Blog
Ed Miliband talks a lot about responsibility and a responsible capitalism. Given reports in the Observer, I have a feeling that David Cameron will take up similar themes on the Andrew Marr show this morning. This illustrates a dimension of the responsibility theme identified by Robert Saunders in the current edition of Renewal.
“Like Thatcher, Miliband has sought to identify a unifying theme to which all Britain’s problems can be related. Where Thatcher chose ‘socialism’, Miliband has opted for ‘responsibility’. The theme has obvious merits … The problem is that it is inherently non-partisan. When Thatcher railed against ‘socialism’, it was obvious that she was talking about Labour. No one on the Conservative benches self-identifies as ‘irresponsible’, and that limits its power as a political weapon. ‘Responsibility’ has no political hook; indeed, if it were to ‘take’ as a theme, there would be nothing to prevent David Cameron from simply co-opting it.”
Some points that Labour MPs might make in the EU referendum debate in the Commons today:
First, why now?
Many of the Treaties that define the UK’s relationship with the EU were signed by Conservative PMs, e.g. Maastricht Treaty. We didn’t have referendums when these Treaties were signed. Are Conservatives now saying that we should have done? And should now retrospectively do so?
The priority for all MPs and MEPs should now be economic recovery. Almost everything else is a distraction. Resolving the euro-zone crisis would significantly improve the economic prospects of the EU and the UK. This is, therefore, a more pressing issue for debate than whether or not the UK should have a referendum on EU membership.
Second, how do Conservatives propose that the euro-zone crisis be resolved and how would this impact the UK’s relationship with the EU?
The UK’s interests here are: That the euro-zone members find a durable solution to their crisis, while properly allocating responsibility within this solution to EU and euro-zone members and ensuring that the benefits of EU membership continue to be enjoyed by non-euro EU members.
What matters, therefore is: encouraging and supporting euro-zone members to find a durable solution; requiring that euro-zone members properly face up to whatever responsibilities are created for them in this solution; and guaranteeing that this solution does not forego the benefits of EU membership enjoyed by the UK. We, for example, must insist on UK access to and involvement in shaping a deepened single market, even in the context of further consolidation amongst the euro-zone members.
Third, do Conservatives not accept that we should return to this debate on an EU referendum in the UK after these pressing and profound issues with the euro-zone have been properly and fully addressed?
We should be focusing all of our energies on resolving these issues in a durable manner, which protects the UK’s interests, as a non-euro EU member, both in the near and longer-term. It may be that these solutions necessitate changes that are constitutionally significant to the UK. In which case, a referendum would be entirely appropriate. But we are a long way from resolving the euro-zone crisis. Until we get to this stage, all debate about the EU amounts to shuffling deckchairs on the Titanic.
Fourth, why can the Conservatives not work constructively to resolve the euro-zone crisis, instead of re-hashing debates of the 1980s and 1990s?
Let’s return to the here and now, as this could not have more serious questions to answer. These are questions that will impact the incomes and wellbeing of all British citizens. It ill behoves any elected representative to create distractions to the resolution of these questions.
When these questions are resolved, with the euro-zone crisis behind us and the UK’s interests protected, if this resolution has necessitated a constitutionally significant change in the UK’s relationship with the EU, let us then return to this debate on a UK referendum on EU membership.
I never knew that horrific moment of watching the second plane crash into the World Trade Centre. I was travelling by bus to the city of Oaxaca de Juárez, Mexico, blissfully unaware of the outside world, as the attacks happened. Only later, in an internet cafe, my travelling companion and I realised what had happened.
As we tried to get our heads around events outside the cafe, uninvited pictures were taken of us by what appeared to be paparazzi. Obviously, we weren’t celebrities but our Caucasian skin probably led to the presumption that we were American and maybe “grieving Americans in Oaxaca” was thought a picture worth having. Our picture, though, didn’t appear in the local newspapers that we bought and which somewhere, probably my parent’s house in Cumbria, I’m fairly sure I retain as a piece of local perspective on an epoch defining event.
For the most part, the Mexicans with whom we had contact were shocked and respectful. I remember a conversation in Spanish in our hotel reception coming to a hushed silence as we returned. The receptionists looked at us, looked at the reports from New York on the TV behind them and looked again at us. We didn’t speak much Spanish and they didn’t speak much English, but their body language communicated a bewilderment and concern that we, as assumed Americans, might be more directly impacted (which, thankfully, we weren’t).
My friend and I graduated from Durham University a few months before and I’d been a know-it-all, smart-arse presence in politics tutorials. In these tutorials, I had a (probably conceited and almost certainly naive) answer to any point of view. As we reflected on events, on the balcony of our hotel room, overlooking the city, with its rich Spanish Empire-era architecture, I had no answers. I had barely anything to say. This strike against the great power of our time was utterly beyond my ken.
