Ding dong merrily on high
Being a
glass-half-full sort of person when it comes to the state of the Labour Party (http://www.progressonline.org.uk/2011/12/21/no-need-for-jitters/)
I thought I should respond to the
glass-half-empty blog post by Anthony Painter (http://labourlist.org/2011/12/a-pretty-bad-year/),
backed up by Peter Watt (http://www.iaindale.com/posts/labour-is-just-speaking-to-itself
).
Anthony
says the Party has “stopped pretending it’s in trouble when clearly it is”.
This is clearly nonsense, everyone I know in the Labour Party spends their
entire time full of angst about why we lost and what we need to do to win again.
He says
“I’m afraid by-elections and local elections are pretty meaningless in terms of
the national picture”. How come then that by-elections and local elections were
a perfect indicator of the national picture in predicting we would win in 1997
and lose in 2010?
He says
Labour’s “organisation is a bad fit for the needs of the moment”. An odd time
to mention this when we just finished spending a year debating structures in
the “Refounding Labour” review, made some radical changes in terms of opening
up the Party via the supporters’ network, and we have a General Secretary
making the most radical changes in living memory at Party HQ. It’s no use
making a statement like that without suggesting specific reforms, and the time
to do that was in the summer during the RL process.
He says
“You no longer win by putting blocks of support together” but anyone who runs
campaigns at a local level knows that’s exactly what you do – segment the
electorate based on socio-economic data(Mosaic codes) and previous voting behaviour
from canvass returns, and target your message at the different groups. It is
correct to say there are more groups, a more splintered society, and the big
blocks of Labour support are smaller because society has changed, but the idea
that economic class isn’t the primary determinant of voting behaviour is
nonsense, if it wasn’t why would inner city and former industrial areas be
predominantly Labour, rich areas predominantly Tory and mixed areas
marginal? The way the two parties have
acted in government shows that they remain basically vehicles for the
aggregation and advancement of class interests – Labour improves life for
people in places like Hackney, the Tories make it worse.
Anthony
says we need a “nuanced conversation” with
voters. Yes, with a minority who follow politics very closely we do. But most
voters have very little time to think about politics. They don’t want a
“nuanced conversation” they just want to know they can trust us to run the
country and once we pass that bar they will think about very broadly sketched
visions of the future and what our priorities might be.
He argues that it is “stark raving mad” to think
“politics has to change society”. Maybe it is. Maybe I am mad. But you won’t
get people to sacrifice their spare time to run a voluntary political party by
just accepting society as it is and making politics just about electing the
most attractive candidate or most competent team. And British society needs
changing – it is grossly unfair and unequal – who is going to change that if it
isn’t Labour? If it can’t be changed by politics we might as well all emigrate
or slit our wrists. Surely the whole point of even the most rightwing versions
of social democracy is about fundamentally changing how society works to make
it fairer?
He calls for “heavyweight statesmen and women; not
former advisers” to lead Labour. I can’t decide if that is a straightforward
attack on the current leadership, most of whom were advisers before being MPs,
or just naïve – changing the way we recruit our leaders would bear fruit in 20
years time not now. I’m not aware of a “heavyweight
statesman” sat in the wings waiting to lead Labour. And what’s wrong with being
a former adviser? I wasn’t one, I don’t have the patience or self-control to only
advise or speak for other people rather than speaking for myself so went down
the path of elected political office, but why would we have a downer on people
who spent Labour’s period in government working full time helping Labour
ministers? A) it’s a commendable thing to do and involved a lot of financial
and personal sacrifice and B) it means when they become Ministers they already
know how to make government deliver our policies.
He also complains that “the upper echelons of the
Labour party is dominated by brothers, sisters, husbands, wives, and friends”.
Errr, yes, because if you work together in the common endeavor of getting
Labour elected and then governing successfully for two decades, you will end up
being friends with each other, and maybe even marrying each other. Does Anthony
want people dropped into Labour’s leadership who haven’t got a history of hard
work for the Party? I confess I trust people more and tend to vote for them
more if I canvassed with them in 1990s by-elections or sat with them at NUS and
NOLS conferences 20 years ago. It means I know what I’m dealing with.
He says
“we have a party that interprets diversity in purely
gender or racial terms. You end up with even less diversity as a result.”
There’s an implicit attack there on measures that do address gender and race
representation. There’s also a failure to show any recognition of the training
scheme the party is currently running to help people get selected from all
sorts of non-traditional backgrounds that are under-represented in the PLP, or
the high profile example of us running ex-army officer Dan Jarvis in a by-election.
If Labour is a “guild” as he says, it’s one anyone can
join by getting a reputation for campaigning hard. That’s the basic criteria –
party members will select people with very diverse political views and personal
backgrounds if they know they are grafters who have done the hard slog as
volunteers on the doorstep, ditto in terms of who gets appointed to jobs within
the party staff.
As for Anthony’s critique of Ed’s leadership, I simply
don’t agree with it. Listing things you don’t think Ed has done well is not
massively helpful. It would be more useful to set out things you think he
should do.
Anthony says, implying this is not a good thing, “The
highest value within Labour is now loyalty and unity.” I wish it was. It should be. We’ve tried disloyalty and
disunity throughout our history, particularly in the recent past. It never
helps.
He calls for “more (constructive) disruption at the
top and throughout the PLP and party – including the NEC.” I’m one NEC member
who won’t be heeding that call. If I am constructively disruptive you won’t
hear about it – it will be in arguments made in private at party meetings or
face to face with the people I disagree with, not grandstanding.
If you want to read a more straightforward, upbeat
assessment of where Labour is at, read this by Michael Dugher: http://labourlist.org/2011/12/have-confidence-2011-in-review/
It might help you have a merrier Christmas.
posted by Luke Akehurst at 8:00 pm
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6 comments
