Compass - An 'Ersatz' Left Within New Labour?

Within six months, the United Kingdom will have a new Government. It might be a Tory Government or a Government of the centre-right or centre-left precariously juggling nationalists or Liberal Democrats before being forced to return to the country - or we might see the return of New Labour ...

How New Labour Might Return From The Dead

New Labour's return to power under Gordon Brown looks unlikely but it is far from impossible. Its coalition might yet remain solid while the opposition, although a majority in the country and almost certainly in Southern England, splits into its Tory, liberal and radical nationalist components.

The New Labour coalition has some pretty good reasons for holding together and getting its core vote out. The trades unions fear political evisceration under a vengeful Tory Government and the public sector always suffers more in terms of cuts under the centre-right.

The Celtic nations and decaying Northern urban communities have lived off the fat of the South. They know that the machine for taking Southerners cash and re-laundering it back to them via the EU, and more directly, will come to a sharp halt as the Tories look for quick and easy cuts.

Finally, there is a large middle class quangocracy and a fair body of liberal progressives who like the redistribution of English cash to the emerging world. Neither trust claims of compassionate conservatism despite Cameron's attempts to win classical social liberals over to the Tory cause.

For all these reasons and others, New Labour could squeak back in with a majority but if and only if its traditional voters walk out of their front door on the day, forget their rage and frustration - with wars overseas, failures to deal with poverty and 'political correctness gone mad' - and vote.

Compass

And this is where Compass comes in - a sort of ersatz Leftist movement, led by Jon Cruddas, MP, a key figure in the liaison between the trades union political officers and New Labour in the early days of the party's 'modernisation' but now reinvented as the main Left challenger to the consensus.

Its latest mailshot (admittedly to the faithful) is red in hue, its main symbol the internationalist one of a man holding a globe and weighed down by the responsibility, with much talk of 'change' through action (an obvious nod to the Obama phenomenon).

It claims 30,000 members and supporters which, if true, is significant in recent political terms. It is probably 10 times the size of the real membership of the last grassroots revolt within the Party in the mid-1990s.

If Compass succeeds in mobilising its growing number of discouraged activists, students and fringe intellectuals into a machinery for winning Labour a victory in 2010, Jon Cruddas and those associated with him can justifiably demand preferment. Cruddas is Cabinet material under such circumstances.

Ersatz?

I used the harsh word 'ersatz' to describe Compass but I write objectively not to denigrate what Cruddas and his supporters believe themselves to be. They believe themselves to be of the Left because they have taken radical positions within an essentially conservative movement.

Naturally they continue to avoid the 'S' word. Socialism frightens the English horses and is now unacceptable to a progressive mentality that hated Sovietism more than 'American imperialism'. If they are attempting anything, it is to take over the contested word 'progressive' and own it.

Instead Compass speaks of 'greater radicalism' (as if New Labour has been radical at all). This term radical refers back to a late nineteenth century pre-Labour Representation Committee culture of dissent before the socialists and Fabians muddied the waters and confused trades unionists with theory.

To back this up, in their fund-raising and recruitment campaigns, Compass makes seven claims that define what they are and how they want to capture the Labour Party and, through the Labour Party, the Government:

1. Their support for Jon Cruddas as Deputy Leader is positioned as instrumental in getting housing and inequality up the Party agenda.
2. Compass MPs campaigned to add 'ethical', social and environmental obligations (or 'burdens' as the centre-right might put it) on businesses through amendments to the Companies Bill.
3. They have 'led calls' for a High Pay Commission.
4. They campaigned for greater 'tax justice' just before the 2009 Budget and claim that three of their demands were included in Darling's Speech.
5. They campaigned for a windfall tax on the energy and oil firms which, they claim, was instrumental in the Government's subsequent £1bn energy package.
6. They were part of a 'broad coalition' in opposing the part-privatisation of Royal Mail (and claim substantial credit for postponing, though not 'shelving' as they further claim, these plans in July 2009).
7. They collaborated with CND, Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth to delay the renewal of the Trident nuclear WMD system.

Assessment

This is not a bad record over eighteen months or so - certainly so when compared to the complete failure of any Left challenge to the prevailing order within the Party since the middle years of Kinnock's leadership.

But it is not quite as impressive as they claim. The determination in their literature to tell us that 63% supported a High Pay Commission and 67% supported the windfall tax on energy tells us that the campaigns are still not built on principle but on populism.

Compass is not a coherent ideological challenge to New Labour. It is pitching for a place in New Labour's sun, adopting its assumption that power derives from political mobilisation. Compass will claim its place on mobilising votes for New Labour rather than by mounting a cogent critique of its failures.

Nor has it achieved a great deal of a practical nature. The changes to the Companies Bill may be irritating to business but they are insignificant. The windfall tax and the postponement of Royal Mail part-privatisation and Trident owe far more to straightened economic circumstances than Compass.

