Neal Lawson responds to Anthony Painter’s article, Uber-connected
I agree with everything Anthony Painter says. We are facing new times, a paradigm shift from a 20th century world that was all top-down command and control – the politics of elites – to a 21st century world of bottom-up change and dispersed power – the politics of networks.
This presents an existential challenge to Labour – can it make the cultural leap to join the new century? Labour, as it stands, is profoundly a party of the past. It sees itself as the only vehicle through which change can happen – the logic of its DNA is, ‘Vote for us – we will make good things happen to you, you will be grateful, and you will then vote for us again.’ As such it tries to recreate 1945 or even 1997 but with little of the intellectual coherence and none of the deep social and cultural forces that made those two moments possible. Long ago Labour stopped being a movement in which different interests were represented.
The Labour party is drying up just at the moment, as Anthony Painter makes clear: new forces are emerging that will not wait for the political class to do things for them and to them – they are making their own world. From the local to the global, Labour means little to them.
So it is no coincidence that not a single social democratic party the world over is on the front foot ideologically or organisationally. Yes, they can stumble into office, but not in a way that allows them to make the weather.
But what Anthony Painter describes is a unique opportunity – on these new and flatter planes, with everyone connected to everything, we have the chance to be more egalitarian and democratic. Yes, it is contested but there is an opportunity to unite means and ends – we create a more democratic and equal world by behaving in a more democratic and equal way. Can Labour rise to that challenge and change itself in ways it has never managed before?
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Neal Lawson is chair of Compass. He tweets @Neal_Compass
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Articles in the Britain 2020 series are all available to read on the Progress website
Dried up? Add water. Start by watering down academic reading in that BA PPE course up at Oxford by adding a Marketing Tips for beginners section. Philosophy needs a Room 101 bin.
Have you read some of the spelling, out-of-context and grammatical errors some [many?] PPCs are distributing online for their Election Launches? Abysmal. Back to the Copwriter editor’s drawing board. Does LABOUR pay for the illegible gumpf that I read in Newsletters from MPs and PPCs up and down the land? That Oxford PPE degree needs a reality injection. And less Union scriptwriters. Or more depending which end of the country you reside.
Shoot the Author[s]. God help Labour.