The next day the main square of Oaxaca was packed with farmers, with their traditional dress, pitchforks and placards. Primarily, they seemed to be protesting some local issue. The placards that jumped out, though, were those that featured pictures of the attacks on the Twin Towers and the words “a strike against Yankee imperialism” (which even our Spanish was able to decipher). Those pitchforks suddenly seemed more menacing. We left before anyone turned them on us.
Given that the hotel TVs broadcast Spanish language stations and that sitting in an internet cafe all day would have cost a small fortune, our news flow remained relatively patchy over coming days. We’d quickly descend on any TV we came across, seeking out nuggets of information on any developments. The news we were dreading was America letting loose some kind of Armageddon. The possibility of massively violent retribution seemed real.
Between protesting farmers and foreboding about what America might do next, we seemed to have descended to a much more polarised and uncertain world. In this sense, we succumbed to being small cogs in the giant wheel of someone who I had never previously heard of, Osama Bin Laden. Mercifully, his master plan now seems much less on track.
I had this on Labour Uncut earlier this week.
As the national transitional council’s (NCT) grip on Libya tightened, I wondered: What do the Muammar Gaddafi loyalists in their last redoubts want? Having refused the NCT’s generous reconciliation offer, do the Gaddafi loyalists really think that they can recover the whole of their country? As this is implausible, it must be that they remain loyal enough to their barbaric, ego-maniac, delusional leader that they’d rather die in his name than accept Libya’s new reality.
Belief held so absolutely has become alien to most westerners and, thus, inherently terrifying. Willingness to fight to the death is beyond the ken of people unwilling to fight for much besides the TV remote. That’s why it wasn’t just Tony Blair and George W Bush who were mortified by Al-Qaeda. We all were. These ingenuous people would go to any lengths, including sacrificing themselves, to destroy us. What wasn’t to be afraid of?
Well, much less than it seemed. We thought Al-Qaeda’s appalling idea could attract ever more active backers. We suspected that many people, possibly millions, absolutely believed things utterly out of kilter with what we believe fundamentally. And they believed these things with the passion of newlyweds, while the passion of western citizens for the defining values of their states is that of the long married. Not non-existent, but not obviously burning.
While the passionate beliefs of Gaddafi loyalists now bemuse western eyes as much as the passionate beliefs of Al-Qaeda have done, these passionate beliefs are very different, of course. Gaddafi comes from a tradition that starts with Gamal Nasser and hopefully ends with Bashar al-Assad. Upon these strong men Arab states were personalised. Gaddafi was Libya and Libya was Gaddafi. And that just seemed the way things were.
This appeared almost as otherworldly to western eyes as Al-Qaeda, who hoped to replace the secular despotism of the Arab dictatorships with an Islamic caliphate. Ten years after 9/11, revolutions have come, but not those anticipated by Al-Qaeda. Modern freedom was more attractive than returning to the seventh century.
In bravely rising up, the Arabs showed themselves to be not so odd after all. They’ve hungered for the same things that Al-Qaeda want to destroy. Not western values, but universal human values: liberty, democracy, the rule of law, the absence of arbitrary power. Now the Arabs are for the long march through the institutions but with what Hegel called weltgeist on their side. Ultimately, they will arrive at states embodying the universal values for which the Arab Spring strives.
The rise of the rest, particularly China and India, is often taken to mean that weltgeist is passing from west to east. But, while the values championed by the Arab Spring are universal, they have their fullest expression in the west. The power of this advantage is overlooked in the rush to proclaim western decline. Western countries are not convulsed, as China and India are, by the protests of expanding middles classes, no longer prepared to have their rights trammelled upon. Trade with China has often been justified in terms of Chinese economic freedom being a precursor to a more assertive Chinese middle class, which would demand political freedoms.
This argument for Chinese trade is a confident western argument; an argument that believes in the potency of values upheld by the west. Yet, just as the Arabs are inspired by the same values that this now emerging Chinese middle class demands, so underlining the universality and appeal of these values, western confidence seems nowhere.
This diminution was encouraged by needlessly betraying the values that Al-Qaeda assaulted (Abu-Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay). As well as an economic crisis in which the commanding heights of private capitalism were massively subsidised by the taxpayer and, subsequently, banking practices remained unreformed amid widespread public and private deleveraging and horribly anaemic growth rates. But these post 9/11 mistakes and the financial crisis were self-inflicted western wounds. From which we could recover strongly with a fraction of the resolve that the Arab Spring has required.
It wasn’t always so. Britons once volunteered to fight against those who would crush universal values. They believed, as strongly as the Gaddafi loyalists who now cling to their wrong-headed beliefs, that if they could shoot Welsh rabbits then they could kill Spanish fascists. The spread of universal values that the Arab Spring and the rise of middle classes in China and India portends, hopefully, means that we won’t have to fight as the International Brigade did for these values.
