What is the Compass strategy?


11:00 am - March 17th 2009

by Don Paskini    


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Neal Lawson and John Harris have a very bad article in the New Statesman called ‘No Turning Back’. The political strategy behind it appears to be that Labour should team up with the Liberal Democrats and leftie lobby groups (and draw comfort and inspiration from such diverse sources as the “Red Tories” and the Countryside Alliance) in order to change society in profound and yet not very comprehensible ways.

As Paul says, this approach is about constructing “the 21st century sanctuary that is the centre-left think tank world and the accompanying blogosphere, a place where the chattering socialist classes can all feel safe and comfortable while the storm of dangereous, savage, rightwing policy implementation rages outside.” I also agree with Hopi’s point that at the moment our priority “needs to be what we’re doing to help people who need a helping hand, not how we’re going to punish those who deserve a slap.”

To accompany this lengthy article, Neal and John have come up with ten policy ideas (here, pdf) which make up a ‘manifesto for change’. Four of these ten policies are about introducing new taxes, at least two are meaningless jargon (‘radical localism’ and ‘General Well-Being Index’), and they are written in the assumption that the reader will know what things like ‘remutualising the banks’ means.

This ‘manifesto’ in other words, is part of the strategy aimed at people who are already highly politically engaged. This makes sense as a strategy for Compass to grow its membership amongst leftie activists, but it is not a way of ‘making change happen’, however admirable many of these policies are.

Harris and Lawson refer to the Obama campaign and also the Attlee government. But it is striking how different their approach is from either of these examples. The policies which Attlee and Obama campaigned on, prioritised and introduced or are planning to introduce grew out of the experiences of ordinary people – the problems they faced, their hopes and their fears.

Compare and contrast, for example, ‘middle class tax cut’ vs ‘a maximum wage’ or ‘National Health Service’ vs ‘General Well Being Index’.

The language is different, but more than that, the criteria for selecting policy ideas for inclusion in the ‘manifesto for change’ doesn’t appear to have any relation to the issues that people are interested in. There’s a brief, and quite ambivalent, mention of jobs, but nothing about care for children or older people, youth services or housing, let alone any issues which might be even slightly out of the Compass comfort zone such as crime.

Any manifesto does, of course, have to choose which issues to prioritise, but that’s an even more compelling reason not to put, say, the 35 hour working week in the top ten things that you tell people that you want to achieve.

To ‘make change happen’, then you have to start by talking about what people are interested in, not what your lobbyist friends or the latest pamphlet thinks they ought to be interested in.

The problem that us lefties have got at the moment really isn’t that we don’t talk to the Liberal Democrats or single issue pressure groups enough.

Or to put it another way, Nye Bevan once said that ‘the language of priorities is the religion of socialism’. And by that measure, Neal Lawson and John Harris are heretics.

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About the author
Don Paskini is deputy-editor of LC. He also blogs at donpaskini. He is on twitter as @donpaskini
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Story Filed Under: Blog ,Economy ,Think-tanks ,Westminster

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Reader comments


1. Mike Killingworth

This is at least in part because the left hasn’t had any new ideas in the last fifty years. Or rather, it’s had ideas, just not left-wing ones. Identity politics not merely fudged the “melting pot” question but gave covert support to separatists of all kinds – people who deny the value of the common humanity that underlay the left project from the Englightenment onwards. Green politics lie completely outside the conventional left/right spectrum and create space for libertarian survivalism.

But perhaps this problem isn’t confined to the left: the shortcomings of State intervention are as clear as market failures are – a “quality of life index” may not be the way to go about it, but a new left polity must surely start from the truth that beyond a certain point, materialism is counter-productive, even for its supposed beneficiaries. This of course fetches up against the fact that our mass media have to be financed, and the only methods we have discovered so far are the promotion of greed (advertising revenue) or State control (e.g. the BBC).

the Countryside Alliance

Hard to think of a group who hate you more really . Is this a joke ?

