I'm really not sure I've ever been accused of Leninism before! I was once denounced by the Socialist Workers Party as a "right-wing communist", a label which at the time I found quite acceptable. I spent much of my time in the CP and in the Labour Party challenging Leninist practice — specifically its anti-democratic, vanguardist approach to political organization. I think there are still strong echoes of a wider ultra-leftism in contemporary politics — from the "impossibilism" of much green thinking and practice to the empty and ultimately dispiriting pieties of the "anti-capitalist" movements. One of the smaller tragedies of New Labour is that it has enabled, via Stop the War, the revival of the SWP and various Stalinist rumps of the old CP. The continuing value of Gramsci is precisely that he enables a rigorous critique of leftism as well as labourism, and links up worthwhile and necessary reforms in capitalism to broader, deeper social transformation. Reform and revolution are not mutually exclusive! That was the historical mistake of both 2nd International social democracy and 4th International Trotskyism — two sides of the same "economistic" coin and ultimately utter failures at any kind of transformative politics.

I have tried to make the general point that New Labour is nothing like as new as it likes to think. One of the curious, barely conscious echoes of older left-wing habits is that at its core, New Labour is ferociously Leninist in its practice, specifically its elitism and exclusivity. How do you join New Labour? You don't — I assume you're invited if your face fits. And one of the reasons for the ultimate failure of New Labour is that really and truly, the only faces that fit are Blair and (arguably) Brown. Lenin (or more precisely Stalin, acting on his posthumous behalf) created one of the most ruthless and blatant "personality cults" ever seen. In an understated, politely English, faintly self-mocking way, isn't that what Blair (and now, in a rather dourer Scottish fashion, Brown) have been attempting? And isn't that why New Labour is now floundering, because people get bored with politicians and, as Enoch Powell put it, "all political careers end in failure"?

The other major reason for New Labour's failure, as I tried to argue in my original article, is that it is simply not new enough. It still carries so much of the baggage of labourism — its macho posturing; its distaste for ideology and theory; its over-emphasis on loyalty to the central leadership (Leninism again) and thoroughly undemocratic, unchallengeable centralism; its attachment to outmoded institutions and practices in the British state and society; its shallow moralism; its absolute focus on winning elections to the exclusion of wider political circumstances and historical trends. The only reason New Labour can purport to be new, starting out every day on its own private Year Zero, is that the Labour Party, and its labourist mythology and iconography, are notoriously blind to history, its own included. If, to take an example from Adrian's piece, the Labour Party "was formed by MPs looking for external support", why have the trades unions invested so much money in it? Surely one of the historic purposes of the party has been to bring about some kind of broader transformation of society. Isn't that at least one of the reasons people join, however misguided and disillusioned they subsequently feel?

The question I am now trying to raise is precisely this — is the Labour Party any kind of vehicle for those of us who still wish to see such a broader transformation of society? I'm not sure Adrian would include himself in this number, but my sense is that there are enough interested and committed people in Britain to make it a worthwhile and very necessary project. Hence my call for a new political formation. Let me make one further thing clear — I'm not advocating the reformation of the Communist Party or anything remotely like it. The CPGB, of which I was an ill-fitting member for ten highly formative years straddling the onset of Thatcherism, was in political and historical terms a pathetic failure, unlike Gramsci's PCI. Choosing to wind itself up in 1991 (the only CP in the world to do so) was about the most honourable thing it ever did. However, it has left a huge gap on the left of British politics. For all its faults, the CP was a persistent source of creative, dynamic thinking, including some of the original steps towards New Labour. There is precious little of that around at the moment.

As for New Labour and its nearly ten years in government — what is distinctively democratic, left-wing, or even political about it? I honestly cannot see anything it has done which amounts to anything more than technical fixes, the kind of thing any modern state (including one led by post-Thatcher Tories) would have done to keep our society ticking over, while we adjust to deepening globalization and marketization of every aspect of our lives. Capitalism has become more unregulated and totalitarian, more unforgiving and brutal, and as a consequence more unequal and destructive under New Labour government. That simple fact outweighs all the ameliorative wheezes and eye-catching initiatives, all the New Deals and Sure Starts, all the guff about social exclusion and child poverty. At the receiving end, they are experienced as at best briefly useful handouts and at worst demoralizing condescension and chastisement for personal, family and community "failure".

