Quality | 2009.07.25
Beware the liberal drift. Equality, always | Jon Cruddas
Which way forward for the left? We must tackle society\'s glaring wealth and income inequalities
James Purnell is right. Now is indeed the time to return to first principles and redefine what Labour is for. And these debates must allow for a plurality of views and debate to take place with courtesy and respect. Yet we also have to be brutally honest.
The results at the recent elections were our worst since 1910. Millions of people simply have no idea what Labour stands for. Yes, the Blair and Brown governments have plenty of positive achievements to their name, but Britain is more unequal than it was 12 years ago. Most tragically, our response to an era-defining economic crisis often appears timid, informed by the strange notion that we will soon return to normal. The result is disorientation, desperately low morale – and, worse still, a kind of resigned fatalism.
I\'ve just read RH Tawney \'s essay, The Choice before the Labour Party – the best analysis of the current crisis facing Labour, yet written in 1932. It highlights the dilemma at the heart of the party – the unresolved conflict between strands of liberalism and socialism – which marked its founding moments.
This tension is apparent in two significant party crises. The first is the period of national government between 1929 and 1931, and the second is now. Both Ramsay MacDonald and Tony Blair shifted the centre of gravity of the party toward liberalism. Both men were fatally attracted to wealth and power, and both allowed Labour\'s ambivalent political identity to escape containment and thereby threaten its existence as a coherent political form.
Each of these crises has been blamed on external events, not least serious economic recession. But this is to deny Labour\'s inability to resolve the contradiction – not so much a broad church as fragments in search of unity. Tawney captures this dilemma. Writing about the debacle of the Labour party in 1931, he describes how the government "did not fall with a crash, in a tornado from the blue. It crawled slowly to its doom."
He challenges those who looked for the causes of political disaster in outside events. "It will not soothe the pain of defeat with the flattering illusion that it is the innocent victim of faults not its own. It is nothing of the kind. It is the author, the unintending and pitiable author, of its own misfortunes."
Tawney\'s words echo down from the past. "The gravest weakness of British Labour is ... its lack of creed. The Labour party is hesitant in action, because divided in mind. It does not achieve what it could, because it does not know what it wants." He doesn\'t pull his punches." There is, he says, a "void in the mind of the Labour party" which leads us into "intellectual timidity, conservatism and conventionality, which keeps policy trailing tardily in the rear of realities".
What has been learned since then? Purnell would draw solutions from Amartya Sen and a re-presentation of liberalism; personally I think the answers lie with a return to Tawney himself, together with the more contemporary ethical socialism put forward by the likes of philosopher Charles Taylor , which take the best of social liberalism and keep the socialism of solidarity and interdependency.
A couple of basic points need to be made as James develops his ideas. First, the suggestion that Cameron\'s attempt to clothe himself in progressive garb is some kind of compliment to Blairism must be challenged. Cameron is doing this because pointing out the government\'s failings on social justice is an easy hit. His attempt to outflank us on the left is a sign of our failure, not of success.
Second, Purnell\'s idea of equality of capability is very interesting – if, and only if, it is more than just a reworking of the promise of equality of opportunity, another way of ignoring questions of distributional justice. Wide disparities of wealth create a maldistribution of opportunity, which no amount of supply side tinkering can compensate for.
Along with a belief that the market has self-evident limits, equality is surely Labour\'s most fundamental idea – to return to Tawney, its creed. Moreover, as Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett prove in their much-acclaimed book The Spirit Level, a society as unequal as ours is simply dysfunctional. Purnell says he thinks "we need to widen out from a narrow focus on income", which is true – but what follows only highlights a glaring omission. Why no mention of wealth?
All of this plays into the moment in which we find ourselves. With a supposed age of austerity looming, we have to reinvigorate social democracy. If sacrifices are to be made, will people really tolerate glaring inequalities in income and wealth remaining untouched? Is now really the time to be hesitant about top-end issues such as tax avoidance, or the imperative to take millions of low-paid people out of tax altogether?
I believe in the possibility of a progressive realignment. Both James and I watched it come together in 1997 but then fracture and fail. But the basis of such realignment has to be the idea whose abandonment explains a good deal of Labour\'s current crisis: equality – first, last and always.
Jon Cruddas is Labour MP for Dagenham. He ran for deputy leader in 2007 cruddasj@parliament.uk
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/jul/19/labour-open-left-future
