Whatever happened to true socialism? There certainly wasn’t much of it around at the Labour Party Conference. I don’t mean just the waving of the Union Jack rather than singing The Red Flag. I mean actual commitment to a different way of running society.
Go back to a real socialist like George Orwell. As his essays make clear, he certainly didn’t support socialism as a vehicle for fashionable causes – indeed he mocked the vegetarian sandal-wearers on the Left just as we do today. He was a socialist because he thought that socialism, public control of production, was actually a better way of producing wealth and making people better off – better than “wasteful” competing private companies with all their advertising and other middle men.
He was wrong about that. No one thinks that any longer, even in Labour. Everyone knows this kind of socialism is a bad way of running an economy. But Labour has never really been able to let it go. They eventually reconciled themselves to a watered-down form of it, so-called social democracy.
This grudgingly makes a concession to reality in allowing the private sector a role, but still assumes that the state should control the basics, regulate heavily, and recycle any excessive surplus from the private sphere into benefits and to favoured social groups. This form of socialism too ran into the buffers in the Seventies. Now again, after the happy Thatcher interlude, we are back in the same position. We’ve run out of road.
Labour’s problem is that their head knows this but their heart won’t accept it. In their heart they believe the public sector is morally superior even if it isn’t more productive. The party is still emotionally engaged in Attlee socialism, collectivism, the labour movement, and redistribution.
Some in Labour are intellectually honest enough to accept that this isn’t a viable way forward. Wes Streeting clearly knows, even if he can’t say it, that the only way to get a responsive healthcare system is to bring in elements of the market. He can see that, without the private sector, discontent with our health “service” would be intolerable – no doubt why he was so quick this week to rubbish any suggestion that Labour might tax private health as they have private schools.
Even Starmer can see that the only version of Left-wing politics that has a hope of being palatable to more than a fringe of British voters is the light touch social market of Blair’s first term. That’s why when he talks about growth in his conference speech he has to sound like a Tory, complaining about “the mindless bureaucracy…that chokes enterprise”, or the need to “strip out bad regulation, confront the blockers that strangle a thriving private sector” – not comments that were greeted with great enthusiasm in the hall.
What his audience wanted to hear was more crackpot schemes, more state direction, more targets, industrial strategy, free meals for children, libraries for schools – and someone else to pay for it all.
This creates a fundamental dishonesty at the heart of the Labour project. The intelligent part of their leadership know the truth, but have to find a way of presenting it that doesn’t offend their party’s idées fixes. Meanwhile the rest don’t see why they can’t have old-style tax-and-spend socialism, and want to keep telling people so.
This means Labour does not, and cannot, have a political plan that passes the minimal test of both making the country more prosperous and being acceptable to the party. So only one thing is left to do: attack their opponents.
That’s why we saw the aggressive moves against Nigel Farage and Reform. The only thing everyone in Labour can actually agree on is “stop racism, stop fascism”. And it keeps them happy because it goes back to folk memories of the Battle of Cable Street or fighting the National Front.
The only problem is that there is no longer any racism to speak of in mainstream British politics. And Labour’s feeble centrist-dad version of patriotism has no emotional content, no historical resonance, no ability to inspire. It’s like an atheist giving a Bible reading: the text visibly means nothing to the reader, it’s just social convention, the words are just words. Indeed one could be forgiven for thinking, from the response in the hall, that most in Labour are much more nationalistic about Palestine than about Britain.
This is the political void at the core of modern Labour. I don’t think any Labour leader can ride it for long. I’m quite confident that, once the conference vibes have subsided, Starmer will be in just as weak a position as he was last week.
What ought to be bothering Labour still more is that, if socialism in its strong form doesn’t work, if even in its weak form of social democracy it’s hit the end of the line, if even Starmer has to advocate Tory measures of spending control and deregulation to achieve growth and wealth creation: then what precisely is the point of the Labour Party?