My final point is that various forms of this critique of New Labour is now held by the vast majority of people in this country, at all points on the political spectrum. It expresses itself in many different ways, from disgust with "spin" and Labour-variant "sleaze", anxiety about social order and civility, utter horror over foreign policy starting out with the catastrophe of Iraq, all the way to inchoate anger and fear over "where the country is going". That critical feeling is solidifying into a pretty damning historical judgment from which I do not think the Labour Party will ever recover. This is the new "political coalition" (or to use Gramsci's term, historical bloc), which will form the ideological backdrop for coming decades in Britain. However, the Labour Party's complacency and narcissism seems to blind it to this harsh political reality — they really do not see how bad things are. Whenever I attend Labour Party events (like the recent Compass conference), I find myself asking who's this "we" they keep going on about? I'd ask Adrian the same — who exactly is this "we" who "won't be winding our party up" and who "won't be belittling its achievements either"? Look around you, Adrian, there's not many of "you" left.

Underlying Adrian's critique of my piece, and pretty much everything Blair says and does, is a weird kind of flippancy. You can sense and sometimes see a smirk forming on the face of New Labour. This all may look like a game from the perspective of Parliament and wherever the Labour Party offices are these days, but out here in the country some pretty fundamental shifts in mood and attitude are taking shape. My ultimate concern is that unless the "democratic left" finds a suitable vehicle/location/agency (choose whichever metaphor you wish, Marxist, Leninist or otherwise) from which to exercise some influence over those mood-shifts, they will take us into far darker times yet. This was the blind spot of 1980s Gramscian thinking. We understood that the game was up for our primary sponsor, the CPGB, but some of us imagined the Labour Party was capable of genuinely "hegemonic" leadership. We really can't afford to dodge "the question of agency" now. As Lenin said (when was it? I never actually read the bloody thing — I much preferred "Left-wing Communism — an Infantile Disorder") — "What is to be done?"

Andy Pearmain is a research student in History at the University of East Anglia. A version of this paper was presented to the Third Rethinking Social Democracy conference in Sheffield 28-30 June, 2006. Andy was a member of the Communist Party between 1975 and 1985 and more recently a Labour councillor in Norwich. He is the author of the Compass paper "Gramsci and Us" [Microsoft Word document, hosted on another site].

We encourage readers to write responses to this article and send them to Alan Johnson, Social Democratic Futures editor, at alanjohnsonsdf

The symposium will be in Town House 102, Kingston University, Penrhyn Road, Kingston upon Thames on 11th September 2006 from 10-6pm

Speakers will include: Vernon Bogdanor (Oxford University), Andrew Blake (UEL), Sarah Childs (Bristol University), Nick Ellison (Durham University), David Walker (The Guardian), Rokhsana Fiaz (Change Institute), Simon Woolley (Operation Black Vote), Eric Shaw (Stirling University), Matt Beech (York University), Anna Showstack-Sassoon (Birkbeck College), Brian Brivati (Kingston University/Euston Manifesto Group), Alan Johnson (Edge Hill College/Social Democratic Futures), Rupa Huq (Kingston University) and Tim Bale (Sussex University)

Panels will cover Security and Foreign Policy, Domestic Policy, Representation, Governance: local, regional and constitutional policy and Party-Government relations.

Audience places are limited. Conference costs £15 (£10 concessions) for a booking form and to reserve a place please email: Dr Rupa Huq.

As Labour approaches the start of our second decade in power we are rightly discussing the continued evolution of new Labour. For some obsessed by the Westminster village this will inevitably be viewed through the prism of the processology of the Labour succession. Nothing could be more damaging.

We are after all in unchartered political waters for Labour. To be in opposition for a decade has been commonplace. But to be on the cusp of ten years in power is unprecedented. So how should we enter the start of a second decade in office?

For me this isn't about how the ordered transition to a new Labour Leader should take place. The Prime Minister has already been more specific than any of his predecessors. Rather this is about how new Labour continues to evolve. We have been at our best when we have grasped the challenges of the age. In '97 we were elected with radical solutions to the problems of the day including long term unemployment, underinvestment in public services, poverty pay and the shame of Britain's aid budget being cut. Our policies of the New Deal, the National Minimum Wage, and Devolution, transforming our laws on race, disability, age and sexuality as well as public service improvements were a solution to many of the then contemporary problems. Each policy was radical in it's time and were opposed by some. But these policies now appear to have been accepted by most as part of a progressive political settlement.

