DOM has been with Labour ever since the party was founded more than a century ago. If all politics ends in failure, then for Labour all government ends in the tirades of DOM. Of course there is a critique of the last Labour government. It lost control of public finances sometime after 2005 when the public bureaucracy made an audacious bid for taxpayers’ money and replaced politics by state management. But the achievements of 1997-2010 still remain undimmed. Here is the reply I posted on the OD website in reply to Marquand who invited us to read Burke as well as left texts.
‘Yes, David, but I remember saying all this after 1970 as a young Labour activist convinced that the Wilson government had betrayed the workers, sold out to market forces, and done nothing to reform the Lords, monarchy, public schools, the City et cetera. And after 1951 there were identical cries of betrayal at how Attlee, Morrison, Bevin et al had betrayed socialism, opted for Nato, spurned the USSR, held back workers’ pay, left the public schools, the odious rightwing media, and the Lords unreformed.
‘But yesterday I was in two new schools in Rotherham which were light, airy, full of fun and fizz and utterly, utterly different from the schools I saw when first elected in 1994. The cars in the teachers’ car park were handsome and new and for a moment I was very proud of what Labour 1997-2010 achieved. My northern borough has many, many problems but life is incomparably better for many (not all, not everyone, but many) because there were social democratic reformist ministers in charge after 1997.
‘I can list all the things that did not happen or did, but should have happened. But my whole life I have listened to the litany of betrayal chanted at Willy Brandt, Felipe Gonzalez, Goran Persson, Francois Mitterrand, LBJ, Bill Clinton and now Barack Obama as well as at every Labour government. I love Burke but his lines on the French revolution are pure reaction.
‘Can we not learn from the European tradition of historic compromise such as Swedish and Swiss socialists fashioned in the 1930s. But for the left of those countries these compromises, even as they helped greatly the workers and the poor, were of course betrayals. I just wonder if the discourse of intense dislike of anything a left party does in power under the conditions of electoral democracy takes us forward. Crosland provided a road map but did so without trashing the Attlee achievements. We need some Crosland de nos jours and fewer denunciations.’
I’m always conscious of the danger of having in my head what the late humourist Robert Anton Wilson called a “loser script” – in other words, of trying to slot events and individuals into a narrative which ends in tragedy. That’s why my favourite political slogan is from Samuel Beckett: “Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” It’s like “optimism of the will, pessimism of the intellect” but funnier. I suppose that what Denis writes above could be interpreted as a criticism of Neal Lawson and John Harris via David Marquand. But then, John and Neal are writing a winner script at the moment. What strikes me though is that what Denis leaves out of his criticism of New Labour in office is the crisis which crunched the last government’s approach to the economy – this is just as much an oversight in Marquand, in Kellner who is partly critiquing, and in other responses to the “new socialism”. Here, I think there’s much we can learn from Thatcher… (labourlist.org/ideas-for-electability-the-right-to-own)