With the 2015 UK general election looming, the Labour Party has begun its attempt to shore up support amongst its fringe voters. With polls suggesting that it will be a close run thing, the fragmentation of support across the Left is a threat to the Labour methodology.
Labour's approach has long been about claiming control of the establishment and propping up it up, in order to use its power in support of their goals. Those electoral aims, of propping-up and shielding, are fundamentally contradictory. They leave no room for external compromise or co-operation that might challenge the establishment they hope to use and so requires, and demands, comprehensive majority support. As David Marquand (Bogdanor, 1983) put it about Labour theorist Anthony Crosland:
"Crosland took the traditional structure of the British state for granted, and failed to see that the centralist, elitist logic underlying it was incompatible with his own libertarian and egalitarian values."
Yet, even as it demands monolithic solidarity from voters, the party continues to be blatant in its hypocrisy by remaining as twisted by internal intrigue as ever. Former Brownites, Ed Miliband and Ed Balls, struggle amongst themselves, with former Blairites, and also with the more socially conservative voices in the party (McElvoy, 2015). They argue as to which populist policy to throw out next, in an attempt to shore up its wavering support (Ratcliffe, 2015), and they argue over what socialist economics really ought to look like:
"In truth, Balls and Miliband do have different visions of what a progressive economy should look like. Miliband has a fundamentally less approving view of the way markets work than many in the Labour centre ground (a whiff of the idealism of an American east coast seminar room is never far off). Balls takes a more pragmatic view that the best way to advance progressive goals is to allow the markets free reign and cream off revenues to use for social gain." (McElvoy, 2015)
In 2010, Labour warned of the risks of a split vote, caused by those who thought of leaving the party to look for brighter alternatives elsewhere. In the run-up to that election, the Liberal Democrats had appeared like a fresh voice, which
spoke of an active and hopeful step forward. Labour, in turn, offered only a stable
conservation, centred on the establishment - and they lost a lot of voters,
though fear succeeded, at least temporarily, in quelling the tide before
it became a flood.
Those warnings from the party and from commentators, in the face of a fragmenting political order, have now turned against the Greens. Former Labour minister Peter Hain has called for the party to come up with policy proposals that will allow the party to cover any potential threat to the solidarity of its support that the more radical Green Party might pose (Wintour, 2015).
In the light of the pressures being placed on the Greens, it is unsurprising that a lot has been made of the apparent announcement that its support for a Citizen's Income will not be in its 2015 election manifesto (Riley-Smith, 2015). In an interview on BBC Radio 4’s Today Programme, Green MP Caroline Lucas said that:
"The Citizen's Income is not going to be in the 2015 general election manifesto as something to be introduced on May 8th. It is a longer term aspiration; we are still working on it... The Citizen's Income, as I've explained, is not going to be a red line."
Its apparent absence from the Green Party's campaign was revealed over a series of interviews where the policy was heavily criticised with regards to its cost (Findlay, 2015). While Lucas attempted to play down the party's intentions regarding Citizen's Income, other senior Green Party members have reaffirmed their commitment to putting the policy into the 2015 manifesto (Cowburn, 2015).
However, some of those among the Greens, such as MP Caroline Lucas, seem to be responding to the party's election possibilities with pragmatism. They are looking for the party to gain enough seats to take part in a left-wing coalition, and are setting out, ahead of time, where they draw the line for coalition talks (BBC, 2015).
"What we are going to do is to put forward some radical and visionary ideas which this political system needs so badly. What we are also going to do, with a handful of MPs, is to push Labour in particular to be far more progressive."
That means leading with their more modest aims, to give them the best chance of achieving an agreement. It also means learning from Liberal Democrat mistakes and not committing to things ahead of time, which they may not be able to achieve come May.
However, while the Green Party are making compromises to be a progressive force alongside, and not necessarily instead of or opposed to, the Labour Party, Labour continue to be pushed towards their standard, monolithic, pragmatic response: give us your vote unswervingly and we will save people from cuts and inequality.
The SNP too is now on the receiving end of whispered warnings (Rawnsley, 2015). The rise of Scottish separatism, and of the SNP as a left-of-centre alternative, has Labour scrambling to find a response that allows them to protect the establishment they deem so precious to their goals, while wooing back their disaffected supporters.
Labour remain clinging to their hopes of power in a dead system. They hang on to their two-party, us and them,
polarised dynamics, and try to squeeze out the rest of the Left, with negative
tactics on the one hand, and populist appeals on the other, and warnings of a need to act practically
in response to the system's iniquities, even as they fail to press for reform of those
same iniquities.
They encourage a resistance to radicalism within the Left, feeding the fear of loss; the fear of losing the ground claimed inch-by-clawed-inch, year-by-painful-year. Those tactics have motivated continued support for Labour, even as they have failed to secure those hard fought victories with constitutional or economic reforms.
Voters continue to point to the dangers of stepping outside of the safe routine for fear that the selfish other might sneak in and conquer. But there is a longer term danger of failing to reach, than in reaching and falling short. While the Left has hidden away in its Labour bastion, it has been suffering a slow creeping loss. The Left allowed the momentum, the initiative, to be taken by conservative and reactionary forces. The Left, in their fear, have succumbed to a slow shifting, slipping, seeping surrender to an agenda set by the Right.
The question is, after 2010 brought a fresh voice against Labour's stable conservatism, will people fall back into Labour's drudging march, or will they keep looking for new hope with the Liberal Democrats, or with the Greens, or the SNP? Or, can Labour finally turn over a new leaf after one hundred years where each radical step has been accompanied by a conservative one: civil liberties with authoritarian policing, public health with privatisation, devolution with centralised control, popular power turned into an obsession with establishment power?
If Labour is truly committed to the best interests of the Left, it has to learn to co-operate. The support for the Greens, SNP and Lib Dems, as
left-wing alternatives, represents various kinds of idealist hopes for the
future, all of which have been strangled within a political system that the Labour Party
has persistently used against these left-wing oppositions to its own agenda.
Labour need to overcome that bad habit and get behind political reform, to reshape politics so that the Left, in all of its wonderful and diversely fragmented forms, can work side by side.
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References:
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+ David Marquand, in Vernon Bogdanor's 'Multi-party politics and the Constitution'; Cambridge University Press, 1983. [Buy Now
]+ Anne McElvoy's 'The clash of two Eds raises the ghost of Labour past'; in The Guardian; 22 February 2015.
+ Rebecca Ratcliffe's 'Would £6,000 tuition fees be a vote winner for Labour?'; in The Guardian; 16 February 2015.
+ Patrick Wintour's 'Labour needs to be more radical to counter Green threat, says Peter Hain'; in The Guardian; 22 January 2015.
+ Ben Riley-Smith's 'Greens ditch citizens' income from election manifesto'; in The Telegraph; 2 February 2015.
+ Joseph Finlay's 'What Natalie Should Have Said - How to Fund the Green Party's Citizen's Income Policy'; in The Huffington Post UK; 1 February 2015.
+ Ashley Cowburn's 'Green deputy leaders contradict Caroline Lucas: Citizens’ Income will be in the manifesto'; in The New Statesman; 9 February 2015.
+ 'Green leader Natalie Bennett backtracks on terror groups'; on the BBC; 3 February 2015.
+ Andrew Rawnsley's 'Voting SNP is more likely to hand power to Cameron than to Miliband'; in The Guardian; 22 February 2015.
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