Soft Machine Politics
If there is one thing most Labour members hate it is internal factions, even though their party is sometimes a bit lost without them.
Even though I find the ‘left-right’ spectrum more than a little redundant and quite unhelpful, I find myself drawn into using the terminology this week. It would just be impossible not to. Suffice to say I think there is a lot of overlap. I object to the use of the term ‘right’ about people in the Labour Party. Labour members are all, at least of the centre left. Anyway, enough of the pompous indignation. There are also a few cultural items: a couple of good books plus one I read so you don’t have to, oh, and that album.
The former MP for Southampton Itchen, John Denham, is a longstanding friend and colleague. More often than not I have broadly agreed with much of what John has written over the years and a lot also about his approach to politics, much of which I have shared in different contexts.
John recently wrote a piece for the journal Renewal, in which he considers the current state and positioning of Labour’s ‘soft left’ entitled, “Wither the Soft Left”.1 He concludes it (whatever it is) isn’t in a good place. While there is, again, a good deal I agree with some of the substantial points merit further examination.2 I should say I strongly recommend reading the original, though I will try to make this make sense stand alone.
In a nutshell John’s argues that Labour’s ‘soft left’, of which he still sees himself as part, has a distinct unifying political approach, achieved some successes during the 1980s and 90s and became allies to the New Labour project. More controversially, he saw Ed Miliband as a ‘soft-left’ leader who was frustrated by events and questionable actors, undermined by a lack of organised ‘soft-left’ support within Labour and defeated. After that defeat, John seems to argue that the ‘soft-left’ lost its way, its organisations have diminished and unless it re-invents itself politically, intellectually and organisationally the ‘soft-left’ will become (or remain) marginalised.
That’s a 97 word précis of a 4000ish word article - but I don’t think it’s unfair, and we’ll go into some of the detail as we go.
The question for me, however, is what in 2024, or for that matter in 2010, is/was the ‘soft-left’ of Labour anyway and what does it want to achieve? Behind that is the question I was raising in this column several weeks back - what is the left, be it soft, firm or rigid, for anyway?3
John quotes Jeremy Gilbert, who I had not heard of but seems to be some kind of academic, as saying on a podcast with someone else I’ve never heard of that the soft left:
“is the common sense of Labour members to genuinely shift the balance of wealth and power … but (be) willing to accept modest goals as a pragmatic strategy”4
From which John infers “If so, perhaps the soft left is a matter of sentiment, not politics.”, which I find at once the bleedin’ obvious and somewhat patronising. Experience suggests that there is a critical mass of Labour members, at least those who go to meetings and/or take part in ballots, who position themselves a little to the ‘left’ as they see it of whatever the leader might be doing at any time but who are in the main motivated by seeing Labour win elections and who would prefer any Labour government to any alternative. These people will co-operate with other parties to keep the Conservatives out of power, they are concerned about environmental matters, are (rather wisely) deeply reluctant to countenance wars, regard poverty as an evil to be rid of, passionately back an NHS free at the point of use and care far more about education than is the norm. To suggest, even tangentially, that these views amount to “sentiment not politics” is, well, kind of elitist.
John goes on to define:
“(the politics of the soft left as) centred on three questions:
How do we understand the evolution of the capitalist economy nationally and globally and what does this mean for effort to create an economy that works for the common good?
How do we understand the nature of the state, and what does this mean for the way in which power should be exercised in contemporary society?
And how do we understand the changing electorate and civil society and what does this mean for politics of power and the possibility of radical economic and social change?”
I wouldn’t really argue with that, but that’s hardly a badge of exclusivity for any particular current of Labour/centre left thought. The people I talk of above would, I’ve generally found, share a general critique of capitalism and all its works and have an understanding of its ability to change and evolve with new trends and technologies, and while few of them are economists many of them are bothered by it and understand its importance. Many of these people have a little too much faith in the ability of the state to deliver solutions but are also perfectly able to acknowledge that many aspects of the NHS, the local authority or the police are, shall we say, lacking in flexibility. On the last point, well, sufficient to say that if you asked most of the people I’m talking about whether bringing about change was merely a matter of voting in a government and everything else will follow, they would tell you that it seems to be a bit more complicated than that. The critical mass of Labour members might not pass the multiple choice paper on the works of Gramsci, a minority will have read Gordon Brown’s last book setting the world to rights, and only a minority will have been tainted by Marx, but they are entirely capable of making political judgements - just not always the ones John or I might want.
