“What’s more, they instantly appeal even if they fall apart after a moment’s study: their fuel escalator idea is a fantastic concept, easy to understand but which is completely out of step with their so-called green credentials; locking up yobs with knives is populist and difficult to argue against while being a terrible idea; and his broken Britain stuff is brazen and defining but empty.”

I still don’t get the fuel escalator proposal – it doesn’t help control the price of fuel, only the amount of revenue the govt. gets from it, so the motorist could still get screwed, but they could try complaining to ExxonMobil rather than the Chancellor (good luck…). As for knives, well it worked for New Labour and handguns, so why would any major party try an approach based on anything other than ‘prison works’?

Of course any decent analysis of Tory policies would provide ample material for a coherent and focused attack – it’s just that New Labour doesn’t seem to get much beyond ‘Tories got the lurgi’ (Cameron, a PR driven smoothie? After Blair, who’s surprised?) It’s also not helped by its history of Tory-lite policies and rhetoric while in office. It’ll be hard for the left to offer an election-winning critique of Cameron when too many in New Labour make doe eyes in his direction.

Good piece..Thumbs up!

You forgot to add:

>>Yes, a tiny minority of individuals are stupid, wear awful clothes, listen to terrible music and act like imbeciles..

AND WATCH EASTENDERS!

Anyway, I still believe its not too late for labour to pull their socks up and strongly challenge the tories before the next election (with Brown as the leader); they need to take quick and constructive measures though.

‘This is why it makes me so despondent when rather than challenging the Conservatives and potentially forcing them to improve their plans, the left seems more concerned with such petty, ridiculous and banal matters as whether or not we should use the word “chav”.’

That’s fair enough, but you forgot to flag up the more important problem: that of the seemingly complete inability of lefties to agree with each other about things. British politics has always had a bit of the playground about it, but it seems to be getting out of hand. Here, on LibCon (and on Pickled Politics too), I see so many discussions on threads disintegrate into ridiculous levels of pettiness as people argue over semantics and interpretations… who cares?! If the other person doesn’t agree with you, clarify once and then move on. Either they’ll see what you meant, or they’ll continue to disagree. Stop wasting time.

Debate is one thing, but those kind of very typically ‘Internet’ debates are really futile. It also makes me wonder: if left-wing bloggers and blog readers, generally among the most well-informed and analytical of lefties, can’t pull together and resist the call of the pissing contest, how the heck will anyone else?

That’s all Labour seem to have left now – insulting Cameron and trying to save Brown’s long-lost rep without actually working with the Lib Dems and fighting back against the Tories by making them show their cards, as already suggested here by Andrew Hickey and by Jonathan Freedland in the Guardian.

Thanks, Septisicle, for so eloquently summing up my fears and irritations regarding the Blue future!

It’s very difficult for New Labour to attack the Conservatives because they have knicked most of their policies. The gap between rich and poor has grown under this govt, just as it grew under Major and Thatcher. In fact, ever since the Right started cutting income tax and putting up indirect taxation the gap has grown. It is quite funny when the Tories talk of “stealth taxes,” remember 8% VAT going up to 15% and then on to 17% to pay for the big income tax cuts for the top 30%?

If Brown had any sense and any courage, he would put up income tax and use the money to cut indirect taxation. Be quite fun watching all these millionaire farmers who are demanding lower petrol prices, paying 50% income tax to get the same fuel price as in France and Germany.

Either the Labour party picks itself up out of its desperate misery, viciously goes on the offensive against Cameron and completely challenges them over every little detail,

The problem, it seems to me, is that Labour hasn’t found any language to attack him with.

The toff thing doesn’t wash because people don’t feel any more connected to Labour. ‘The Tories are the nasty party’ thing doesn’t wash when Labour is simply aping them in many policies.

Don’t get me wrong – I get a ton of press releases every day by the Labour press office attacking the Tories. In fact they spend an unhealthy time on it.

But I don’t think attacking the tories works for two reasons:
1) You need a narrative to attack them with rather than simply questioning their proposals. Most people don’t know anything about Tory proposals as you said. So there’s little point in taking them apart.

2) By attacking Conservatives, you’re having the debate on their turf. So you lose anyway. For example, if you attack them on not having serious enough policies on knife crime, as the current atmosphere dictates, then you’ll lose.

