While the then prime minister’s sentimentality was roundly ridiculed, wanting to turn the clock back to an idealised past is par for the course for conservatives. What, though, are we to make of ostensibly progressive voices such as Jon Cruddas and Jonathan Rutherford clinging on to a romanticised Olde England, albeit a grittier one of community-owned ports and ancient fish markets? ‘Labour’s future in England is conservative’, they declare. Really?
On one thing, the need for financial reform, Cruddas and Rutherford are right. As I argue in Aftershock: Reshaping the World Economy After the Crisis, our bloated banks need to be broken up. Britain’s financial sector is a government-subsidised racket that makes monopoly profits in good times, gets bailed out in bad, crowds out productive industries, destabilises our economy and subverts our politics. Just because the government taxes away some of those monopoly returns doesn’t mean that the UK benefits from being fleeced by the financial sector.
Unfortunately, the rest of Cruddas’s and Rutherford’s often incoherent argument is wrongheaded. They defame New Labour by lumping it together with Enoch Powell, ‘the prophet of the Thatcher revolution’, while also accusing it of destroying the party’s English working-class roots by abandoning the country to immigration and multiculturalism – the very things Powell hated. So were New Labour and Enoch Powell intellectual soulmates or mortal enemies? They can’t be both. And when the two authors call for Labour to ‘confront and turn the page on what Powell started’, their prescription sounds a lot like watered down Powellism: Labour, they argue, should ‘fight for an England which belongs to the English just as they belong to the land’. Nick Griffin would no doubt agree.
Their analysis of last year’s election defeat is also confused. The notion that Labour lost because it was New Labour is bizarre. Tony Blair assembled a broad coalition of voters that delivered three election victories. While the Iraq war did a lot of damage in 2005, New Labour still won. What changed between 2005 and 2010? Gordon Brown proved to be a disastrous prime minister. The man who boasted that he had abolished boom and bust presided over the worst recession since the 1930s – a global crisis, yes, but one which this champion of the lightly regulated City did nothing to prevent. And while people weren’t convinced by Cameron’s Conservatives, they were mightily sick of 13 long years of Labour rule.
Yes, of course Labour needs to reconnect with those white working-class voters who feel it does not address their concerns about housing, jobs and public services. Labour’s biggest failure in office was housing: cheering on the property bubble while not building enough social housing. Affordable housing should be at the centre of the next manifesto: a tax on land values, for instance, would encourage the private sector to redevelop brownfield sites and help pay for a new generation of affordable homes. Labour can improve on its good record on jobs with a Danish-style commitment to lifelong learning and employability, combined with a generous but tough welfare system that provides a hand-up rather than a hand-out. Increased investment in transport – another area where Labour failed to deliver – would help spread growth and opportunity. Last but not least, a genuine commitment to good education for everyone, especially the poorest – not a piffling pupil premium carved out of a shrinking education budget – is essential. We can learn from Finland, whose schools are rated the best in the world. All this could help break the vicious cycle of deprivation that is scandalous in a rich country like ours, while also stimulating growth.
It would be a terrible mistake, though, to wrongly blame our economic and social problems on Britain’s openness to the rest of the world. Trade with China, foreign investment and Polish workers all boost growth and create jobs. Now, more than ever, if we are to break out of our unhealthy reliance on debt-fuelled consumption, housing and finance, our future prosperity depends on exporting to China, investment from India, educating foreign students and a diverse workforce that generates new ideas and businesses. And an open economy also needs to be flexible – otherwise we could end up like Spain, with a 20 per cent unemployment rate and 40 per cent of young people out of work. There is nothing progressive about a rigid labour market that ossifies the economy and excludes outsiders.
In any case, Labour cannot win again solely by appealing to a dwindling band of white working-class English voters. It also needs to win back middle-class voters, those of immigrant descent, and Scottish and Welsh voters for whom talk of ‘forever England’ holds little appeal. Labour needs to be about tomorrow’s Britain – which, like today’s, will be wonderfully diverse.
In our age of easyJet, Facebook, curry and kebabs, American TV shows and foreign news, Greenpeace and other global campaigns, national boundaries are blurring, while people within Britain are also freer to express their differences since the liberating 1960s. Is that such a bad thing?
