One Step Beyond

New Labour's Project does not go far enough, argues Roger Warren Evans  Gower CLP

That debate misses the point.  The real problem is that the Blair Project is in danger of getting stuck in a traditionalist rut.  The bleak truth is that the modernising is not going far enough.

The Party's social security thinking is very conventional, failing to adapt to a fluid labour market.  Labour has no proposals to support poor children locked into poor families.  "Stakeholder" pensions represent an oppressive capitalist solution, bowing to City demands.

There are no plans to tackle the systemic abuse of corporate power, by root-and-branch reform of company law, on a national and international scale.  Labour relies on a stakeholding view of companies, just at a time when companies as institutions are withering away in a constant flux of international manipulation.

In Labour's view of international relations, including the European Union, the Party keeps its sights firmly focused on the narrowest of materialist horizons, without perceiving any broader inspiration.

Labour plans for Britain to become the last major country to incorporate the European Convention of Human Rights into our law, an idea that was new - in 1964.  Labour plans a Freedom of Information Act for the public sector, yet does not propose it for the corporate sector, to which true power has migrated.  The Party fails to recognise that the corporate sector is the primary oppressive institution of the modern world.

Labour plans to retain the House of Lords, instead of abolishing it and developing a truly democratic single-chamber system.

Instead of decentralising power to our cities, Labour is planning to hand it over to pale Celtic models of Westminster sitting in Edinburgh, Cardiff, perhaps even Stormont.  And for England, Labour has no convincing democratic decentralisation policy at all.

There are no plans for neighbourhood government or for the strengthening of local government institutions. There is no strategy for returning quango powers to the control of representative institutions, offering only the prospect of a huge bonanza of Labour patronage.

Labour is still enmeshed in the century-old question of Proportional Representation at Westminster, when that is the very least of the country's problems.

This is all very old-fashioned.  Nor can I find any relevant new ideas on the Old Left, or Democratic Left, or Traditional Left - or whatever they now prefer to be called.

I am a socialist and a post-moderniser.  We cannot rely on the Westminster model of government at all, either for the nation state or its provincial parts.  We must build new forms of representative government, from the bottom up.

The nation state is not losing its importance.  But there are continuing changes in the character of the people's sovereignty, and radical reforms are called for.  We must challenge, at every turn, the assertion of private property rights over personal freedom and fulfilment - from Rupert Murdoch's satellite box to the extinction of rambling rights by the Forestry Commission.

We cannot rely on companies or employers at all, as primary institutions of the future social order.  Our children will have to earn their living in much more complex ways, and will need support to do so.  We must even be prepared to challenge the received ideologies of family values and parent-power, when millions of children are the victims of poverty in oppressed families. Labour's commitment must be absolute, to the education and personal development of each child, regardless of family origin.

We must forge true international links between people at local level, as Germany and France did between their peoples over many years.

My socialism predicates a new relationship between each individual citizen and the national government, giving to each the great personal support that the modern nation state can afford, without mediation by company, trade union or association, or even family.

Our collective institutions must reach out to each citizen as an individual, as having a unique value as a fellow citizen.  In my post-modernising socialism there are echoes of liberal individualism, even of an anarchist impatience with the constraints of received institutions.

We must have it in our hearts to open our communities to the oppressed from elsewhere, giving them the welcome of asylum when they have need of it.

The traditional Left does not address these new concerns.  It is still fighting the old battles and remains for the most part a collection of fixers, centralisers, schemers, conspirators.  It is right for the Blair Project to move away from their preoccupations.

The problem is that the Project has not moved far enough away to find new firm ground for the construction of the new socialism. 

It could easily get bogged down.

(my italics, added this week - 15 July 2002...)

Does any of this ring true?
Drop me a line > < Back to Home Page