Of course, some of those challenges remain and have been added to by the need to go further to eradicate poverty here at home, to grasp the opportunity of globalisation, to face the challenge of migration and to sustain improvements in public services. Our solutions to today's challenges have to be just as radical and as wide ranging as we have been in the past.

One of new Labour's greatest political achievements is how we have set the agenda which other Parties have had to respond to and belatedly, if somewhat superficially, accept. We should continue to do so. It would be a mistake for new Labour to revert back to the long periods in our history when we allowed others to set the pace. Labour must continue to set the agenda and challenge others as we have done on so many progressive causes over this past decade. To stall now would be to stagnate; to slow would be to concede the political initiative to the Tories. It is clear that neither the Prime Minster nor the Chancellor wish to do so. There are some in the media that claim new Labour will wither when Tony Blair leaves Downing Street. But this ignores the nature of new Labour. New Labour is about much more than Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. New Labour is the product of a collective and considered decision by the Party as a whole in the 1990's that we wished to move away from politics as normal and forge a different type of Labour Party. This remains true today as the votes at recent Party Conference record big majorities amongst local party representatives to continue to reform public services.

But there are those in the Party who wish to see a "new direction" and a return to "classic Labour" values. They are absolutely entitled to their strongly held views but it is the polar opposite of what we should do. They don’t just want a new leader; they crave a change of direction. I can only assume that proponents would have us return at least in part to a policy prognosis which delivered four successive election defeats and allowed the Tories to cause such turmoil. It would also be interesting to listen to what their analysis is of why we won three elections. It is not enough to say we won because the Tories were in disarray. They were only in such a condition because of their inability to respond to the challenge of new Labour.

However such voices have acknowledged that there is now an opportunity for us to discuss in a reasonable way how new Labour can evolve.

So what should we do?

Labour at its best has always been the Party that captured a sense of the nation's optimism. From Attlee's "Homes fit for Heroes", to Wilson's "White Heat of the technological revolution" to Tony Blair's "many not the few". At our historic worst we have appeared a Party which made reluctant concessions to the British spirit of enterprise.

All Labour governments have been founded on optimism but too often flounder when we lose that connection with the nation's aspirations. In Local Government we have managed to renew ourselves while in power. There are numerous local examples of imaginative policy and political regeneration. However unlike the best local government experience, historically many Labour governments have been worn down by events. Sometimes in the past fatigue has blurred political vision. This time we have successfully avoided the desperately repetitive interchangeable cycle of events which plagued many Labour governments of the past — wonderful goals, difficult choices, economic problems, political fractures, public disconnection and then long periods in opposition. Attlee's second post war government lasted less than two years hampered by internal division and the effects of the sterling crisis and spending cuts. Wilson struggled with tiny majorities or, when he had Parliamentary strength, was weakened by internal discord. The difficulties that beset Callaghan's minority administration in terms of the IMF, cuts and division are all too well documented and to this day remain part of Tory Party doctrine.

Bill Clinton said that progressives should campaign and govern as though every year in government was their first. Whilst that may not always be possible we do have to continue to find fresh ways of communicating and to evolve new policies

It is not enough to simply recite our achievements. We need to convince the public by our words and our actions that we remain fresh and optimistic. Most people continually want to do better for their family. Very few parents ever rest in the belief that they have done everything possible for their children. New Labour has given a political voice to those personal aspirations of many and we need to maintain that connection. We have to share the aspiration that tomorrow can be, and with Labour will be, better than today.

One thing is clear; we cannot simply expect a belated sense of gratitude from an electorate who are rightly more interested in our vision about the future rather than retrospection about our achievements, some of which are nine years in the past. We implicitly acknowledged this in the '90s when we proclaimed that new Labour was about "the future not the past" In an era of declining voter turnout we need to inspire as well as reassure. People are not inspired by the safest option. We should not simply be about consolidation.

New Ways to Tackle Poverty

We need to maintain a sense of new Labour radicalism in finding new ways to tackle poverty and stay in tune with voters aspirations.

In the past we sometimes spoke of the politics of aspiration as though it was distinct from the politics of poverty. But the politics of aspiration and the politics of poverty are two sides of the same coin. No one aspires for change more than the poorest families trapped in the poorest areas and sometimes served by poorer quality public services. And we have to continually give voice to those aspirations.

