The new division on the Left
After the general election, I found myself sharing platforms with people who wanted to talk about cross-party co-operation, notably a fascinating debate with Caroline Lucas in Hay-on-Way. More on this another day, I hope.
Most of these have been debates about collaboration on the Left, and that is where the need for an effective opposition in the UK is most energetically felt. I’ve been approaching this from three angles so far:
1. Change is inevitable. Change will come, as it always does, pretty much by clockwork in the UK, every 40 years – which makes us due for a reset around 2019/20. But there is very little consensus about what to do. New Weather aspires to fill precisely this gap.
2. Sharpen the various strands of the Left. One way I believe I can help this process along is, paradoxically, to be clearer about what the role of Liberalism is now in the 21st century – not as a way of beating up other political traditions, but because this has been a little muddled since 1979 or so, and it doesn’t help us move forward. But that is my own project, not one belonging to New Weather.
3. Make small changes. Overwhelmingly the best way forward for inter-party co-operation is to now use the House of Lords to make things happen. They will be small things, at first, but – as long as they are real achievements – they will lead to others, and build trust across the various political divides.
But that last one is more important than I had realised a few weeks ago. Because I am increasingly aware that there is a completely different division emerging on the Left than I had seen before.
One the one hand, there is the traditional, irritating, negative Left, backward looking – to the policies of 1945 and the symbolism of 1917 – fearful of the future, defensive of the past and apparently with little to contribute to the present. Pretty irritating, in fact.
On the other hand, there is the emerging Left which is overwhelmingly positive, highly practical, ideologically committed, but seeking new ways forward with energy and innovation – especially in the field of economics.
This is powerfully local, aware that centralism no longer works, and using the language of renewable energy, social entrepreneurship, social enterprise, people powered prosperity, and the strange nether world between small business innovation and urban revival.
What is fascinating, and rather unexpected, is that the sheer pragmatism of this emerging Left is remarkably similar in one part of the pantheon as it is in another. It is English in the sense that it goes for what works.
I recent found myself in Preston (of which more another day), interviewing members of the council, and was fascinated to see the new strand of the Left represented powerfully by the bold and innovative economic programme the Labour Party put forward there in last year’s local elections.
Blairite it isn’t, but then neither is it obviously socialist – its concern with enterprise could almost make it more Right than Left. But it is certainly radical and positive.
There is, in short, a new kind of radicalism that is only of the Left by default, is overwhelmingly pragmatic, motivated by what works and rejecting what doesn’t. And I have a feeling this is where the new consensus is going to emerge from.