Piece for ShiftingGrounds on Ken Loach's new film

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Can we revive the spirit of 45?

Of the twentieth century it’s often remarked that “the left won the culture war, the right won the economic war”. If nothing else, Ken Loach’s Spirit of 45, out in cinemas last week, is a useful reminder that this did not always seem like being a foregone conclusion.

A great deal has changed since then, of course, as the film expends little subtlety in telling us. And indeed many have wasted no time in dismissing Loach as nostalgic or simplistic, something he probably leaves himself open to with his use of sepia tone and eventual descent into agitprop (Ms Thatcher emerges from nowhere to shatter the reverie, encouraging the audience in my showing to audibly hiss!).

But past its casual bursts of pantomime, The Spirit of 45 is a beautiful and inspiring movie. It leaves you, as I suppose it intends to, with the question of what we can revive of that time – of, as the late Tony Judt might put it, “what is living and what is dead?” What can be resuscitated and how?

The first – and the most striking thing about that era – was the sheer scale of ambition of the Labour government. They faced circumstance which make today’s problems seem meagre by comparison: a country decimated by war, fiscal deficits of 21.5%, national debt at nearly 250% of GDP. And yet they embarked on a programme of wholesale transformation of the British economy and society – not because it was romantic, but because it was the right way to solve those problems.

In many ways an experiment, this boldness is a salutary reminder to those of us on the left who at times have had our horizons narrowed by the last thirty years of free-market triumphalism, or even the austerity of the past few. Too often we content ourselves to talk big but fiddle at the edges; a tweak and a nudge here, a tax incentive there. Ownership and control matter, as do institutions; public and private interest are not synonymous – the former should always be a buffer to the latter, not a mere facilitator.

Simple truths but ones too often forgotten. And relevant when we look at our country today. What really is the case, for example, for continuing with the absurd public subsidy to train companies to run our railways, instead of just taking what is a natural monopoly back into public ownership? In energy and banking industries, we should at least be looking at national or regional ‘public options’ which could undercut profiteering from the cartels that dominate those industries.

What these institutions might look like brings us to what Loach pinpoints as the failure of the left in the late twentieth century. While the collectivism of the post-war years expressed itself through politics, that spirit largely stopped at the ballot box. Nationalised institutions eventually became sclerotic and bureaucratic; run in the interests of people but with little of their input.

The only way by which the left of today can take up the spirit of 1945, while not repeating its failures, is through a relentless focus on economic democracy.  Where institutions are state backed, they should be run equally by management and employees, ideally with third party input too. The plans for a ‘Peoples Port of Dover’ – controlled equally by employees, local residents and businesses – provides a good model.

This ethic also needs to be extended right across the economy, including to businesses. For example, Peter Tatchell and others have long argued for medium and large companies to be required to be run in this way, with shareholders and employees represented equally on boards, alongside an agreed (smaller) third group. This reflects the recommendations of the 1977 Bullock Report, never enacted in time before the tide of Thatcherism swept all such considerations away.

The dream of abolishing the profit motive has evaporated, and it is very unlikely to come back. Over a century social democracy (and even democratic socialism) has indeed sadly gone, as Dylan Riley puts it,“from a strategy for achieving socialism to a policy package for managing capitalism”. But if that’s to be the case, lets at least do it comprehensively.

Undoubtedly though, there are a some elements of the era Loach venerates which are dead – and to which it is less easy to reconcile. The working class still exists, but it is far more fractured, far less homogeneous than it was; the very nature of our cities have also changed. This all creates significant barriers to the important work of political and trade union organisation, particularly in the private sector.

As does the most pressing change of all: the way globalisation has transformed capital, making it more fluid and global, and far harder to regulate or tax. These problems are not insurmountable. But as Paul Mason has said, they do pose a dilemma for the left. Namely, this is whether we pursue a   programme of ‘deglobalisation’ (capital controls, anti-outsourcing measures etc.) or enter the far more untested and ambitious terrain of global governance. This debate has yet to even really get under way in mainstream left circles, nevermind reach a conclusion.

Nevertheless, we have enough to be getting on with. As Eric Hobsbawm told Juncture shortly before his death:

“Politics is the only aspect of the 21^st century world which globalisation [has] weakened but not transformed. It remains the only effective mechanism for social redistribution…It has its problems and abuses, but it remains the last bastion against the free market. And it needs politics – politics by collective action to move it.”

It is this which we can take forward as the true essence of the spirit 1945, linking that which can be rescued from that time to what we can bring to new challenges; the centrality of politics and collective action. This has never been more urgent than now, as we look back at the unquestioned inequity, inequality and unsustainability of the pre-crash years. Just as those post-war generations did, we too should vow never to go back to “that sort of peace”.