One way of doing so is to make a reality of the slogan of Making Poverty History in the UK. There is no better place to start than eradicating child poverty. There is no more ambitious Government target than ending child poverty by 2020. It may be the most ambitious challenge that we have ever set ourselves. In many ways eradicating relative child poverty can be seen as a proxy target for restarting social mobility which has stalled in recent decades. I have previously gone into this in some detail in the pamphlet I wrote on Social Mobility earlier this year (read at www.JimMurphyMP.com) I do not wish to cover all that ground here but suffice to say the socially immobile 30-somethings of today were the children in poverty in the 1980s. This is not an attempt to avoid contemporary responsibility but simply an assessment of the timescales involved in the influence of public policy on social mobility.

We have made real and lasting progress on poverty. We inherited the highest levels of child poverty of any major EU nation and now more children are being lifted out of poverty here more quickly than anywhere else in Europe. But have we done enough to restart social mobility of the future? The only way we can be certain is if we make real progress in eradicating child poverty. In the absence of a million people demonstrating in the streets to Make Poverty History here at home we need to continually challenge ourselves. That is why we invited Lisa Harker to carry out her current review into the Department of Work and Pensions child poverty strategy.

The redistribution of power

We also need to go further in redistributing power in the public realm and our public services. The Left has often been animated about the redistribution of wealth but has inexplicably been strangely muted about sustained redistribution of power in communities and public services. We need to go further to embed choice in public services. And not a choice for the sake of choice but one that helps to redistribute opportunity. I have previously argued, and I still maintain today, that those in poorer communities still experience poorer public services despite the real improvements in recent years. As Progressives what is our response to those who pay their taxes but still experience a quality gap? The alternative to radically extending choice is for those families to simply wait for a gradually improving uniformity to eventually get round to those living in the poorer areas. This is not a Labour response to what — despite remarkable progress — still remains a problem.

The spirit of optimism

In addition to an evolution of our policies we also need to change important aspects of how we convey our politics. It is my sense that the public punishes the political pessimists. I'm not suggesting we all become wide-eyed dreamers. Nor am I arguing for a counterproductive and senseless state-sponsored contentment campaign or a never enforced US style right to the "pursuit of happiness" which is contained in the US Declaration of Independence.

But we do need to temper our rhetoric which proclaims that tough choices are totemic of new Labour. Of course we are taking important decisions that are sometimes controversial. But a new Labour government is not just about tough choices; we are also about great causes. The sometimes tough decisions are a means to achieve those ambitions. Our health and education changes were about speeding up the much needed improvements which continued investment alone would never achieve. Our welfare reforms are about no longer allowing anyone to be written off. If the vocabulary of tough choices prevails to the exclusion of the talk of great causes the public will make their own choice and vote for others who claim, however superficially, to share their optimism.

So, as the conversation about new Labour's evolution continues, we should strike a tone which avoids the division that has beset every previous Labour government. We should also remember that in the past we have had to learn painful lessons from our failures. Today we cannot make the mistake of ignoring the lessons of our successes.

Jim Murphy MP is Minister of State for Employment and Welfare Reform

Would you like to respond to this article? Send your comment to Alan Johnson, Social Democratic Futures editor, at alanjohnsonsdf and we will post it.

‘I simply don’t think that the current Labour leadership understands that its political fate depends on whether or not it can construct a politics, in the next 20 years, which is able to address itself, not to one, but to a diversity of different points of antagonism in society; unifying them, in their differences, within a common project. I don’t think they have grasped that Labour’s capacity to grow as a political force depends absolutely on its capacity to draw from the popular energies of very different movements; movements outside the party which it did not — could not — set in play, and which it cannot therefore “administer”.

‘It retains an entirely bureaucratic conception of politics. If the word doesn’t proceed out of the mouths of the Labour leadership, there must be something subversive about it. If politics energises people to develop new demands, that is a sure sign that the natives are getting restless. You must expel or depose a few. You must get back to that fiction, the “traditional Labour voter”: to that pacified, Fabian notion of politics, where the masses hijack the experts into power, and then the experts do something for the masses: later … much later. The hydraulic conception of politics.’

So said Stuart Hall, in ‘Gramsci and Us’, nearly 20 years ago now. New Labour was a response of sorts to that critique, drawing heavily on the late 1980s ‘New Times’/Marxism Today analyses (with which Stuart Hall was himself associated) and attempting a kind of virtual, heavily mediated connection with some of those emerging social ‘movements outside the party’. Many of us now feel that it was a peculiarly selective and distorted response. The de-classed ‘identity politics’ we contributed to the New Labour project, with its worthy emphasis on race and gender and sexuality and sometimes giddy consumerism, came out the other end as Philip Gould’s ‘suburban populism’. Our disintegrating industrial proletariat was reconstituted as their Home Counties petty bourgeoisie.

