Jon Cruddas on Keir Hardie's pluralism

Next Left has run two posts responding to David Miliband's Keir Hardie lecture last Friday night. While welcoming Labour's renewed ability to critically interrogate its own political tradition, the second post sought to offer a heretical challenge to the Miliband lecture's historical narrative, staking at least a half-claim to Hardie as an advocate of Lab-Libbery, of necessity if not choice.

Having noted Jon Cruddas' evident influence on the Miliband lecture, Next Left readers might well want to follow up by engaging more fully Cruddas' own Keir Hardie lecture last Autumn. While the short New Statesman extract saw Cruddas warn against an anti-Labour implication in some calls for Labour to rediscover its liberal roots, the central thrust of the lecture was to argue Hardie as a pluralist, with an ethical socialism drawing from socialist, radical and social liberal traditions.

Extended extracts of Cruddas' Hardie memorial lecture can be read here, while both the Hardie lecture, Cruddas' Compass annual lecture can be read in a Compass e-book 'The future of social democracy' (PDF file).

In drawing contemporary lessons from Hardie's radical pluralism at the start of the century, Cruddas' lecture also challenges the party to address how a movement politics would seek to emulate that in our own times:

Hardie was not the extremist of caricature but the subtle strategist that moulded the socialism of the emerging Party to the contours of British society and wider political and cultural movements within it. For example, he was always willing to make alliances with elements within Liberalism to forward his goal of working class emancipation.

By 1903 Hardie had pragmatically come around to accept some form of global agreement with the liberals for election purposes. They had been revitalised under Campbell-Bannerman and there were signs that the ILP view that liberals were unable to come to terms with collectivism and social reform were being disproved, especially in the work of radical Liberals like Hobson, Hobhouse or Samuel.

Thus, Hardie’s socialism was never rigid, doctrinal nor dogmatic. His search was for a progressive coalition with the ILP as the backbone of this gradualist movement of alliances. As such, he could work with progressive strands within Liberalism – as he would with all elements of late nineteenth century radical thought- yet would steadfastly oppose its more conservative elements.

Later, when Party leader, Hardie worked with Sir Charles Dilke, unofficial chair of the ‘social radicals’ on the Liberal side, on labour and radical issues. Even at the two elections of 1910 he maintained support for the alliance with the Liberals and the radicalism of Asquith and Lloyd George. Yet by 1912 had badly fallen out with the Liberals, especially Churchill, following the brutal industrial disputes and State responses at Tonypandy and Abedare.

This conditional, contingent relationship with progressive liberalism was a hallmark of his tactical brilliance and his wider talent at coalition building. Hardie would link his politics into wider, radical social movements that often would include non socialists. Again this put him on a collision cause with more conservative elements within his own party.

His links and passion for women’s emancipation and the suffragetts, the anti imperialist struggles, the peace movements, colonial nationalism. All of these movements were for Hardie part of the broader coalitionary politics which he espoused. It was this fusion of radicalism and Labour – what has been described as his ‘dualism of vision’- that was a major contributory factor in the emergence and strength of Labour itself and remained a continuous source of tension with Henderson, MacDonald and Snowden. Again, the tension between radicalism and orthodoxy within the party.

What broader social and cultural movements does Labour now stand part of? The environmental and peace movements, the global anti poverty crusades, fair trade; at home the fight for dignity at work, civil liberties, migrant groups and faith communities; broader cultural movements, generationally, in the arts and music. Has this radicalism been lost? Would the Hardie of today be active within or outside of the Party? At its best Labour, and its leaders, operate as a bridge between these sites and our representative democracy; it distils these movements and refracts them into westminster. Does it do this now?

So, how far did Keir Hardie reject Lib-Labbery?

An intriguing sub-plot of David Miliband's Keir Hardie lecture - about which we
blogged on Friday night - is that it seeks to construct a new alliance across contemporary Labour party factions through the curious code of a rather elevated doctoral discussion of Labour party strategy a century ago. It looks as though Progress and Compass have gone, on a blind date, for a night out at the Labour History Group.

The historical narrative of the David Miliband lecture was strikingly Cruddasite. If a concordat is afoot it could well prove good politics, with Cruddas an obvious frontrunner for the role of elected party chair, yet may be founded on bad history.

The lecture offered an account of Labour's origins which may fit the party's current anti-Coalition mood rather better than it does the historical facts. This is the key passage, in which David Miliband finds much convenient contemporary resonance in Hardie's vocal suspicion of the Liberals.

In that understanding lay Hardie’s greatest act of political strategy – to reject incorporation into the Liberal Party and seek an independent movement, based upon its own values and practices, and pursuing a common good. Why did Hardie refuse an alliance with the Liberals? Why did he insist that Labour had to be an independent party? It was not because he rejected the great causes of liberty – of freedom of the individual – but because he considered it vital that when the national interest is considered, the interests of working people are considered to be part of that. So that those who were then exploited and excluded could take their rightful place in the body politic and in the governance of our nation.

Hardie said, repeatedly, that although there were many things that we can agree on with liberals, when it came to the conflict between capital and labour, between the banks and the real economy, they would always side with the Conservatives. He didn’t have a crystal ball, but he would have predicted that Nick Clegg would be busy defending a Conservative Budget over 100 years after he was elected MP for Merthyr Tydfil and Aberdare.

