Hazel Chipmunk and communities against the BNP
It took me a while to get around to Blears’ remarks on fighting the BNP through the devolution of authority to local levels. I don’t share with some critics the view that such devolution in respect of the police and other services is dangerous as it risks handing over control to extreme groups. I do think that there are some criticisms to make of Blears’ contribution to the debate on fighting the BNP.
Firstly the conception of Blears that the BNP represent an “anti-politics” is a grave miscalculation. If such an accusation is to be based on the notion that the BNP have no real solutions to the problems people might elect them to solve, then it is easy to describe Labour, the Conservatives and the Lib-Dems as a brand of “anti-politics” also. Decades of mainstream parties in office hasn’t solved much.
If it had, then the BNP probably wouldn’t be making electoral inroads on the basis of local grievances.
The problem with this miscalculation is that it undermines Blears’ idea of further devolving control of services. Further devolution won’t challenge the ideological preconceptions of the three main parties, many of which are shared between them. It is those preconceptions which are to blame for the situation we’ve now reached with the threatening gains of the British National Party.
Local government has been denuded of many of its former responsibilities, those things such as the construction of housing which once formed ideological battle grounds. Giving that authority back would reinvigorate local government by recreating the old battles, but with the shift of Labour to the right it won’t be Labour who capitalizes upon this shift. What’s the point of voting Labour if they’re privatising too?
This is what Blears misses when she calls the BNP “anti-politics” and assures us that they won’t capture power from further devolution.
Blears’ own narrative is substantially that of a liberal rather than a socialist. The Co-ops, mutuals and social enterprises she wants don’t escape the logic of capitalism. They still exploit workers, for example. They cannot but exploit workers because it is upon that which their security depends, if we take it as read that they will always have a viable group of customers. Moreover, we’ve seen what can happen to mutuals.
Many of the banks that have succumbed to part nationalisation were former mutuals. They over-leveraged themselves to take advantage of the financial climate and ended up being bankrupted, bought over or part-nationalised. What Blears is advocating is not a situation that could be maintained constantly – activism isn’t like that. Battles can be won or lost, they can’t be fought perpetually for the same limited gains.
Of course Blears can’t countenance a situation where we win and break out of the straightjacket of capitalism. Nor can most other liberals. Yet her proposal, where we need to be constantly active to secure the same limited benefits, leads to activist fatigue and defeat. Certainly it did with the Co-op and with the former mutual funds as discussed. Moreover these don’t cover things “the centre” wants to keep.
Housing is a big one in this regard, but it passes unmentioned amid Hazel’s orgy of “active citizens on every street”. People can and will be active to fight for things, and they can be secured within the network of a political party – but where the party advocates a holding pattern they’ll drift away again. Democracy, unless it be used to challenge the consensus over public services etc, is pointless.
Moreover it does risk passing power to the BNP, as fanatics will only be encouraged by the disillusionment of the majority.
For a while Labour may retain enough prestige to fight off the BNP in target wards, in certain democratised services – but for every year that passes where Labour doesn’t challenge the status-quo, it becomes more difficult for people to vote for them. It becomes even more difficult for socialist activists to remain within the Labour Party. This doesn’t even count the opening chasm between Labour and the unions.
This will continue to happen regardless of which elected bodies we’re talking about – but it risks becoming even more pernicious if it allows the BNP to directly take over the delivery of specific services. I’m in favour of socialised industry, socialised government – but on capitalist terms, devolution represents simply another level at which the prevalent class correlation of forces can be reflected.
Very true. And with the issue of housing – far and away the biggest political issue in Salford right now – off the agenda, it’s hard to see what Blears really means by “politicians reconnecting with the people”. Maybe they should all set up myspace pages or something.
Blears is something of a walking contradiction: staunchly Blairite yet apt to talk of socialism. But I’m making the mistake of believing what she says. (As the old joke goes, you can tell when a politician’s lying: their lips move.)
The BNP is concentrated in de-industrialised parts of the country in communities that are traditionally Labour. This should ring alarm bells for Blears. Rather than being “anti-politics” this is a reaction to Labour’s acceptance of the Thatcherite “consensus” and abandonment of avowed class politics – from the collective “working people” to the atomised “hard-working families” (which implies those who are unemployed, disabled, or single are somehow less important).