If you instead challenge the notion that we’re going through a knife crime killing spree, then Labour would have more of a chance of convincing people.

Oh, and Cameron is not the new Blair or Obama, He is the New George W Bush. He ran on a platform of being a moderate Conservative. His people even created the meaningless phrase “compassionate Conservativism.” Once elected he soon moved radically to the right. In fact, about a week after he was awarded the Presidency by the Supreme court Cheney met with Republicans on Capital Hill, and told them to forget about all that centrist stuff. They would be governing from the far right.

Unfortunately, New Labour can’t point this out, seeing as they have gone along with Bush’s folly in Iraq.

Sunny, I completely agree on the second point. The figures released today unsurprisingly show that no, there isn’t a knife crime epidemic and despite the Daily Mail’s front page today it isn’t a massive problem all over the country either. The problem is that no one believes the figures, and this is down to all sides abusing them for their own ends for so long. One of Louise Casey’s few decent suggestions in her report from the other week was for a completely independent body which would release them and put the figures into context, reducing the chances for outright fabrication.

The problem Labour also has is that little thing that it ought to be governing instead of just attacking the Tories, which I should have mentioned. The party needs someone though who actually has some sort of respect and not an abysmal record to do so: my thoughts were with Jon Cruddas, but then he seems entranced with Cameron and his “emotive literacy”, which with Blair gone Labour hasn’t managed to provide.

As you can probably tell, I’m more inclined towards the second option of completely detaching from Labour and going our own way in taking the Tories on. To do that however we do also need to drop the bickering as Amrit says and also the empty partisanship over things like David Davis. I just can’t see it happening, and I get the feeling we’re going to pay dearly for it.

sally: I disagree, I have to say. The Tories, as the Guardian pieces makes clear, all thought that Blair didn’t mean when we’ve discovered to our cost that he did. I can see the same happening this time round with Cameron. Even if he does go back towards the right, that makes it all the more urgent that we develop a way of challenging him without being denied the opportunity to do so.

Ministers who have more or less said that knife crime has grown into a massive problem, and that there are hundreds of thousands of problem families, that we need to intervene in families when children are still very young in order to stop them becoming criminals, etc., etc., have problems in contradicting Cambell when he says some thing similar. Huhne, Clegg and Co. are carefully not saying all the obviously unfounded things that Ministers and Cameron are saying; and are apparently waiting for Cameron to get himself in deeper before showing him up as a pompous idiot. Seems reasonable tactics to me.

Heh, “waiting” is not a tactic, it’s a fools game. It’s also disingenuous to what the Lib Dem’s are trying to do. They have been announcing policies, they have been pushing the issues they think they can win on…at least enough to show that they are seriously thinking about government (as I’m sure they always do). The Tories meanwhile continue to drift with no set policies, no doubt as they don’t wish to offer more than they need to to win the majority they feel they’ll get, and Labour continue to piss away the promises and pledges they’ve made over the years so no-one trusts their word.

The LIb Dems are carefully saying what they think people want from them, but no-one is really picking up on it and the media is doing its best to ignore or only pay lip service to that fact. Huhne released his youth crime strategy thingy and it is not a million miles from the Labour offering, yet Huhne recieved almost no coverage while the Labour paper got all kinds of comments and focus. Granted Labour’s one contained utter drivel that deserved lambasting, but Lib Dem’s surely operate knowing this is what will keep happening for the time being.

I agree the bickering should stop, but to say it as if we’re all on one side and should just unite is a little false. Ultimately you have a lot of liberals here that don’t follow some of the more socialist views of others. What is sad is that we’ve still not really defined (in terms of this site and what it can aid and grow in to) what our “manifesto” is. We still get people writing articles on here that cause huge controversy because they are aimed at a very specific niche in the liberal left fold. If we were to say that those things are cool and everything, and we’ll certainly highlight them under the liberal-left banner in casting the net, etc, but that these issues (i.e. civil liberties, database state, electoral reform, political/constituent engagement, etc) are ones we will actually push and make something out of.

I mean, take benefits for example, we can’t work cohesively on this matter because despite considering ourselves liberal lefties we all have a different idea on how that should work. We can’t fight for tax cuts with higher personal allowances along side fighting for the status quo with improvements in tax credits can we? We can loosely make a unified agreement against poverty and helping those that need it financially, but that’s like saying we all think the environment should be protected more ignoring the immense diversity of solutions and ideologies beneath it.

