Same old lefties
As someone who sees himself as, at times, or in part, on the political left, I've seen all of this kind of thing before. By 'this kind of thing' I mean the sudden hostility between Labour and the Lib Dems, which of course existed before, but is even more vicious now that the Lib Dems have got a fingernail in power and Labour have been nudged into a period of soul-searching, rebooting and opposition - or perhaps just the repositioning and rebranding that worked so well last time.
I had it once described to me that the Right are like Catholicism - strong, pigheaded, determined, blindly faithful despite whatever evidence to the contrary might turn up, but united, powerful, cohesive. Whereas the Left are a bit like Protestantism - because their very existence came about as a protest about something and as a reform, they can't help looking at themselves and wondering which bit needs reforming next, and which bit they can protest about - leading to more and more splits and splinters along the way. Which is why we have a rainbow coalition of Proddy churches and just the one bloc of Catholics. I can see the argument, and it makes a bit of sense. But I would hope that somewhere along the line the left might try and get over these stumbling blocks, and over their (our) inherent desire to reform, to criticise, to protest and to maybe think about the consequences of the endless infighting, splitting and so on.
Maybe that's hopelessly naive, and I really ought to go outside and have a word with myself. Probably it is. I get the sense among many on the left, and I'm thinking about New Labour cheerleaders here, that they feel a bit betrayed by what the Lib Dems have done - getting a bit of power in return for shacking up with the Tories and biting the bullet on stuff they used to believe in. That's the charge, anyway. I'm not so sure it's as simple as that, though. Because many of us who are on the liberal rather than authoritarian left (there I go, splitting again), and don't really like the Tories, will have already seen things happen which have cheered us - the scrapping of ID cards, for example, or the disposal of the Heathrow 3rd runway plans. It's not been a terrible start from the Lib-Con pact. I mean don't get me wrong - the forthcoming destruction of the public sector is going to be a bloodbath. But not everything is horrific. That medddling, overbearing, anti-freedom side of New Labour which many lefties will have disliked has gone. In its place, differently unpleasant things, yes; but progress on some civil liberties issues.
People talk about diversity, as if New Labour was some kind of shining example. I don't really think it was. When public schoolboy Tony Blair defeated comp-school John Major and then stuffed Government with his old lawyer mates, did we all chunter on about a land grab? I'm not so sure we did. We probably ought to have done, but that's a different matter entirely. No point in bleating about the public school and Oxbridge credentials of the Government, either; that's the way in every other large organisation in Britain so I don't see why Government should be jarringly different. Everywhere else, a nice public school and farting around Oxford or Cambridge for a couple of years means you're automatically at the top of the pecking order - why do we expect Government to be any different? Why should we? I see people complaining about this kind of thing at the Guardian and Observer - and I suppose those newsrooms are chock full of comprehensive school people who went to former polytechnics? Did New Labour, with their crippling tuition fees and student debt, do anything to stop this kind of thing, or did they accelerate it?
Same old lefties, always splitting, always fighting. It's started already, the bitterness between Lib Dems and Labour, and it's going to get worse. Labour probably see it as a chance to put Lib Dems in the crosshairs to be tainted by the Tories, which of course they will be in a lot of people's eyes. But I still think that's missing something. It's missing the idea that people didn't vote Labour because they didn't want to vote Labour. Not everyone is united against the Tories in a way that some of us were in, say, the 1980s. A lot of us had our hopes for substantial change wrecked by three New Labour governments - nothing on electoral reform (until the game was up), not much on reform of the House of Lords. And then there was war. You can say that the Conservatives or Lib Dems might have done exactly the same thing with regards to Iraq, but we won't know, because they weren't in power; all we do know is that New Labour took the decisions they took, because God told Tony Blair it was the right thing to do, and the millions of protesters were completely ignored. It's all very well saying "Forget that, come back, at least we're not the Tories", but for a lot of us, that isn't going to work.
Same old lefties, always fighting. I would like to hope that New Labour, now that they're finished, might try and take a long hard look at what went wrong, and why we now have a Conservative-LibDem coalition in power. They can blame everyone except themselves, or they can try to take responsibility for why they alienated so many voters. Is it just that Gordon Brown was a bit dour and turned voters off? Or was there something else going on? Did the endless years of spin, war and clampdown on freedom eventually make voters throw up their hands and reject the whole project? For years, New Labour went further and further to the right, assuming that it would just drag the left on a lead all the way, through all the neoliberal delights, the increases in inequality, the war, the lack of progress on reform, and that we'd all just have to say yes because they were the only show in town.