Certainly, this spread means that the west should have more confidence in our capacity to build a world that would make these universal values universally enjoyed. A confident west would, amongst other things, now be offering the same kind of carrots and sticks towards enduring democratic change in the Arab world as were offered to Eastern Europe twenty years ago.
It doesn’t just matter that the values that shape the west are universal. It also matters that the west believes in them enough to act upon them.
I had this on Labour Uncut a few weeks ago.
Blue Labour seems less in fashion than previously. It was never the answer to every challenge facing Labour. But it does have contributions to make to Labour’s renewal. Whatever it is, blue Labour seems defiantly rooted in our country and the traditions which have shaped and continue to comfort and inspire its people. Global and jet-set it isn’t.
It feels odd, therefore, to see the core motivations of a creed as unabashedly Anglo-Saxon as Britpop reflected back in the protests convulsing India and Israel. These protests, like blue Labour, are, fundamentally, about rejecting contemporary materialism for the perceived morality and communality of exalted past eras: the dignity of Gandhi’s India; the solidarity of the Israeli kibbutz; and the warm embrace of the Labour party before the middle class dilettantes stole it from the working class. It’s easy to be cynical. There were, of course, no golden ages. But it’s what blue Labour and the protests say about the present that is most interesting.
Tobias Buck recently observed in the Financial Times that 250,000 Israelis have taken to the streets calling for social reform. He described them as ranging “from students to pensioners, and Holocaust survivors to taxi drivers” and as “perhaps the most serious challenge yet to the government of Benjamin Netanyahu”. He went on: “Many Israelis, regardless of their wealth and social status, say they still long for a return to the years when the country was less materialistic and more egalitarian. Even in cosmopolitan Tel Aviv, the ideals of the kibbutz live on”.
Anna Hazare’s anti-corruption protests have evoked the spirit of the independence struggle. Jason Burke explained in the Observer that his “asceticism – he eats yoghurt for breakfast, chapatis and a single portion of vegetables for lunch and has just a glass of lemon juice for dinner – has a deep resonance in a time when unbridled materialism is the dominant social ethic”. The bigger question, according to Burke, that Hazare has posed is: “What is this new India that is being created with its 8% year-on-year economic growth rates”?
The financial crisis brutally forced Iceland to confront its national purpose. Sam Knight wrote of this in August’s Prospect. He was told by an Icelandic campaigner: “Everyone said, ‘Let’s go back to fishing’”. Another Icelander said: “It (fishing) is a strong part of our identity”. The ideals of the kibbutz and the asceticism of Gandhi also persist as powerful parts of Israeli and Indian identity. This is in spite, or perhaps because, of the pervasive materialism of these societies.
Globalisation is man-made but, as its pace ever quickens and all that is solid melts into the air, it feels beyond human control. This leaves ever more people in circumstances that seem perilous, arbitrary and unfair. This leads them to questions of belonging and identity. I’ve written previously that the rise of the English Defence League is not the only instance of the search for identity turning ugly. In different ways everything from the birther movement to the success of the True Finns and Thilo Sarrazins can be seen through the same prism.
There are two lessons for the left.
First, without retreating to an unhelpful protectionism, actions need to be taken that re-claim globalisation for what it is: less arbitrary and more man-made. Globalisation isn’t some indestructible genie unleashed from the bottle, leaving us only with its wreckage. If we don’t like this globalisation – tax havens for the few; squeeze for the many – we can have another, so long as we have the political will and imagination.
Second, while talk of another globalisation isn’t fanciful, it is technocratic. Tumultuous times demand more visceral consolations. This can produce the ugly fear of the other, as in the birther movement, True Finns and Thilo Sarrazins, or it can celebrate the past glories of the kibbutz, Gandhi and fishing villages. The left can be more comfortable with the latter than the former, but shouldn’t be uncritically so. Eagerness to return to the Icelandic fishing villages of yore is leading to misguided reform to the Icelandic fishing quota system, while the authoritarianism of Hazare is troubling.
The point remains that people now require reassurances in ways that were denied them by New Labour’s narrow and shrill emphasis on the chill winds of global change. If romanticising aspects of national folk stories provides this, then we should be romantics. At the community level, romance means preserving the things that people want to see preserved, while fighting for change where it’s needed. The romance of preserving that with collective meaning should be as much of Labour’s lexicon as the hard-headed rationalism of confronting change.
While his views on immigration are as batty as the Icelandic fishing quota reforms, Maurice Glasman is quite the romantic. Globalisation can be re-made by human agency, but humans must be at ease and up-lifted in their hearts if their heads are to achieve all that they can. Let us be romantic, so that we may be rational.