I agree that trying to get Labour to do anything (as I think many have said in previous threads) is a lame duck idea, and that if we want to do anything we have to take some initiative and push things ourselves a bit more. no point waiting until we are technically in opposition to start making the right noises, eh? (I understand practically many of us feel we are already!)

In reality there are pockets of acceptionally low levels of education, training , life skills , self-respect and ambition in this country. There is also a much wider problem too many people with low levels skills.The change in industry with the collapse of secure and reasonably well paid employment makes it very difficult for the unskilled with low levels of education to earn enough money.

Many occupations such as being a docker , factory worker etc have gone. The introduction of containerrs removed the need for most dockers and robots can build cars. Invariably if one has 3 or more children it is better to stay on welfare as the low low skill low pay jobs do not make it worthwhile to work. What is vital is to increase the educational and skill levels of people such that they can hold down higher value jobs. The problem is that we also have a skill shortage. 40 years ago the cost of building a tall office block was largely due to the structure which used a large number of unskilled and sem-skilled labour. Now the use of lifts, air-conditioning and need for large open plan floors with computers means that the building services engineering can be the majority of the cost. This means there is a need for far more highly skilled electricians and mechanics. The use of mini excavators to dig foundations, loaders to carry materials to the higher floors means that hod carriers and general labourers are needed far less. The increased use of off-site prefabrication is likely to further decrease the nee for labour.

For many who come from a background of very low educational achievements means that the lack of trade education from the age of 13-14 in schools after this age they become totally indifferent to education. For many in the bottom 25%-30% of academic ability ,the last 2 years of school is waste of time. If we could develop a system where people could leave school at 14 and enter the world of work they may become enthusiastic about learning. Why cannot a 14 yr old in work return to college for 2 days a week in order to study?

One can take a horse to water but one cannot make it drink. If we can persuade many of these people with low educational achievements to attain an equivalent level to GNVQ 2 or better, then they can hold down better paying jobs and work their way out of poverty. If a person is in work and sees that aquiring more qualifications is a path to better pay ; then they are more likely to want to study. The problem is that for probably 20-25% of the population they see no benefit of aquiring an education in order to better themselves . If there is no purpose in education why study? The problem is that the politicians, unions and civil servants are largely ignorant of the impact of technology until it has happened.

The late 70s and early 80s was the beginning of computer aided design, manufacturing and introduction of electronic/computerised control systems. The German car industry survived because it went up market . 40 years ago BMW and AUDI were not nearly so exclusive , only Mercedes was a luxury brand. Whole new careers have been created around the computer – webb designer, programmer, etc. When YTS was set up , 2 year course in the UK was covered in 6 months by a German school leaver. Much of the R and D for the FI car teams is undertaken in this country, aroun Witney and Silverstone ( 40,000 employed in the F1 business in this area). The UK can compete in manufacturing but only in the upper middle to upper range , for that we need skills and decent craft training.

Septicisle – thanks for this, it needs saying and the sentiment is spot-on.

I’m a Labour member – cradle Labour. I Joined the Young Socialists in the early 60s: been in and out of the party ever since; served as Ward Branch Sec., delegate to various constituency bodies, developed septic knuckles knocking on doors canvassing … etc. etc. I stopped renewing my membership shortly after Blair became leader and rejoined the party very shortly after Brown took over. It’s changed a lot and achieved a lot over the years, the tories haven’t changed at all (IMHO), still ‘lower than vermin’ – their leaders, anyway.

One way the Labour Party changed is that the footsoldiers, e.g. union activists of various sorts, ordinary working people – especially working people in the public services, idealists (remember them?) and folk like me with wives, kids, a job … a life – who care enough to spend at least a small number of hours a week working for the party, felt marginalised from the start of the New Labour ‘project’. NL (again IMHO) has achieved things that Old Labour never could have. It’s done whatever it thought necessary to hold on to power, it used techniques (e.g. media manipulation) and people (e.g. Peter Mandellson) that OL would have shied away from and it has attacked and won where OL (again IMHO) would not even have fought ( Minimum Wage, womens, race and gender issues ) but NL looked better than it was because the tories picked a succession of plonkers as leaders. Now they have got someone half competent who can take on NL at their own game and maybe even win, so the old media are feeling their oats again and reverting to type and the leading lights in the LP don’t seem to know how to fight.

