Donald Trump rails against the ‘establishment’. On the Today programme on 10 November so too did Yanis Varoufakis. The specific debate was on international trade agreements. ‘Took your jobs away’ cries Trump. In Europe a huge campaign of the Left has been against agreements such as CETA and TTIP. For Varoufakis the worst evil of trade agreements is the siphoning of profits to tax havens where wealth is locked up and not invested in the countries where they were made. But does anyone seriously think that the man who boasted that it was ‘clever’ not to have paid tax is going to crack down on tax havens?
The anguish of the handloom weavers that gave rise to the Luddite movement was very real. The conditions in the factories that replaced them were dire, but what overcame that was the growth of trade unionism and factory legislation. The pace of change was grindingly slow, which turned many to look to gaining power through universal suffrage and winning the levers of power. The welfare state is perhaps the greatest achievement of that approach, using political power to create its structures and fund them through redistributive taxation. In doing so public attitudes were also fundamentally changed, at least so far as the National Health Service and universal education were concerned, making it much more difficult to roll them back.
There are many, especially in the older industrial areas, who are in much the same position as the handloom weavers. Skilled jobs replaced by call centres, distribution warehouses like those of Sports Direct, and the ‘self employment’ of Uber and Yodel. Can we turn the clock back? ‘Bring back the coal’ as Trump suggested in some speeches? Or should our focus be on sensible regulation of these new sectors, protecting pay and conditions? Trump, the man who wants to scrap regulations, is not the man who is going to do this.
Railing against the ‘establishment’ has become a commonplace. Often it becomes identified with a place – ‘Washington or Westminster (or ‘Westmonster’ as it is to many cybernats). To those who hailed the breakthrough of the first black president in 2008 it may come as a surprise that he and his supporters are now also ‘the establishment’, trade unions, too. As a result Barack Obama’s administration is seen as having done ‘nothing’ for ordinary people. It is much the same here where the Labour government is routinely condemned for having achieved nothing. And somehow against this backdrop listing the achievements, real falls in pensioner poverty, tax credits, increased NHS spending, building new schools and raising educational attainment, devolving power from Westminster to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, falls very flat.
This is not that old chestnut about the extremes of left and right in the end being much the same. They are not. But when we use the same simplistic slogans we are inadvertently contributing to that which we abhor in the rise of ‘Trumpism’. For instance is all the media part of the same establishment conspiracy – the BBC in it with Fox News?
To talk of an undifferentiated ‘establishment’ is to reduce politics to slogans. The risk is that we as the Labour party find ourselves on the ‘wrong’ side of this divide. After all we have formed the government (or ‘governing elite’) for 13 of the last 20 years.
Let us be more precise with our criticisms . We must ‘listen’ but we must also act on what we hear. Party members and elected representatives who have reported back from their daily work in their communities telling of concerns on immigration or on ‘welfare’ going to the ‘wrong ‘ people have too often been categorised as rightwing.
And we will be judged by our actions. In oppposition in parliament that is more difficult, but we have huge opportunities in local government and where we have elected mayors to build on the work already going on and publicise it. Then we can say clearly ‘this is what Labour is and what we do’.
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Sheila Gilmore is a candidate in the general members’ section in the Progress strategy board elections. She tweets at @SheilaGilmore49
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New Labour were a disappointment. I’m glad they’re gone.
I don’t disagree with sentiment behind this piece but you do seem to express it a way that fundamentally misses the point. Those who talk of others being the establishment are not talking of a conspiracy in the sense that you say it. They are talking of a commonality of values that binds that group together against those outside. Therefore whilst the BBC is a part of the establishment Fox News isn’t. They are not different parts of the same establishment or different establishments. One is and the other simply isn’t.
In the eyes of its accuser there is no such thing as an undifferentiated establishment. That is an accusation that could only come from the mind of someone who is taking offence at feeling accused of being a part of the establishment. The views of the establishment are clear for all to see and they are not the views of Fox News, Donald Trump or UKIP. Nor are they the views of Jeremy Corbyn. They are views shared by the BBC, the left of the Tory party, the LibDems and the right wing of the Labour Party.
