Charting Labour’s future

The Labour Party is still ambling in the wilderness – sure of its destination, but uncertain of the route. Its response to last year’s general election defeat has been silence, publicly at least. In the privacy of debating chambers however, the party is charting its potential renewal.

These circles murmur that ‘the state has reached its limits’; or, in other words, that Fabianism, the dominant force in the post-war Labour movement, has been tested to destruction. Philip Collins touches on this in his must-read column for the Times today (£):

‘Since the general election defeat, the only intellectual life in the party has come from blue Labour, an intriguing set of ideas associated with Maurice Glasman [and Jon Cruddas], an academic and community organiser ennobled by Ed Miliband. Blue Labour attempts to revive Labour’s lost tradition of voluntary association. In Glasman’s genealogy, Labour is the offspring of a father from the trade union and co-operative movements and a forbiddingly earnest mother who is forever attending Fabian summer schools in the quest for scientific techniques to alleviate the condition of the poor. The central blue Labour claim is that the marriage failed and it was mother’s fault. The victory of the technocrats meant that the dead end of nationalisation was succeeded by the illusion of state planning: 1945 was a victory from which Labour never recovered. In the process, Lord Glasman says, “social democracy has become neither social nor democratic”.’

Collins adds his own critique, saying that ‘the new Labour cap still fits’ because the previous government was insufficiently new Labour: it ‘elevated manic change to a principle in its own right’, and was disabled by insensitivity to the volatility of capitalism and a residual Fabian naivety about the proficiency of the state. He agrees with Glasman that change is fundamental and suggests that Labour’s exodus will be foreshortened by ‘the synthesis of what is blue and new’.

However, Miliband, the leader whose crown is red and old, is yet to define himself beyond fumbling gropes for the ‘squeezed middle’. As Collins concludes, perhaps the party will reach it terminus under the leadership of ‘someone as yet unheralded’.