It may seem now that ‘New Labour is unravelling’, but with the prospect of Brownite renewal offering a variant strain, we should remind ourselves that it’s still there and in government. Gould and others are insisting that the project’s achievements are deep and permanent, in changing the terrain on which their New Tory opponents have to operate and in ‘transforming’ the Labour Party (albeit effectively out of existence). Whatever, New Labour needs to be historically accounted for, even if only so we don’t fall for something like it again. It’s time to ask — what was New Labour all about? Beneath the bossy spin and the rising, scummy tide of sleaze, what has happened in the 15-odd years since New Times?

If we look beyond the glossy rhetoric of ministers and advisers, and the Blair/Brown Punch and Judy show, two particular components of New Labour seem to have come to the fore , and squeezed out the far richer mix which the best of late-period Marxism Today represented:

• An odd kind of shallow, quasi-Marxist determinism, which argues the ‘historical inevitability’ of capitalist globalization with just the same dogmatic fervour and disregard for politics and ideological conflict or real human agency of any kind that marked 2nd International social democracy and later forms of (mainly Stalinist or Trotskyist) leftism. Socialism (or now, globalisation) is coming — all we can or need do is ready ourselves for the new dawn.
• A nerdy awe of information technology, characteristic of people who don’t really understand its scientific or logical bases and that it’s only ever as good as the creative uses that people put it to. This combines, in the writings of Leadbeater, Mulgan et al., with a taste for way-out and ultimately empty ‘new age’ management theory to create an approach to government (or should I say ‘governance’?) more suited to a millenarian cult than a modern, secular political party. The future is coming. It is bright and shiny. If you don’t embrace it you will die… Prepare for lift-off!

But is New Labour really that new? It likes to think and insistently tell the rest of us that it is. The project’s ‘visions’ and ‘models’ are supposedly written on a historical blank sheet. But it incorporates far more old-fashioned, horny-handed Labourism than it cares to admit, even if only because it is grudgingly dependent on the Labour Party electoral machine to “get out the vote” every few years and on the likes of John Prescott to keep the North of England in line. And is New Labour’s “technocratic managerialism” really all that different from the “hydraulic” Fabian expert-ism Stuart Hall referred to in 1987? The cumbersome, room-size, calculating machine may have given way to a palm-top computer, but it’s still churning out the same old exhortation to “trust the experts” on everything from macro-economics to public sector reform and so-called ‘social exclusion’.

I would argue that, within the history of the Labour Party and the ‘broader’ democratic left in Britain, New Labour is simply the latest manifestation of Labourism, that inert, stodgy, defence-mechanism of a fractious, fissured working class firmly, grimly entrenched within capitalism. For all of its hundred-plus years, it has drawn on the energies of more dynamic but marginal and ephemeral social movements to renew itself and in particular to get its professional cadres re-elected to parliament. That is the real, thoroughly dispiriting, historical outcome of ‘Labour’s capacity … to draw from the popular energies of very different movements outside the party’.

The Labour Party was founded on the back of the great upsurge in mass, ‘national-popular’, democratic activism in late-Victorian, still overwhelmingly industrial Britain. Even then, it managed to combine all sorts of other ideological components from what was at that time an extraordinarily rich ‘civil society’, such as radical Liberalism and Marxism, Methodism and pacifism, feminism and male chauvinism, imperialism and internationalism, voluntarism and statism, municipalism and parliamentarism — all these and more, in often dynamic contradiction. This was the celebrated (and much admired elsewhere) ‘broad church’ approach to working class politics, with deep roots in daily life and about as close as Labour ever came to a genuinely ‘hegemonic’ strategy for taking and exercising power. Then came Ramsay MacDonald, the first in an almost pathological pattern of ‘betrayal’ and dashed expectations, which forms the sorry emotional leitmotif of Labour history.

