Labour's new divide (The party needs Robin Cook's optimism more than ever)

[Anarcho-Socialist]

Labour's new divide

Blairites have become fatalistic. Their party needs Robin Cook's optimism more than ever

David Clark
Monday August 15, 2005
The Guardian

The reaction to Robin Cook's death shows that he was much more than a great parliamentarian and a reforming minister. In this age of public disaffection there are not many politicians who can expect their funeral cortege to be applauded in the street by hundreds of mourning citizens. As the tributes that have poured in testify, he struck a chord with people from across the political spectrum who feel that British politics has lost its way.

Cook was also the standard bearer for an important tradition of Labour thought, and this is perhaps the most significant political issue raised by his passing. What happens to this tradition now may determine whether Labour is able to renew itself in office or is set on an irreversible course back to opposition.
The section of the party that identified most strongly with Cook is very far from the old left of lazy caricature: the sort of people who prefer the purity of opposition to the difficult compromises of power. Indeed, its origins lie precisely in the rejection of that outlook in the early 1980s by what came to be known as the "soft left". In a very real sense, it was Labour's original modernisation project and laid the groundwork for the successes that followed. Its starting point was a recognition that Labour's traditional political base was too narrow to sustain progressive change, and that broadening its appeal should be the party's top priority. Cook himself would gently mock those who complained about Tony Blair on the basis that he was attracting Conservative voters. That was a sign of success, not failure. Labour needed to stand on a platform that was electorally viable, but it should also be one that remained rooted in its distinctive political values.

By the early 1990s this tendency had coalesced around a fairly clear set of political ideas. Labour should locate itself firmly within the European tradition of social democracy, with everything that implied. Europe and its social model would be embraced as an antidote to the deregulatory, minimal-government dogma of Thatcherism. The state ownership of industry, as opposed to public services, would be abandoned, but social partnership and stakeholderism would be advanced as ways of balancing and humanising market relations. The British constitution, which had come to be seen as a structural impediment to radical change, would be transformed by a new politics based on decentralisation and democratic reform. In its most ambitious variant, supported by Cook, this included electoral reform and a willingness to work with other parties. This was the common sense of mainstream Labour at that time, so much so that Blair continued to identify himself with it, in each of its specifics, for a surprisingly long time after he became leader. Indeed, in its early period in office, New Labour remained remarkably true to this vision, supporting a national minimum wage, adopting the European social chapter and legislating for devolution. It was only gradually, and without discussion, that it was displaced by what we now understand as Blairism, and we realised that the social-democratic baby had been thrown out with the old Labour bathwater. The idea that we knew what we were getting when we voted for him is a cleverly spun myth, just like the idea that Labour was heading for oblivion before he took over.

It is a preferred tactic of Blair and his sympathisers to stigmatise their critics on the left as recidivists who wish to return Labour to a failed past. What they hope to obscure is the fact that the argument advanced by Cook, and the disillusioned modernisers who supported him, is that Blairism is failing on its own terms, not old Labour's. The promise of a new politics has foundered on broken commitments to hold a referendum on electoral reform and create a democratically elected second chamber. In many ways, Blair's political style, with its instrumental view of power, and preference for the clever procedural fix over honest debate, reflects the very worst of old Labour. On Europe, Blair has taken a Eurosceptic lurch that has led him to call on our partners to abandon the very social ideals that once made integration attractive to Labour. In fact it has become increasingly hard to see how Blair's European policy differs from the one pursued by John Major.

More at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1549199,00.html