Jon Cruddas' influence on that passage can be traced very clearly if you go back to his New Statesman preview last Autumn of Cruddas' own 2009 Hardie memorial lecture in Merthyr Tydfil. Having distinguished between a good social liberalism which helps to provide Labour's intellectual foundations, and a bad 'hollowed out' version of contemporary liberalism, Cruddas issues a curious warning that those who want a more pluralist and liberal Labour party may hanker the secret wish that their own party had never been born:

Implied in the move to uncover and reconnect liberal traditions in our party is the view that the foundation of an independent Labour Party with a distinctively socialist outlook was a historic wrong turning, and that the progressive left would have been better off devoting its energies to building an enduring electoral base for a strong and reformed Liberal Party. This conclusion is not stated openly, but is implicit in much contemporary discussion. Hardie, however, would have been appalled. And so should we today.

That is a "betrayal" thesis. Its tone and content rather jars with Cruddas' pluralist insistence on respecting Labour's internal coalition which has always made it a broad church party. (A plausible defence may be that this simply insists that any effective outward-facing pluralism must be securely be rooted in Labour values). Still, I doubt that any such point has been intended, or is implicit, in "much contemporary discussion". There is scant evidence that the "what if" history of political competition and cooperation from 1893-1906 has even crossed the mind of most Labour political voices suggesting that the party must recover an instinct for liberalism. An interest in liberalism should hardly in itself be cause for suspicion, nor entail the failing of a Labourist loyalty test, as Cruddas' own interest in promoting a serious Labour interrogation of the party's liberal socialist roots itself proves.

To my knowledge, only Richard Reeves has made precisely the argument which Cruddas describes. But he is a liberal/LibDem rather than Labour voice. As with so much else, Reeves blames the Fabians, attributing the division of progressive forces to the "To your tents O Israel" tract of 1893 repudiating the Liberal party.

So it is interesting that David Miliband's own Keir Hardie lecture should now offer, in reply, the clearest possible repudiation of the argument which so worried Cruddas.

Unless Cruddas was simply protesting Tony Blair's political history tutorials with Roy Jenkins some 15 years later, I read his challenge last year as quite probably directed rather more at David Miliband than any other active Labour politician. With the partial exception of James Purnell, Miliband had been most active and prominent in seeking to "uncover and reconnect liberal traditions" for Labour, including arguing explicitly that the party's ideological future lay in a progressive fusion to "integrate the insights of the social democratic and the radical liberal traditions", a potentially important attempt to resolve the challenge of the "progressive dilemma' set out by David Marquand.

So the Keir Hardie lecture could signal an interesting evolution in Milibandism (D), albeit a potentially ambiguous one. Perhaps he now seeks unimpeachably Labourist and even tribal foundations for what I would hope would be the continued pluralist pursuit of a liberal and egalitarian social democracy.

David Miliband's lecture also adopted a Cruddasite distinction between good and bad liberalism, half compatible with social democracy yet half inevitably antagonistic to it.

We must retain a strong connection with that tradition of social liberalism that recognises that liberty and solidarity are two sides of the same coin, while being vigilant in opposing that form of economic liberalism that rules the world in the interests of the richest. Hardie was put under a great deal of pressure to merge with the Liberal Party, but he resolutely pursued and established the integrity of the Labour interest. And we are reminded in our time how right he was to do that.

This simple bifurcation of liberalism was not evident in Miliband's earlier progressive fusion analysis. There, the tension between liberal individualism and social democratic collectivism was both acknowledged and largely viewed as a potentially constructive tension. Seeking to incorporate and reconcile both sets of insights about the good life and the good society might help to avoid a social democratic tendency to give too little weight to liberty and also the danger of an insufficient liberal engagement with structural disadvantage and the pursuit of the common good.

So that looks like game, set and match to Jon - on the historiography at least - in the name of our founding father Saint Keir.

Yet how far is the new Cruddas-Miliband orthodoxy the whole story about Hardie's relationship with the Liberals? Both Miliband and Cruddas acknowledge that Hardie remained deeply influenced by liberalism, while rightly noting Hardie's commitment to a distinct and independent political identity for Labour. But Miliband goes too far in arguing that Hardie "refused an alliance" with the Liberals. (Miliband's website contains an elaboration on the theme from newly elected Labour MP Gregg McClymont, who has good credentials as an Oxford history lecturer, celebrating Hardie's rejection of the fiction of a "progressive alliance").

But the full story was perhaps more complex. Kenneth Morgan, very much a champion of Hardie as Labour's greatest hero and author of the definitive biography (notably subtitled "Radical and Socialist"), observes that Hardie was both the staunch advocate of Labour independence - and yet also a "symbol of the Progressive Alliance in Britain". This post is obviously deeply indebted to Morgan's essential book, the first serious study of Hardie's political career, and one which demonstrates that a claim to political greatness can survive without an excess of mythology.

So we can go further and say both of Hardie's Parliamentary career - and of his political project for Labour independence - that they advanced and thrived when in alliance with both liberalism and Liberals in one way or another, but were blocked and frustrated when they were not.

Hardie's Parliamentary career and the progressive Alliance

Hardie's place in Labour folk history owed much to his flamboyant entry into Parliament in 1892. It was one peak in an electoral career of hits and misses. In short, he was elected to Parliament where he had Liberal support, and lost when he didn't.

Hardie came to national attention in the 1888 Mid Lanark by-election. But despite a campaign pitch of "a Radical of a somewhat advanced type", telling the mid-Lanark miners that a vote for Hardie would "be a vote for Gladstone, Parnell and YOU", the Liberals would neither adopt him, nor give him a free run. So he finished a distant third with 8.3% of the vote, though Morgan notes that the defeat did establish Hardie's national profile but also "generated an anxious dialogue between Liberal party organisers and Labour spokesmen that eventually resulted in the Gladstone-MacDonald entente of 1903".