The problematic bit is what the ‘soft left’ wants to create and who on earth is articulating that? What kind of world do we want to live in and what might those things look like? What is our idea pragmatic solution to economic organisation? What is the balance between the state and the individual that we favour? What are fundamental freedoms and how are they protected? How does democracy develop alongside the right checks and balances? How do we bring about and maintain change? All of that. Something a little deeper than ‘a bit more regulation’, ’a bit more public’, and ‘a bit more voting’ but perhaps losing the baggage that there is some kind of transformational nirvana out there the can be delivered across two parliaments.
Nonetheless John tells us,
“It is hard to imagine the soft left operating outside the Party and it is arguably the only tendency never to have attempted or even considered forming its own party.”
Well, no. Because soft left people are Labour people first. It is OUR party. I always felt it was a useful reality check to have been involved, if only a little, in political life before entering the rarified world of student politics. Labour was the vehicle for making change in the here and now, in the world we lived in, rather than waiting in the bar for the revolution to arrive. But the politics of the student world have undoubtedly shaped much of the ‘soft left’ and its small organisations and think tanks. Much of it is for the good but there is a disturbing tendency (no pun intended) to scurry down rabbit holes in pursuit of causes that are the obcessions of tiny minorities. It’s not that these things don’t matter and shouldn’t influence the direction of travel, but there isn’t much perspective down the rabbit hole. A least that’s where internal groupings tend to go from time to time, whether it’s on PR or gender or whatever and of course these little groups see themselves as being ‘the soft left’.
I have, however, found that the critical mass of Labour members, the actual soft left, particularly dislike is being told who to vote for, being told what they should think, and seem especially to dislike any kind of internal factions. They just don’t want to know. Their home is Labour, sentiment or otherwise, the ‘soft left’ to a very great extent IS Labour. They also can see these small bodies as the grifting platforms of individuals, and sometimes they aren’t wrong. This is both understandable and something of a problem. It means that good leadership is crucial - here I mean both the Party leadership and more general organic leadership with a small ‘l’. When leadership screws up bad things follow.
2010 and all that
In 2010 Labour was exhausted, but the rearguard fought in 2010 was sufficiently successful to make a tilt at power in 2015 a possibility. Instead Ed Miliband won the leadership almost by accident, without majority support among MPs nor party members. He was a nice enough chap but not being a remotely credible candidate to be Prime Minister. John, as he makes clear in his article, was PPS to Mister Ed and he sees him as “the first ‘soft left’ leader since Neil Kinnock”. What baffles me is how anyone could ever have seen Ed Miliband as an electable proposition. I fear more MPs backed him because brother David had dissed them in some way or other.5
I should make it clear that I campaigned unreservedly for both Kinnock and Miliband. Not only were they the party’s choice and the only Labour leader available, I think had they won each would have proved a much better Prime Minister than people gave them credit for, but that isn’t the point. There is a massive difference between being able to do the job of Prime Minister and being a candidate who the public are prepared to trust with the job. Personality matters, mannerisms matter, voice matters and, yes unfortunately, looks matter. THEY. SHOULDN’T. BUT. THEY. DO. It amazed me that people whose day job was politics could not see what was manifestly clear to ordinary people and that’s before we get into the deeply weird big brother-little brother thing.
Maybe I look at these things as a proudly shallow ad man, but maybe that’s a better perspective because I’m not confused by ‘policy’ and it has been my job to know what people will buy and what the face of a brand might be. The fact that Labour under Mister Ed managed to score a few mid-term opinion poll leads is not really an indication of anything very much and certainly no indication of having “set the political agenda”. Blows were certainly landed on a government doing some pretty unpopular things but it is also a fact that Mister Ed always trailed Call Me Dave in the leadership ratings.
Trouble is when you hitch your buggy to a loser it affects what comes next. I was constantly surprised by speaking to people who were loyal to Labour through Blair, Brown and Miliband and were essentially soft-left in their views and who had voted for Corbyn. It was the critical mass of Labour members in a vacuum of leadership, not £5 entryists, who almost put Labour out of business. They could only do so because they were allowed to by poor judgement from within the Westminster bubble, failing to do their job as political backstop and in several cases allowing local political convenience to cloud their primary judgement.6 Yet somehow now we should look to leadership from people who created the mess that led us directly to Corbyn.
