Jonathan Todd

Given that the Guardian now report that David “Cameron faces Eurosceptic backlash after Czech Lisbon treaty decision”, it seems an apt moment to revisit this question: ”Could UKIP still save the day for Labour?”

Perhaps confounding expectations of what the Spectator would be like with Fraser Nelson as editor, James Forsyth at Coffee House has been quick to man the trenches on Cameron’s behalf and insist he “hasn’t broken a pledge on Europe”. Such activity from someone, who is, among “the leading commentators”, according to Danny Finkelstein, to well “understand what the Cameron team are trying to do” might suggest that this team is worried that UKIP could indeed save the day for Labour.

I’m doubtful that Nigel Farage and co have it in them to save Labour’s speck (at least any more than the BNP have the potential to steal this same bacon by similarly undercutting the vote of one of the major parties). But, certainly, it is in Labour’s interests to widen and magnify the divisions that obviously linger within the Tory Party on Europe.

Ah, a dividing line, Number 10 surely cries. But I hope it doesn’t. As I have argued elsewhere, Labour needs to be more realistic about our capacity to impact perceptions of the Tories. Essentially, our capacity in this regard is almost zero. Instead of trying to mine this very limited potential, we should be focusing on changing perceptions of ourselves; presenting a positive case for Labour. This argument holds on Europe as much as it does on other areas of policy. So, rather than any ”clever” tactical games, I suggest that Labour makes a positive case for the EU and for our position on the Lisbon Treaty and the future of the EU, while hoping that the snipping of Bill Cash et al opens up the divisions within the Tories that any ”clever” tactical games would seek to achieve and, in so doing, pushes some Tory voters in the direction of UKIP.

It might seem madness (even suicidal) to attempt to present a positive case for the EU and Lisbon Treaty in the UK at the moment. But, first, a more negative politics of dividing lines ignores the reality of our ability to impact perceptions of the Tories. David Aaronovitch’s ability in this regard is probably now stronger than the whole of the Cabinet’s combined. Second, part of the reason that this seems madness is because the dots between the Lisbon Treaty and our national interest remain so un-joined. Take, for example, Daniel Korski’s well-made argument today: ”Europe has the US president it wished for, but Barack Obama lacks the strong transatlantic partner he desired.” This is profoundly true and it is manifestly in the UK’s interest that the EU becomes this strong transatlantic partner. It is far more likely to be able to perform such a role once the improvements to its systems of governance enabled by the Lisbon Treaty are in place.

Labour should make arguments of this kind; arguments that are global and universal in focus, as we leave Cameron and Cash to petty and parochial arguments (Cameron and Cash even sounds suitably like a petty and parachial firm of solictors). Combining UKIP with an enlightened and far-sighted approach from Labour could yet save the day.

I’ve just got home from a Spectator event that debated the motion “the Left is dead“. Although the motion was defeated, I didn’t sense myself to be surrounded by legions of fellow Labour Party members. Still, I take instruction wherever I can find it and I found it at the debate, as I find it in the pages of the Spectator. I may not agree with the magazine’s editorial line but its analysis is often incisive and perceptive. Fraser Nelson, for example, strikes me as more on the money on the BNP than most.  

The main piece of instruction that I picked up at the debate is that the speakers in favour of the motion (Michael Heseltine, Minette Marrin and Stephan Shakespeare) were only able to declare the left dead by mistaking the left with something it never was. Both Marrin and Shakespeare argued (wrongly) that an ideologically driven desire to control is a central left-ist motivation and that such control will be impossible in the digital era. Thus, they declared the left dead.

Their logic negates the savaging that Jan Moir’s career has just received at the hands of the Twitterati. In the pre-Twitter era Moir may have got away with peddling her vile spite. In the Twitter era she set herself on a collision course with an ascendant cultural egalitarianism. So, Marrin and Shakespeare are right that the internet is an agent of empowerment that throws off attempts to control and shackle, but the force that this agent unleashed in the direction of Moir simply speaks to the potency of the force that they declare dead: the left.

As Jonathan Freedland, who argued against the motion, pointed out cultural and social norms on race, gender, the environment and sexuality have come to be constructed around values and views that would have been considered left-ist, if not extreme left-ist, a generation ago. Homophobia just isn’t going to be served on the Twitterati menu. There was no vanguard coercing the Twitterati into championing a left-ist ideology, as Marrin and Shakespeare presume that there must be to sustain any left-ist ideology. They chose to adopt one and in so choosing they demonstrate both the strength of the left’s victory on social and cultural norms over the past generation and the potential of the internet to secure more victories for the left in the next generation.

In the past week alone, for example, I have used the internet to pick up great ideas on combating the BNP from Mary Riddell and David Aaronovitch. The defeat of Moir gives me confidence that if these ideas are taken forward, then the left will need no vanguard to defeat the BNP.

MPs have abused their expenses, seeming to treat them as perks or part of their remuneration. In doing so, they have shattered a social contract with actions that sometimes appear criminal.