The travails of the 1920s and ’30s at least helped to focus and popularise the party, to lay the basis for the post-war heyday of Labourism. This culminated in the highest ever popular Labour vote in 1951. Even then, there were ‘betrayals’ and disappointments along the way (Oswald Mosley and his ‘New Party’, Stafford ‘austerity’ Cripps and eventually the labourist patron saint Nye Bevan himself). Labour’s failures were barely offset by the great (similarly mythologically resonant and seriously flawed) labourist achievements of the NHS and the welfare state. And of course, though Labour got its highest ever vote in 1951, it lost the general election to the new ‘one nation’ Conservatives. Labour’s most ambitious attempt at ‘technocratic managerialism’ by Harold Wilson, underpinned and propelled by Crosland’s social-democratic ‘revisionism’ and the corporatism represented by ‘beer and sandwiches at number 10’ for trade union barons, foundered on its own internal contradictions amid the capitalist crises of the 1960s and 70s.

Along the way, there were repeated attempts by Labour to tap into new popular energies, such as the war-time ‘Dunkirk spirit’ of national togetherness; or the ‘scholarship generation’ of 1950s working class intellectuals borne along on their parents’ hard-won affluence and aspirations; or their younger brothers and sisters ebulliently engaged in the evenements of 1968 and after. I have a particular interest in the latter, as the final example of the ‘broad’ left attempting a truly hegemonic take on British political economy, via the social contract and the alternative economic strategy in its first, pre-Bennite form. It swiftly retreated from mass politics into the far more comfortable settings of trade union office, seminar room and ‘left-leaning’ newspaper columns.

In the 1980s, Labourism tried several different takes on the ‘new social forces’ derived from ‘the politics of identity’ which Stuart Hall and others were helping to articulate. Bennism had a go first, with an opening to the non-Labour left of feminists, black and gay activists. This generally ended in tears when they rubbed other, more straight-laced members of ‘the broad church’ up the wrong way, so to speak. As Thatcher embarked on her full-frontal mid-80s assault on ‘loony leftism’, we embarked on yet another round of recrimination and disillusionment. The ‘soft left’ was in part an honest attempt to salvage something from the wreckage. Egged on by Kinnock’s ‘favourite Marxist’ Eric Hobsbawm, and by the Eurocommunists’ favourite Labourist Bryan Gould, it came perilously close to a thoughtfully reformist, outward looking and alliance building politics, but at its big soppy heart Labour remained a party of tribalists. All talk of pacts and alliances fell away when they sensed that with professional advertising and media management to gloss up the product, Labour could go it alone just like in 1945. Finally, as we’ve seen, New Labour took off on its own messianic journey into ‘New Times’.

My analysis is open to challenge on a number of counts. Labour has in its hundred-plus years achieved some genuine amelioration in the living conditions of the industrial working class. Imagine what the last century would have been like if capitalism had been able to exercise the free hand it has now. Unemployment and related benefits, state pensions, some measure of protection against injury and discrimination at work, comprehensive education (even post-war access to grammar schools for bright poor kids like me) and social housing are all real consolations for the miseries inflicted by the ‘free market’.

New Labour continues to devise and to offer its own consolations. Just recently I heard one of its advocates argue that the slush-funds of ‘local regeneration’ and ‘social inclusion’ represented a further, proud example of Labour providing compensatory ‘access to the state’ in addressing ‘market failure’. Throw money at anything, I would respond, and it will undoubtedly feel better for a while. Ask any lottery winner. But, as is all too obvious now, these schemes and fixes are easily undermined or even swept away when they are judged ‘unaffordable’. All the ‘new deals’ and ‘sure starts’ will not survive the next serious recession and round of public spending cuts, let alone a New Tory sweep-out. Besides, they have never provided any basis for a real challenge for power, or rather in Gramsci’s much more resonant term ‘hegemony’.

Then there’s the historical absence of much else of value in British working class politics. Even Labour’s staunchest critics have felt forced to accept that it has historically been ‘the mass party of the British working class’. They have usually campaigned for some wider social ferment, which would force the party to adopt ‘more progressive policies’. For much of its history, Labour’s only semi-serious political rival, the Communist Party of Great Britain, worked to a strategy of ‘militant labourism’. This would (in ways never entirely spelt out) bring along ‘a Labour government of a new type’. Even Hall’s (and especially his Marxism Today stable-mate Hobsbawm’s) 1980s critiques were aimed (however tetchily) at eventually restoring Labour’s political vigour. What is most striking now about the history of the CPGB is just how deferential it was towards Labour, in all its phases and across all its factions, rather than seeking seriously and strategically (like other more effective European communist parties) to displace their labourist rivals or at least force them to develop a coherent social democracy.

