Though Cowards Flinch

Having spent yesterday on top of St. Andrew’s Church in Deal, helping to clean up the roof and guttering, I arrived home and promptly checked mail, email and all the usual websites. How thoroughly unsurprised I was to find the latest piffle from the Fabians and this waste of cyber space from Tom Miller of Newer Labour fame. To be understood more ably, let me first say that I don’t think our Tom’s work deserves to be placed alongside the Young Fabian’s Anticipations magazine, it’s not that bad. It is to the Fabians that I’ll first turn.

Skipping through the Young Fabians magazine, I came across an article by Dan Whittle. It was a mock celebration of a Labour victory in 2010 which began, “Dear Diary, woke up still wearing my suit and rosette, feet aching, with the Party’s election theme “Things continue to get better” going round in my head.” Now, granted, I shouldn’t have had high expectations from ANY article entitled, “Were you up for Twiggy?” a reference to the potential election of Stephen Twigg. I don’t think a Party should celebrate its further emasculation by electing such an unimaginative, artless goon.

But that’s just me.

Anyway, the article continued in this strained, hyperbolic, nauseatingly loyalist theme for a whole page and left me needing a stiff drink or a shower. I chose the latter. The whole thing was startlingly emblematic of the one theme of continuinty among the Fabians: overwheening paternalism. Laden in every paragraph was something about how Labour had reconnected with its ‘core’ or ‘most loyal’ supporters or ‘activists’. My favourite had the be the following reference:

“The turning point [in Labour's fortune], of course, was the 2008 conference and the organisational and policy changes made following it. Emphasizing grass-roots campaigning, then rewarding our core supporters with policies that appealed to them, then creating a new big tent [...]“

This is Labour history and internal politics re-written from the point of view of a wannabe Stephen Twigg. Max Weber wrote at one time about how capitalism is a system of mediocrity, where the great languish and the middling excel. One sympathizes with his view, however much of an arch-reactionary he was. Those are my feelings, at the very least, about the Labour Party and its organisations, and the un-nuanced views in the article at question raises no challenge to those views.

There is no mention of leadership resistance to grassroots policies or the lack of democracy in the Party: the above quotation benevolently grants acceptable demands from on high (or at least from the NPF, which from the point of view of an activist is much the same thing), ignoring that most of the real demands are incompatible with the majority of the PLP, never mind the cabinet and those touted for leadership post-Brown. No matter that the powers of conference have been eviscerated.

On the page facing there is an article by Parliamentary candidate Rachel Reeves which made me chuckle grimly. Reeves expressed the worry that, “Anyone under 25 will only have hazy recollections of a Conservative government [...]; they will not necessarily link Labour to the new school buildings or to the increased capacity of our universities.” Not to glory in my cynicism overmuch, I have a much more pressing fear: people will link us to those things, and our unthinking citation of them as achievements is not wise.

Building Schools for the Future is a programme of extended remortgaging by basically selling our schools to special interests and corporations with their own designs on the property. It has been ill-thought out to the extent that some of the new schools are badly situated and meet with a deep-seated opposition because they’re in areas which don’t need new schools. As for extending university capacity, we’ve encouraged universities to turn arts courses into cash cows rather than investing in much more burdensome subjects like the sciences. That’s a decision we’ll rue.

Yet these were just exercises by the new class of Labour politico working its way up the ranks, shaped by the environment in which they’ve been competing to get ahead. The really dangerous material is slipped in towards the end, via an article by some chap called Sam Dale, and regards yet one more defence of the policy of ‘military humanitarian intervention.’ One wonders if there are yet grounds for describing such a phrase as a contradiction in terms.

The article begins with the quote everyone knows from Tony Blair’s speech (to the Economic Club of all things!) in Chicago in 1999: “We are all internationalists now, whether we like it or not.” If I’d been there, my answer would have been short and sharp: “You’re bloody not, you great pillock.” What an assault upon meaning for the war-mongering Prime Minister of the UK to usurp the great ideal of the socialist Internationals (which was about stopping war by concerted working class action – something Blair never failed to oppose), prostituting it to give the intervention in Serbia legitimacy.

Continuing through the Treaty of Westphalia and all the usual claptrap from World Politics 101, the article reads like a Politics student was trying to show off how thoroughly erudite he was by basically regurgitating as many thinkers as could be squeezed in. Sam Dale, if you’re reading this, you missed the Melian dialogue from Thucydides – if you’d included it, you’d literally have given the first lecture I received at university several years and universities ago. Nice try though. But the real problem is not, of course, the style.

