Do the Tories really own the future?

Phil Hearse says the ‘soft left’ alternative put forward by John Harris in the Guardian is weak and unworkable

Within hours of the announcement of Tony Benn’s death, ex-Labour cabinet minister Clare Short was on BBC TV saying that “the problem with Tony” was that “he refused to acknowledge that the world had moved on” and that in particular “the world economy had moved on” – and thus he remained “stuck in the past”.

John Harris in the Guardian recently said the same thing about the whole of the left, in which he includes everyone from the Labour leadership to Left Unity’s Ken Loach, who he patronises with the word “venerable”. His theme is that while the Tories own the future the left is stuck in the past. The Tories have understood the present and how to adapt to it; the left has not.

A flavour of what he regards as the left’s problem is the two demands he singles out for special attack: a massive national programme of housebuilding and the renationalisation of the railways (!) More popular demands capable of mobilising the enthusiasm of millions could hardly be imagined. John Harris regards these things as problematic because they involve a central role for the state, which in the era of neoliberal free enterprise and privatisation is a no-no. And Harris knows full well that the Labour leadership does not advocate such things: he is really attacking the militant left like Left Unity.

The rational part of what John Harris says is that we cannot go back to the old Keynesian welfare state model of capitalism, but the radical left has never been so minimalist in its ambitions. For us the future is not about adapting to neoliberal globalisation, or imagining that 1950s Labourism can be recaptured, but making a radical break with the whole logic of ‘turbo capitalism’.

John Harris makes a series of spectacular false analyses which if accepted would demoralise and demobilise the left. First, “it increasingly feels as if the Tories will win the next election, possibly outright”. Does it? To me it feels like in the absence of any really radical alternative from Labour, UKIP could get a massive vote which might destabilise the possibility of a Tory victory. The outcome could be a long period of governmental instability.

Second, “As proved by the budget, the basic idea [of the Tories] is simple enough: they divide society into those who think they can cope with globalisation and those who cannot, and then shower the former with praise and modest enticements – which clobbering the latter in the service of political popularity… For all its awfulness, I understand that version of what lies ahead; indeed, I can almost feel it.”

This sounds like he’s saying the Tories can build a coalition of the upper class, middle class and the employed working class with average or above incomes, and bash the badly paid, the irregularly employed, the unemployed and immigrants. Doubtless they will try to do that, but the scheme is far too optimistic about how many “feel they can cope with globalisation” – ie. how many people now feel comfortable and secure.

Job insecurity, welfare and NHS cuts and the increasingly nightmare pressures on all workers to work harder and longer are driving the effects of the crisis deep into sections of the middle class, and into previously relatively protected sectors like teachers, lawyers and local government workers. To crystallise that politically against the Tories requires a radical alternative vision, one that Ed Miliband and Ed Balls are incapable of providing.

Third “the mode of production has long since changed” (no it hasn’t, it just got nastier) and this has brought about three huge changes that the left has failed to respond to. He says: “First, there is the changed nature of work. Politicians and commentators still crow on about the glories of ‘jobs’, as if human beings achieve their highest state of being while clocking in and out of posts they might keep for decades at a time… But that world has gone.”

The radical left does not glorify the world of work: we do not regard the factory, the office or construction site as ‘liberating’, far from it. But in a capitalist world not having a job is usually a disaster. ‘Abolish the wages system’ or ‘abolish work’ is hardly an alternative to demanding the right to work or a living wage for all workers – and of course a living wage for those on benefits. In Greece, Portugal or Spain, explaining to the 25% who don’t have jobs (up to 50% of youth in each instance) that the world of work should not be fetishised would be greeted only with astonished contempt.

It’s true that the awful and increasing pressures of work need to be addressed. A rather traditional radical left approach to this is encompassed in an experiment in Gothenburg, Sweden, where the city council is reducing its staff’s working hours to six a day without cutting their pay. There’s absolutely no reason why the working day can’t be radically reduced and more people employed to make up the hours… except that it will reduce profits. Work-sharing would make a radical and massive difference to peoples’ lives.