Perhaps the best hope of keeping an old-style viciously elitist Conservative Party out of power is to re-enlist the footsoldiers (who may remember how to fight) and look at how best to arm them for the traditional battlefields and new the new battlefields of the Web

Pete

First, want to echo what Pete B says.

Secondly, septicisle you say:
my thoughts were with Jon Cruddas, but then he seems entranced with Cameron and his “emotive literacy”, which with Blair gone Labour hasn’t managed to provide.

What do you mean by this? I like Jon Cruddas a lot. John Denham is another one.

As you can probably tell, I’m more inclined towards the second option of completely detaching from Labour and going our own way in taking the Tories on.

Well, here’s the problem. For a start the left still needs an electoral vehicle if anything is to happen. With a choice between Labour and Libdems, and with the latter not making any real left-wing overtures to attract that part of the party, I find it unlikely in the short term that people will move to the Libdems enmasse.

I was actually thinking of having a week-long discussion here on what the Libdems need to do to become the effective opposition.

My view is that we wait for Labour to get chucked out, and then get involved in the fight to ensure a more left-wing alternative is created. Right now New Labour is intent only on winning, not only developing any coheren ideology.

This means that it doesn’t need a base until its out of power. Its strategy has been so far, as Pete B says above, to just keep hoping the Tories look worse. Obviously they cottoned on soon enough.

In other words, Labour will have to go out of power if its to realise its roots again. That’s what I think for now anyway. I’m open to persuasion otherwise.

Who cares about left-right arguments? Surely what matters is what works.

What Cameron’s ‘broken society’ narrative says is that he recognises there is a problem, but he doesn’t know exactly what it is. Because he can’t describe the problem accurately he can’t offer any real solutions.

What this means is that he thinks he can judge when the problems will have been resolved, but that nothing will be to his credit.

What it says is that he can’t identify who is to blame, and he can’t accept responsibility for any personal role either he or his party has had in creating the problem in the first place.

What it means is that he isn’t prepared to apologise for past or future mistakes, because he’s not prepared to get his hands dirty making any changes to challenge convention and vested interests.

If we accept his narrative and we as a country are prepared to vote for him, it says we are gonna get screwed and we better had enjoy it, because we’ll deserve everything we get.

Houston, we have a problem.

At least I think we do. Frankly I have only seen the odd Liberal Conspirator argue that Labour is the answer on here. Personally, as a Liberal, who will vote SNP until that becomes a reality, and then revert, I do not see where some folk on here are coming from. Your vote is a tactical vote, Is it not? To give it over to the son of Thatcher seems to me to be counter intuitive.

Correct me if I am wrong.

BTW, I think Brown is a disaster.

Perhaps the SNP should stand in Central London. Their non devolutionary policies are probably what you guys would vote for…

Y’know:

Free tertiary education

Free subscriptions for medicine

No to 42 days.

stuff like that.

Who cares about left-right arguments? Surely what matters is what works.

But what works depends on what you are trying to achieve, and that’s where people on the left and right will often differ.

“I somehow doubt Cameron himself has been on a bus in years, if ever”

Another pathetic and childish comment about a man who has three young children, one of whom is seriously disabled. Yet again your desperation to make personal attacks on him leaves you looking stupid, not Cameron.

It’s interesting in this article that you don’t mention ANY of the points that Cameron has raised as indicating that society is broken. In this article you fail to mention family breakdown, drug abuse, falling educational standards etc. For you to then claim that the concept is a broken society is “empty” when it is backed up by over five years of research, some by the Conservatives and some by external organisations, is laughable.

Cameron understands what’s wrong with this country and you don’t. The Left has no response to this because they have provided no evidence to counter any of Cameron’s claims on the various social problems we are facing.

http://lettersfromatory.wordpress.com

But I don’t think attacking the tories works for two reasons:[1 &2]

There is a third reason – the public is turned off by negative campaigning. If politicians still don’t understand this very simple fact, they should in good conscience find themselves new ways to occupy their time.

“Cameron understands what’s wrong with this country and you don’t. The Left has no response to this because they have provided no evidence to counter any of Cameron’s claims on the various social problems we are facing.”