Wynford Phillips (Liberal) 3847
Captain Bounsfield (Unionist) 2917
Keir Hardie (independent) 617

How was Hardie able to bounce back and enter Parliament in 1892 as member for West Ham? Here is Morgan's account:

From the start, [Hardie] was aware that his reform depended on amassing the largest possible Liberal vote and inducing supporters of Joseph Leicester [the Liberal candidate] to throw their weight behind his candidacy. Hardie emphasised repeatedly his agreement with the broad outlines of Liberal policy laid down at Newcastle. He upheld franchise reform and Irish Home Rule, he stressed his long career as a temperance reformer ... he bid hard for the non-conformist vote ... "He would support the Liberal programme in its entirety", Hardie declared to applause from a Plaistow audience "but at the same time would use his best endeavours to call attention to the social questions of the day". Hardie certainly underlined his appeal to labour: he addressed a steady stream of trade union demonstrations, dock gates meetings and other informal assemblies. But his appeal was sufficiently flexible to be entirely compatible with that of the Liberal Party. The question of socialism (apart from some incidental references to land nationalisation, which many Liberals also supported) never intruded.

That broad appeal saw most local Liberal and Radical associations back him. Just days before the vote, it was formally announced that the Liberal candidate would withdraw, his remaining supporters urged by the Liberal whips to vote for Hardie. With 5268 votes, Hardie defeated the Unionist candidate who had 4036 votes, in a straight two-way fight.

As Morgan writes:

"though socialists hailed the political awakening of the working-class, in fact, Hardie owed his success less to the faithful support of the dockers and other unskilled workers than to Liberal votes, carefully enlisted by a "Lib-Lab" programme.

Yet Hardie did not exactly demonstrate gratitude in return for his Lib-Lab support. As elections took place over several weeks, Hardie immediately got on with campaigning against any Liberal who opposed the eight-hour day. As Morgan sums up:

This was eminently 'reasonable' for a Labour candidate. What was a disastrous error was Hardie's recommendation that Liberal voters in these constituencies should actually vote for the Unionist. To take this step, immediately after his election largely on Liberal votes at West Ham, was widely taken as a sign of opportunism and cynicism. Bernard Shaw was not alone in telling Burns it made Hardie look like a "Unionist catspaw" ...

Logic had supplanted common sense. It made any cooperation between Hardie and backbench Liberals on such questions as an eight-hour day or unemployment a difficult cause. Hardie's record in Parliament between 1892 and 1895, however inspiring in terms of propaganda, was a relative failure in terms of practical results. He was to prove less effective than, for example, Burns who dilligently mended his fences with the Liberals. Hardie's role in the 1892 election confirmed the view he was an incorrigible outsider. It went some way towards ensuring he would represent West Ham in the Commons for one Parliament only. If it served as a symbolic episode in the preliminary manouveres leading to a labour alliance, it alienated far too many potential Lib-Lab sympathisers. It ensured that for years to come Keir Hardie remained a voice in the wilderness.

In stark contrast to 1892, Hardie made few concessions to Liberal sentiment in 1895, now stubbornly telling single-issue campaigners he would give no particular priority to Irish home rule or temperance. His own vote falling by 1000 with Liberals less inclined to support him after his attacks on their party..

Following his own defeat in 1895, Hardie could again intervene elsewhere. As Morgan writes, the result was that all 28 ILP candidates lost, mostly heavily, just about the only ILP consolation was that they ensured the Liberal John Morley lost Newcastle to the Tories:

"Hardie spent the rest of the campaign in a bitter anti-Liberal crusade of revenge that helped bring down the rest of the ILP candidates. In the Daily Chronicle, he came out with a ringing statement of hostility to official Liberalism that doomed ILP men all over the country ... The results threw the whole Hardie strategy of all-out belligerence to the Liberals into question".

In his unsuccessful Bradford by-election (again a distant third) in 1896, Hardie was now building bridges, proposing "radical unity" and appealing to Liberal radicals for "an alignment of advanced forces",a greater openness to radical and Liberal alliances which was a feature of his later career.

Hardie got back in to represent Merthyr in 1900, curiously and controversially dividing his attention between that seat and also fighting a fairly hopeless prospect in Preston (where he came a poor third). And how did Keir Hardie get to represent Merthyr, where both Jon Cruddas and David Miliband can, to this day, go to praise and commemorate his staunch hostility to the Liberals?

Again, with Liberal votes and organisational support. One of the two Liberal candidates - the reformist coal mine-owner Thomas - backed Hardie against his pro-war party colleague. Hardie shared 4437 of his 5745 votes with the successful Liberal.

Morgan stresses that Merthyr "was still overwhelmingly a Liberal seat ... Hardie was returned as an unequivocal representative of the ILP and LRC. Nevertheless, without this clear evidence of Liberal endorsement and the backing of Thomas' private machine, Hardie would have been as disappointed at Merthyr as he had been at Preston". The Liberals topped the poll at Merthyr to the end of Hardie's Parliamentary career.

Hardie as party leader

Leaders need something to lead. Hardie was one of only two LRC members in the 1900 Parliament, withh no working relationship whatsoever with his colleague, a keen Lib-Labber who saw the LRC as a pressure group, not a party.