And with newspapers full of racist scare-stories and government ministers issuing inflamatory statements on ethnic and religious minorities, is it any wonder the fascists are able to spread their lies?
Yes, you’re right to home in on the fallacy that it is only groups like the BNP that have sought to portray themselves as ‘anti-politics’. At local level the Liberal Democrats have become quite expert as what I’ve until very recently heard referred disparagingly to amongst older Labour supporters as ‘street politics’ (and especially in Oldham).
While these members may be behind the times in that they cannot or will not recognise the (electoral) effectiveness of such techniques, I have a sympathy for their view because it is based on a deep sense that street politics/anti-politics is not really, in the end, what’s it all about – as it simply re-inforces the liberal status quo.
And of course, because street/anti-politics is electorally successful, the Labour party is pulled towards it as an attractive way of doing things, increasingly ignoring the fact (as you set out) that it doesn’t structurally change anything.
(At a personal level, I’ve been pulled towards it myself, and my early newsletters around my local patch could be case studies in ‘anti-politics’ in that they deliberately avoid issues of structural inequality in service provision as too ‘risky’ while I was establishing a readership. Now that I’m trusted to deliver on ‘the small stuff’, I have been able to expand towards the explicitly political without damage to any electoral prospect, but it took a while.)
But at a more general local level, the question remains of how we deal with ‘anti-politics’ wherever it comes from. While I’m sure you don’t intend it to be, your post could be read as somewhat deafeatist – that because local government has been emasculated, and because we don’t have a socialist enough national government, there’s really nothing the left can do at local level.
I still think there’s plenty to be done (and so do you, or you wouldn’t be campaign co-ordinator down your way). As we’ve discussed in relation to othr posts, beneath the anti-politics, ‘no alternative’ discourse being adopted by all parties, Conservative and Lib Dem Councils are still more ideologically committed to maintaining and re-inforcing material inequalities than are Labour-run Councils.
That is not to say that all Labour Councils run marvellous socialist idylls, because they are indeed constrained in what they can achieve, but the reality is that Conservative Councils are bad places for poor people etc.
The challenge for local Labour parties is to combine electoral ‘street politics’ with a commitment to rooting out the social injustices wrought by Tory/Libdem Councils, and often that means digging behind the scenes in the way that some might expect the local press to do but we know they will not, and bringing stuff to notice (via the street politics) in the best way we can.
Where Labour is in or gets into power, it’s about parties, in the same way as Peter Kenyon demands, starting to re-impose values and policies on Labour groups which go beyond street politics and onwards to how the money is used. There are ways of doing this, not least through the largely ignored-by-parties-and-overtaken-by-liberal-technocrats Local Strategic Partnerships, which offer the flexiblity to bend sigifiicant mainstream spend in a way which simply wasn’t there before the Local Government Act 2000.
And if all that sounds like a call for a return to the early 1980s, where local parties were faced with internal challenge from a new generation of left wing ideologoues, then that’s exactly what I want it to sound like.
And Charlie is right, Hazel Blears is a ‘walking contradiction’; some of her remains ‘emotionally socialist’, though as she accepts herself in her post, of the not-very-intellectual kind, but central government institutionalisation has ‘liberalised’ her views, in tune with the inherent conservatism of communitarian nonsense. This is evidenced in her post and (in much of her recent spieling on the White Paper), where she calls upon vague notions of community strength without realising that the discourse of ‘community’ is simply another tool for depoliticisation and even the creation of in-community/not-in-community discourses which can lead to exclusionary polices and practices of the Laclau-Mouffe ‘otherness’ type, and at their worst to ‘atni-politics’ not too many million miles away in tone at least from the BNP, though tone and practice are of course wildly different things.
Even as recently as 2003 she was more ‘socialist’ in her semi-thinking, when she said in a Fabian Society booklet:
‘As a political term, community – like freedom, equality and democracy – tends to mean what politicians want it to mean. ‘The community’ is invoked like a muse, to provide political cover, to imply democratic legitimacy, and to sweeten the pill.’
So maybe she just needs a reminder.