Of all the accusations thrown at the Labour government, none has been more persistent than that we have forsaken Labour’s traditional values. Critics from left and right unite in a common front against the leadership of the party in their continued insistence that the party’s basic principles have been abandoned in the pursuit of power.
This allegation is clearly fallacious. Those with even a fleeting knowledge of the history of the Labour party know that Tony Blair’s government has pursued social democratic values in a manner consistent with the party in all its previous incarnations. Our economic and social policies are rooted in the values that inspired the founding of the Labour party a hundred years ago: namely, liberty, equality and fraternity.
Yet this misconception persists among sections of the Labour movement. It is worrying and, potentially, damaging. As a party with a strong sense of its own history, suggestions that the government has abandoned Labour’s traditional values generate considerable unease. The result is suspicion of our motives: the government’s intentions are repeatedly second-guessed, and the movement’s trust in us – so vital in difficult times – gradually eroded.
It is therefore imperative that the myth be exploded. To do this successfully, however, we must first understand why it has proved so potent. The answer, I would suggest, lies in a failure of communication on our part. As a party and latterly as a government we have failed to communicate the way in which our values develop our policy. We have neither adequately explained the necessity of revisionism that underpins our whole approach to government, nor the broader social democratic ideas on which
we have based our specific policies. In short,
we have failed to develop a narrative that locates this government firmly within the broad tradition of Labour politics.
I suspect that the origins of this failure lie in the early 1990s. Keen to distance the party from the disasters of the late 1970s and early 1980s, we allowed the impression to grow that New Labour rejected the party’s entire history. This was never true, but it did enable a perception to develop that we neither cared for, nor would be influenced by, classical social democratic thought.
Naturally, our leftist critics made the most of all this. They have been allowed, almost entirely unchallenged, to develop a mythologised history of the Labour party. The socialist principles that had guided Labour since its birth, so we were told, had been discarded by a bunch of unprincipled opportunists in the pursuit of power. In short, Tony Blair was a Tory and the Labour party was no more.
This account was well developed even before we took office. But the challenges inherent in the wielding of power presented some of our internal oppositionists with the opportunity to ratchet up the rhetoric. This is par for the course when Labour is in power. To govern effectively demands an acceptance of the ethic of responsibility. It involves an acceptance of the limitations of political action; a willingness to grapple with pragmatic questions of choice and priorities; seeing the need for reconciliation and compromise. We have governed in a fashion consistent with this ethic.
This is anathema to some of our critics. Interested only in purity of intention and absolute ends, and with little or no interest in political power, their actions have a purely exemplary value. One single end transcends all others and justifies a total sacrifice. The compromises necessary to govern effectively are wholly alien to this section of the left. They will never be satisfied by anything a Labour government does.
Notwithstanding this, those holding such a view are in a small minority. The larger body of the Labour movement, including most of those anxious that the government has forgotten the party’s historic purpose, is open to persuasion. They want – and deserve – an explanation of how our policies spring from our values. It is the job of the leadership, despite all the other pressures of time, to get out there and explain the continuities between the Labour party past and present, and to explain that our social and economic policies are wholly consistent with the best traditions of British social democracy. To convince people that it is our task not only to deliver, but also to develop, social democracy.
Let me sketch out how such a project should proceed. In the first instance we must explain our commitment to the principle
of revisionism. Developed originally by the dissident Marxist Eduard Bernstein, revisionism has been central to Labour party thought since at least the 1940s. Yet revisionism is not a body of doctrine. It is a cast of mind based on two simple premises. First, that our policies and prescriptions must relate to the world in which we and our electorate actually live today, rather than some (romanticised or otherwise) past.
Second, that today’s world will be different tomorrow, because the only constant is change. Thus, though our values endure, the circumstances in which we have to apply them, and the means of applying them, must change.
Revisionism says ‘here is the world, here are the most important facts about it, here are the values we bring to bear on the facts, here are our conclusions, and the actions which spring from them’. It exposes those who stick to the status quo as a matter of principle as the conservatives they are.
Revisionism is thus predicated on a distinction between means and ends. The latter remain the same, but the former is liable to repeated adjustment. It can surely be no other way in a world where change is the only constant. We retain our commitment to liberty, equality and fraternity; only the ways in which we apply these values have changed.
Of course, these values are often in tension and we must be prepared to admit that this is so. Developing policies that promote all three values simultaneously, and to an equal extent, is extremely difficult. We should be confident enough to admit this also.
Take the recent debates about foundation hospitals. Critics of this policy are overwhelmingly concerned with equality, which they believe to depend on a uniformity of provision. I certainly respect their view, but they fail to deal with the world as it is. This is an NHS with powerful existing inequities that their ‘uniformity’ has failed to abolish. And also those who oppose this policy must be aware of the centrality of liberty and fraternity to the social democratic lexicon. Decentralising power to those using and working in hospitals promises both an enlargement of freedom and the encouragement of participation. This is wholly in line with the social democratic tradition.
We must similarly be prepared to highlight continuities in social and economic policy. One of the most prominent aspects
of the government’s economic and social philosophy is the insistence that individual rights must be matched by collective responsibilities. Indeed, this conviction underpins a whole raft of policies from the New Deal through to our recent programmes to combat anti-social behaviour.
At the heart of such policies is an emphasis on reciprocity consistent with the Labour party’s traditional commitment to fraternity. Keir Hardie certainly had no doubt about each individual’s obligations to his fellow citizens and to society. Neither did Clement Attlee. Indeed the latter stressed that duties were as important as rights, even declaring that: ‘The greatest task which is ahead of all of us in the Labour and socialist movement is to see to it that the citizen’s sense of obligation to the community keeps pace with the changes effected in the structure of society.’
How could it be any other way in a Labour party that was founded on the values of fellowship and committed to the brotherhood of man? But then, Hardie and Attlee were both attacked as guilty, revisionist compromisers in their own time. Plus ça change…