What claims has he made? That people aren’t responsible for their own actions? Then why was he so hesitant to properly spell that out to the people of Glasgow? Perhaps he realised that hearing that other people need to take responsibility is only a good line if not directed at the people you’re actually talking to?

What else has he identified as a problem that all other politicians haven’t already as well? This is the trouble, Cameron is being painted by people like yourself to be the man with the vision for change, and it’s utter bollocks. he’s said absolutely nothing of substance in the last year and has received amazing amounts of press coverage for it. It’s mind blowing.

I also agree that any help we can give to Lib Dem’s makes sense. If Tories are going to win then we need to do what we can to persuade Labour deserters to find a (temporary) home in Lib Dems rather than the Tories. It’s like someone said above, it’s completely barmy that a Labour supporter in a general election would choose to vote Tory unless they were never really a Labour supporter as such. If we can keep the Tory majority down by increasing the shares of other parties in the commons that’s the best we can hope for I feel.

I know that Cameron is hopelessly exaggerating, but I don’t think it fair to say that the UK is fine. I think he may be on to something with the general lack of civility – but to combat such things calls for a big, touchy-feely, liberal education programme.

I take your point that there is something unsettling about the way Cameron combines talk of selfishness with myriad other social problems (knife crime, for instance). The implicit message is that he thinks we need more authoritarian measure – and that is certainly what we’re getting from Bojo in London.

Yet I’m not sure disconnecting from Labour is the way forward. When the liberals left Labour, it meant that many important liberals ideas left the public discourse. I’m still a great believer in dialogue: there are what we might consider “left liberals” in both the main parties as well as the Lib Dems. And those liberals probably have more opportunities to influence things for the better. Admirable campaigns such as Liberal Conspiracy should aim to include not alienate such individuals.

“I’m still a great believer in dialogue: there are what we might consider “left liberals” in both the main parties as well as the Lib Dems. And those liberals probably have more opportunities to influence things for the better. Admirable campaigns such as Liberal Conspiracy should aim to include not alienate such individuals.”

There comes a time when you have to realise that dialogue has actually just been a decade of one group talking while the other sits there making the right noises and head movements, not actually engaging. It’s all well and good about “changing from within” and I agree completely with that way of thinking…but not when you physically can’t change from within. As Sunny says, it won’t be until they’ve lost that they realise just how much they should have been listening, until then they’ve got their ears plugged.

I’m not sure the ears have been that plugged (there have been some notable successes these past ten years). And I’m not really sure that it is impossible to change within. We’re not talking about Labour of the early 1980s, I think we’re just talking about an exhausted and on the way out leadership – a natural stage in the life cycle of a political party. (I mean, look how difficult it is to change things in the Lib Dems.)

I think it might be a question of what sort of forum actually influences. Internal party democracy might not be the most successful forum. Look at how influential the Fabian Society and other liberal left think tanks have been. Many of these have run out of steam. The left in the blogosphere simply hasn’t kicked off like the right. The comment pages in The Guardian and The Independent are dreary and generic.

Holding Labour solely to blame seems a bit disingenuous. I think it is more a question of collective failure. Maybe it was the damn baby boomers and their self-defeating cynicism

To conclude, I think to argue for disconnecting from Labour is to mis-identify the problem and its solution.

“Another pathetic and childish comment about a man who has three young children, one of whom is seriously disabled. Yet again your desperation to make personal attacks on him leaves you looking stupid, not Cameron.”

I’m sorry, what does the fact that the man has children got to do with anything, or indeed whether he’s been on a bus? If you’re trying to suggest that his children have been, then it would be nice to have some evidence to back that up. Only his seriously disabled son is of school age; the other two have yet to go. You’re the one making a mountain out of a molehill here.

“In this article you fail to mention family breakdown, drug abuse, falling educational standards etc. For you to then claim that the concept is a broken society is “empty” when it is backed up by over five years of research, some by the Conservatives and some by external organisations, is laughable.”