3. Andrew Hickey

The problem is that ‘what people are interested in’ and ‘what might actually make things better’ are two different things.
I don’t agree with Compass on everything (obviously – I’m a Lib Dem , not a member of Labour) but they’re trying to solve the right problems. You’re right that they’re mostly talking to those who are already interested in politics, but that doesn’t mean that what they’re saying isn’t still right.
We do need people to communicate left/liberal ideas to the general public, and Compass aren’t the best people to do that, but that doesn’t mean you need to attack them either.

4. Alisdair Cameron

These laddies are not for turning, then?
(Sorry, bad joke, but then again so is Compass, as it navel-gazes too much)

#3 I agree we shouldn’t be spending all our time attacking Compass, but it is annoying when the claim to speak on behalf of the left, or worse still BE the left of the Labour Party.

while the storm of dangereous, savage, rightwing policy implementation rages outside

I must have missed this “storm”. Where is it exactly?

7. Anthony Painter

Yes, I had the same broadly deflated feeling when I read that piece. Don is brutal but there’s a lot in what he says. I am not sure that the argument as outlined in NS is ‘no turning back.’ It feels like turning back completely,

I’ve blogged on this further:

http://e8voice.blogspot.com/2009/03/compass-turning-back.html

This is a bit harsh Don. Its dangerous for the left to turn into cats in a sack again just because we have minor differences over where we want to get to, and how.

Anthony notes above that Compass have done some good stuff in the past – very true. I fully backed the Windfall tax campaign and against Royal Mail privatisation. But there’s two instances in which they’re sorely lacking: building a mass movement which directly engages with leftwingers across the country not just the sort who would come to the Labour party conference… and also finding a way to come up with radical new ideas. They have sort of reached a plateau and need to figure out a strategy to move forward.

To ‘make change happen’, then you have to start by talking about what people are interested in, not what your lobbyist friends or the latest pamphlet thinks they ought to be interested in.

This point, I feel, is key. Well said, if a bit harsh.

I think the term “left” lends itself towards cats in sacks, and increasingly it is not even clear what values are being fought over. Essentially, I think you have to decide which lot of you are liberal and which aren’t. That is, people who are devoutly sceptical about the power of the state (or its privileged corporations) to make changes from the center and who rigorously oppose the use of arbitrary law and administrative regulation to get stuff done regardless of the outcomes it is seeking.

Once you have got that out the way, you would be surprised how much agreement you will find with other liberals regardless of whethey they are left or the right. For example, I find myself agreeing with Unity rather more than most conservatives even though I am nominally to the right.

As for the rest, those that in end will pursue objectives like “social justice” at the expense, as necessary, of basic liberal premises like rejecting arbitrary rule, well in the end you will have more in common with populist conservatism than the liberal left or right.

I don’t think it’s fair for you to decide that lefty-liberals have less in common with people like myself than they do with you, or that people like myself have more in common with populist conservatism than the liberal left. I’d identify with the liberal left over populist conservatism any day, and I suspect eg Don Paskini would identify with my politics over right-wing liberalism too.

Well perhaps it is not so much about having more in common, so much as agreeing to some constraints on the means with which you can pursue political actions. De facto, that means liberals will have more in common because in politics the ends are always rather distant and it is your means that you actually inflict on people.

Not all ends are distant. A democratic socialist reformism is often explicitly formulated with nearby ends in sight.

But perhaps the more salient point is – where does that leave those of us that reject the means-ends distinction entirely?

Well, with the way most socialist programmes work out, the ends tend to lengthen into the horizon even as you try to grasp them.

If you reject the distinction, however, then I think it depends on whether in your programme, you have built in a constraint on your use of arbitrary power. That doesn’t exactly rule out socialist reforms. After all, Scandinavian countries specialise in social reforms that do respect protections on civil rights and do not arbitarily appropriate private property, but are still designed to promote a reasonable level of equality. That is a reasonable and potentially liberal position to hold but it doesn’t seem to cache out very often into policy on the left, and only sometimes in rhetoric.