It is ironic, then, that in this week Gordon Brown has given us his first key note speech on crime as PM and John McFall has alleged that remuneration packages in the financial sector have lead to a social contract being broken.

So, MPs and bankers both stand accused of breaking a social contract. What does this mean? And what are its consequences?

Wikipedia defines a contract in these terms:

“A contract is an exchange of promises between two or more parties to do, or refrain from doing, an act, which resulting contract is enforceable in a court of law. It is a binding legal agreement”.

But what is a social contract? An exchange of promises between two or more parties to do, or refrain from doing, an act, which resulting contract is enforceable in a court of public opinion? Harriet Harman once threatened to throw a banker to the lions in this court but MPs are now as likely to suffer a mauling as even Fred the Shed.

That said, the long history of the term social contract, appealed to by thinkers from Thomas Hobbes to John Rawls, makes it harder to properly define in terms as concise as Wikipedia’s definition of a contract. The vagaries of legal courts are legion but are nothing as compared to the vagaries of the court of public opinion, for one thing. In contract disputes, it is also usually clear between whom the original promise was reached. In contrast, it may be a surprise to some bankers that they have a contractual obligation - a social contract – to anyone beyond their employer. Presumably, MPs have, at least, a dim memory that the Fees Office are not the people with whom they have entered into a contract. Electors, I believe, they are called. The ultimate sanction in the case of MPs who break their social contract is also clearer than it for bankers. It is to be found at the ballot box. Fred the Shed will be grateful that this doesn’t determine his fate, as he would only receive two votes: one from a Hearts player and another from Jackie Stewart. Though, there are MPs, elected with fat majorities, who must now wonder whether they are any more capable of attracting popular support.

When once respected MPs and bankers can dredge such depths of unpopularity, the ballot box may not seem for all an entirely adequate sanction for the breaches of the social contracts that have occurred – not least when this sanction doesn’t even apply directly to bankers. Some may sigh and shrug, feel even more powerless than they do already and not vote. Some may vote for a party like UKIP, up 12 points in the polls in the past 7 days, in the belief that minor parties will be more respectful of the social contract than major ones. Some may react even more extremely: voting for the BNP and/or engaging in violent protest. Am I getting too excited?

I’m not sure. Trust has been lost on a massive scale, as it is when any contract is broken. This is very difficult to recover. Tony Blair, for example, never regained the trust that he lost over the invasion of Iraq. Broken trust begets broken trust, as violence begets violence. Broken trust often begets violence and vice versa. Certainly, neither broken trust nor violence begets anything positive. Only negativity suggests itself.

Britain has, rightly, moved away from the absurd, unjustified hierarchies that defined us as a deferential, class-based society. But it is hard to imagine a society that doesn’t need leaders of some kind in politics, business and elsewhere. Social contracts are formed between these leaders and those that they lead but such contracts are only viable when the leaders can command respect on some basis. This respect has long since ceased to derive from class, while most of our present leaders in politics and business struggle to command respect by virtue of their abilities and virtues. The breaking of social contracts would, therefore, seem to have produced a crisis of leadership. Whether it produces anything graver than that will depend what, if anything, emerges to fill the vacuum of trust and respect that this crisis has opened up.

The BNP is Labour’s challenge. This is because a major new study which “examined a large sample of those who have voted BNP or would consider doing so” concludes:

“The BNP is gaining new support principally from older, less educated, white working-class men – voters from Labour’s historical base who feel they have benefited little from the past decade of Labour government, and whose resentments the BNP has succeeded in articulating”.

It is not traditional Tory voters or traditional Lib Dem votes but traditional Labour voters who are inclined to support the BNP. This is a message from The New Extremism in 21st-Century Britain by Matthew Goodwin and Robert Ford which Routledge will publish later this year. These traditional Labour voters, report Goodwin and Ford, “gained little from the Blair boom and will be the first to suffer in the Brown bust. Their growing cynicism, distrust and detachment from politics have not been taken seriously by Labour”.

Nonetheless, the alienation described brings to mind the thought of one of Labour’s great strategists: Michael Young. Ferdinand Mount asked us to “turn back to Michael Young and Peter Willmott’s Family and Kinship in East London” and ”ponder the stabilities described there and question how much of that survives in the Bethnal Green of today”. This loss of stability feeds the alienation that was Young’s concern in Small Man, Big World (1949). Here Young wrote that:

“The common purposes of the small group are more easily understood; in the large group the people at the top tend to get out of touch with those at the bottom, and the small man to regard those at the top as ‘they’, the impersonal authorities with mysterious power over himself”.

‘They’ have certainly been exercising their mysterious powers over the kind of communities liable to vote BNP. These communities feel bereft of the common purposes that provided stability to the Bethnal Green of the 1950s. The world, thus, feels that much bigger and the man that much smaller.

