08) FROM BRITAIN: THE ONGOING DEMISE OF SOCIAL DEMOCRACY
By Steve McGiffen, Morning Star (UK)
European centre‑left leaders gathered recently in Oslo to discuss their difficulties in winning power, and their inability to do anything with it once they've got it.
Patrick Diamond, an author of Labour's last manifesto, believes that recent local electoral success "cannot disguise the governing crisis which threatens Labour's very survival as a party of power." This crisis is not confined to Britain.
Centre‑left parties hold office in Norway, Greece, Spain and Portugal, but only in Norway do their policies bear any resemblance to social democracy ‑ the political philosophy behind the movement which brought us the welfare state, low rates of poverty and a code of values based on equality, solidarity and dignity.
This may be because the Norwegian government includes a party to the left of the social democrats or it may be because as a non‑member of the EU, the country's rulers have a bit more space to determine policies than do those of the 27 countries bound hand and foot by the neoliberal Lisbon Treaty.
A recent poll conducted in the US, Britain, Germany and Sweden found that the vast majority of people in those countries do not believe that governments can stand up to vested interests, while sizeable minorities ‑ almost three in 10 in Britain ‑ are sceptical of any possibility that governments can be effective in bringing about positive social change.
This is hardly surprising when governments of the centre‑left have failed to reproduce anything like the achievements of social democracy of the post‑war years. The Labour Party and its sister organisations have failed to challenge the logic of neoliberalism.
Take the financial crisis and the economic crisis which it provoked. The problem began with a US sub‑prime mortgage crisis which was the result of a process of national and international deregulation of financial services which centre‑left parties might have been expected to resist.
After all there is nothing particularly radical in believing that consumers ‑ both public and private ‑ as well as honest investors should be protected from the unscrupulous and the greedy. Instead, nominally social democratic leaders were amongst the most enthusiastic advocates of global financial anarchy.
Once the system collapsed, governments bailed out the very institutions most culpable in bringing the crisis about. The result was a wave of destruction caused by the private sector being magically transformed into a crisis of government debt. The people's money was used to ensure that the people's enemies continue to sleep off their champagne suppers under silken sheets.
In Britain, the government is not just venal and absolutely unrepresentative of the country's people. It is also incompetent, floundering into an electoral trouncing, the junior partner staring into the abyss of total meltdown. Yet there is absolutely no sense that when people vote against this government they are voting for anything at all.
When I first voted Labour, in 1974 at the age of 19, I had a clear idea that the party stood for a gradualist approach to social progress. Although it was clearly not going to lead Britain to a glorious socialist future it was all we had on an electoral level.
Blair transformed it into a fully bourgeois party with only nominal links to the working class. This has been demonstrated by the Labour leadership's failure to promote a social democratic response to the intensified class war unleashed in the wake of the crisis.
In some ways this is puzzling. Labour consistently shunned real left politics, ostensibly on the grounds that they would not have been popular with sufficient voters.
Whether this was really the case in the past or not is debatable, but it is surely the case that a programme of financial reform would ‑ as the global economy began to fall apart, taking people's jobs with it ‑ have been popular. A Keynesian programme including additional massive investment and public ownership of banks would have been capable of mobilising broad support. Proving to people that the state can stand up for their interests in the face of the concentrated power ‑ the inevitable product of deregulated markets ‑ could have restored faith in democracy.
There are whole areas of public life which are being undermined by cynicism, corruption and that great British disease, nepotism. This could have been tackled by a programme of reform which could have been carried out at no great expense.
The survey cited above also showed that people associate the centre‑left with high taxation but that they do not object to taxes in principle. It's just that they want value for money.
Taxation to strengthen public services, education and health care has majority support. Most people in western Europe and Britain are social democrats even if they don't know it. Survey after survey has shown that people want a strong welfare state, healthcare accessible to all, sound pensions and a good system of education.
Labour does not heed this because it is now, as much as the Tories, a representative of big capital and not of working people at all. It does not heed it because it is unwilling and unable to challenge the dictatorship of the European Central Bank and the European Commission.
For socialists to support the Labour Party is to indulge in a pessimistic nostalgia which has no real relationship to the world as it is now. Parliament itself is no longer an agent capable of bringing about meaningful social change.
Electoral politics in the context of modern Britain can only ever be protest politics.
However movements are stirring ‑ UK Uncut, the refusal of students to lie down and see their education and their future prospects blighted, the emerging mass movement to save the health service ‑ which promise to be far more effective than the passive strategy of putting a cross next to the name of the candidate whose party will, you hope, close down the fewest hospitals.
(The above article is from the June 1-15, 2011, issue of People's Voice, Canada's leading communist newspaper. Articles can be reprinted free if the source is credited. Subscription rates in Canada: $30/year, or $15 low income rate; for U.S. readers - $45 US per year; other overseas readers - $45 US or $50 CDN per year. Send to People's Voice, c/o PV Business Manager, 706 Clark Drive, Vancouver, BC, V5L 3J1.)