What we are is what we’re not
In reality, people left of centre have always been better at defining their politics around that which they oppose rather than that which they favour. Back in its heyday this was alway true of the soft left and of the organisations and currents that could reasonably be thought of as its embodiment. Successfully leading opposition to entryism in the 1980s and helping shape the party during Neil Kinnock’s essential but doomed leadership laid the foundations for Labour’s later electoral success and brought through a range of once radical ideas that became mainstream - and that, I suggest, IS the point of it all.
So what now? For me the problems John rightly identifies are not particular to a current of thought but are those of the Labour Party and the left in general. But my focus would not on organisation in a factional sense, but on ideas and politics. There are too few ideas, too few serious policy organisations, too little funding, too little reach, too few think tanks, too little communication of those that do exist, no Labour ecosystem to rival anything the right has been able to produce and sustain and grow social democratic politics for too long. And also there is too little effort to develop people into leaders of opinion, of politics. Leadership to the right isn’t a dirty word. To the left and centre it kind of is - we aspire to lead the country but we just don’t develop leaders nor do we seem to understand the need to do so. Ideas and leaders are the essential ingredients, make those things happen and the organisation will follow.
The cultural bit
Entertainingly backwards
Helen Rose Wood’s look at British history through a backward facing lens, “Rule, Nostalgia”7, is entertaining, novel and witty. Firmly academic and immaculately referenced but readable and telling a story of a country which has always based it’s national story on past glories. It is partly an exercise in myth busting - it isn’t that a nostalgic view is the invention of the post imperial years, but more that the post imperial self-image is just the latest instalment in a long running saga of change and apparent regret. So there goes the idea that Brexit was exclusively the product of some kind of backward view of a world that never really existed - there had to be more than that to it (and of course there was).
Everywhere is the same then? Well, no. Although this is about Britain there are other countries where the same rules don’t apply. Countries which are relatively new, young, with boundaries that have regularly changed. Places where the national story is positively and actively spun. Britain, the UK, whatever, just doesn’t really do nation building. It did Empire building.
But, though I instinctively like Dr Woods and her take on things, I can’t help but wonder why she doesn’t really go into the notion of exploring why nostalgia is such a powerful force? For me this is quite simple. Older people make decisions, older people run or heavily influence politics, leadership, big business. Money and power rests with the older and the aging. Trouble is those people have their best years behind them. They look back to a time when they were fitter, more energetic, when their lives were ahead of them, when they were bright and beautiful when life was better - not because IT was better but because THEY were better.
Dr Woods, a young historian, cites the origins of the term ‘nostalgia’ as a diagnosis of homesick soldiers - a bunch of people who could well die soon. What she doesn’t do is transpose the condition of nostalgia to the mental health of mid-life. Like so much, nostalgia is ‘all about you’. Of course things were better when you weren’t going to die soon. Even if they actually weren’t, why wouldn’t seem so to you?
I think I’ve seen this cover before, and I didn’t like the ending
Alex Niven’s “The North Will Rise Again” is a nice piece of marketing. The jacket designer certainly made it stand out on the shelves and the title might appeal to anyone interested in the culture, history, politics and distinctiveness of these regions. As it is, the title is lifted from a tune by Manchester post-punk art rockers, The Fall,8 but has very little to do with the content and certainly not the conclusions of Mr Niven’s extremely self-indulgent and frankly rather silly book.
In fact it is hard to see exactly what the conclusions are. Mr Niven fails to say how, exactly, the North will rise again. In fact he makes a pretty convincing argument that it won’t. He seems to dismiss any notion that regional policy of any form, inward investment or the possibilities of the knowledge economy rendering physical distance irrelevant or even the that notions of identity and ‘brand’ could have any influence over the fortunes of the region. And, of times before any personal experience for which he seems nonetheless nostalgic, while virtually giving a free pass to the endemic corruption of T Dan Smith and failing to grasp in the slightest the toxic top down legacy of the over-mighty Planning Department created on his watch. That there might have been any connection between Smith’s 1950s Stalinist world view and his exploration of the Labour one party statelets of North East politics doesn’t even merit a question.9 Niven goes on to mistake the 1960s gatherings of a few beatnik types reading poetry in the old City Walls for a mass movement.
