The fourth way (part 1)

The period of reflection

The period of reflection is over, and the leadership contest has begun. Sadly, nobody did much reflecting in the reflection period. (I had a go, but no-one was interested.)

Instead, the three main factions vying for control of Labour’s future have used the period to justify their existing positions: Blue Labour advocates say, with differing levels of regret, that their position has been vindicated, those loyal to New Labour’s methods, say that it had all gone wrong in 2010 or 2015, when an electable leader wasn’t elected to be the leader, and those still bound to Corbynism argue that the policies were popular, and if it hadn’t been for those pesky media kids etc. etc…

Those with nothing to say other than it’s all terrible and someone really should do something, because think of the poor, have had their column inches as well, because, well they’re too important not to.

As a party, we look likely to settle into what has become business as usual, with the new leader likely to be claimed by one faction and rejected by one or both of the others.

For myself, I will campaign and vote for the leader and deputy leader candidates who scores best on this question:

Can you provide evidence of ability and willingness not just to unify the party around some kind of common agenda — that can be achieved by an triangulation which will create a new feelgood factor internally but will attract even less voters than in 2019 — but also to draw on new ideas from beyond the current factions, especially ideas which correct for those factions’ various errors?

I see no candidate either for leader or deputy who would currently score well on that question, though I can see a couple who would not even be able to fathom what the question was about.

Still, there is time, and some of the candidates have displayed some intelligence and capacity to adapt to new circumstances. What follows, then, might be seen as a set of tips to any leadership candidate that wants my vote, but it is also, I boldly contend, the only way to save the party from the Tories, save the country from the Tories.

The new leader’s speech to the public

In my mind’s eye, Labour under its new leadership will be getting somewhere if, at the 2020 annual conference — realistically, April 4th is too soon — the new leader says something line this in conclusion to her or his speech:

Under my leadership, Labour will respect , your right to choose, your right to opt in, and your right to opt out, will respect your autonomy.

As Labour, we know that by and large people just want to live their lives as they see fit, in the company of the people they see fit, without being hassled by the state, but with decent public services appropriate to need, and a real say in what the state provides.

We know that people all over the country want to earn a decent living in a job that doesn’t degrade them, and we know that for that to happen people need to live in a stable environment without fear of climate catastrophe.

Our job is to make sure this happens, in the knowledge that in such circumstances people generally get on pretty well with each other.

This applies to everybody. We hope, therefore, for support from a majority of people.

This is my mind’s eye speech conclusion aimed at the TV cameras and therefore the wider public. A less public speech, made to a fringe meeting of Open Labour (let’s say) might be this version, as aimed at members who understand a bit about the internal politics of Labour, how the three broad factions vied for control of the party during the leadership election, and who are now either celebrating that ‘their’ man/woman won, or working on ways to subvert her/him.

The new leader’s speech to Open Labour

Under my leadership, Labour will respect , people’s right to choose, their right to opt in, and their right to opt out, will respect their autonomy.

As Labour moving forward on what is becoming known as the ‘foutth way’, we understand now what the Blue Labour faction, for reasons I can explore with you, obscured from view: that by and large people just want to live their lives as they see fit, in the company of the people they see fit, without being hassled by the state, but with decent public services appropriate to need, and a real say in what the state provides.

We also now understand, in a way that those harking back to the once useful, but now outmoded methods of New Labour have failed to understand, that people all over the country want to earn a decent living in a job which not only doesn’t degrade them but also offers up the potential for both a collective and professional pride.

Our job is to make sure this happens, in the empirical knowledge that in such circumstances people generally get on pretty well with each other, but also sensitive to the new realities of structured hate and division which the far right and their accomplices in the Conservative party have successfully introduced over the past decade to suit their own material and ideological interests.

There are very specific challenges for the Labour party arising from a decade, to date, of rightwing hegemony, and this will require specific innovative actions on our part, both out of and then within government. I will come to what these actions are likely to be in a little while, and how they will need to be resourced, but for now what I will say is that anything we do must be undertaken not because we seek to “connect to people” — people are not mugs and they know that such “connection making” are usually little more than begging for votes — but because we want to help people connect with each other and — I use the term purposely — to live convivially.