Responding to local concerns, which Margaret Hodge argues is the way for Labour to tackle to the BNP, can create a sense of common purpose; making the world smaller and the man bigger. Activity and organisation on the community level, which Sam Tarry advocates, can combat the sense of alienation upon which the BNP feed. Labour should not underestimate the importance of this task, particularly in view of the upcoming European elections. A parallel that is made by Goodwin and Ford highlights this point:

“Jean-Marie Le Pen’s Front National (FN) sets a worrying precedent in France. Founded in 1972, the FN was dismissed as a fringe movement for a decade. But after gains in local elections around Paris, the FN achieved a shock success in the 1984 European elections, obtaining ten seats and transforming its electoral prospects. In the next legislative elections, the party increased its vote from 44,000 to 2.7 million, nearly 10 per cent of the vote. It has been a significant force in French politics ever since. Those who dismiss Griffin’s BNP would do well to remember that no one in France took Le Pen seriously in the early 1980s. Twenty years later he was competing with Jacques Chirac for the French presidency”.

The alienation that fuels the BNP is real. It is imperative that it does not become seen to be more socially acceptable than it presently is to try to address this alienation via the false solution of voting BNP. The genie cannot be let out of the bottle, as it was in France. ‘They’, the impersonal authorities with mysterious power, cannot be seen to include Labour – otherwise, Labour is considered to be part of the problem by the communities that we seek to serve. Labour must, instead, be seen to be a real part of these communities. In taking on this role, Labour addresses the alienation that gives succour to the BNP.

Before Christmas, I was disappointed to notice on Luke Akehurst’s blog that the BNP enjoyed a large swing in their favour in a by-election to Cumbria County Council. I know that the turnout was very low but, given the lack of BNP presence in Whitehaven previously, I was rather taken aback.

This came back to me today when seeing Denis MacShane’s call to beware the European street. The main employer in Whitehaven is, of course, Sellafield, where, as Michael White notes, “they hope to revive the flagging local economy by helping build new nuclear plants – and want most of the jobs to go to their own pool of skilled workers”.

Those closer to the Cumbrian street may have a better idea how many of the illegal strikers at Sellafield voted BNP in December. I grew up in the area but can now only note that the BNP are the only political party to have supported the strikes, wonder and worry. Certainly, David Aaronovitch is right to draw attention to “the half-truths” that have fanned the spat of strikes and Gary Becker has provided a massively coherent critique of protectionism that would be very warmly welcomed both by Peter Mandelson and in Davos.

But Davos is a long way from Whitehaven. The facts on the ground, to appropriate another phrase with a Middle Eastern origin, in Whitehaven may feel to many in Whitehaven not so far removed from the facts on the ground in Lincolnshire, where Janice Turner claims, “the skilled oilmen of Lindsey now find themselves flotsam and jetsam on the economic tide”. But facts, as Aaronovitch points out, are not what have fuelled the strikes. Nor are facts the currency of the BNP. They are what the people of Whitehaven and Lincolnshire richly deserve, however.

Equally, they do not deserve ‘social dumping’.  Just as there are perfectly legitimate economic arguments against parallel trade, which an economist can support without parting company with Becker’s arguments against protectionism, so too one does not need to deploy political arguments to oppose both ‘social dumping’ and protectionism. There are strong economic arguments for a position that distinguishes between protection and protectionism, as Peter Mandelson has previously said. These economic arguments form the basis of the political case that Labour should be taking forward to win back streets in place like Cumbria.

However, ’social dumping’ would not have occurred at the Lindsey Oil Refinery on Humberside if, as Total claim, the Italian and Portuguese workers’ wages are the same as other equivalent jobs on the site. The facts of this claim are to be established by Acas. The reason why this claim is suspected was identified by Peter Hain in the Commons on Monday.

“I still find it puzzling that European companies can bring their labour in, meet all the costs of accommodating and transporting them—both to this country and to and from work—and still claim to abide by national pay rates and conditions of service. That does not seem to add up, and I wonder whether the real answer to that puzzle is to be found in the fact that these subcontractors subcontracted all the way down the line to a point at which nobody really knew whether the workers concerned were being exploited or whether local workers were getting the justice and fairness to which they are entitled”.

The decisions of the European Court of Justice (ECJ) on the Posted Workers Directive mean that the government cannot require that firms abide by national pay rates and conditions of service in respect of posted workers. The verdicts of the ECJ mean that legally such workers are only entitled to the local minimum pay rates and conditions. However, as Hain pointed out, the wages at Lindsey are “many times higher than the minimum wage”. This certainly leaves scope for such wages to be undercut and ‘social dumping’ to occur. There is no inconsistency between recognising the unfairness of this and arguing, as Hain did, “that right-wing anti-Europeanism and protectionism would be disastrous for British workers”.

There has long been talking on the left of building a fairer form of globalisation, while, there is also much to fear from the recent trend towards de-globalisation. Globalisation is more likely to avoid going into reverse if it can be made fairer and seen to be so. Part of what this involves is ironing out any tensions between protection, which avoids ‘social dumping’, and protectionism, which causes a different kind of harm. Davos may be a long way from Whitehaven but the right mix of providing protection and opposing protectionism requires that this distance is minimised.