It’s all very strange, disconnected and driven by the personal interests of an English Literature academic on a narrow canvas of what constitutes ‘the North’. Manchester gets the odd mention, Liverpool is grudgingly acknowledged as just about being part of it in the context of a certain sixties band who’s importnce to Liverpool Niven gets utterly wrong, as for Yorkshire, aside from the Brontes, the place hardly merits a mention. On the other hand the indy art rock band Everything Everything, of which Niven was a founder member, get quite a bit of space - or rather their ‘early work’ does - Niven parted company after their first recording. Apparently he was “disillusioned” and chose another path, though to me it all comes across as more than a little ‘Crème Brûlée’.10
All in all shades of “Chavs”;11 nice cover shame about the content. Just not serious.
Singer-songwriter issues album shock
A friend of mine was 70 last Friday, 19 April. I pointed out that somehow he managed to arrange his birthday to be on the same day Taylor Swift issued her eleventh studio album.12 It seems that’s the way round things are now. In the series of ‘biggest things since the Beatles’ Taylor Swift is the latest and, by any number of metics, biggest, though obviously not as culturally important as the early work of Everything Everything.
Before I go on, by way of Tangent Boulevard I’ll recommend another book. A couple of few years back a friend, who knows far more about the music business than I, gave me Pete Paphides “Broken Greek”.13 It’s the tale of his Birmingham childhood and love of pop music. In the world of Pete P’s early life ‘the charts’ are important, because by his childhood logic whatever is Number One is not merely the best selling tune of the moment but must therefore also be the BEST tune of the moment. In a way that’s quite admirable as well as funny because to sell a lot of copies a song has to have something, even if it’s maximum cheese. The book is rather lovely, a joy, in fact.
By the criteria of the young Pete Paphides Ms Swift must be the best right now. The scale of the Eras tour, in terms of both production and revenue, is quite something and though Bruce Springsteen played for more than four hours in Helsinki in 2022, his costume changes were a little limited. For what it’s worth, the few negatives of the music critics - most of whom have never played a note in anger - seem to be more about justifying they aren’t just fans with typewriters.14
Having spent much of the last week listening to it, I have to say love The Tortured Poets Department, all of it, but who cares what I think. As I had been told this is “not age appropriate” (what? )I was reassured by this (paywalled) piece by Shakespeare scholar, Sir Jonathan Bate,15 who is about my age and equally taken by the work of Ms Swift. So, in case you live in a cave in Bora Bora and haven’t heard it, here’s the sublime title track.
That’s all for this week, thanks for reading,
Next week is election week - so there will be a shorter, regular post on Thursday and some specials commenting on the results to follow as and when.
Till then take care.
John
Renewal vol 32.1. 2024 - pp22-31.
I’m swerving the stuff about Europe. In the context of this piece it’s a rabbit hole, suffice to say the nature and politics of the EU have changed radically with its expansion, unsuprising that minds about it have changed too.
Golfing in the Red Wall, 28 March 2024 - Cnut in the Media Age and Other Stories
Culture, Power, Politics podcast, quoted in Renewal, ibid. (they get paid for this stuff)
Really this is more than a suspicion. David Miliband may be regardedd by many as ‘the lost leader’ but his personal PR was pretty terrible and I’ve met enough people he cheesed off on a personal level to know it was a thing.
I have spoken of those guilty of pushing Corbyn over the threshold in 2015 before. Many of the same people were guilty of nominating Diane Abbott in 2010, lest the field be all male. It was a mistake then too but the fact it did no damage partly led to the grester mistake in 2015.
“Rule, Nostalgia, a backwards history of Britain” WH Allen, 2022
I’ll confess to quite liking The Fall, but you can’t exactly dance to it.
T Dan Smith moved from the Communist Party to Labour. He was a leader of Newcastle City Council and in cahoots with the corrupt architect, John Polson. Niven’s account states as fact that much of Smith’s dubious homes are still standing. Well, some are, the renovations have cost quite a lot. I canvassed them in their original state in the 70s. It wasn’t pretty.
A band from the fictional northern town of Royston Vasey, lamented by one of the characters who was an original member. Google it.
Chavs - Owen Jones - see GitRW 24 March, ibid.
The Tortured Poets Department. Taylor Swift, Republic.
“Broken Greek” Pete Paphides, Quercus Editions 2020.
Like, who uses typewriters anyway?
“Taylor Swift is a Literary Giant”, Sir Jonathan Bate, The Sunday Times 9 April 2023.
Formerly Head of Worcester Colege, Oxford, he now teaches at Arizona State. Am I jealous much?