Hardie's great achievement was the independent party, and the Labour alliance of trade unionist interests with socialist opinion, Hardie's famous resolution which founded the LRC in 1900 had quite deliberately evaded all substantive questions of ideology, policy, strategy and alliances, in proposing only to "set up a distinct Labour group in Parliament, who shall have their own whips, and agree on their policy, which must embrace a readiness to cooperate with any party which for the time being may be engaged in promoting legislation in the direct interests of labour".

That Hardie did get to lead a significant parliamentary Labour group of 29 after 1906 was a direct beneficial result of the secret Gladstone-MacDonald electoral pact of 1903.

Morgan's conclusion is surely unavoidable:

The image of Hardie differed sharply from the reality. The real Hardie was exceptionally flexible in his attitude to relations with the Liberals. He supported a national electoral alliance through the whips or through individuals like Lloyd George, provided that it gave due recognition to the independent status of the LRC ... He persistently advocated short-term agreements in pursuit of minimal reformist goals.

If political strategy and tactics faced both ways, in ideological terms, there was no great difficulty for Hardie, as Morgan describes"

Hardie's vision of the Labour Party allowed it to expand. While he preached Socialism, its character was so ill-defined and its establishment placed so far in an undeterminate future, that it presented no serious obstacle to practical cooperation with radicals of other parties, and of none on behalf of day-to-day progressive reform. ... Hardie's socialism was never hedged around by rigid dogma. It was compatible with almost all of the New Liberalism of Lloyd George, Masterman and their allies in the press. It was compatible equally with the Old Liberalism of the chapels and of the struggle for democracy and for civic and religious equality ... Hardie's own abiding attachment to themes such as temperance reform and Celtic nationalism showed how enduring were the links that bound him to the Liberalism of his twenties and thirties. His socialism was in reality a radical-socialism of a singularly malleable kind ... In Lenin's eyes, Hardie's outlook was contemptible, the very epitome of 'opportunism' ... To many British radicals, however, Hardie's opportunism was simple common sense.

***
Progressive dilemmas restated

The past does not determine the future, though it is healthy for political communities to to interrogate their own histories, traditions and indeed myths. Miliband's lecture is a very welcome sign that Labour is finally now over a neuralgic relationship with its own history, and makes a strong argument that a constructive and critical engagement with a political tradition can avoid both nostalgic reverie and hyper-modernist contempt for the past.

And this argument about Labour's origins does contain much of contemporary resonance about political choices which the party may face in the future.

Firstly, Labour does have a suspicion of political alliances and entanglements which often runs much deeper than it does for Liberals or Conservatives. Ramsay MacDonald's betrayal of 1931 retains an important symbolic role, and so reinforces the tendency to turn Keir Hardie into a plaster saint, a polar opposite, always rejecting alliances as a dilution of socialist principle. So the party instinctively feels that the new Con-Lib Coalition will help to clarifying an adversarial choice. Perhaps. Yet, in the long-run, it seems unlikely that the deep and gradual shift to increased pluralism in British politics over the last thirty years will be sharply reversed. If that does prove to be the case, enshrining Labour's historic aversion to political alliances into a proud shibboleth of integrity, even at the price of impotence, could prove a costly mistake, particularly when it can be shown that Labour's founding father demonstrated rather more flexibility and pragmatism in pursuing the cause.

Secondly, David Miliband suggests that the Conservative-Liberal coalition is dangerous because it reflects the tacit alliance which enabled the right to be dominant in the 20th century. That essentially restates Marquand's progressive dilemma, looking at it from the other side of the aisle. Part of his response is that Labour will have a responsibility to defend the interests of those likely to lose out. That is right, but it does not explain how to disrupt or change the outcome. In 1935, British politics was dominated by an anti-Labour alliance, despite mass unemployment; in 1945, Labour represented a broad cross-class alliance.

So there is a danger in asserting a single underlying cause from 1900 to 2010 of Lab-Lib division and Lib-Con alignment. Doesn't this suggest that an anti-Labour alliance is the natural order of British politics? Yet key moments of division or realignment - such as 1918-22, 1929-31, 1981-83, 1997 and 2010 are strikingly different, dependent on particular choices made in specific context and circumstances. Miliband tactitly acknowledges in referring to the mistakes made by Ramsay MacDonald and Phillip Snowden after 1929. Then it was Labour which was wedded to Treasury orthodoxy, and it was Lloyd George, Keynes and the 'yellow book" liberals who were campaigning for an alternative. How bemused they would be to find their "Orange Book" successors defend George Osborne's economic strategy, very much in the spirit of Montagu Norman. That useful challenge to today's LibDems also casts doubt on Miliband's endorsement of Hardie's account of the underlying cause of lack of Labour-Liberal understanding being rooted in differences about class, political economy and the choice between the banks and the real economy.

Thirdly, this account understates the amount of Lab-Lib cooperation at key moments in British political history. It is true that there have been many, perhaps crucial, missed opportunities, enabling the right to dominate. If there has usually been more ideological affinity between the Labour and Liberal traditions, that has more often been trumped by a more supple and pragmatic high Tory statecraft. That is why the pattern of British political history has been that Coalition governments have always involved the Tories. These may usually have been alliances more of convenience than principle, but they have achieved their objective of securing political power.