At the centre of the article is the essential affirmation of nation states as a valid point of reference in the determination of global politics, though abridgeable in unique circumstances. My initial thought was to dismiss it as typical liberal fluff, but in truth it confirmed to me the irony of the quote at the beginning: far from writing in an internationalist tone, it simply assumed the necessary centrality of the State in everything and proceeded from there. Less hypocritical than Blair in using such terms, it was no less boring.

The danger of course is that impressionable minds read this thoughtlessness, and its counterpart in the media, and aren’t challenged to think beyond it or worse, think it original and daring, even when they are university students and well educated themselves. I can’t say I’ve ever enjoyed reading Anticipations, but if these people are the future movers and shakers of the Party, then our demand for “new ideas” simply isn’t enough – we need root and branch replacement of people too.

However, all that said, the ’soft’ left in Compass don’t seem to be appreciably better than their think-tank opposite numbers at the Fabian Society. Tom Miller (Young Fabians membership officer and Compass executive member, a two-for-one) leads his recent blogging with yet another article attempting to assert the materialist basis of Compass and to denounce John McDonnell as a cheap rabble rouser, supported largely by cheap rabble. The phrase “rent-a-mob” comes unbidden to mind.

The reason John McDonnell stoops to this is that he knows his own supporters, largely true-believer loyalists, commonly of a romantic disposition, can be easily fired up, regardless of the accuracy of the statement. As long as he can make sure that people never want to use a #2 vote! Orwell would have been horrified by such crass and self-regarding use of political language. On the downside, this is at the total expense of any advance of lefts, soft or hard, within the party to which the democratic left is suppsoed to belong. But hey, who cares about that eh? Our terms or none. When you’re as marginalised within the PLP (and some of the bigger unions) as the LRC, that’s a recipe for no terms.

I think we can do better than gaze at the hypnotism of this piece of Socratic wonderment. If John McDonnell knows his followers are easily fired up, why bother mentioning Compass at all? There are many more promising pastures to help fire up supporters on the other side of “The Line” – by which I mean New Labour or the Tories. A large proportion of the people that Maccy D and the LRC engage with don’t even known Compass exists. Nice characterization attempt Tom, but logically inconsistent.

Speaking of characterization attempts, one wonders how Tom can in all conscience denounce the LRC as marginalized within the PLP and “some of the bigger unions” and yet take a position on the Compass executive. As we all know, at the time of this statement, even before the former Blairites begin jumping ship to Compass in preparation for Operation: Populist Opposition, the parliamentary group of Compass is bigger than that of the LRC. Or not. Even if it was, when your flag carriers can’t even vote like proper progressives, who cares what banner they stand under?

By which I mean Trickett and Cruddas, as has been endlessly discussed here and elsewhere. As for the dig about the unions, Tom, remind me how many unions have branches currently affiliated to Compass? If Cruddas emerges as a leadership contender, I don’t doubt that the major unions will back him, but they backed Brown too, and Blair before him. Official union backing and the support of the bureaucracy of the unions is as good an indication as any that a Compassite Labour Party will be a slightly tempered version of New Labour should it get elected to government.

On the other hand, you have the Labour Representation Committee which has fought tooth and claw for every branch endorsement of unions and local Labour Parties. It has fought the indifference or the intransigence of the entrenched within each union, and within each local Labour Party and every victory is meaningful because it is conducted by local people at a local level. It is not a media-dominated campaign, backed by book launches and speechifying – it is an activist-led organisation.

This very activist-led organisation has been at the head of the charges on unionizing part-time and immigrant workers, the defence of terms and conditions for the unions under attack; it has led the charge in actually organising people of disparate ideas rather than planting a flag in the ground and waiting for the proles to turn up. Unlike Compass, which, if its members led the Party, would pursue the same poster-and-newspaper campaign that secured New Labour electoral victory.

How inevitable this is can be seen even in your own words, as someone conditioned in the very material environment of Compass: you yourself decried any attempt to call together “small section[s] of the electorate” because they are somehow unrepresentative. This is precisely the same basis upon which New Labour – and those before them – sought to undermine Labour Conference democracy. Hell, it was the basis for Wilson’s uppity behaviour after In Place of Strife was defeated and of 1920’s Labourites for hating the constituency parties.

