The Death Agony of Social Democracy

This was started in the Spring of 2017, before the local elections which were not good, and well before the General Election the results of which suggests that a wake might be premature. I had been planning something along the lines that classic social democracy was struggling around the world. The Lawson article below catalogues its electoral failures, obviously it used the reviews to chart the rise of Corbyn, which asks if he could make a difference; the polls weren't looking good. Lawson suggests two routes forward, one of them PR with which I agree, although I suspect his appeal for a progressive alliance is over for the moment. I conclude with a White Paper which argues that Labour has killed its democracy and that will inhibit it's renewal.

The General Election result which happened just a month ago, (on the original publication) will change the way we read this story.

The way that rump New Labour holds onto power and its historic apolitical practices remain a problem for Labour.

The first is from the TLS and is a polemical review of three books about the rise of Corbyn. They say, "Rosa Prince, in Comrade Corbyn, offers a pacy biographical account, sourced predominantly from outside his circle; Alex Nunns’s The Candidate is a very well-researched narrative, widely sourced but written from a supportive perspective; and Corbyn: The strange rebirth of radical politics by Richard Seymour mostly eschews the personal for a witty and acute political and historical analysis from a position to the left of Corbyn."

The review of Nunn's book catalogues Corbyn's ascent to power through the failure of Blairism, the slow re-joining of the soft left who'd given up during New Labour's ascendency and the final accumulation of the young and the new Left from single issue politics.

The reviewer is pessimistic of Labour's chance of victory, but points to the Referendum Party's 1997 catastrophic failure and remarks that the future is hard to forecast. He does say that Labour's majority want to focus on inequality and to reject insipid triangulation and that the left majority is solid for the foreseeable future. A view to be repeated by Paul Mason at a Progress Conference later in the year.

The next article is by Neal Lawson, who's strong on the road to irrelevancy, the weakness of the Unions, the loss of social memory of the depression and WW2, the decline of manufacturing and its command and control management style which was used by the Atlee & Wilson Governments and still aspired to by the New Labour rump. He notes the failures in Greece, Holland and France of Labour's sister parties.

His answer is what he calls a unification of 45 degree politics and proportional representation. The former involves the creation of campaigning organisation and their legitimisation by the State. By calling it 45 degree politics he makes it sound new and innovative, but this is how we used to do politics in the 70s & 80s, although the lessons from Spain since 2008 are worth learning from and Grenfell may be the focus that leads to more powerful tenants organisations, a new tier of civic society. PR would doom the Tories to a minority in Parliament and he hopes make Labour confront its tribalism and work with other progressive parties. The results of the election make this less likely not more.

A paper by Emanuelle Averil on New Labour, shows its managerialism and the destruction of its activitist commitment and influence.

There follows a number of quotes from the paper.

In his classic work on the rules of innovation, James Utterback explains,

The Averil paper in particular is worth a read, it encapsulates a lot of what's wrong with the Labour Party today.