The citizen’s income idea Harris champions in his article sounds fine at first blush, but check out the websites advocating this. Its often a right wing idea, counterposed to adequate welfare and benefits and counterposed to a living wage. Its right wing advocates want everyone to have a basic income and then be ‘free’ to spend it buying in healthcare, education, food or whatever. However at any conceivable realistic level it just cannot cover the healthcare of the elderly or sick, the cost of education or the cost of care for the elderly. For that you need adequate national health care, child care, care of the elderly – a functioning and funded welfate state. The next issue Harris raises is an ageing population, and his line on that deserves quoting at length.

“Quite apart from the spiralling costs of social care and pensions, this highlights profound social problems to which traditional left orthodoxy has few answers. Whither that same preoccupation with paid work when so many of us will have to be carers? How will we address loneliness when all those modern singletons turn grey? What does preventive care entail in practice? Again, the right has a crude but effective pitch: work like hell now, for fear of what might happen later. A big part of an alternative answer will lie in self-sustaining social networks: a revival of neighbourliness and the extended family, as well as people exercising together, sharing their experiences of chronic conditions, and more. Target-driven, behemothic government will have nothing to do with that at all.”

The problem with this argument lies with the last sentence, which changes the whole meaning. Let me explain from personal experience. Last week I found out that the fees for my mother’s barely adequate care home are being raised from £38,000 a year to £43,000 a year. A neat 11% rise in one go for the private chain that owns it. Will the service provided improve? No way. Will the workers, nearly all of whom are on national minimum wage, get an increase? You must be dreaming.

The alternative to such private care homes cannot be mainly “self-sustaining social networks: a revival of neighbourliness and the extended family, as well as people exercising together, sharing their experiences of chronic conditions, and more”. In essence this is the same argument as the “care in the community” thought up by the Tories. It is utopian and based on possible long-term changes in society, which themselves depend on social relations going well beyond capitalism. We cannot abolish care homes any time soon. John Harris is really accepting the argument that we cannot afford the health and care costs of having many more elderly people, but this is false. Already there are lots of societies in which the proportion of GDP spent on health, welfare and the elderly is much higher than in Britain. It’s a question of priorities and tax levels for the rich.

In the John Harris caricature, Left Unity and others on the radical left are conflated with statist Labourism of the 1940s and 50s, as if we thought the NHS plus council housing would bring about the Millennium In reality we agree with the objectives of Compass, quoted approvingly by Harris, about “giving away power and resources to our nations, regions, cities, localities and, where possible, directly to the people”. Except that power will never be ‘given’ away, it will have to be taken…and that has to go hand in hand with radical income redistribution that can only be achieved by undermining the power and perogatives of capital.

But there you have it. If you won’t compromise with neoliberalism you have take on the wealth and power of the rich and reject the ‘there is no alternative’ mantra.

The real problem with John Harris is his mechanical and reductionist approach, in which neoliberalism and the present hugely unjust order appears like an act of God, an inevitable given that just can’t be shifted. Neoliberalism was not and is not inevitable. It was created by political struggle and can be overturned by political struggle.

In the recent TV debates between Nigel Farage and Nick Clegg, the UKIP leader made a transparent bid to steal the clothes of the left. He attacked big business and talked of building a ‘people’s army’ for political change. He shamelessly milked the utter contempt that ordinary people have for mainstream politicians. But the ex-stockbroker’s demagogy has no solutions to the problems of ordinary people. A left alternative to the Tories and UKIP has to talk about housebuilding, about renationalisation of rail and the utilities, nationalisation of the banks and major monopolies, cutting working hours with no loss of pay, the implementation of a living wage and living benefits, a major boost to the NHS and the welfare state, punitive tax rates on the rich and slashing defence budgets and cancelling Trident. Then you can build a people’s army from the left.