Dover – A chance to put theory into practice…?

Piece for LabourList

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The Labour party has not agreed on much since 2010. Understandably following such a long stint in power, a lot of time has been spent contesting ‘lessons learned’ and ‘where to from now’. One area where there has been broad agreement, though, is on the virtue of Co-ops, mutuals and other community-based models of ownership. This not only formed the bedrock of Blue Labour thinking, but featured in the Red Book, the Purple Book, Compass and Fabian literature. Warm words from cosy seminar rooms are one thing, however – but do we actually believe in this stuff? If so, there is a fight going on, in a tiny corner of England, which offers the chance to turn theory into practice.

The port of Dover a key strategic hub in the region, hosting a number of small and large businesses (mostly ferry companies) and enabling the movement of goods and people across our border. Since 1604 it has been the source of stable and secure employment for thousands of men and women in the local area – from stevedores to electricians - while other industries have deteriorated or declined around it. The dock is deeply embedded in both the local and national economy, facilitating trade, transport and acting as a ‘gateway’ to Britain. It has come to form as integral a part of the community as the famous white cliffs which it neighbours.

Now, though, it is on the verge of privatisation. The Government is gearing up to sell it to the highest bidder, with a number of multinational private equity companies looming. We already have a prelude for what this will mean, as current administrators ‘fatten the pig for market day’. Jobs have been cut, wages slashed, skilled port workers put on zero-hour contracts; all to push down costs with a view to showcase the profits that potential bidders could line their shareholders pockets with.

As well as an affront to years of history, private ownership would likely be a horribly inefficient way to run the port. There is no evidence that it would improve the way it’s operated. That’s why ferry companies are so opposed to privatisation, and 97% of the town voted against it in a referendum last year. From the bidder’s perspective, it is simply about turning a huge profit on a ‘service’ they will have a natural monopoly over (it’s rather hard to ‘marketise’ this industry unless you want to give Dover citizen the right to set up their own shipping port…). For the Government, it is merely about a short-term boost to Treasury coffers – but even that would be lost in the long-term damage on jobs and demand.

Just as there is nothing ‘modernising’ or progressive about this, neither is there anything inevitable about it. The one group standing between a Tory government set on selling off the family silver, and the grateful arms of an overseas corporation, is ’Dover Forever England’. A coalition of groups that includes supporters of state ownership as well as the community-owned Dover People’s Port Trust, they are looking to stage a fight back on a scale we saw around the proposed sale of Britain’s forests.

But the Trust are not just opposing the privatisation of the port, they have come up with a detailed, coherent alternative. They plan to buy it from the government, and run it in partnership withDovercitizens, employees, port users, local businesses and local authorities. In other words, the port would be put in the hands of the people, locked away forever from bean-counters in Whitehall or transnational business elites. Revenue would be spent on jobs and infrastructure, not shareholders.

As well as an alliance of citizens, workers and businesses people, the Trust has teamed up with both Labour and Conservative MPs and councillors to stand against privatisation: the embodiment of the ‘Big Society’ Cameron professes to believe in. Sadly, though, if there’s cross-party consensus pushing for an alternative to the sell-off, there is also an uncomfortable degree of continuity on the other side of the argument. The idea of selling off the port originated under the Brown government, highlighting an instinct among many of our political leaders that most things are better run privately – an assumption that has disfigured much policy on public services, industry and the economy for over thirty years. An alternative to it – and in my view the idea that everything should be controlled bureaucratically, top down from Whitehall– is desperately needed. Though it may appear to be just a local scrap, the fate of the port of Dover is a crucial battle in a much larger war, with huge implications.

That’s why everyone on the left – and groups within Labour who have identified the crucial role community ownership can play in breaking with the past – should give their support to the campaign, do what they can to get involved or spread the word about it. Only this way can the Government be forced to listen, stop the sale – and hopefully hand the port over to the people of Dover.

The Government is set to decide on the port’s fate and whether to put it out to auction in the next few weeks. Ahead of this there is a big campaign meeting tomorrow (8th September), 11am at Pencester Gardens in Dover. If you can’t make it, then you can share articles about the campaign (Patrick Macfarlane at Progress, Tristram Hunt or Julian Baggini are good places to start), sign up to the Facebook group or donate to the Trust through its website, to play a part in the vital effort keep Dover forever England.

Review: The Purple Book and Tangled Up in Blue

Shorter version of this is on the Fabian's Next Left blog

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Any willing provider? Labour's new anti-state chic. A review of the Purple Book andTangled Up In Blue

The Purple Book: A Progressive Future for Labour, Robert Philpot (ed), Biteback, 2011.
Tangled Up In Blue: Blue Labour and the Battle of Labour's soul, Rowena Davis, Ruskin, 2011.

