|
|
|
Setting the course By Martin McIvor November 2003 You would have thought that if you asked several eminent and high-profile academics and figures from thinktanks ranging through Progress, Catalyst, Renewal, the Fabians, ippr and Demos to agree an assessment of Labour’s current predicament, the result could only be vacuous in the extreme. But the significance of the Compass statement, published by these individuals on 15 September 2003, was not in who had come together to contribute to it. It was that, at the end of it all, it still had something pertinent and challenging to say. The initiative revealed a remarkable consensus across the left on where we are and where we need to go – crystallising thoughts that many have had recently and setting them down as an agreed basis for taking progressive politics forward into the 21st century. Of course, the statement has a critical edge to it – would there have been a point otherwise? But its spirit is one of self-criticism. I can only speak for myself, but I suspect that for all of us who signed up, it contains a mixture of things we have been saying for some time, and things that challenge our past thinking and practice and which we have only lately seen the need to take on board. And to the extent that this critical edge is turned outwards as well, its criticism is not of others’ achievements or failures, but of the existing state of things – the state of our society, our economy and our polity. And in this sense the left must remain ruthlessly critical for as long as its work is not done, for as long as that “progressive deficit”, rightly identified by Progress, still exists. So what were we saying? At the heart of the statement is a call to ideological renewal, an appeal for Labour to rediscover its core social democratic purpose. As the last issue of Progress said, ‘the vacuum caused by our inability to make a strong intellectual case for state action has been filled with a managerial style’ which “has failed to inspire our core voters and has confused many others.” More provocatively, perhaps, the Compass pamphlet proposes a hardening-up of some fundamental principles that may have become blurred or confused by necessary accommodations to electoral or presentational expediency. Any summary will inevitably be partial, but two essential themes stand out for me. First among these is equality – the “sovereign virtue”, as philosopher Ronald Dworkin has called it, because it is the very basis of the liberty that must be made real for all as of right. We can certainly call it “fairness” if that resonates more effectively with some voters – I’m happy to go with the pollsters and spin doctors on that one. But let’s not forget what we mean by it. Of course, we don’t only mean monetary measures of income and wealth. But these are a major part of the package, and serve as basic indicators and, moreover, crucial determinants of those other dimensions – educational opportunity, social inclusion, cultural participation – that also matter. Six years after Labour’s first election victory the income and wealth gap in Britain remains one of the worst in Europe – an appalling legacy of the Thatcherite revolution that continues to undermine our social fabric and frustrate Labour’s other social, economic and political objectives. The forces now driving the widening dispersal of earnings and capital acquisition are forbiddingly powerful; some of them are global. The danger is that after a time such phenomena are no longer regarded as the responsibility of government, because they are no longer within its control – a perception that the Conservatives tried to engineer with regard to mass unemployment. We must rule out any similar abdication of the left’s historic task of a progressive equalisation of opportunities and outcomes. The second area where Compass puts down a clear ideological marker is on the defence of collectivism and the public domain. Again, this is a problem where social trends and economic dynamics are in many respects against us. We live in an increasingly atomised and privatised society where many seek their escape from the world of work, not in political or community action, but in the comforts of personal consumption. Again, clarity of thinking is essential here: the left must not deny the truth of this picture. Our policies and politics must adapt to gain purchase. But this does not mean we can adopt a stance of simple neutrality towards it, even less an uncritical embrace. We must be obsessive in our search for countervailing tendencies, and policy instruments that can strengthen them. We must engage with the reality of contemporary social change precisely because we have not given up on the vision of the good society we want to create. This would be a society where voter turnout is increasing, not declining; where voluntary involvements are the norm; where trade union membership is growing; where people are ready to set aside a greater portion of their income for social provision through the taxation system; and where they view the public services that result as a shared project in which they are responsible co-producers, not as just another commodified realm where they seek the best for themselves with what market power they have. On both these fronts – the advance towards equality, and the expansion of the public domain – the government’s scorecard is mixed. And it is clear that this is because in both cases it has had to work against the grain of the contemporary market economy. This is another important argument of the Compass pamphlet, and perhaps the radical thread tying together all its propositions: Labour needs to redevelop “a critical relationship to capitalism” (to borrow a phrase I heard recently from a thoughtful party member), to both its economic operations and its social and cultural effects. Labour needs not just to administer but to intervene in and redirect capitalism. To pose the problems is not to provide the answers. Compass points out some directions for travel, but does not presume to know the policies or strategies that will take us further along those roads. Is a more progressive income tax regime an unavoidable part of the answer, or a red herring? Will investment in childcare give us the leverage we need to equalise life chances? What will it take to distribute quality employment more evenly around the UK’s regions? How can we best combine decentralisation and choice with equity and universality in public services? Here, I expect, the agreement that has broken out among these most opinionated and argumentative of Labour supporters comes to an end – and rightly so. We have reaffirmed and clarified our common ideological orientation – let the battle of ideas recommence as we seek to identify the practical steps that these ideals require of us. Martin McIvor is director of Catalyst and a co-founder of Compass Published in Progress magazine |
 |
|