But there is another side of the story too, as the example of Keir Hardie's progressive alliances shows. Centre-left alliances have usually been looser, more difficult and have not endured. So isn't it striking just how much which endures has been achieved by these flurries of cooperation. I have argued that all of the great progressive advances of British history have arisen from various forms of Labour-Liberal cooperation, albeit that these have never been sustained: it is true of Labour's 1906 entry to parliament; breaking the Lords veto in the hung parliament of 1911; Attlee enshrining the Keynes-Beveridge settlement; the social legislation of the 1960s; and early New Labour's constitutional legacy, developed in dialogue with extra-parliamentary pressure from Charter 88 and pursued through a joint Cabinet committee with the LibDems. The outcome was the biggest reforms in British politics since 1911, and they set a clear benchmark for the Coalition's hyperbole about its unique post-1832 reformist ambition.

The importance of this cooperation risks being written out of history. We may see an example next year, with the centenary of the Parliament Act, which concluded the last great Liberal-Conservative battle, an existential political crisis which brought Britain to the brink of civil war. No doubt we are all on the same progressive side now. But it was a close run thing. What has mostly been written out of the history is just how crucial the alliance with Labour was to the victory of Lloyd George and Asquith in the knife-edge elections of 2010.

After all, the Conservatives won 250,000 more votes than the Liberals, and led the popular vote by 3.5% points. They gained 110 seats while the Liberal government lost 121, leaving the parties almost tied on seats. The only reason the Conservatives did not win a Commons majority - so killing both Lloyd George's people's budget and the bid to remove the Lords veto - was that Labour and Liberal leaderships managed to contain the number of three-cornered contests to only 35.

As Martin Pugh writes in his new history of the Labour Party, 'Speak for Britain!', the progressive alliance was absolutely crucial to this democratic breakthrough:

The leaders recognised that, quite apart from safeguarding the party's own electoral interests, the pact made complete sense from the national perspective. The Conservatives, who had pushed their share of the vote to over 46 per cent, would have won an overall majority of seats if Labour and the Liberals had not severely restricted the number of three-cornered contests. As a minority government, the Liberals were now dependent on the votes of the forty-two Labour members to enact reforming legislation especially as the eighty Irish were not always reliable.

Had Labour instead employed a Clegg doctrine of the mandate after the January 1910 election, this could have entailed the historic defeat of Lloyd George. Instead, alliances were forged on the basis of principled agreement over the core issue at stake. Of course, Lloyd George was later to maintain a Tory alliance after the great war ended in 1918, from which almost nothing productive resulted beyond the betrayal of the promise of "homes fit for heroes" and the split and historic destruction of the Liberals as a governing force.

***

Of course, another common (Liberal) reading of the history of Labour's emergence is to regret the assistance to a minor party which eclipsed its rival. A similar (Labour) reading is to warn against alliances which could have the same result, with the party eschewing all calls for progressive cooperation, whether with LibDems or Greens, as a potential death-trap.

Of course, this makes sense only on the dominant post-war but increasingly contested assumption that British party politics will and must always revolve almost exclusively around an essentially two-party system. That then provides a strategic imperative that parties should never cooperate precisely because they share common objectives and ideological space, and so should fight each other to the death first before one or other can take on a Conservative enemy at some undetermined future point. (That is a staple Labourist account, though an argument using precisely this arid "progressive death-match" model was implausibly offered by Nick Clegg in his Demos pamphlet last year, though he must now need an entirely different political strategy).

Such party tribalism may have a strong intuitive appeal to activists in all parties, but it can have important costs for progressive political outcomes, nor is it as dominant in the Labour tradition as is commonly assumed.

So the politician in 2010 who could well benefit most from a close study of Keir Hardie in 1900 would be Caroline Lucas, party leader and sole Parliamentary representative of the Greens. No doubt there will be political pressures for a rhetoric of staunch independence. Yet, as there ultimately was for Hardie, there may well be more to be gained from pluralist cooperation too.

Left's flag carried by Spain's footballing Fabians

So the World Cup final - the single, largest collective exercise that humanity has yet devised.

For Next Left's political world cup, the left's banner is carried by Spain.

They are worthy heroes. Beyond their leftist government of Zapatero, Spain's growing football confidence on the global stage reflects a a long elusive fusion of Catalan republicanism - with seven Barcelona players in the side - with the Real Madrid right in this most complex of internal coalitions of football and patriotic identity.

If we wanted to stretch the point further, should we not see Spain's tika-taka touch, touch style as the very footballing expression of Fabian gradualism?

Let us hope they remember, as Carlos Puyol with his magnificently direct header in the semi-final against Germany, that the Roman general Fabius Cunctator famously had a strategy of two halves in his war with Hannibal:

For the right moment you must wait, as Fabius did most patiently when warring against Hannibal, though many censured his delays;

but when the time comes you must strike hard, as Fabius did, or all your waiting will be vain, and fruitless.

The Netherlands are of no fixed political abode, having begun in World Cup Group E's "group of political uncertainty" they remain in a Coalition stand-off which will continue long after the World Cup.

David Winner who wrote the fantastic 'Brilliant Orange' - "the Dutch think innovatively, creatively and abstractly about space in their football because for centuries they have had to think innovatively about space in every other area of their lives” - writes in today's Observer about how this emore pragmatic Dutch side is seen as symbolising a retreat from a distinctive Dutch liberalism.

Indeed, Spain are widely seen as co-inheritors of the legacy of Cruyff.

So football history says the Dutch deserve a World Cup. But on the football of 2010, and the World Cup politics too, Next Left will have to back Spain.

Well, why wouldn't an anti-statist government scrap the census?

I am quite surprised by just how badly the new government has been doing on basic administrative competence.