Perhaps the most striking thing about the years following the economic collapse of 2008 was the absence of new ideas on the democratic left. Labour's election defeat confirmed for most that something had gone awry with modern social democracy. Most agreed that approaches to state and market had been ill struck, and that the economy had become too dependent on the City. But these axioms never gave birth to much in the way of renewal. All the while the Tories were stitching together their own story, re-casting the crisis as one of overspending and inefficiency, co-opting Britain's other allegedly centre-left party along the way.

It's amid this impasse in 2011 that Labour's multi-coloured insurgencies have emerged, offering their own readings of the past, present and future. Chief among them have been the Purple Book, organised by Progress, and Blue Labour, lead by Maurice Glasman but resuscitated from his misdemeanours here by Rowena Davis. Although many Progress members may now balk at the suggestion, the two actually started life closer than is often recognised. A number of the Purple Book's contributors and cheerleaders (e.g Caroline Flint, Tessa Jowell, Philip Collins) were involved in the first wave of seminars and publicity that gave rise to Blue Labour. They've since sensibly gone their own separate ways, but retain their shared starting point that the root of Labour's woes lay in becoming too centralist and remote; “administrative, elitist and technocratic”, as Davis puts it. Both claim to be interested in returning to Labour's decentralising tradition, and both eschew 'big state' Fabianism, top-down universalism and public spending as the solution to all of societies' ills.

As befits its organisers, The Purple Book approaches this argument in a considerably more slick, metropolitan way. At its best, it is far more thoughtful, practical and self-aware than many of its critics have given it credit for. It hangs together in a way few anthologies do, and is more astutely conscious of itself as an electoral strategy than its rivals. There are plenty of interesting ideas on the value of co-operatives as a means of spreading social control over public services (Caroline Flint, Steve Reed and Paul Brant's sections on housing are surprisingly engaging) and on revenue-raising at a local level.

The trouble with it is, at times, it feels like a new language is being adopted to advance a familiar agenda, which is essentially one of marketisation. The passage on public services that Paul Richards approvingly quotes from Blair's memoirs is interesting in this respect:

“...we have fashioned a template for reform: changing the monolithic nature of the service; introducing competition; blurring the distinctions between public and private....and in general trying to free the system up, letting it innovate, differentiate, breathe and stretch its limbs.”

Richards adds the only problem with this approach is it didn't consider social ownership in the mix. But he never really explores whether Co-ops should be prioritised above private providers, for instance, just that services should be removed from monolithic central state control. This ambivalence is made explicit by Alan Milburn who, on education, says:

“There need be no single model. There could be academies or trusts, parent-owned or community controlled, run by social enterprises formed by teachers or by chains run by voluntary, or for that matter, private sector bodies.”

The impression gained through the book is not of a central state endowing local communities, but of diversification and the state “letting go” as an end in itself. All this is fine if one believes in it, but it's difficult to know how it differs from the current government's 'any willing provider' approach to healthcare. Co-ops are in the mix and are to be encouraged, sure, but what of the potential for conflict between different providers? Surely a Co-Op couldn't hope to compete with private providers in terms of outcomes; does the state inherently privilege Co-Ops in the contracting process to balance this out? What are the rules applied when opening services to tender? What if no local group – or demand for co-operative control - emerges? None of these questions are ever really explored satisfactory, apparently lost to the contributors' reforming zeal.

A similar frustration stalks you as you read the books' sections on political economy. Tristram Hunt's contribution is fantastic, by far and away the best of the bunch. It wisely focuses on 'pre-distribution' and the need for the state - in smart, considered ways - to get 'up stream' and shape a more equitable distribution of the benefits of growth, as opposed to simply redistributing through the tax system. But this more bold, hands-on approach with the market is never matched or built on elsewhere. The living wage, pay multiples, greater democratic organisation in the workplace, regional or national investment banks - all are examples of small, fairly inexpensive things that can be done to achieve the more balanced economy the book talks of, but nothing like it is ever touched on. Instead we get a few nods to more “strategic” industrial activism from Peter Mandelson, but what this means is left fairly vague. Would it mean, for instance, protecting local communities from predatory takeovers of local industries such as Kraft's of Cadbury's?

Throughout there is often simply an unwillingness to leave well-worn comfort zones and suggest anything that might appear 'anti-business' or 'old Labour'. Instead the book frequently retreats into public service reform, or constitutional issues, as if the past 5 years hasn't happened. At the end of the book, editor Robert Philpot lists its recommendations – there are around 10 pages on reforming the state, and just 1 on reforming the market. But what the UK has seen is surely not a failure of the big state, but the market – or at least, the state's relationship with it. How else to understand the financial crisis, or the de-coupling of growth from wages?