Perhaps that wasn't going to last forever. Perhaps Labour needs to win back the former supporters it has treated with contempt for these past few years. Perhaps they might realise that some of the policies they advocated were highly unpopular. But I doubt that's going to happen. What I see happening is just a rebranding exercise. Get a nice Miliband in to run the show* and change some colours around, move further to the right, try to outstrip the Tories, show even more contempt for traditional Labour voters, expect that horrified Lib Dems will abandon their party to oblivion because of association with the Tories, and hope that'll be enough. I don't think it will be. But I can't see anything else happening.
Same old lefties, always complaining. Except I'm not complaining that much. Not yet. There'll come a time for that, obviously, when we see what's really in store for us over the next few years, but that's for then, not now. There is a small-l liberal element to the new Government, albeit a Tory one that's going to do some horrible things to the country. Things could still be a lot worse. I don't think this is going to be a great Government, or even a good one; I just know that it's not New Labour, and that makes me a bit relieved. I know I shouldn't feel that way, but I do. Maybe I'm just a splitter. Maybe I'm just carrying on with the infighting, I don't know. But for now, things can only get bitter.
* I've always preferred Ed to David. Ed reminds me of a nice next-door neighbour in a 1980s sitcom, coming round to borrow the lawnmower while wearing a big white jumper. David looks a bit like a 9-year-old chess prodigy who doesn't talk to girls because he's too shy. Maybe I'm wrong entirely, I don't know.
Related posts:
Buy my book, it’s great
Switch site
Donate
Recent Posts
- Cheerio, cheerio, cheerio…
- Children died
- The letters you never get around to sending
- Applying again
- I just sent Robin round – 2
Most Commented On
Recent Comments
- Iain on Applying again
- Roger on The letters you never get around to sending
- Dave Hodgkinson on The letters you never get around to sending
- droid on The letters you never get around to sending
- Rogue_Leader on The letters you never get around to sending
About Me
Hello. I'm a Bristol-based writer and soon-to-be-redundant journalist. You can read more about me and the Enemies site here, or follow me on Twitter. Email me if you like - antonvowl at live dot co dot uk
If you're struggling to read the site please use the drop down box below to increase the text size.
May 17th, 2010 - 10:02
Excellent series of sentences, relieved that not everyone has forgotten what Labour is so quickly. Can’t really understand the mentality of “Why, Nick, why?”, at least at this stage, it seems better than a fully-Conservative government, and if we want electoral reform it would be good to prove a coalition can work. Plus if Labour wanted the Tories out they could have gone with that “Progressive Alliance”, but it appears that they think some time to rebrand without losing seats to proportional representation would be better.
May 17th, 2010 - 10:07
A few problems in my opinion. First of all, liberals are not left wing and the LibDems and Labour party certainly have never been truly left wing. They both have always followed pro-capitalist ideologies and have been firm supporters of imperialism. Trying to associate them with revolutionary left wing ideologies is an insult to great writers of the past such as Lenin, Kropotkin, Marx, Engels etc.
Secondly, with the actual left wing in Britain, the reason for the problems in the actual left wing with division is mainly due to the fact that the “Left” in Britain is mainly constructed out of those who hold various petit-bourgeois ideologies rather than any truly revolutionary ideologies. If you look through the numerous socialist organisations in this country and other vaguely left wing groups, you will find that generally they are constructed out of anarchists, Trotskyites, “libertarian socialists” etc. What do these all have in common? They are all highly counter-revolutionary and hold onto bourgeois concepts of individualism that ultimately just lead to constant division and prevent them from ever really posing a challenge to the status quo. A completely new British left devoid of the corrupting influence of bourgeois ideologies and slander against great Marxists of the past needs to be built if it is to pose a challenge to the reign of capital.
May 17th, 2010 - 10:45
I suggest you read Norfolk Blogger for another explanation; namely, that the Liberal Democrats treat dissent with contempt and hiss and spit at their own dissidents (something bound to embitter people) and articles on a thing which was introduced to me today called cognitive dissonance which seems to be badly aflicting the Lib Dems at the moment for other explanations different to your ‘same old lefties’ jibe.
Your right though; as far as I (and I believe alot of other Labour members) are concerned the progressive alliance is forever dead and the LD’s will be bracketed with the Tories for the remainder of their political existance which I believe will be a relatively short space of time.
May 17th, 2010 - 11:42
Hmm. I’m not sure that the right is quite as cohesive as this post makes out – take for example Tebbit and his merry band of moaners, or the ruthless infighting that took place among the Tories during the first two terms of the Labour government. If they think their leader’s a winner they might bite their tongues and back him/her, but this isn’t really unity so much as it’s pragmatism and a desire for power over and above ideological purity. Similarly, many on the left were reluctant to criticise Blair to begin with – he was a winner, so worrying traits like his penchant for cronyism were ignored for a time.
