The next left
James Forsyth 4:55pm
If you want to know how a post-Brown Labour party might take on the Tories, I’d thoroughly recommend the Jon Cruddas and Jonathan Rutherford edited Is the future conservative? It is one of the first things from the left that I have read that takes the Cameron Tories seriously and maps out how the left can fight back.
Here’s Cruddas and Rutherford’s rallying cry to the left:
The future does not belong to the Conservative Party. Right now it belongs to a social democracy that is willing to bring liberal free market capitalism and corporate power back under control. The debate is about how we secure this post neoliberal politics. The left needs to recover its ethical socialism and commitment to equality. It needs the political will to realise ideas for democratising public services and building an accountable, redistributive state. Power needs to be devolved to local government. There has to be a renewed argument for constitutional and electoral reform and the protection and extension of individual civil liberties. The conditions for trade unionism have to be improved and a new internationalism established. Perhaps most of all, and most difficult, the left needs an ecologically sustainable, pro-social political economy capable of generating both wealth and equitable development. The future is for the left to lose.
You can disagree, I certainly do, that liberal free market capitalism and corporate power need to be brought back under control by the state but what you can’t deny is that this offers an ideological framework for Labour to work within. Indeed, one of the problems for Labour is that the two groups in the party who have a vision for the future are the Blairites and the Cruddas-left and there is little common ground between the two. The debate in the Labour party post-defeat is going to be fascinating to watch.
You can download the whole book here .
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BCS
September 11th, 2008 5:16pm Report this commentWith the exception of the modish reference to ecological sustainability, how is this programme distinguishable from that promoted by the pre-Thatcher moderate left? The allusion to improving the conditions of trade unionism is especially telling. Cruddas's vision may be coherent, and it is by no means exreme, but it differs little from the ideology that was so discredited, both electorally and economically, in the 70s and 80s.
Tiberius
September 11th, 2008 5:27pm Report this commentIf Cruddas has the opportunity to go down that route, then good luck to him, but he might as well don a donkey jacket while he's at it.
Faceless Bureaucrat
September 11th, 2008 5:53pm Report this commentAs I have commented in previous threads, if Cruddas can mobilise the Unions sufficiently post-Conference, then Brown will be gone by Christmas. This by-no-means extreme view of the future for Labour could become the lightening-rod that so many disaffected former Labour voters have been waiting for. Miliband, Purnell, Harman and the rest of the Labour Party pretenders are suddenly history…
Bill
September 11th, 2008 7:35pm Report this comment"The debate in the Labour party post-defeat is going to be fascinating to watch".
Much like watching two stools drying in the sun.
Here's hoping that Labour is demoted to the position currently occupied by the Monster Raving Loonies (do they still exist?), so that we be spared this particular 'entertainment'.
Verity
September 11th, 2008 8:08pm Report this commentArrogant socialist mistake: "The future does not belong to the Conservative Party. Right now it belongs to a social democracy ...".
No, ignorant arseholes, the future of Britain belongs to the British people, not a political party. Go and boil your fat, ugly heads.
James J
September 11th, 2008 8:24pm Report this commentTiberius
Donkey Jacket in Jonathan’s part of Notting Hill?
Now back in his constituency of Dagenham Donkey jackets may go unnoticed but there the BNP are snapping at his heels, forming the official opposition in the Town Hall.
David C
September 11th, 2008 9:11pm Report this commentThese are not the generation to lead Labour back to power.
After todays little exercise in abject futility, it's safe to say that the leader of the next Labour government is still at school.
Nicholas
September 11th, 2008 9:28pm Report this commentMuch as I detest the Left I warm to this honesty of aspiration and actually prefer it to the thinly cloaked national socialism and desperate popularity-seeking propaganda of Herr Braun & Co.
New Labour tricked their way into power by promising moderation but delivering extremism (as well as incompetence).
Don't like Cruddas but prefer the old face of the enemy to the new one.
Hereford
September 11th, 2008 9:31pm Report this commentTotal meaninless politicobabble. Plain and simple.
How can you think this bulls~"t is coherent?
olivepeel
September 11th, 2008 9:56pm Report this commentLooks like cruddas, benn and harmann have given up. Will probably see a few more extreme left positions during the conf. season.
Richard
September 11th, 2008 10:05pm Report this commentJames, you show your youth in thinking this "offers an ideological framework for Labour to work within". That is, unless you mean simply that the party apparatchiks can work within it. But if you mean it offers a framework for the Labour Party to govern, forget it. You seem not to realise the strength of the antipathy towards this nonsense that exists in a huge number of people - mostly over 40 now, and more likely to vote than the young - who lived through and remember the horror of the last time it was tried.
Fergus Pickering
September 12th, 2008 4:00am Report this commentBut it's exactly an ideologicl framework that we don't want. We don't want all these long abstract words because we know what they mean is that WE IN HERE want to boss YOU OUT THERE for ever and ever.
cuffleyburgers
September 12th, 2008 7:39am Report this commentHowever, by articulating a political philosophy and a programme, however crap, they give the Tories a clear opening.
What they risk doing is starting up an intellectual debate, which they will lose because this kind of pinko socialist bollocks has been discredited time and again, most notably by Thatcher who took a moribund economy in a unionized straitjacket, and turned it round in less than a decade laying the foundations for the wealth which Labour inherited in 1997 and have since frittered away through their incompetent redistributive policies.
This is an argument the Tories can and must win, and in doing so they can lay out an attractive stall of small government and low taxes, minimal interference and a bonfire of quangoes and red tape, especially of the gold plated eu sort.
As long as the "debate" was of the ya boo sucks clunking fist kind, life was always going to be harder for the Tories.
David Hatfield
September 12th, 2008 9:47am Report this commentIt is coherent and we ignore it at our peril
Ian C
September 12th, 2008 11:35am Report this commentNicholas and David Hatfield have the main point right. It is a programme and an identifiable enemy. It is not a credible one but that is the mistake that the right has made before, not being able to believe "this bollocks".
I think that the mistake that Cruddas and co will/are making is that the base today of the Trade Unions is the public sector - the sector Thatcher did not have time to sort out and Major was too weak and distratced to be able to.
By the time Cruddas and co or their successors have a sniff at power the Public Sector will/should be so unpoular that their base will have substantially withered away.
But for this to be the case it is for the Tories to drive the nails into the coffin of the public sector. That needs to be the agenda that is seen through by a Tory government without mercy. And it will take three terms at least.
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