David Selbourne says that New Labour won elections but eradicated all that was good in the party’s traditions. The Cameroons should learn from this terrible lesson
The Thirties taught us that conditions of slump are a mixed blessing for the Left. But in today’s Weimar-like social and economic conditions, and with Toryism a shadow of its former self, it remains surprising that New Labour is in poor political shape.
Other European left and social democratic parties are in a similar pickle. Why? In Britain, it is not the fault of any single individual, not even Gordon Brown. On the contrary, we are in the midst of a systemic failure which old leftists would say vindicates Marx — a crisis of world capitalism itself.
Well over a century before the word ‘globalisation’ had been invented, the Soho Sage was writing of the ‘entanglement of all peoples in the net of the world market’. He not only predicted the ‘universal inter-dependence of nations’, but saw on the horizon the ‘ruin of national industries’ and even the ‘break-up of nationalities’ themselves. To him, capitalism was both creative and destructive. Its destructiveness lay, among other things, in its very power to ‘sweep away all fixed relations’ which stood in its path.
The mess in which the world’s economies now find themselves is deep. In Britain and elsewhere market liberalisation has landed the public exchequer in mountains of debt. But at the same time, public bodies are still being invited to submit to the ‘disciplines of the market’, while company executives have trousered fortunes even as the taxpayer was bailing them out. ‘Give a capitalist enough rope and he will hang himself,’ said Lenin.
Yet at the very time when socialist and quasi-socialist methods have been adopted to deal with the crisis, Labour, gripped by defeatism, flounders.
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