Let us acknowledge that David Cameron is rather good at the tonality and public perfomance aspects of "being Prime Minister", without perhaps placing quite quite the premium on etiquette which so impresses Martin Kettle.

On policy, the record on ever the highest-profile issues has been astonishingly poor.

George Osborne's first big idea, the Office of Budget Responsibility, is facing ever more credibility challenges.

The scale and frequency of Michael Gove's abject apologies to the House of Commons and everybody else is pretty much unparalleled in modern times.

As far as I can tell, the LibDem ministers have so far seemed less likely to make a complete horlicks of high-profile projects (since the personal and political misfortune of David Laws and the private shenanigans of Chris Huhne don't quite figure here).

Now, being a believer in value-based politics, I am by nature very sceptical of claims that one should expect any great difference in technocratic or managerial competence between centre-left, centre-right or centrist governments, particularly in a system with a permanent civil service. No doubt there were many examples under Labour too. (The famous Byers-Mottram fiasco and sweary masterclass springs to mind).

That the government has made a number of proposals - on rape anonymity, and the 55% confidence rule - which did not survive 5 minutes external scrutiny perhaps reflects inexperience among ministers and advisers. (The government's evident surprise when its "fairness graph" in the budget Red Book fell apart within 24 hours did demonstrate the difference between opposition and government, and a surprising failure to imagine or war game the likely scenarios and challenges).

Yet now I wonder if there may also be an underlying ideological reason why this government may prove particularly accident prone over the years ahead.

It is a thought triggered by Francis Maude's wheeze of scrapping the census, reported in The Telegraph.

Mr Maude, who has responsibility for the Census, told The Daily Telegraph that the Government was looking for a “fundamentally” better way of doing it. “There are, I believe, ways of doing this which will provide better, quicker information, more frequently and cheaper,” he said ...

Mr Maude said the Census was “out of date almost before it has been done” and was looking at ways to count the population more frequently — perhaps every five years — using databases held by credit checking firms, Royal Mail, councils and Government.

All very "big society" - and surely supermarket loyalty cards could provide the foundation stone too - but the use of a patchwork of information, including from private credit check agencies (!) which I am sure will delight the civil libertarian wing of the government, will have all sorts of unintended consequences, many of which may come to light when it is too late to go back.

(As the FT blog points out, fortunately, Maude can't scrap it for 2011 so this cost-saving plan will be aimed at the 2021 census, making it perhaps possible that this is an idea which may never happen).

The idea of scrapping the census strikes me as potentially an interesting symbol of a way of thinking about government. Now doubt the government thinks it demonstrates its bold willingness to "think outside the box" in the conviction that you can always get more for less, which is the first article of faith of the Cameroons.

But it reminded me rather more of an interesting point made about the Reagan and Bush administrations by George Packer in a New Yorker essay on the ideological right.

Even Reagan, the Moses of the conservative movement, was more ideological in his rhetoric than in his governance. Conservatives have canonized him for cutting taxes and regulation, moving the courts to the right, and helping to vanquish the Soviet empire. But he proved less dogmatic than most of his opponents and some of his followers expected ...

[Reagan] had failed to limit the size of government, which, besides anti-Communism, was the abiding passion of Reagan’s political career and of the conservative movement. He didn’t come close to achieving it and didn’t try very hard, recognizing early that the public would be happy to have its taxes cut as long as its programs weren’t touched. And Reagan was a poor steward of the unglamorous but necessary operations of the state. Wilentz notes that he presided over a period of corruption and favoritism, encouraging hostility toward government agencies and “a general disregard for oversight safeguards as among the evils of ‘big government.’ In this, and in a notorious attempt to expand executive power outside the Constitution—the Iran-Contra affair—Reagan’s Presidency presaged that of George W. Bush.

The neglect of the unglamorous business of government would not have been a problem of traditional, paternalistic Conservatism. Might it prove a rather frequent unintended consequence of what could otherwise be a positive enthusiasm for 'big society' politics?

Heir to Keir?

David Miliband has given the Keir Hardie memorial lecture tonight in Mountain Ash, South Wales. You can read it here.

It is a significant speech, making the case for the candidates somehow finding time to make more sustained interventions outside of their hustings engagements.

In many ways, the speech bears the hallmarks of the Cruddas-Purnell "Next Labour" dialogues of the last year or two. (Indeed, James Purnell, must now relinquish the heir to Keir title and the Order of the Cloth Cap to brother Miliband).

The Guardian reports that Jon Cruddas has described the speech as ""the most important speech by a Labour politician for many years". To make a slightly different, but perhaps not unaligned point, perhaps it is the speech in the leadership contest which has been most influenced by Cruddas' own Compass summer lecture from last year. Quoting Tawney's 1931 The Choice Before the Labour Party is a particular giveaway. (And I am least convinced by the speech as history, where Professor Cruddas' influence is particularly evident, and where the argument could be challenged in the name of Milibandite progressive fusion, though that will have to be the subject of another post).

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The first good thing about the speech is that the candidate made it. It is one of a number of signals that we can leave behind New Labour's problem in not knowing how to relate with the party's own history, where a "year zero" project risked cutting itself off from the ability to draw on and critically interrogate the party's own traditions. David Miliband condemns that as "a superficial modernist contempt for the achievements of our forebears". Anthony Painter also notes the importance of this.