While Cruddas and Rutherford fret about ‘what in our differences do we hold in common?’, the answer is simple: we live in the same country, vote in the same elections, accept the rule of the majority while protecting the rights of minorities, use the NHS, watch the BBC, speak English, and share aspirations for a richer, fairer and more secure future.
Our diversity too can unite us. Since modern Britain is inescapably diverse, any definition of shared identity that fails to recognise this inevitably excludes some members of society and thus divides it. Londoners treasure the city’s diversity as a key part of its identity. We all celebrate diversity in national football teams – is it such a stretch to apply this more widely? Our diversity ought to be a source of strength, not of weakness, a reason to belong not an excuse to exclude. We should embrace it rather than seek to deny it.
Yes good,but this ‘working class’ business,its so hard isn’t it means different things to different people.The cliche ,if you like is a factory worker ,union member ,or if they’ve been made redundant because of closure perhaps on the dole.Or living in council housing in and out of some peripatetic jobs or on /off the dole. But my idea of working class is someone who say earns up to 60k.that is double the national average wage, people in this bracket work hard ,but there must be some resentment from tax payers towards those who pay none or evade fair contribution at the top end .Its the consolidation of those at the disadvantaged end with those average earners that could cohere the country to fight the greed at the ‘top’. ? and yes this consolidation will come from a modern approach,not this week’s knitting pattern.
I think if your going to make an interpretation of ‘our green and pleasant land’ then you need to understand the hopes and aspirations of what people want at grass route level. Discussions resolve more around streets being safe, under age drinking and what some would bracket as the respect agenda when ‘getting back to how things used to be’, ‘turning back the clock, as its been put is referred to. While economics do come in to it, even more so now, it’s the ‘respect agenda’ that is the leader in this issue and its something we ignore at our peril.
but respect has to work both ways,and those kids who have nothing left but to deal drugs (the grass route indeed) ,stab each other , mug and burgle – its such high visibility crime isn’t it (as opposed to so much other sophisticated ,behind closed city towers type) and drink to feel some temporary life enjoyment whilst accomodating those who once again benefit financially from them doing so .These kids have a right to have their life potential respected too and our society should be able to offer that.
Legrain is right to argue that Labour embrace diversity, but that requires an understanding of the elements that constitute that diversity, and one thing he and New Labour definitely do not get any more is the white working-class and their sense of dispossession. This can be attributed to a variety of factors, economic policy primarily and schmoozing with big corporates, but within the party itself the dislocation is down to the elite at the top sucking all the power upwards and plugging their ears to those beneath. Far too many at the top have no have no origins in the working-class and neither have they worked their way up from the bottom, while those few who do seem to have forgotten what the lower rungs of society’s everyday struggles are. I despair every time a party top dog visits the constituency. I observe as they go through the motions of trying to connect, the artificiality and insincerity of it not lost upon locals, knowing that upon their departure I”ll hear the same old refrain of “they just don’t get us , do they?” And so the hard work starts all over from scratch to rebuild trust and faith
Philipe as Anthony Painter points out over on Labour List there is an important argument taking shape here. So I’ll make my own personal response. The problem with your suggested alternative to our argument is that you embrace everyone and no-one. One can love humanity but no-one in particular. It is a politics that ends up in meaninglessness. There is nothing wrong with Romanticism. It has its problems but socialism particularly in England was strongly influenced by the Romantic movement. Nor is there anything wrong in looking to the past. We need to in order to learn lessons about the future; to remind ourselves of the virtues and enduring values that make life meaningful . The politics you suggest is a recipe for an unanchored life. And an unanchored life breeds fear and anxiety and creates the fertile ground for extremist politics. Ownership matters and our economy increasingly does not belong to us so I favour a community owned port in Dover, and Forests that remain in some form of public ownership. Local place matters to people. Families matter. Life for most people is parochial and its good. The symbols of a national community matter. What holds society together are relationships built up between people and which extend upward into the body politics through strong institutions. Democracy requires deep social foundations framed by a national community. That is the only viable basis for a global economy. Your world of easy jet, kebabs, American tv shows etc is no basis for sustaining a society. It lacks any depth or sense of belonging and it will not hold things together in the face of the destructive effects of capitalist globalisation. It will not stop the commodification of people’s labour and of nature. The problem with liberal progressive politics is that it has become abstract. It belongs nowhere. Its the politics of disconnection. The best way forward is to rework socialism for our times and that means democracy all the way down and all the way up and not stopping at the door to the economy. Anthony on Labour list suggests revisiting early New Labour with its ethical socialism, stakeholding and language of community. Its no longer enough but it seems a good place to begin. What’s interesting about the current popularity of the film The Kings Speech is that it echoes our contemporary predicament. After decades of the Thatcher hegemony (and Powell was its prophet and New Labour despite blunting it was one phase of it) we have become a country without a people and a people without a voice. In other words it has not only wrecked our economy it has put our democracy at risk.