In so many respects, therefore, Compass is nothing new. It’s just a new coat of paint upon ideas which are old and, even when power is handed to them, hollow in their ability to actually help in the re-organisation of the working class, so that it can represent itself in a collective rather than rely on a well-meaning think-tank and its members and the occasional context-deprived, top-managed plebiscite. More important than all of that, however, I feel moved to ask of Tom, “Et tu Brutus?”

I make no secret of my distaste for many elements of Compass, organisationally and on the strength of the evidence as regards the lacking boldness in their self-nominated representatives. However I have rarely heard such sneering and unthinkingly stereotypical attacks as are seen in the post linked to above. Perhaps it will take the next Labour government to force the current generation of grassroots Compassites to realize their mistake. The problem with the whole situation is that we don’t have the luxury of time.

Finally, what is the obsession with George Orwell? This is what links Tom in this post to the Fabians. It is the sheer dilettante flirtation with such a feeble figure (repeated by the Fabians, though not using Orwell) which irks me so much, even beyond the politics of the Fabian articles or the character attacks of Tom’s article. This style of writing, of name dropping to sound erudite I have mentioned in respect of Orwell not a week ago, but here it comes up again.

Orwell, for all his valour, ended up depressed and disillusioned because he couldn’t grasp the very material situation which Tom wants to appreciate. His socialism was based on a utopian rather than a materialist basis and it collapsed when faced with the pressures of things that would not fit into his world-view. It reduced itself to the desire for an all-encompassing ‘love’ – as though the world could be simplified down to love and hate, often mere shadows, cast through a human medium, of other forces at work.

Herein lies the crux of the matter. The Fabians, for all their adroit piecing together of issues current and past, fall into categories utopian or reactionary. It is a very fine line, as Orwell found out in his later writings, though apologizing for neo-imperialism easily crosses it and with room to spare. Utopian thinking often fails to pierce through the surface (More Money For Hospitals) to the reality (Inefficient, Piecemeal Privatisation). This is the predominant problem of the Fabian articles quoted.

This is also Tom Miller’s problem: the surface (Every Member Has A Direct Vote) dominates the reality (Democracy Should Be About A Relationship With Each Other, Not Merely A Relationship With Authority). In the case of assessing the LRC, or John McDonnell – who is but human and thus imperfect – this continues. “Followers” of McDonnell are “commonly of a romantic disposition” which escapes the reality that followers of McDonnell often don’t even think about theoretical socialisms.

They’re concerned with bread and butter issues, and the ground-level, media-starved , intensely practical world of struggles in which those issues are fought to resolution. Often only at times of heightened struggle, when the material reality means that never less so are socialists “of a romantic disposition” because often they’re fighting against the odds for their livelihoods, do the theoretical battles really come to the forefront – these battles being the only element of the whole movement classifiable as “romantic”.

One wonders if, when Tom suggests that we take lessons from the successes and failures of our predecessors and our enemies, that he hasn’t taken entirely the wrong lesson from that history.

Indeed, from the point of view of fighting on the ground level, it is Compass and the Fabians who seem to be “commonly of a romantic disposition.” Certainly they are “true-believers” in their own romantic assessments of (varyingly) the state of the party, the nature of democracy, the usefulness of ‘pluralism’ howsoever one defines that, the ability of an army to rescue a citizen population from overlords without recreating the problem on a different basis and so on.

In John McDonnell’s personal vocabulary, if Compass qualifies as “Them” rather than “Us” – unavoidable distinctions for any individual, politically motivated or otherwise – this difference between romantic Utopians and the at-times hopeless struggle of the Materialists is what causes it. If the upper echelons of Compass &c are peopled by a less spirited, more hackneyed version of the rather superficial types who characterize the lower, it is understandable if not forgiveable.

Our goal should be to at least try to overcome this, as much of a lost cause as we, the younger members, may find it. Certainly I admit to feeling entirely disenchanted by my experience of YL, LS Young Fabians and Compass, and the often careerist impulse which seems to run through the heart of anyone remotely senior in these organisations. This has been my intention in writing: not merely to condemn, but to correct. They are all, until they become political full-timers, exploited like the rest of us, and in a position to react against that, once the inconsistency and woolly thinking is rooted out.