It’s a weird contradiction that the left is seen as divided when there is also this inherent assumption, as you point out, that we’ll all unite in horror to vote for anyone but the Tories. All this tactical voting malarkey that was spewed out by various desperate Lab / Lib politicians before the election, as though we all assumed that there was basically no difference between the yellow ones and the red ones because we knew that they both hated the blue ones. It’s a bit pathetic, and if this coalition loses the Lib Dems votes then I hope the votes are lost because of things they actually do whilst in office, and not automatically because they went into coalition with the blue team.
Also, maybe I shouldn’t whinge about this, but re. the Oxbridge stereotyping – I went to Cambridge and I didn’t get there by virtue of having been to public school (I didn’t go to public school) nor did I use some kind of special secret handshake that automatically got me accepted there, nor did I spend my three years there re-enacting Brideshead Revisted and congratulating myself on my imminent accession to the position of master of the universe. Like a lot of my friends, I worked really hard, came out with a decent degree, and wasn’t instantly given a wonderful job at graduation on the basis of having been to Cambridge.
I accept that lazy stereotyping is par for the course when people talk about Oxbridge graduates, but it gets up my nose sometimes. Whilst it’s an amazing place and a privilege to go there, we don’t just trip into an easy life after being bequeathed the keys to the ivory towers.
Whinge over
May 17th, 2010 - 15:03
I think it is politicians (read: humans) who in their quest for power become splitters (think: People’s Front of Judea). If you look at the Conservatives from around 1995-2001 they were riven with splits and in fighting and back biting. It was mainly over Europe and so much so that they twice elected unelectable leaders (Hague and IDS) just because they were anti-Europe (a policy that I broadly agreed with though probably for different reasons, but not one that I would if it were my party have decided to elect a leader because of. Hmm. Unwieldy sentence).
IF you look at UK government politics over the last 30 years you’ll see two parties elected for multiple terms each time, and towards the end of that period they had become so complacent with power that they were more interested in deposing their own leaders than focussing on getting re-elected (both Thatcher and Blair were essentially deposed and once both Major and Brown were in power, they both suffered leadership attempts or talk of such).
It’s (base) human nature I believe and all of politics throughout the world and history has experienced this. I think your hypothesis that the left are splitters and the right are united is a mis-perception on your part. It’s probably true right now, but not long term.
May 19th, 2010 - 23:12
A succinct and accurate review of a decade and a half, or so, of betrayal of left wing politics by an ostensibly left wing party which consistently alligned itself with neoliberal, right-wing authoritarian, guff. Bravo.
May 19th, 2010 - 23:16
“Whilst it’s an amazing place and a privilege to go there, we don’t just trip into an easy life after being bequeathed the keys to the ivory towers. ”
I think you missed the point: Which is that you would be hard pressed to find a powerful politician or civil servant who hadn’t been to C or O. It’s not that anybody who goes there must have been born with the silver spoon in their mouth, its that those who were tend to have an easy time clutching at the lapels of money and power.
(And I speak from having a close friend who attended Cambridge on the back of academic scholarships. And she is certainly no ivory-tower inheritor.)
Don’t take it so personally eh!
May 20th, 2010 - 10:01
“I think you missed the point: Which is that you would be hard pressed to find a powerful politician or civil servant who hadn’t been to C or O.”
I agree – in fact I’ve been arguing to anyone who’ll listen that the fact that all three main parties are likely to be led by a white fortysomething man who went to Oxbridge is a shocking indictment of our politics. And the reason I thought maybe I shouldn’t whinge about Anton’s characterisation is that going there does give you advantages in some fields, there’s no getting away from it.
But what I object to is this idea that anyone who is in a high-profile position who went to Oxbridge is only successful because of their background, probably didn’t work particularly hard for it, and when they leave they “clutch at the lapels of money and power” or similar faintly perjorative expressions. Some of the people who went there are able, intelligent, and hardworking, deserve to be successful on merit and add a lot to the professions they join. No matter how much I dislike the hegemony currently in evidence at the top of our political system, I don’t think this should be ignored.
It’s not a particularly big deal, and it’s not as though I’m speaking up for a powerless group or anything — I just don’t like stereotypes (of any group of people) and I don’t think they help debate. It isn’t about “taking it personally”, or whether you have a best friend who went to Oxbridge, or whatever. It’s just that I think stereotyping isn’t particularly helpful if you’re trying to analyse a situation.
I like the pseudonym, by the way