Fair enough. I don’t think it necessarily follows that from that that lefty-liberals automatically have more in common with you than they do with me (they could have such built-in constraints but not attach the same emphasis to them as you do), but I’ll certainly concede your position is reasonable & logical.

Why thank you. I guess we will just have to see whether an alternative core set of values emerges that can encompass the whole, or most, of the left at the same time.

I think the term “left” lends itself towards cats in sacks, and increasingly it is not even clear what values are being fought over.

It’s a broad church, which is why partly it makes it difficult. The Republicans for example included free marketers and libertarians who didn’t necessarily want to interfere in people’s lives the way religious evangelicals did.

Similarly, the liberal-left tent is quite broad – as it should be.

Nick:
That is, people who are devoutly sceptical about the power of the state (or its privileged corporations) to make changes from the center and who rigorously oppose the use of arbitrary law and administrative regulation to get stuff done regardless of the outcomes it is seeking.

Why can;t you be both?

17. Charlotte Gore

“…more in common with populist conservatism than the liberal left or right.”

I’ve been saying this for years – and not just me. Philip Gould, writing about the pre-New Labour days in his book, “The Unfinished Revolution” talks at length about “working class conservatism” and how the task for Labour was to reconnect with the working classes where they were, not an archaic vision of the working class as militant socialists, trade unionists and civil rights activists. The working class want the Tories but with better public services – a better NHS and a better education system, said Philip – and Tony, and Gordon, and Peter and lo! New Labour was born. Woo!

When people say, “oh Labour’s right wing” that’s what they’re talking about – that pandering to daily mail and sun readers – getting ‘tough’ on crime, getting involved with trying to engineer a ‘better’ society by rigidly controlling what individuals and organisations can do. I suppose from a purist socialist point of view they’re economically right wing too, but in the main they’re ‘centrist’, just like the Tories, just like the Lib Dems. A few billion here and there, but fundamentally they’re all offering roughly the same package: A heavily regulated and taxed economy. There’s no ‘vote lassez faire’ or ‘vote socialism’ box on the ballot.

The only real difference between populist conservatism as practised by the Tories and populist conservatism as practised by Labour are the beneficiaries and losers. It might not sound like much but it’s the basis for a mighty fight that’s got no end.

All parties seem to be broad, mushy churches full of contradictory ambitions and dreams, satisfying hardly anyone. Tribal allegiances trump policy, old hatreds trump ideological differences. The only practical, working example of a “united left” is “people who hate the Tories so much they’ll vote for anyone if it keeps them out”, and that’s a shrinking demographic.

There is a party with the same values as you, it’s just that it gets nowhere because virtually no one supports it.

19. CommiusRex

What is needed is serious electoral reform. With a more democratic PR system, not only would people be able to actually vote for whoever best represents them without feeling they’re wasting their vote, but it would also fundamentally alter the way political parties conduct themselves. There would, of course, need to be more consensus building in order to be able to form government which would by necessity have to be coalitions. But also, I think, the various political parties would have to make more of an effort to differentiate themselves from one another. Labour and the Tories (and I suppose the Lib Dems, thought to a lesser extent) would both be looking over their shoulders at minor parties which, for the first time, have a real chance of building popular support.

Damn Charlotte, I think that’s the first time I’ve agreed with you from start till the end.

21. Charlotte Gore

hmm…. that’s interesting Sunny. I think I understand you a little more today than I did yesterday. 🙂


Reactions: Twitter, blogs
  1. Liberal Conspiracy

    New post: What is the Compass strategy? http://tinyurl.com/cwmpxf

  2. The Bickerstaffe Record » Blog Archive » The accountability of twittering

    […] to the Compass essay in the New Statesman (covered briefly here by me and also very well by Don Paskini and more recently Anthony Painter, as well as by Dave Semple) should wait at the back, as the […]

  3. Don Paskini

    @joelaking here's one from a little while back https://liberalconspiracy.org/2009/03/17/what-is-the-compass-strategy/





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