The reason I didn’t mention any of those is because surprisingly, Cameron didn’t mention any of those in his interview, except on how black families need fathers. And incidentally, where is this five years of research? If you’re talking about Iain Duncan Smith’s Damascene conversion to suddenly caring about the poor and his huge reports which no one read, then that indeed is laughable. No one’s denying, including myself that we do have some major problems in this country, family breakdown being among them. It doesn’t seem to matter that there is also evidence that drug abuse is falling, according to yesterday’s BCS figures, and that unless you completely subscribe to the doom and gloom that the whole education system is dumbing down, that results keep getting better, even if they are still nowhere near good enough in general. None of this is evidence of a broken society: it instead reflects the way we live now, which is fractured and atomised. But broken? No, not at all. Cameron’s rhetoric which is backed up with no substance whatsoever except a bribe for families of £20 a week will do nothing whatsoever to solve those problems.

Sunny:

“What do you mean by this? I like Jon Cruddas a lot. John Denham is another one. ”

I was referring to this article:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/may/10/labour.conservatives

“My view is that we wait for Labour to get chucked out, and then get involved in the fight to ensure a more left-wing alternative is created. Right now New Labour is intent only on winning, not only developing any coheren ideology.”

I think by then it’ll be too late; Labour will be facing the same potential problems the Tories did in 97. The battle has to be joined before in order for any real influence to be retained. I wonder if perhaps we’re facing an SDP moment: not going to the right as they did, but to the left. That said, the union proposals for Brown today on the whole looked encouraging. Doubtless however they will be fought tough and nail.

“know that Cameron is hopelessly exaggerating, but I don’t think it fair to say that the UK is fine. I think he may be on to something with the general lack of civility – but to combat such things calls for a big, touchy-feely, liberal education programme.”

I don’t think anyone’s pretending that everything’s coming up roses. They are distinct problems, and in some places potentially intractable problems which urgently need to be addressed. Cameron’s rhetoric and solutions however offer no solution and potentially may make things worse.

Oh and thanks for Charlie for that post at 10, which was an excellent distillation of some of the problems which don’t revolve around a broken society.

Septicisle, I wrote the article with Jon and you can’t cover much in 600 words, let alone set out a political philosophy. The point is that at the moment Cameron is connecting to people and Labour isn’t. He has a story to tell as Sunny says. I agree with you that the Broken Society idea is classic right wing politics – moral breakdown, collapse of civilisation as we know it etc – but he is addressing people’s disquiet that society is not in good shape. The Tories have taken some of their analysis from Compass’ The Good Society booklet which argues that Britain is in a social recession. Do you think that is wrong? Have a look at it and see what you think.

http://www.compassonline.org.uk/programme/

“The point is that at the moment Cameron is connecting to people and Labour isn’t.”

I think that the latter factor is rather more important. Cameron doesn’t seem to be addressing people’s disquiet so much as notifying it.

Sorry, Cameron is not connecting with the public. What he is doing is revivifying and reinvigorating the conservative brand by talking about long ignored policy areas.

Neither is he addressing public concerns or engaging our interests. What he is doing is trying to set the agenda and make debate be fought out on his preferred territory and on his terms.

Cameron is in fact treading on thin ice – he depends on the charisma of his personality and his individual self-confidence not faltering as he tries to keep the party unified while a vicious ideological debate goes on around and beneath him. David Davis is one reflection of this yawning chasm that threatens to open up between the different factions of the Conservative party – between the right and centralist wings, between the paternalists and the libertarians, the self-interested and those with a social conscience, the tax-cutters and the financial-sensers, as well as the cautious moderates and the radical ideologues.

So far Cameron has only survived by avoiding any too overt display of alleigance, but he has only managed this feat by throwing crumbs of comfort to all sides and by buying off his rivals (one thinks of Boris Johnson, DD) with greater autonomy of action. He can only continue to hold them all together by postponing the day when he makes any policy announcements – and he will continue to struggle while no satisfactory form of reconciliation can be found. But he can only do so for so long, before the membership tires of his continuing failure and says ’so long’ to him.

It must be the cause of real frustration to listen to ‘true blue’ vehicles such as the Telegraph consider their options and reasess their positions quite as obviously as has been done recently, and one wonders how long the brinkmanship can go on before all the long-supressed instincts explode in a torrent. And it must particularly grate all conservative supporters to be forced now to enter the run-up to the next general election as the party of tax rises – so I, for one, don’t believe Cameron will further risk the outbreak of open warfare by going strong on intervention in private life, at least not while David Davis presents an alternative rallying point on the backbenches and therefore it is just one more example of making the right noises without making any moves – style over substance.

