Though Cowards Flinch

I’ve been toying with the idea of writing a proper book for a while, provisionally called ‘The Fifth Tradition of Labour’. 

I’ve never tried to write a book but, heh, there’s no point looking back in a few years and wondering what might have been, and the words flow quite well.  So why not?

As many of the bits of the book started out life as blogposts, I thought I’d copy in a bit of the main pitch here. 

The book proposal and some drafting is done, and its ready to send off to literary agents and the like.  There’s even an exciting and well-known person writing some bits with me, but whose identity must remain secret for the moment – not because s/he said so, but in order to maintain an air of mystery about the whole thing and thereby entice agents.

So if you’re a publisher or an agent who wants to get her/his hands on what will almost certainly the most talked-about book of 2011 (in my house), please feel free to contact me to discuss terms, or whatever it is you do at the start of the publishing process.

Here’s some of what I’m saying in my submission blurb.

The Fifth Tradition of Labour

The book is ambitious. 

It does nothing less than advocate the conscious development of a new ‘tradition’ within the Labour movement. 

It seeks to move beyond the old antagonisms betweenthose on the Labour left who believe in the parliamentary road to socialism, and regard themselves as ‘realists’, and the revolutionary left who believe that successive generations of Labour politicians have betrayed the working class, and that liberal and parliamentary democracy is incompatible with socialism. 

It sets this out in the context of an analysis of four different Labour traditions that emerged within the twentieth century, and seeks to show how much of the later disjuncuture within the labour movement arises from misunderstandings about what the state is, and how this relates to economic power structures. 

Epistemologically speaking, I seek to ‘decentre’ accounts (and folk memories) of political activism to show how the different traditions emerged and were then interpreted and re-interpreted according to the beliefs political actors and commentators brought to them.

While this is the theoretical framework for the book, it is not a book on political theory, and no specific chapter on theory is planned. 

Most of the planned chapters, the bones of some of which some I have already set out in at Though Cowards Flinch and The Bickerstaffe Record, get down to the real nitty-gritty of current operational codes and practice within the labour movement (and the non-aligned left), and show how these can and should be changed for the betterment of the labour movement overall.   The ‘decentring’ of the account will be woven into this exploration of the historical development of the four traditions.

This engagement with real practice – warts and all – is, I contend, what gives the proposed book its ‘Unique Selling Point’, grounded as it is in my own experiences of grassroots labour activism (and successful electoral campaigning to date), and a good understanding of how the (macro) political economy relates to the currently dominant economic narrative of the right played out national,  local and individual levels.