.jpeg)
Whatever happened to true socialism? There certainly wasn’t much of it around at the Labour Party Conference. I don’t mean just the waving of the Union Jack rather than singing The Red Flag. I mean actual commitment to a different way of running society.
Go back to a real socialist like George Orwell. As his essays make clear, he certainly didn’t support socialism as a vehicle for fashionable causes – indeed he mocked the vegetarian sandal-wearers on the Left just as we do today. He was a socialist because he thought that socialism, public control of production, was actually a better way of producing wealth and making people better off – better than “wasteful” competing private companies with all their advertising and other middle men.
He was wrong about that. No one thinks that any longer, even in Labour. Everyone knows this kind of socialism is a bad way of running an economy. But Labour has never really been able to let it go. They eventually reconciled themselves to a watered-down form of it, so-called social democracy.
This grudgingly makes a concession to reality in allowing the private sector a role, but still assumes that the state should control the basics, regulate heavily, and recycle any excessive surplus from the private sphere into benefits and to favoured social groups. This form of socialism too ran into the buffers in the Seventies. Now again, after the happy Thatcher interlude, we are back in the same position. We’ve run out of road.
Labour’s problem is that their head knows this but their heart won’t accept it. In their heart they believe the public sector is morally superior even if it isn’t more productive. The party is still emotionally engaged in Attlee socialism, collectivism, the labour movement, and redistribution.
Some in Labour are intellectually honest enough to accept that this isn’t a viable way forward. Wes Streeting clearly knows, even if he can’t say it, that the only way to get a responsive healthcare system is to bring in elements of the market. He can see that, without the private sector, discontent with our health “service” would be intolerable – no doubt why he was so quick this week to rubbish any suggestion that Labour might tax private health as they have private schools.
Even Starmer can see that the only version of Left-wing politics that has a hope of being palatable to more than a fringe of British voters is the light touch social market of Blair’s first term. That’s why when he talks about growth in his conference speech he has to sound like a Tory, complaining about “the mindless bureaucracy…that chokes enterprise”, or the need to “strip out bad regulation, confront the blockers that strangle a thriving private sector” – not comments that were greeted with great enthusiasm in the hall.
What his audience wanted to hear was more crackpot schemes, more state direction, more targets, industrial strategy, free meals for children, libraries for schools – and someone else to pay for it all.
This creates a fundamental dishonesty at the heart of the Labour project. The intelligent part of their leadership know the truth, but have to find a way of presenting it that doesn’t offend their party’s idées fixes. Meanwhile the rest don’t see why they can’t have old-style tax-and-spend socialism, and want to keep telling people so.
This means Labour does not, and cannot, have a political plan that passes the minimal test of both making the country more prosperous and being acceptable to the party. So only one thing is left to do: attack their opponents.
That’s why we saw the aggressive moves against Nigel Farage and Reform. The only thing everyone in Labour can actually agree on is “stop racism, stop fascism”. And it keeps them happy because it goes back to folk memories of the Battle of Cable Street or fighting the National Front.
The only problem is that there is no longer any racism to speak of in mainstream British politics. And Labour’s feeble centrist-dad version of patriotism has no emotional content, no historical resonance, no ability to inspire. It’s like an atheist giving a Bible reading: the text visibly means nothing to the reader, it’s just social convention, the words are just words. Indeed one could be forgiven for thinking, from the response in the hall, that most in Labour are much more nationalistic about Palestine than about Britain.
This is the political void at the core of modern Labour. I don’t think any Labour leader can ride it for long. I’m quite confident that, once the conference vibes have subsided, Starmer will be in just as weak a position as he was last week.
What ought to be bothering Labour still more is that, if socialism in its strong form doesn’t work, if even in its weak form of social democracy it’s hit the end of the line, if even Starmer has to advocate Tory measures of spending control and deregulation to achieve growth and wealth creation: then what precisely is the point of the Labour Party?