The narrative of a ‘Broken Society’ is strategic incompetence of the highest order. It not only shows the Conservative party admitting its own legacy of failure, but it has them doing so by drawing attention to the policy area of their greatest failure in a way which shows the ongoing impact of their failure, all the while expecting us to believe that they are the ones to solve the problems they created in the first place!

Frankly, Cameron has overestimated the extent to which he has decontaminated the conservative ‘brand’ by underestimating the extent to which the public feels it is the party which needs purging. It was a task that couldn’t be achieved through personality alone, nor (considering his own background of privilege) was he ever likely to be the person able to do it.

“To conclude, I think to argue for disconnecting from Labour is to mis-identify the problem and its solution.”

The trouble is that this type of attitude is precisely the one that puts barriers up in the online liberal left’s quest for change. Some here simply don’t like Labour and what they’ve become. They recognise that even if Labour started listening we’d still be lumped with ID cards and 42 day legislation because to U-Turn on them would be seen by them as political suicide through indecision and lack of conviction. Some of us simply cannot support a government that is as illiberal as Labour.

So lets find some solutions to moving forward that don’t revolve around “staying loyal” eh?

Hi Lee,

I think it’s a little disingenuous to suggest that my solution was blind loyalty to Labour. I was merely saying that giving up on Labour isn’t going to help. I also said that the left had a collective responsibility to re-energise itself and come up with new and compelling ideas that, if they won’t be useful for now, can be part of a new left-liberal government (whichever party suits that description) in the future.

Far from suggesting that you’re blindly loyal, I think you’re perfectly aware of the issues with Labour and yet still suggesting loyalty, that’s perhaps what I can’t understand the most. But I don’t disrespect that I just don’t think it’s an efficient use of our time to spend any of it trying to make Labour themselves change right now, I just don’t see it happening.

This is a really interesting discussion.

Jonathan:
moral breakdown, collapse of civilisation as we know it etc – but he is addressing people’s disquiet that society is not in good shape.

Mmm… I think its difficult to argue in this climate that we’re living in a great era, especially since the economic climate is rubbish, we’re stuck in two intractable wars and standards of living have floundered.

However, my view is that the left still needs to put forward a positive vision that doesn’t rely on making out that society is currently broken. In other words, the narrative is important in not only where its going but where we stand from..

This is why buying into the idea that we’re going through a knife crime epidemic is a dangerous starting point.

I’m not a pessimist by nature, unlike most of my fellow travellers on the liberal-left it seems Even with regards to the current debates around immigration, identity and terrorism I think its possible to create a more positive narrative.

Jonathan – why do you think we’re in a social recession?

D Harkin:
I think it might be a question of what sort of forum actually influences. Internal party democracy might not be the most successful forum. Look at how influential the Fabian Society and other liberal left think tanks have been. Many of these have run out of steam. The left in the blogosphere simply hasn’t kicked off like the right. The comment pages in The Guardian and The Independent are dreary and generic.

I also think this is spot on. Lee, pull back from the blind loyalty bit to Labour for a second. The point D Harkin is making is that the left in general isn’t exactly brimming with ideas and energy – hence Labour isn’t going in any direction and is thus stuck with trangulation.

The problem here isn’t just that Labour is authoritarian – its also that this Labour govt just doesn’t have any good ideas or intelligent people in power (ok, there are a few but generally no one is listening to them).
The Libdems are hardly coming out with much exciting stuff to be honest, and I’ve been looking at their stuff too. Hell, even the Greens are all over the place.

We can blame Labour for its problems… but what exactly should they be doing? What is the grand narrative? What are the big ideas? Those questions still have to be answered.

Jonathan: I shall have a read when I get a moment and possibly post something on it.

“Lee, pull back from the blind loyalty bit to Labour for a second. The point D Harkin is making is that the left in general isn’t exactly brimming with ideas and energy – hence Labour isn’t going in any direction and is thus stuck with trangulation.”

I don’t disagree but the big question is that if we end up, as the “left”, managing to finally get these ideas moving…are we just giving power to a group of people that are no worse than the tories by using Labour as that vehicle and giving it direction? I know that I for one won’t exactly feel like we’ve won anything if we’ve just supported a Labour government to continue as they are if they stay in power or end up back in power. I can’t imagine many other people, yourself included, would either.