The solution for this must come from you and your colleagues on the right of the party and in Progress but your article is another example of blaming the messenger for the message. The language of your piece is that of the campaigns against all “anti-establishment” movements. Trump, UKIP, Corbyn, Bernie Sanders, Syriza, Scottish Nationalists, all of them have been accused of reducing debate to slogans. None of them have done that. The moderate/centrist/realist (whatever self-aggrandising term they choose for themselves) left has in every case taken the side of its equivalent wing in the right wing political parties to fight against the newcomers to the debate. That looks and smells like an establishment closing ranks. The chosen method of combating the accusation has been to attack those on your own side. It is not up to those who think of you as the establishment to simply give up that notion but yours to prove them wrong.
Stuart Hall said in the early 80’s “The right of the labour movement, to be honest, has no ideas of any compelling quality, except the instinct for short-term political survival. It would not know an ideological struggle if it stumbled across one in the dark. The only ‘struggle’ it engages in with any trace of conviction is the one against the left.” I do not wholly agree with him but on the short termism he was, and is, absolutely right. The hurt feelings of the right of the Labour movement at being cast as the establishment and ideologically empty are leading them to attack their own side with a vehemence they don’t have for the fight against inequality and poverty. For this fight they declare themselves only ready to “listen” and in their listening they pay no heed at all to what anyone to the left of them is saying. They side with the centrist liberal consensus against the left. That is the essence of the establishment. Not wealth, business ownership, holding a job in the city or being an employee of the BBC.
The danger though is contained in your penultimate paragraph. You repeat the entreaty to “listen” that has become the the mantra of the establishment left. This mantra has been repeated since Gordon Brown lost the election without ever revealing what had been heard. Primarily this is because what was heard was that the Labour Party had lost touch with the people it has always taken for granted and they did not want to engage with those people’s concerns. The solution is that the Labour Party must engage with the argument for left wing socially liberal, economically interventionist and egalitarian policies. This is where Blair was in ’97. Since then though the right of the party has given up on winning the argument and instead satisfied itself with the delusion that winning an election is sufficient. The listening strategy combined with the election winning strategy appears to be leading the right down the path of opening the door to the fundamentally racist underpinnings of “concerns about immigration” and the extremist right wing attitudes of distributing welfare only to the “deserving poor”. There are very few examples of party members and elected representatives “reporting back” those concerns without the supplementary accusation that those who conclude that we should argue that those concerns are misplaced, wrong or motivated by bigotry and must be defeated rather than pandered to, (or in other words that Jeremy Corbyn’s approach to this in formation is fundamentally right). This is the source of the accusation of being right wing, not that the conversation was simply “reported back”.
If you draw the conclusion from your penultimate paragraph that you should be arguing that arbitrary immigration controls and caps are simplistic slogans and that the argument for immigration levels based on the general economic wellbeing of the nation is where the government should be, and, that the state must provide a social security system based on the needs of those in receipt of benefits and not some system of social engineering through punishment of the poor, and their children, then, I agree with you. However, if you continue to be on the side of your colleagues who argue that responding to the concerns of the people on the doorstep means accommodation of their bigotry, as many in the Labour Party are arguing, then you have lost me. I keep hearing Labour politicians stating that being concerned about immigration isn’t racist as a way of signalling that they are listening but this is folly. Immigration is going to be a fact of life and the only peaceful future available is one in which people accept the changes ahead. Railing against those changes is not the way forward. Any party that promises significantly different immigration levels will be found to be lying fairly quickly. The anti-immigration sentiment stirred up in the meantime will lead to instability and anger. This cannot be helped by accepting that fear of the outsider and fear of change is the reasonable response. The right wing of the Labour movement has given up the notion of listening and then arguing with what they hear that is wrong. Instead they seem to be arguing that we should not argue for what we think is right and accept what we know to be wrong just because the electoral numbers appear to add up and then call that listening.
The only two people who have articulated the idea that immigration caps and limits are not the real problem and that the facts of free trade in the future mean that we have to open our minds to freer movement of people are Tony Blair and Jeremy Corbyn. They have listened and tried to lead. Those others who argue that the appearance of having listened is sufficient and therefore only argue that we must listen as if it were an end in itself are being lead by their own prejudice about the electorate being fundamentally bigoted.