"Labour Must Die!" - 4 comments

Is the title of an article Andy Pearmain submitted to the Euston Manifesto site just over two years ago - I've just happened upon it again. It's pretty bleak, and certainly hostile to the Labour Party in its present form/state:

The problem for the democratic left is that the actual, final death of the Labour Party, as an organisation of people with deep vested interests in its survival, doesn't look like happening any time soon. Labourism as an ideological strand is clearly exhausted but the Labour Party itself has powerful organisational life-support systems, not least the networks of local and national state patronage it still controls. The Labour Party simply is, even if it has lost any sense of where it might be going and any historic mission beyond the vacuities of the Third Way. The real question for us then is - what can we do to help kill it off? [...]

Then again, it's more constructive to write, and to respond to, an article like that than to read the reports we read in the press and cringe at the state that well-meaning human beings have got themselves into. What follows is my partial response. It's radical and not to be taken 100% literally. 'Defeatist' it certainly isn't intended to be, because there are higher things in this world even the Labour Party.

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The Labour Party is a vehicle for political change. "Progressive" change, if that term means anything, but Bob Piper has as pithy a summary as any I've seen:

For a fundamental and irreversible shift in the balance of power and wealth in favour of working people and their families.

Anyone who's unhappy with that, or for whom the Labour Party just offers a job, a tribal affiliation, a sentimental attraction, or a political host to leech off, is expendable as far as the debate over its future goes. Progressives flocked to the Labour Party because it offered the best ever chance for achieving the desired and change, but if/when there comes a time that Labour is too dysfunctional an organisation to make that change, sentimentality should not keep it alive.

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Why do we support Labour Governments? Firstly, we have faith in the ability of well-meaning Governments to enact good policies. Secondly, the scale of Government power provides the policy with full and equal coverage across the polity, backed by force of Law.

What are the risks? Firstly, that the power of Governments allows a self-perpetuating bureaucracy and political class to develop, through which all Government actions and thought-processes are filtered, generally outside the sphere of public political debate. Secondly, that the more entrenched a particular Government is, the more threatening the possibility of change in either governing party or personnel, even as it finds it harder and harder to develop coherent (let alone fresh) thinking of its own. Thus Government becomes more a case of keeping the other lot out than about what it is proper to do oneself. Finally, whatever the likelihood of Labour achieving 42-43% of the vote at a General Election, and the 324 seats that provides the key to Government, consider - thinking back to 1997 - what concessions have been necessary to enlarge the so-called "progressive coalition" to that size.

So when I declared last month that progressives were misguided to believe that the pursuit of national political power - in the sense of the 5-year+ shot at forming the UK Government - offered hope for solutions to the country's social problems, I wasn't just being mischievous. I consider that, for all the good that has been done, the burning-out of the progressive/Labour (delete as appropriate) movement for a decade to come, amid a mass of disappointment and recrimination, proves that its electoral strategy is misguided.

It's all too easy for Labour factionalists to put this down to "betrayal", but this is about as honest as declaring that you could have scored a missed World Cup penalty with your eyes closed. That, in a decade's time, your incorruptible self could be the one being called for betrayal by an armchair commentator, would seem as far-fetched as it does for today's Ministers.

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How many 1992-era Labour activists cursed the British electorate for re-electing John Major? How many of us must be poised to unleash the same bile when 2009/10 comes around, and each time a Labour seat falls to the Tories? Love for the British people is neither required, nor expected of progressives. It is fruitless to seek it, putting your own favoured social class on a pedestal, just as it is to hold grudges when they reject your earnest political projects. Just as no human being should live at the whim of another, and human rights are worthless with strings attached so the cause of the disadvantaged and the powerless is too important to be left in the hands of the electorate, even if the power and ability to act of the State has to be given up in the process. No more dizzying highs, or crashing lows, just the possibility of steady, incremental progress.

So, progressives need to devise a way to achieve their social ends outside of the State. Five to ten years of Conservative Government might be as bad for their Party as the years since 1997 have been bad for ours, but unless Labour starts to dissolve the power of Central Government while it has the chance, future Conservative administrations will stymie external progressive action, as well as proving all too tempting a target for Labour politicians who fail to follow the lessons of the past century.

One approach might be to render majority Government impossible, for example, by backing a strict kind of proportional representation. The sooner the spectre of Conservative majority administration is eliminated, progressive non-governmental action can continue unmolested. [The danger is that, without any fresh political input of any kind, Government becomes entirely stagnant and bureaucratised. I leave this question for (any) commenters to mull over.]

Update (14/09): minor tweaks.

Impossible Targets: Poverty - 2 comments

Harpymarx has reminded me about the campaign against poverty, which was popular a couple of weeks back, before the David Davis business took off. My criticism of the use of 'relative poverty' is simple enough, and has been stated enough times, but I don't think it's pedantic to repeat it when bloggers and politicians uncritically use a measure that is effectively impossible to target, giving and receiving praise for accidental successes, and condemning worthy failures.

We continue to use 'relative' statistics, but the language of absolutes, confusing ourselves and forcing Governments into the ludicrous position where policies deliberately aimed at improving the life-chances of the poorest are unlikely to have any impact on the standard 'poverty' measure, which is determined - not so much by (a) national income/GDP-per-head, which Governments at least have a chance of influencing - but median income, something which combines the difficulty of (a), with the added complexity that comes with the continually varying distribution of incomes and (possibly also) housing costs.

This is a recipe for confusion and disappointment, that means that no advance in the fight against poverty is ever permanent: one bad year can cancel out five good ones if the statistics turn that way. There are plenty of other reasons for criticising the use of the '60%-of-mean-net-disposable-income' measure', not least the fact the State provides up-front services for free, that the poorest can use without drawing from their limited funds. It might only be a safety-net, but this reduces the moral weight of purely income-based poverty measures.

Yet the Government clings - so it may take credit in good years - to a measure of poverty that makes its child-poverty-elimination target impossible without the kind of radical restructuring of society that would bring incomes closer to the median. But the Government clearly doesn't believe in such a restructuring, and the various charities and pressure groups are hardly going to antagonise donors and activists by associating with radical redistributive politics. In that woolly world, the aim is always to 'persuade' the Government to 'do more', perpetuating the idea that there is a magic lever to be pulled. Thus it's unfair for Harpymarx - undoubtedly a backer of such redistribution - to condemn the Government for missing its own poverty targets, when they must know that (a) a deterioration cannot in itself be a sign of bad faith, and (b) that the impact of worthy measures like Sure Start can only be assessed by a closer look at the statistics than the mainstream media and casual bloggers will normally provide.

As Tom Freeman pointed out last year, there are many alternative measures of 'well-being' that are absolute, comparable, and also moving in the right direction. It must be impossible for Labour to abandon the official poverty measure now, and assuming the Tories are in power within two years, the dropping of poverty targets will make it irrelevant, but if the pressure groups have any sense they will propose a new 'quality of life' index that it is feasible for a future Government to target, that combines an absolute 'fundamentals' element, a relative element that reflects equality of opportunity, and a 'social well-being' element.

Of course one cannot write about Government targets for the poor without a little disgust that such things are necessary at all.