There have been, as I’ve already noted, some genuinely interesting and creative attempts to connect the Labour Party with wider movements and trends in British society, even if they remained isolated and tentative and have almost always resulted in bad feeling all round. And there was always the powerful argument that any political initiative outside of the Labour Party would inevitably end in narrow, shrinking sectarianism and ‘being confined to the political wilderness’. There are plenty of generally very depressing examples of this too, including the CPGB, and thus a serious pro-Labour case to answer. Apart from anything else, there are plenty of ‘good people’ still in and around the Labour Party (many of them clustered around Compass) who would place themselves within our self-styled ‘democratic left’ but still need persuading that Labour is really and truly dying.

I would argue now that, for a whole range of reasons, Labour is no longer the mass party of the British working class, not least because its leadership has decided (understandably) that it doesn’t want it to be. This sounds obvious but it needs spelling out, and in historical terms is the primary explanation for Labourism’s long decline. The long-term retreat and fragmentation of the working class and the breakdown of its tribal habits and loyalties was one of the primary reasons for the New Labour manoeuvre. Voting and (especially) membership figures attest to the party’s decline as an active political (or even social and cultural) presence in the real, everyday world. Hence the reliance by New Labour on ‘spin’, through a generally compliant or appeased media, as the only remaining means of reaching its ‘public’. In a very practical sense the Labour Party barely any longer exists ‘on the ground’ where most of us spend our daily, increasingly de-politicised, lives.

This surely is the real but barely commented-upon reason for Labour’s fawning reliance on rich businessmen’s money, donated or loaned. Labour is simply not receiving enough in membership fees to pay for the operation of a modern, media-dependent political party, let alone making up for dwindling and politically uncomfortable trade union support. The Jowell/Mills and ‘loans for peerages’ affairs attest to the real sorry organisational state of the party, but also to the residual ethical framework of labourism — a large part of the public revulsion with Labour is made up of scorn for the bosses’ ill-gotten gains. How can ‘our people’ be so cosy with ‘them’? That’s why nobody’s much bothered about the Tories’ much greater reliance on handouts from the plutocrats of bandit capitalism, because it’s what we expect. New Labour’s ultimate failure lies in being unable to shake off the ethical straightjacket of labourism, while the real political agency of the party continues to shrivel.

So what do we do now? We could usefully revisit one of the central arguments of the first, late-1950s New Left — that Labourism is an obstacle to the wider social ferment we need in order to bring about progressive change in Britain. The modern democratic impulses at work in Britain, beyond the sterile pantomime of parliament and its regional and local clones, are going on despite not because of Labour. Tribally, instinctively, mythologically, it remains deeply suspicious of Hall’s ‘movements outside the party which it did not — could not — set in play, and which it cannot therefore administer’. It pains me to say it, but the examples of genuinely democratic developments I am most professionally familiar with from the last 20 years (health and social care for people with HIV/AIDS, for instance, or tenant participation in housing) received far more government support, financial and moral, under the Tories than Labour.

Thatcherism was (and remains, in its ‘transformist’ adaptations) a many-faceted beast . In its urge to ‘roll back the frontiers of the state’, it left quite a lot of space for new ways of providing and receiving services, not just in the deregulated private market but also in the remaining, generally battered public sector. It was possible to deploy Thatcherism’s anti-statist thrust in some surprisingly creative, invigorating and genuinely innovative ways. We felt ‘freer’, even if only to harm ourselves and those around us. We could be ‘who we really are’, even if that ultimately meant being confined to particular, comfortable, sealed boxes of sexual, gender, ‘cultural’ or ethnic identity, locked in an uneasy stand-off in our supposedly diversifying society. We could choose our lifestyles and circumstances, even if the very exercise of choice consigned others to deeper subordination. We could take pretty much exclusive responsibility for the upbringing of our children, even if it took extraordinary dedication and sacrifice to do it half well, and the class-status and confidence to avoid the ‘protective’ scrutiny of the moral agents of the soft state. We could purchase anything — any kind of pleasure, our own homes and cars, shares in privatised utilities, high quality education and health care, ‘fancy foreign holidays’, above all our own social identities, that is, who those around us thought we were.