I don’t think that we’re necessarily devoid of ideas, on many levels we have to accept that in certain areas of what Labour has done has been of great benefit, and we also have to be proud of the fact that we’ve got a whole lot of things we want to see changed as a group. You’re definitely right about the energy, but will energy come back to the movement if the vehicle we’re moving with is Labour given what is said above?

Separating ourselves from party politics is, to me, the only way that we have any hope of unifying the cause and movement. The only way I could get on board with any kind of “solving labour’s problems for them” brigade is if they completely drop the illiberal policies that they have seen as key in the last half a decade, ID cards, 42 days, etc. Do you too see this as a hurdle the left needs to negotiate? How do we recognise this and stay true to our core principles while still trying to help out the people that go against them?

Without wanting to evade your question Sunny i don’t think anyone really knows what kind of society we are living in. What is happening to class, what is happening around issues of mental illness, ageing, childhood. There are plenty of indicators that would allow one to argue that Britain is in a social recession. I wrote a longer piece which is available at
http://www.compassonline.org.uk/publications/thinkpieces/

Having said that the discourse of a social recession/broken society has been a right wing moral one. Compass uses it to highlight structural inequalities and their social consequences, and teh commercialisation of people’s lives. I agree that a story of our times that will give the left traction has to be positive and hopeful.

Thomas – are you right? I’m not sure. We just don’t know how deep the schisms go in the Conservative Party, and how willing they are to hold the contradictions together for the sake of election victory. Also their thinking is not as thin as people might like to believe. If anyone is interested it’s worth reading Compassionate Conservatism and From Here to Fraternity, two essays which capture Cameron’s Conservatism. You can download them at:
http://www.jessenorman.com/politics/

I don’t think its strategic incompetence. New Labour has now been in power for long enough for people to laythe blame at its door. It’s only lefties who try and keep an historical perspective and point back to 1979. At the moment I’d guess the election is Labour’s to lose.

In the autumn comment is free and Soundings journal are organising a series of public discussions on ‘who owns the progressive future’. The first will be on ‘Is the future Conservative’. We’re hoping this might be an opportunity to try out some of the ideas that came out of the bloggers meeting organised by Sunny – a collective discussion in the left/liberal blogosphere about our future, post New Labour.

Whether trying to please all the people all of the time is strategic incompetence or not depends upon whether you think Gordon Brown’s engagement of the same idea is or isn’t flawed. Polling suggests it is.

The ‘universalist’ approach to politics makes an arrogant claim which satisfies only the ego of the one who benefits. In this sense Thatcher was a better democratic leader because she accepted she would have to face down the opposition which unified against her, because she was providing the conditions for choice. Whether you agreed with Thatcherite conclusions or not she didn’t play to our prejudices in the way that both Cameron and Brown do, she challenged our preconceptions and redefined the terms of debate.

The problem both the Conservatives and Labour face is that political correctness flies in the face of political reality – of course we all agree that carrying weapons is wrong, but if you’re not prepared to run the risk of taking hits the only defence is to get your retaliation in first and you’re going to load up.

In this risk-averse climate our politicians also begin to fear breaking ranks – such unconditional loyalty changes from a bond of trust into a bond of slavery.

The recent publication of the trade unions demands of the Labour party leadership is a case in point – none of these demands are unequivocal, they comprise together a basis for negotiation which promises continued support whatever the compromise. Union reps may be highly experienced negotiators, but they’ve prejudiced themselves against the outcome of this one by removing their biggest bargaining chip from the table – it’s almost like they’ve started a knife fight by slashing their own wrists!

Labour has now been in power for the consequences of their policies to be unavoidable and clear to see for all – any blame to be lain at their door is blame they deserve. If they want our support at this point in time they must stand up and take responsibility for their decisions and justify any weaknesses in their track record without making more empty promises or refrying all the old empty rhetoric which got them here.

By dumping the spin doctors and showing some contrition, Gordon can show that honesty is the best medicine – and by implication that Cameron is selling snake oil.

However, I fully expect the complete reverse. The growth of the political-media industry will continue unabated with ever more meaningless conferences and boring public discussions and ever more predefined conclusions to lead any willing attendees into the welcoming arms of the organisers. Is it worth the wait?

Where is the spontaneous dissent? Why does politics need to be pre-packaged and controlled and refined to indistinct conformity? Where is the diversity? Where is our freedom?