Of course, as a political branding exercise, New Labour was enormously effective in the mid-1990s in telling sceptical voters that Labour had changed. But the party paid a heavy price over time for creating the caricature of "Old Labour" of its own history to achieve this. This falsely implied that the "no compromise with the electorate" phase of the party's near nervous breakdown in the early 1980s was somehow an authentic representation of the party's mainstream tradition, rather than an aberration from it. (This was always somewhat confused: New Labour certainly celebrated the 50th and 60th anniversaries of the National Health Service, but appeared embarrassed at even noticing the party's own centenary).

Yet this history problem mattered, because this it was a significant contributory factor in each of three major political problems identified by David Miliband in tonight's speech.

Firstly, why none of the talk of "renewal" in office led anywhere, as the government talked about "change" but seemed unable to define it.

Miliband said tonight:

It was not just more of the same. Far from correcting them failings - tactics, spin, high-handedness – intensified; and we lost many of our strengths – optimism born of clear strategy, bold plans for change and reform, a compelling articulation of aspiration and hope. We did not succeed in renewing ourselves in office; and the roots of that failure were deep not recent, about procedure and openness, or lack of it, as much as policy. That is a political fact and now words are cheap but the stakes are high.

Much of this is common ground between the candidates, who all seem to now agree that the 1997-2001 term was easily Labour's best, though none has yet offered a clear analysis about why this happened (and it was surely a collective failure of the government, and broader party, which is difficult to lay only at the door of the party's two leaders).

Secondly, what David Miliband calls the lack of a "a shared creed that is too often undefined".

What became New Labour grew out of of a long-running argument, from The Future of Socialism onwards, about the basis of a modern social democratic project capable of victory in an age of affluence. New Labour's central weakness was that it was too much and too often an exercise in "negative revisionism", being clearer about what to ditch, but less clear about what to put in its place. New Labour was much more reticent than Crosland had been in making clear that a fairer, freer and more equal society was the goal of a modern social democracy, putting that case only in catch-all terms which struggled to distinguish Labour's argument from that of other parties, particularly once the Conservatives finally sought to contest the political centre again too.

Thirdly, by implying that its commitment to causes risked being part of the problem for a party that wanted to win office, this was part of the barrier which saw New Labour struggle to mobiilise - outside of specific, somehow safer, domain of international development - so that it could not become a modern campaigning "political movement".

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The David Miliband speech also captures what some - particularly in the media - have seen as a weakness in this race, but which can also be seen as a good thing for the party: that there is no great ideological difference between the candidates.

In a piece for the next Fabian Review, I suggest the following has emerged as essentially common ground between the field through the hustings, presenting each of the candidates with the challenge of defining their pitch distinctively.

On these points, the candidates agree: Labour is a party defined by its values – and its core commitment to narrowing inequalities in opportunity, income, wealth and power. Labour should be proud of much of its record, but it lost touch over time by becoming too managerial in office. The Iraq war would not have happened if the Government had known Saddam did not have WMD. It should have done more, earlier to challenge unearned rewards at the top of society, and was too timid in pursuing an elected Lords and having more faith in local democracy. The party should pursue equality in representation, and must shift its internal culture to become a movement campaigning in communities for change.

And it is not immediately obvious to me what in the Keir Hardie lecture sharply distinguishes David Miliband from other candidates - with many of the arguments about the state and political economy, ethics and participation, and the need for a movement politics all describing the common ground of the leadership race and most of the broader party. (Compare Ed Miliband on social democracy last week, for one example).

Miliband's Keir Hardie speech can be billed as a constructive quest to combine ideology and moderation, so that Labour has a clear vision of how to represent what Miliband calls "the reasonable hope of a reasonable people". Certainly one can be a social democrat centrist motivated by ideology, though perhaps the speech's moderation means that it often wants to argue both sides of several questions: the failure to be proud enough of the record and the failure to show due humility about mistakes; an excessive "love in with financial markets" and the failure as well to secure business support

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One important area of emerging debate is the argument about the importance of reciprocity in welfare: a welfare state based not only on need but also contribution.

David Miliband says:

To reconceive our notion of fairness. In our concern with meeting peoples’ needs we seemed to sever welfare from desert and this led people to think that their taxes were being wasted, that they were being used. When we said fairness, people thought it was anything but. What emerged as a tribute to solidarity, the welfare state, turned into a bitter division. Many of the ‘hard working families’ we wished to appeal to did not view us as their party. We achieved great things but we did not bring people with us, and our motivation appeared abstract and remote.

This has also been a key theme for Ed Miliband, and has been an idea particularly championed by John Denham through drawing on the Fabian Society's research for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation into public attitudes to fairness and inequality, and Solidarity Society research.

Yet the challenge here for all of the candidates is that this is hardly a new observation. This was also the motivation for "progressive universalism", of which Ed Balls was a principal author, and all of that talk about "hard-working families" and the "squeezed middle". So who can also explain why New Labour's awareness of this problem (leading to a 'rights and responsibilities' approach) did not resolve it, and brought problems of its own and which, because the reciprocity argument was often made primarily punitively, may have exacerbated the decline in public support for welfare to which the reciprocity argument is intended to respond.

Inevitability, superstition and ideology: how the Coalition's rhetoric works

This guest post from Gregg McClymont MP examines how the Coalition's rhetoric seeks to rise "above politics" in order to entrench age-old Tory ideological stereotypes.

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The Coalition framed their budget with some very misleading rhetoric, and not just about its distributional impact. They have claimed that a partial and political view of our economic circumstances is an overwhelming orthodoxy. They are dressing up age-old Tory superstitions about state debt as an inevitable response to the economic ‘facts’.