New Labour of course accepts all this, but in an oddly joyless, fastidious and ultimately begrudging spirit. The ‘celebration’ of Thatcherism is the aspect of the ‘New Times’ legacy they bridle most at. New Labour accepted the invitation to the party, but they’re still standing in the corner with their ties and belts done up tight, watching everyone else enjoy themselves. Really and truly, New Labour disapproves of Thatcherism’s freedoms, what Stuart Hall has called its license to ‘hustle’. It has, by contrast, rushed to accommodate and deepen all the ‘regressive’ elements of Thatcherite ‘modernisation’ — globalisation above all, but also its closely related project of ‘authoritarian populism’. In its drive to get us all ‘ready for market’, it shows growing disregard not just for the traditional niceties of the liberal state but for any kind of difference or dissent beyond those officially sanctioned within its own ‘respect agenda’ . It is even more inclined than in 1987, when Stuart Hall wrote these words, to regard as ‘subversive’ anything which ‘doesn’t proceed out of the mouths of the Labour leadership.’ And again, why should we be surprised? Personal liberty, in its deeply English (and highly, even globally, attractive) form of comic irreverence and wilful individualism, has always been inimical to the Labourist tradition of dour conformity.

The problem for the democratic left is that the actual, final death of the Labour Party, as an organisation of people with deep vested interests in its survival, doesn’t look like happening any time soon. Labourism as an ideological strand is clearly exhausted but the Labour Party itself has powerful organisational life-support systems, not least the networks of local and national state patronage it still controls. The Labour Party simply is, even if it has lost any sense of where it might be going and any historic mission beyond the vacuities of the Third Way. The real question for us then is — what can we do to help kill it off?

There are epochal processes at work within British politics, which seriously threaten the Labour Party’s survival. The decline of popular faith and involvement in electoral politics is eroding its own popular base. Very few local Labour Parties nowadays are capable of a ‘total canvass’ of their wards, which was always the pre-requisite for the regular, well-oiled Labour ritual of ‘getting out the vote’. The party has officially lost more than half its membership since 1997, over and above all those members (like my wife) who stopped paying dues years ago but still receive members’ mailings and are presumably still counted as members because they never got round to actively resigning. As it loses local council seats, not to mention local ‘activists’, there are fewer local councillors to do the actual donkey work. The policy/lobby group Compass shows signs of intelligent life, but they are about the only ones around the Labour Party. It remains to be seen how much long-term impact or influence they have.

The decline of interest in electoral and party politics among younger people has been well documented. They are simply not acquiring the habits of ‘civic duty’ of previous generations. However, that’s not to say they are politically uninterested. In my experience of parenting and teaching some of them, I find a hunger for insight and explanation to help make sense of the bewildering world around us. They very often end up looking in the wrong places, embarking on forms of ‘political tourism’ and returning from their global gap years with the simplistic, unsustainable pieties of ‘anti-capitalism’. But they are not in any numbers going anywhere near the Labour Party or anything else which might engage them in the hum-drum but utterly crucial routines of national-popular politics.

We may just at the next election, by a fortuitous combination of luck and tactical design, arrive at a hung Parliament. That’s assuming that the imminent deterioration in economic and political circumstances, which have so far spared New Labour any serious test, doesn’t deliver something nastier. Then, if the notoriously slippery Lib Dems can hold their nerve and insist on Proportional Representation, we might just see the beginnings of a properly democratic, modern political system, which genuinely reflects the real currents of popular feeling. That would include all those of us on the democratic left who finally, historically, have had enough of Labourism, the Labour Party and all its ways and works.

That’s a relatively optimistic short-term view. I don’t share it — far more likely is a New Tory Cameron government, sooner or later displaced by some form of neo-Thatcherism, which remains the strongest ideological impulse in Britain. But all of that should be of secondary concern to anyone who wants to see real, deep, meaningfully left wing transformation of British society in all its cultural, social, political and economic aspects. We need a new political formation, which will survive the demise of the Labour Party, and hopefully play an active, purposeful part in the long overdue historical ‘project’ of killing it off.

Andy Pearmain is a research student in History at the University of East Anglia. A version of this paper was presented to the Third Rethinking Social Democracy conference in Sheffield 28-30 June, 2006. Andy was a member of the Communist Party between 1975 and 1985 and more recently a Labour councillor in Norwich. He is the author of the Compass paper ‘Gramsci and Us’ [Microsoft Word document, hosted on another site].

We encourage readers to write responses to this article and send them to Alan Johnson, Social Democratic Futures editor, at alanjohnsonsdf