There will be innovations, but we don’t start from a blank page. Adherents of Blue Labour have something to offer, as long as the problematic parts of its thinking are corrected for. There are useful insights about what really makes people tick, and may allow for the conviviality I refer to to blossom, as long as those insights are adopted for a 2020s context.

And likewise, we shouldn’t throw the baby out with the bathwater of Corbynism. As has been widely noted, many of the policies set in the 2019 manifesto were popular, and they can be adopted or adapted for the new ‘fourth way’ project on which we’re now embarking. But, we have to be honest about why a popular set of policies didn’t translate into party popularity.

Some of the reasons are obvious: the failure to deal effectively with incidences of antisemitism made us look ineffectual and meal mouthed, and we will deal with that through a concrete action plan, set out separately; the manifesto got too crowded at short notice in a snap election, and we won’t make the same again; Jeremy an also John incurred personal hatred on account of previous allegiances, which were no doubt well-intended but were exploitable, and were exploited; our positioning on Brexit was probably the right one, but the shifting messages and disagreement within the party were exploitable, and exploited.

But in addition all of these doubts about our legitimacy as a party of government, there is one problem with the Corbyn project we need to address head on: it’s the adoption of a type of narrative which came to known and proudly espoused as Left Populism, rooted in a type of Gramscian analysis which was arguably well-suited to the development of a socialist politics for pre-war Italy, and perhaps also a pre-war Britain, but is not suited a 21st century Britain in which we seek to be legitimized by a a population that not just enjoys a very different set of subjective identities — that’s something we can take from New Labour — but also one asked to take part in an antiquated First Past the Post system of voting.

I will come back to my critique of what Corbynism got wrong, as I will with my critique of Blue Labour and new Labour,

In these these opening remarks I have sought to set out the broad direction of travel for a Labour party in opposition, committed to creating the conditions for a new conviviality. But before drilling down further into how, through an honest critique of Labour’s three current factions, we can unite the party for that journey — and we won’t make the journey if won’t unite — I want to mention the elephant in the room, so that you know I’m not going to ignore it.

This is the elephant with a massive footprint — the massive carbon footprint.

Because absolutely none of this conviviality, developed first on our innovations jn opposition and then our majoritarian legitimacy in government, is going to last very long unless we play our part — a leading part — in staving off the worst of the climate catastrophe headed our way (indeed arguably already with us.

Let’s be blunt here.

The Green New Deal proposed in the manifesto, was a great start, but as implemented it would never have been enough, let alone be enough after five more years of a Tory government committed to ignoring the potential for the end of humanity because it’s all a bit too difficult.

Greening jobs, as set out under the GND, would not have reduced overall energy consumption, and that is the only real way the catastrophe can be properly averted. Nor does it seek to tackle the problem of resource extraction being exported to less developed countries.

So we need to rethink, and then redo, in a way which other countries I can copy. I can’t hope to do full justice to what can and should be done in this speech; we are talking about a whole shift in the economic paradigm, and we need to do this while maintaining our legitimacy as an aspirant and real government. But I want to outline where I think we should be headed.

Where we should be headed, I will contend, is towards Ivan Illich’s extraordinary prescient vision from the mid-1970s about where we would end up if we continued as we were then doing — we did — and the way in which we might do differently.

Illich referred to this vision — and this is not at all coincidental to the narrower understanding of the term that I will also employ - Tools for Conviviality.

For Illich then, and I hope for Labour now, the real goal — a goal Blue Labour has never conceptualised, a goal New Labour saw but lost sight of, and a goal Corbynism saw subsumed into a forced collective identity —is individual freedom and autonomy in a complex 21st century where politics has to do the hard yards. I will come back to how we might go about it as Labour, but I want to quote just one paragraph from Tools for Conviviality, which for me sum up the current crisis but,more importantly, the desired state of affairs:

The individual’s autonomy is intolerably reduced by a society that defines the maximum satisfaction of the maximum number as the largest consumption of industrial goods. Alternate political arrangements would have the purpose of permitting all people to define the images of their own future. New politics would aim principally to exclude the design of artifacts and rules that are obstacles to the exercise of this personal freedom. Such politics would limit the scope of tools as demanded by the protection of three values: survival, justice, and self−defined work. I take these values to be fundamental to any convivial society, however different one such society might be from another in practice, institutions, or rationale.