RIDERS ON THE STORM: LABOUR'S STRATEGY IN AN EPOCHAL MOMENT Part I: Where the Party seems to be Neal Lawson Published June 2020 by Compass By Neal Lawson A note on the author: Which matters, so that the reader can better judge this account of Labour’s strategy. Neal Lawson is Executive Director of Compass, a platform for a new politics so we can change society – to a good society: one that is much more equal, sustainable and democratic. Crucially for these two essays, he is author of 45° Change, a report that examines the growth of emergent civil society forces and organisations that are increasingly springing up precisely because neither bureaucracies nor free markets allow people to fulfil their human needs in the 21st century. Increasingly, networks, driven by social media, and the collaboration they engender, do. But to thrive, these new participatory ways of deciding and doing need to be accelerated and amplified with the help of the state. The state is on the designed or vertical axis; civil society on the emergent or horizontal side – the diagonal meeting point of the two is the 45° line where transformative change can happen. He is a member of the Labour Party and has been continuously since 1980, having been a branch and district secretary, an election agent, and an advisor formally and informally to several Labour leaders. His attitude to the Labour Party now resembles his attitude to religion, he is sceptical it can contribute meaningfully to the transformation of life on earth but is willing to be surprised. Anyway, Labour, he believes, cannot be ignored, it is currently too big and too powerful, but must either change dramatically or get out of the way and allow others who can transform society the space to do so. He has been sceptical about the transformative capacity of Labour under every leader since 1997, the moment he began to focus on the why and how of big change. The dominant culture of Labourism, which emphasises its own exclusivity and is a product of a late Victorian mechanical mindset, that predates the current era shaped by climate and complexity, will be the Party’s downfall unless it can adapt and do so quickly. But like most organisations, he sees Labour not as a monolith but as a collection of people, practices and values that can either help or hinder the birth of a good society. In these two essays he sets out first where Labour and its new leader Keir Starmer seem to be, in the context of Coronavirus and in the shadow of Corbynism. In the second essay he will suggest the contours of a political strategy that is aligned with both complexity and climate in a post-Covid world. The goal of the essays is to be constructively critical. By encouraging the Labour party to change, he hopes, it may do so, 2 Where the Party seems to be Labour's Strategy but regardless, some, maybe enough, people in and around the Party will change and will make common cause with others in the pursuit of a good society. He would like to thank Jeremy Gilbert, Francesca Klug, Laura Parker, Lindsay Thomas, Frances Foley, Remco van der Stoep and Clive Lewis for conversations and comments around an early draft of this article. The faults though are all his. © Compass All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism or review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrievable system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of Compass. 3 Where the Party seems to be Labour's Strategy Please get in touch, join, support and work with us. Write to us at Freepost Compass Email us at [email protected] You can follow us on Twitter @CompassOffice To find out more about Compass, please visit our website: www.compassonline.org.uk/join About Compass Compass is the platform for a good society, a world that is much more equal, sustainable and democratic. We build alliances of ideas, parties and movements to help make systemic change happen. Our strategic focus is to understand, build, support and accelerate new forms of democratic practice and collaborative action that are taking place in civil society and the economy, and to link that up with top-down/state reforms and policy. The question we are trying to help solve, which we explore in the recent document 45 Degree Change, is not just what sort of society we want, but, increasingly, how to make it happen? 4 Where the Party seems to be Labour's Strategy The Tories won’t just let Johnson drive them off an electoral cliff and simply let Labour into government. It won’t happen. They will change and renew. But even if Labour can win office, on its current course, it will still be far from real power, defined as the ability to transform society. The party needs a political strategy, not just to govern the country but to dramatically change it. Does it have one? This is an epochal moment. Let’s repeat that. This is an epochal moment. By epochal, it is meant the rare coincidence of new developments and great change that usher in a different social and economic era. There are two big drivers of this new epoch – climate change and technological change. We live at a moment in which our lifestyles are destroying life while simultaneously networks and social media enable incredibly fast, deep and sometimes shallow communications across the globe and between every community of interest under the sun. Just look at how an incident involving just a handful of people in Minneapolis sweeps the globe in days and portends seismic and welcome cultural shifts. The symptoms of change are both morbid and marvellous. Some people embrace the complexity of the challenges conjured up by the moment and look to build collaborative and sustainable progress. Others, those less secure, retreat and seek to regress. Culture, identities, meaning, purpose, the economy and society are all now in flux. This is an incredible moment to shape or be shaped by. It comes together in the form of the Covid-19 crisis. Through it our relationship to nature has become fully exposed. In just weeks, a dominant economic orthodoxy is revealed as mere self-interested fabrication. Governments, apparently, can print money and pay us to stay at home and to fend off mass unemployment. We see the return of the state as the lender and employer of last resort. More tellingly, as Anthony Barnett dissects, people have been placed ahead of profit across the entire globe – precisely because pandemics can no longer be swept under the carpet in new era in which we all see the same things. Unless you were alive during the war, nothing like this, on a society-wide basis has happened in our lifetimes. The moment challenges everything in good ways and bad. It is within this incredible moment that Labour’s strategy should be judged and changed. Labour, back in the game? Just as an independent report is published on why Labour lost the 5 Where the Party seems to be Labour's Strategy last election so badly, it is suddenly looking electorally competitive. This is a surprise. But almost everything in politics is now a surprise. Against the backdrop of a historic defeat at the end of last year, many had written Labour off for even the next election, which would make it the fifth defeat in a row. Now though, it looks like it’s game on. In a matter of just months Keir Starmer’s obvious competence and forensic questioning skills, combined with the Government’s mishandling of the crisis, have closed what was a huge polling gap of over 20%. So, why raise questions about Labour’s strategy so soon when things are going so well, and Labour has only just installed a new leader? ‘He is only two months in, give him a chance’. These thoughts are offered to encourage and help for the long and winding road ahead. And because right now matters. The public mood is being made malleable by the crisis – a rare moment when the Overton Window can be shifted to the left, or it will be shifted further to the right. And strategy, or more likely the deep underlying presumptions and habits of leaders and parties, get baked in very early, usually more by accident than design. The very presence of early success naturally encourages what could turn out to be a false sense of hope in Labour’s prospects; the already forming assumption that Tory incompetence plus Covid-19 does Labour’s work for it. So ‘just sit tight’, rely on ‘Opposition by cross examination’ and all will be well’. But this is a dangerous. First, because if politics is now entirely unpredictable, no one knows what’s going to happen next. From Cleggmania, to Corbyn’s election in 2015, to Brexit and Trump in 2016, the failure of the Tories in 2017 and then their big success in 2019, through to the Covid-19 crisis and now the sudden and welcome return of the state, few saw much if any of this coming. In these turbulent times, the only way for any political project to survive is to be based on deep intellectual and cultural foundations, alongside dense connecting networks which permit agility and values to be combined. Such foundations and networks do not guarantee the party will survive the storm - but does give it the chance not just to ride it out, but to bend arc to progress.