In short, it's not that 'leaving the big state behind' (the books' promotional strapline) feels like the wrong prescription for the UK's problems – it's that it's the wrong diagnosis. When Patrick Diamond argues that “social democrats need to acknowledge that state intervention has left a multitude of social and economic ills untouched”, he writes as if we've just experienced 30 years of post-war Keynsianism. Nor did Labour lose because it was too statist. Philpot triumphantly reveals 1 in 4 of Labour's lost voters saw 'government as part of the problem not the solution' – but what of the other 4 in 5? Nobodies arguing there's a thirst for a Soviet-style command economy, but there is room for a positive case to be made for the state in the market, actively shaping it not least so that it puts money in the pockets of ordinary, hard-working people. A brash anti-statism simply neglects the challenges of our time.

A similar misreading pops up through the Blue Labour story, as documented in intimate and intelligent – if at times slightly breathless – fashion by Rowena Davis. It holds at its heart the mantra that “relationships are transformative”; that organising local communities is the best means by which to achieve social change. But instead, to Glasman, Davis writes, “the modern Labour party...seemed obsessed with expanding the state”. This would be fine were it just a piece of posturing, but it leads Glasman to sweeping statements (“the model that we had in 1945 of universal state based [provision]... lead to massive erosion of solidarity”) which can in turn beget frustratingly rigid policy conclusions.

Take Sure Start centres. Blue Labour, says Davis, wouldn't open more of them, because it believes they've become “a means of...free childcare” while both parents are at work, not of promoting relationships. Instead, Glasman wants the state to facilitate neighbours taking turns to look after each others kids. But Sure Start centres more often serve as a space where parents interact with and help other parents, picking up tips or sharing support as well as receiving it from staff. They foster exactly the sort of relationships that Blue Labour values in a more effective manner than ad hoc approaches. The idea that universal state services are always an anathema to social solidarity is simply false – as the public support the BBC or the NHS further shows.

This belligerence denies a more important, complicated conversation about when, where and how state services get it right in promoting relationship, and how they can change to get it right more often, rather than just cease. Here Davis tellingly notes that traditional social democrats were the only under-represented sections of the Labour party during Blue Labour's formative seminars - Sunder Katwala couldn't make it, and no Brownites were involved. It's difficult not to conclude that greater dialogue with the schools of thought Blue Labour sets up such antagonism to (particularly Fabianism) could give more nuance, and less divisiveness, to its conflict with 1945.

Yet there remains much to engage with about Blue Labour, and Davis convincingly argues that it has been received rather lazily by parts of the media (the reaction to Glasman's recent intervention serves as a case in point). Unlike both the Purple Book, and Philip Blond's Red Toryism, Blue Labour is rooted in a powerful critique of free markets, seeking to organise communities “against the dominance of capital”, on their high street and their workplace. This lends itself to plenty of thought provoking policy prescriptions. It has cogent ideas, for instance, on shifting the UK towards a more skills based economy, and its ‘a third, a third, a third’ model of public services (wherein, for example, a school would be run equally by the state, parents and staff) avoids a lot of the ambivalences of the Purple Book.

It’s also no surprise to learn from Tangled Up In Blue that Glasman wrote probably the two most rich and evocative Labour speeches of recent years - Gordon Brown at Citizens UK and David Miliband’s Keir Hardie lecture, both among the best either have given. There’s a certain magic and humanity to the Blue Labour language, of organising and action, that transcends the Think Tank generated jargon of our time. So much so in fact that its advocates occasionally slip by you a slight (and sad) exaggeration of the appetite among the public for getting involved in local decision making, something common to the Purple Book too. Oscar Wilde, afterall, famously said “the trouble with socialism is it takes too many evenings”, and Davis does in turn seem to over-state the influence of both Cameron’s ‘Big Society’ and Brown’s Citizens UK speech had on the electorate.

Nevertheless, it's imperative that Fabians engage with the strength and weaknesses of these two books. Social democrats shouldn’t allow ourselves to be boxed in as reflexive defenders of the state. Not even the most ardent among us can deny that occasionally government ends up feeling top-down and transactive, or that services need to be shaped by those running and receiving them. Neither should we dismiss the power and energy of community activism as only to be harnessed for winning election campaigns; sometimes you need to govern in poetry, too. But there is an urgent need to push back against the bogeyman-esque depiction of the state that at times animates Purple Book and Blue Labour thinking. We need to articulate a vision of the state that's not in opposition to organised communities, but in constant partnership with them, providing a bulwark against the dominance of capital and the dysfunction and alienation which accompanies free market capitalism. How’s that for a New Years resolution?