As if to say, ‘Britain forever!’ Spoken as a true metropolitan Brit of non-native-English stock!
By the way, that John Major quote clearly refers to England even though it actually talks of “Britain”. He was a classic Anglo-Brit. You definitely seem to be a 100% Brit of the New Labour school: denying the validity of any distinct English identity at all and subsuming England into Britain. That might be OK in the metropolitan, Europhile circles in which you move; but it’s not acceptable to the great majority of English people – including the non-whites – who aren’t prepared to see England and Englishness obliterated in this way.
You say, “Labour cannot win again solely by appealing to a dwindling band of white working-class English voters. It also needs to win back middle-class voters, those of immigrant descent, and Scottish and Welsh voters for whom talk of ‘forever England’ holds little appeal.” This comes across as inverted-racist Anglophobia. Those middle-class voters are presumably mostly white and English; many of “those of immigrant descent” who live in England also identify as English – unless you’re reserving ‘English’ for a despised ethnic under-class that you seem to believe are less worthy of Labour’s campaigning efforts that the ‘non-English’ class with which you clearly identify.
Plus Labour’s vote share actually increased in Scotland at the last election; so if you want to be a party for the whole of Britain, I think you do need to prioritise England a bit more. But of course, you’re thinking of Labour’s best chance of winning an overall majority in the UK parliament: electing a large number of Scottish and Welsh MPs who can then override the will of England’s elected representatives on English bills just like in the New Labour days. As you say, “we live in the same country, vote in the same elections”. Not true, of course: the Scots and Welsh elect representatives to decide on matters such as health care, education and transport for their own countries (in devolved government); and then they also elect representatives to make decisions in the same policy areas for England only. So they have double the electoral power that English people do.
So clearly, “Labour cannot win again solely by appealing to a dwindling band of white working-class English voters” – but you think it can and should win by ignoring them, even as I repudiate that racial stereotype of those who identify as English. But after all, as you say, “any definition of shared identity that fails to recognise this [diversity of modern Britain] inevitably excludes some members of society and thus divides it”. So we’ll just exclude Englishness then, shall we, as a precondition of establishing a multi-cultural Britain in its place? But that’s OK, of course. That’s not racism, is it?
“non-native English stock”! wot like the Romans the Normans the Vikings ! and people who came because we desperately needed them from the Caribbean after the war or gave them shelter from the Nazis as we did with many Poles,etc etc .
@ d.mcardle – if you read my whole comment, you’ll see that I don’t have a mono-ethnic concept of the English, unlike Philippe Legrain, it would appear. He seems to think that those of non-British origin such as himself (French father, American-Estonian mother) can only integrate if the society into which they integrate is a multi-cultural Britain, rather than a multi-ethnic England, which is what I advocate.
d.mcardle in reply to your response relating to having nothing left but to deal drugs etc and needing to be respected too. It’s complete nonsense. Nobody has the right to peddle drugs and to believe they should be respected for doing it is stupidity at best, a moronic opinion at worse. If the crass opinion is in some way attempting to suggest that the people – its not all kids (apart from those underage drinking) causing problems need to be provided with better options than thinking crime is a solution to anything then I agree with you but just to say its justified and has to be respected is foolish. It’s a choice and a lifestyle and before you come back with no it isn’t, let me advise you that while I am sat here at my pc an associate who chose a different path than the one I took at 15 is now doing 20+ years in prison.
Britologywatch just tore the limbs off Philippe Legrain’s argument and left it bleeding to death on the carpet.
yes ,thankyou for that clarification , I did indeed mean that they should be provided with better options and support.