just don’t think so this time.
Very interesting post.
I would tend to disagree with you about housing though. The obvious solution to the lack of spending power for public servants in the south east is to pay them more. This sort of differential pay has been fiercely resisted by the public sector unions because it would erode their power. The problem is being perpetuated by the left.
You are right about health though. I think the right has ideas, however unpalatable these may be to many, but they probably don’t have the nerve to put them into practice. The left
doesn’t really know what to do at all. A sorry state of affairs.
I’d be interested to see somebody knowledgeable set out a viable and progressive, left-wing health policy. From a party-political perspective, and not to suggest that this is the main motivation, I think health is potentially the most risky area for the Labour Party, given the lack of any ‘big ideas’ and the fact that health expectations are getting harder and harder to satisfy.
Question is: what is a left-wing health policy? Should it allow choice, should it compensate ‘good behaviour’ and not pay out for bad, should it merely minimise the level of suffering in society, and can there ever be a limit on its expenditure?
We can see that left-wing parties more often than not favour socialised healthcare, with right-wing or neoliberal parties perhaps preferring insurance-based solutions, with varying thicknesses of safety-net. That being the case, it might be sufficient that a left-wing health policy is one that shores-up the socialised system we have. That would appear to be the extent of the new ideas since the 1990s: gradually de-couple the centralised system and optimise the processes while preserving central funding, targets, and ‘mostly free at the point of delivery’. To be honest it’s difficult to see how the system is sustainable as costs and expectations rise, and at a time when, perhaps, people’s ability to look after their own health is also rising.
I wouldn’t say it was a ’sorry state of affairs’ for patients in the medium term, as long as funding holds up and essential tasks (e.g. cleaning) are carried out, but these are not guaranteed, and the combined lack of thought, action, and progressive policies on health would itself fit your description.
It may be possible to decentralise and allow competition to such an extent that ‘free at the point of delivery’ can be sustained for some time and vouchers resisted, but I can’t help feeling that, before too long, the Conservative Party will commit to vouchers and health insurance, turning the NHS into merely a repository for hospitals, staff, and equipment, and that this policy will win plenty of votes.
Hopefully somebody out there has something positive to add!
“Health and Safety remains to the left.” But I remember sitting in a Works canteen in the late 70s while a Steward instructed us (in terms no Supervisor would have dared to use) how he was going to use a fake H & S issue to force the company to over-man a plant, and how we were not to reveal the truth to Management.
“of late we’ve been breeding monsters”: well, since the French Revolution onwards i.e. for as long as there has been a self-conscious left. No; face it – when the left gets power, it usually turns out not to consist of well-meaning herbivores but of fierce and bloody carnivores. Progress comes from the dialogue of liberals and conservatives (small “l”, small “c”, British meanings). The left is a dead end: give it up.
On the other hand, how many urchins lose limbs while cleaning industrial machinery nowadays?
There’s little enough debate as it is without us suppressing radicalism and returning to the party politics of the 18th Century, safe in the knowledge that the working class have ‘grown up’ and realised the futility of trying to change anything.
The monsters (who I take to include totalitarian communism, and ‘peace at any price’) wouldn’t have been such a problem if the left had been honest and consistent in challenging them (as many individuals were), and hadn’t sided with the devil (so to speak) against their political opponents. Communism in principle can’t be defended against communism in practice, but it would be stretching things to attempt to use that to discredit the left as a whole.
‘Small “l”, small “c” ‘ means that I wasn’t referring to Parties but rather to approaches. But still,using your interpretation:- “the party politics of the 18th Century, …the futility of trying to change anything.” Well, it led to the abolition of slavery, one of the most remarkable events in human history. And eventually on to the Reform Act, Catholic “Emancipation” and lots more. The Labour Party surely has nothing to boast about that’s anywhere near the magnitude of these changes. Voting against re-armament 10 times in 1935-1939, perhaps? Trailing after W into Iraq?
OK, political philosophy: that’s more interesting than parties. In the absence of a clear ‘leftist’ philosophy, Labour would broadly adhere to modern, Anglo-Saxon, redistributative, liberalism, with elements of communitarianism, feminism, and vestiges of Marxism. With the Conservative party combining communitarianism, conservatism, and (perhaps increasingly) libertarianism, I don’t know if your “liberal v. conservative, and the left out on a limb” is really accurate.
Didn’t mean to imply that politics in the 18th Century didn’t change anything, more that with no democracy there was no reason to believe that the masses could ever put through their own program, instead having to resort to lobbying, petitions, violence, or revolt. It took all four of these to secure the abolition of slavery, after decades of prevarication and thousands of unnecessary deaths. Perhaps more remarkable than the abolition of slavery is how it thrived at all among Englightenment Christians. Anyway, we needn’t merely look to the Labour Party for ‘leftist achievement’ in democratic Britain: what about the reforming uppercase Liberals? Pensions, National Health, Trade Union rights, and Votes For Women are not to be sniffed at.
“the masses could ever put through their own program”: there are “masses” which have a single “program”? As for “reforming uppercase Liberals”:-
Pensions: credit to LLoyd George, but nothing to do with The Left, surely, which would complain that they were a conspiracy to reconcile the masses to capitalism?
National Health: in the UK form, a bad Labour idea – one real flaw is in the “National” – stealing hospitals from local charities and local government replaced local power by London power and led to decades without much new hospital building.
Trade Union rights: “Liberal” all right but a dreadful thing to have done – the old Union laws did endless damage.
Votes For Women: thoroughly good idea but nothing especially Socialist about it. Just the sort of thing that liberals could persuade conservatives to accept. It’s a shame that the female voting age was reduced to 21 of course: how much wiser it would have been to increase the male age to 30. One must also add that it was the Great Reform Act that took away Womens’ votes (in those constituencies where they had them) which Just Goes To Show.
It’s a long time since I’ve heard the argument about the welfare state being a sell-out to the middle classes and an attempt to prop up capitalism. That’s a Marxist view (don’t know whether they still believe it) and is hardly representative of the left (e.g. the Labour Party, as far back as you like).
Here’s a good article on socialism and feminism – http://www.antoniabance.org.uk/2005/08/30/on-the-left/ – perhaps votes for women is not in itself socialist, but it’s surely an essential precursor if democracy is considered important. I imagine the concentration on male suffrage made it easier for the 1832 and 1867 Acts to pass. Wouldn’t like to say that compromise was worth it in the end, but suffrage could have taken even longer to expand (for either sex), and we’re not exactly talking about a democracy.
Being under 30 I’m hardly likely to support disenfranchising myself, am I?
You end with the sort of self-interested remark that Socialists would call others selfish for using.
As for the Welfare State, Lloyd George’s National Insurance and old-age pensions were modelled on Bismarck’s so, OBJECTIVELY, blah, blah, blah.