But political economy is never a perfect science. Public budgets are about the distribution of the national income, through tax and spending. Any budget is therefore inherently political as well as economic.

You wouldn’t guess this from the Coalition’s rhetoric. Even though the entire concept of an Emergency Budget is a political manoeuvre, they have presented their cuts and tax rises as economically inevitable.

Depoliticising the budget is a smart political move. It’s about claiming the appearance of consensus, and making austerity an inevitable, ‘centrist’ proposition. The fact that two parties are (notionally) involved, in spite of the Liberal Democrats’ substantial abandonment of their pre-election commitments on the economy, aids the impression. It allows the government to argue that ‘there is no alternative’ politically as well as economically.

The notion that a purely managerial politics can ever exist – that these parties are simply ‘working together’ to ‘get things done’ – is a fantasy. But there is a deeper logic to the Coalition’s rhetorical positioning. They are attempting to monopolize political discussion of economic policy at all levels. Tabloid scaremongering about debt and deficits, and repeated condemnation of Labour’s ‘irresponsible’ spending, is being made to sit with the supposed pronouncements of economic ‘fact’.

There is a rhetorical effectiveness to all this. Superstitions about the proper response to economic downturn determine which bits of an extremely mixed, volatile and fallible evidence-base are mobilized in defence of the Coalition’s actions.

Broadly speaking, there are four main superstitions which underpin almost everything we hear from ministers and government MPs:

- Long-term debt is unnatural and wrong for households.

- States should be governed like households

- The UK’s finances are/were ‘out of control’ and a sovereign debt crisis was inevitable under any other government than this one

- In the current economic climate, there is a clear positive correlation between a tight fiscal policy and investor/consumer confidence.

The first three do not stand up to any sustained scrutiny, but need to be confronted more openly if the argument is to be won at the most elemental level.

Only the fourth is supported by even a section of reputable economic opinion, and this too is far more contested then ministers are willing to concede.

It is hard to work out what the Conservatives truly believe about the economy, and the virtual silence of most Liberal Democrats outside the Orange Book inner circle speaks volumes. Conservative opposition to social democracy and the welfare state is, however, a given – or at least since Thatcherism became the Conservatives’ unchallenged creed.

The long-term objective of the Coalition programme is Thatcherite: to reduce the financial burden on those who tend to vote Conservative by substantially reducing the size of the public sector. The likely dividend of a balanced budget will be poorly targeted tax cuts like the rise in personal allowances, not increased spending on redistribution or improved public services.

They see this crisis as an opportunity to ‘remake the state’. Outsourcing, privatizations and redundancies will undermine even further the basic concept of collective provision of public goods, and compound the weakness of the trade union movement. This government will work very hard to ensure that social democracy is the major casualty of a crisis in neo-liberal economics.

This is the only context in which the Conservative claim that the public deficit is ‘the biggest threat to the recovery’ makes any sense.

Gregg McClymont is MP for Cumbernauld, Kilsyth and Kirkintilloch East, first elected in the 2010 General Election.

Revealed: the OBR must have an Octopus too

We may owe Nick Clegg an apology. After all, Next Left rather satirised the deputy PM's lament that the Institute of Fiscal Studies' analysis of the government's regressive budget decisions had failed to take account of future policy that the government had yet to make or announce.

After all, what type of independent forecaster would could produce more favourable results than the facts allowed, on account of positive future intentions?

Now we know the answer.

The Office of Budget Responsibility would.

So the Financial Times today explains, reporting a Chris Giles scoop, which is about rather more than a more favourable employment forecast.

As the FT Westminster blog notes, "raises doubts over its very purpose and independence ... far more significant than any speculation over Sir Alan Budd’s departure".

As Alex Barker explains:

The reasons for the revisions are even more surprising than the end result. Without telling anyone about the changes, the OBR assumed that George Osborne would:

1) Cut state contributions for public sector pensions (an assumption that pre-empts the conclusions of John Hutton’s pension commission)

2) Put the brakes on promotions in the public sector (even though the chancellor has never announced such a policy)

There are three possible explanations: the independent OBR is taking orders from the chancellor; practising economic telepathy; or inserting random policy into its forecasts.

Meanwhile actual coalition policy announcements that would lower long term growth under the original OBR model — such a limiting net-migration to 1990s levels — were excluded. Hmm.

Is the FT right to be suspicious? Or might the explanation be that the OBR has simply been taking advice from a psychic German Octopus on a consultancy basis?

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A further authoritative intervention arguing that "drastic change" is needed if the OBR is to establish its independence and credibility is set out by Doug McWilliams, chief executive of the Centre for Economic and Business Research, who was influential in shaping the OBR's purpose and remit.

As The Guardian reports:

McWilliams said the OBR was a good idea, but in order to be effective needed to be led by someone appointed by the Treasury select committee rather than the chancellor, be staffed by officials who had not worked at the Treasury, base its work on the consensus forecasts from 40 UK forecasting groups, and have its own offices outside the Treasury.

Next Left was first out of the blocks following Budd's departure in advocating that the Treasury Select Committee, rather than the Chancellor should appoint the OBR's Chair. That proposal was echoed by the New Statesman in its editorial this week.

Peter Hoskin of the Spectator agrees.

The CEBR and Financial Times interventions signal growing pressure from expert economic opinion of the need for the OBR to change substantially after its initial birthing pains if it is to credibly stake a claim for independence.

Accountability to Parliament is therefore emerging as the key test necessary to command a consensus among expert opinion and across the political spectrum that the point of establishing the OBR - credible independence - can be met.