In 1978, after a century and a half of progress, historian Eric Hobsbawm asked whether we had seen the forward march of labour halted? . For those of us involved then in the struggle for the survival of the Labour Party, the question mark in his title seemed a little superfluous. Under the slogan keeping in touch with our roots , Labour had lost touch with modern reality.
It was only after controversy, struggle and enormous effort that the forward march resumed twenty years later with Labour s historic victory in 1997. For two decades the task had been simple but immense to relate Labour again to the modern world and contemporary working families.
New Labour, as it emerged, translated our traditional values into a programme relevant to a broad spectrum of modern working people. Their support enabled us to implement some of the objectives that had proved beyond the capacity of previous Labour governments like the century-old demands for the minimum wage and devolution.
That new approach was based on two simple premises: first, a recognition that, though our values remain constant, how we apply them has to be based on an analysis of the world as it exists today, not as in our romantic and collective memory. Second, an acceptance that, because the world as it exists today is not the same as the world we will encounter tomorrow, there is a need for continual revision and modernisation.
This is the application of our traditional values in a modern setting. Simple enough to say, perhaps, but more complex to achieve. At every stage, progress has been opposed by those who substitute old slogans for contemporary analysis. It needed continuous political struggle to convince the whole Labour movement that the alternative to this approach is continual decline and, ultimately, demise.
Today, with the world changing faster than ever, the need for a constant revision of how we apply our values is even greater. So what are the major social forces that shape the world in which we now live and what challenges will they throw up for the next decade?
The first concern is the concept of community, at the centre of developing socialism. In its various forms solidarity, collectivism, social justice, the need for responsibility to balance rights the sense of the individual as a member of a community is central to the socialist mindset. Yet the modern sense of community is being formed in the midst of major domestic and international changes. Two developments are particularly potent.
The first is described by that trite term globalisation . The technological revolution, which has delivered unparalleled access to knowledge for some, also means that investment, jobs and security can traverse continents in the time it took to cross the street a few years ago. Decisions previously taken locally are now being removed, socially and geographically, from those affected. As the global economy becomes interdependent, the mechanisms for integration and influence remain distant or underdeveloped. People s lives are affected by decisions over which they have less control than ever. Distancing means powerlessness and insecurity.
Yet at the same time, at a domestic level, traditional social formations that enshrined some security through community have been breaking down for decades. Traditional family structures, including the extended family, have reduced rapidly. Marriage is more transient. People move around more, settled communities are rarer, social mobility greater. The collective esprit de corps of industrial capitalism has reduced with the decline of heavy industry, factories and associated communities. Play, now moved from the street or field to the bedroom computer, like work, has become more centred on the individual.
Thus the traditional buffer against insecurity community has been eroded just as the basic causes of insecurity powerlessness in the face of alien forces have been increasing. How are we to tackle this issue and its consequences? How do we, as democratic socialists, address the breakdown of social solidarity, collective values and mutual responsibilities?
These will be crucial questions for Labour over the next decade. Because, important though material wellbeing is, it s not just the economy, stupid which determines the extent of our personal security or (Nye Bevan s word) serenity. It s not just the state which secures. Security derives from and manifests itself in our social formations, belief systems and mutual support. That is why it is so important for us to develop our thinking on the nature of modern civic society and in the whole area of rights and responsibilities, which are intrinsic to it.
We should not be deterred by those for whom any talk of responsibility smacks of Toryism. Far from being a derivative of rightwing thinking, this sense of individual responsibility to others and the security of knowing that it is reciprocated, is intrinsic to the very notion of socialism. We can clearly draw on the values of the pioneers of the Labour movement, who placed such emphasis on solidarity, self-help, mutual responsibility and voluntary commitment, rather than just on the apparatus of the state.
Nor should we be deterred from continuously modernising ourselves. As our ideology develops with social change, so must structures and relationships in the Labour movement itself. We are, as Mick McGahey once said, a movement, not a monument . Yet changing the relationship between the party and trade unions has always caused controversy. At the present time, some claim that any change must mean that the party is deserting its roots, denouncing any move away from their agenda as mere rightwing expediency. Unfortunately, it is not open to socialists to ignore a century of social and political change. The changing nature of the party union relationship is a sensible response to that change.
A century ago there was a huge overlap between the demands of trade unions the workers organised as producers and an appealing, appropriate manifesto for the Labour Party because the electorate was composed of workers who were nothing more than producers. Their economic position gave them little more than basic means to continue working and the minimum for food, clothing and shelter. There was little left over through which to exercise choice. The commonality of this experience extended this consciousness beyond the factory gate and into the local community.
Precisely because of the past success of the Labour movement, workers now enjoy choice, education, experience and aspirations never available to their parents and grandparents. The Labour Party has thus to address an electorate largely composed of consumers, with aspirations and expectations deriving from that hard-won status. It is this huge social change which necessitates a change in our relationship with our union colleagues. We share in many areas common objectives but, just as the audiences to whom we appeal have become much more differentiated, so must our relationship.
These changes will not go away. If anything, they may accelerate. Failure to address them will result not in their being rendered irrelevant but in us becoming so. Challenges such as these are often uncomfortable and unsettling. The cosy certainties of yesterday are always more comforting than facing up to those changes. But then that would be a certain way of ensuring that our forward march once again came to a grinding halt.