Compass' power resides entirely on its ability to mobilise disillusioned activists to vote for a Party that has (by any standards) been involved in illegal war, been a mere adjunct to a foreign power and reduced basic civil liberties (albeit in return for increased 'human rights').

It has also been administratively incompetent, done little about inequality and presided over a disastrous economic meltdown built on an unsustainable use of credit to promote growth. So, the critique of particular policies rather than the system is telling - loyalty and solidarity trump analysis.

The Limits of Compass

Closer analysis of Compass' claims show that its power is extremely limited. The big wins are merely postponements of controversial policies. The use by the State of their street pressure to mount windfall raids on the prosperous are not signs of a shift to the Left but of economic weakness.

The particular failure to position housing (a sector which cheap credit was designed to deal with) as ring-fenced, alongside the educational and healthcare expenditures that most concern the swing middle classes, shows that Compass is still mostly noise and fury.

In fact, the Government has done very little to claw back bonuses or deal with high pay as a structural issue. It bought into 'international competitiveness' arguments about the City, on which welfare spending now largely depends. Compass has no consistent alternative critique of this strategy.

Compass is being used by New Labour to give itself the opportunity of stabilising and even advancing its vote in the street. Compass offers the Party the chance to mobilise activists to knock on doors and show enthusiasm on the day without having to make any promises it has to keep!

Hope Again!

What New Labour needs is students and activists on the doorstep able to counter negative arguments with a message of hope and hope is best spread by believers and not by bureaucrats.

We have covered hope before in our postings - it is a very powerful political tool but also one that raises expectations. Growing disillusion with Obama in the US is the price paid for using hope as a campaign weapon. But New Labour is now desperate - later disillusion it can live with, loss of office it cannot.

Any New Labour Government that emerges on a bit of populist Left legerdemain will not be radically different from the one that it replaced. It will still have a PLP dominated by the centre-right of the Party and figures like Mandelson and Miliband, even Purnell, will be of more significance than Cruddas.

If Brown remains in office (it would be hard to dispose of an election winner for perhaps another two years), the Brownites will be manouevring to protect their future. Cruddas and the Compassites are likely to be seen as merely the mobiliser of the OMOV vote in a Leadership contest.

But this is where Compass pays off for its PLP and union promoters. It builds bridges across the Party to non-Party progressives. Its real power will lie either in its value as a chip in a leadership contest if existing factions are prepared to bid for its vote or in the immediate aftermath of a defeat.

Compass' populist stance has thus nothing to do with the country and everything to do with the Party. If it can 'own' the grassroots activists and then pull disillusioned outsiders into the party for the first time or as returnees, it could, with trades union support, transform the balance of power within the Party.

What Compass Means

This is what Compass is about - the recapture of the main centre-left Party by the Labour Movement so that it can resist, in coalition with progressives and the regions, a vicious class attack from the Southern middle classes.

What the Labour Movement fears is the ending of the New Labour commitment to full employment, deregulation of the labour market and cuts in public spending affecting their members. Civil liberties, issues of war and peace and national sovereignty are trivial next to these concerns.

A beaten New Labour Party with a disillusioned and divided activist base might open the door to decisive action by the Conservatives to break the link between the trades unions and politics, decentralise public services (removing union bargaining power) and turn the labour market into a free-for-all.

For trades unions, the best and only option is to ensure the return of a Labour Government against the odds so that the Tories collapse back into a futile English nationalism. But if that option fails, the second line of defence is a united 'resistance movement' that has forgotten the failures of New Labour.

So, Compass is not unimportant. It is of no direct political consequence currently in terms of policy but, as a tool of Labour/trades union recovery, as a potential influencer in the next Leadership contest and as a centre of labour resistance to Tory 'reform' on defeat, it needs to be watched.

But, at the end of the day, it is still an 'ersatz' Left. It has no coherent ideology other than a general and vague progressivism and labourism where labourism represents a decreasing number of people. 

Labourism just wants more 'working class representation' within an existing Blairite politics. Compass, in this context, replaces coherent thought with populism. It suffers from the same disease as New Labour - a preference for power over principle.

This is not its fault. The structures of New Labour offer no alternative to challengers - and there are signs that Cruddas may be sympathetic to reform of those structures. But what Compass offers to anyone outside the special interests operating within Labour coalition remains unclear.

Where the Sun Don't Shine ...

We really, really, really do not want to add to the overwrought, over-excitable, neurotic and nerdy commentary on the Sun's shift from New Labour to the Conservatives ... but duty calls. Let's keep it simple?

False Dawns

In a country of 44m voters, the Sun has an average daily circulation of just under 2.9m on a very good day (end-2008). It reaches directly only 6.5% of the population at best.

Of course, the fact that the Sun is not backing New Labour is now known to very many more people than this relatively small group but it is a moot point whether the rest of the population are going to be much impressed.

We need to unpick the hysteria surrounding a spoiler announcement and ask whether the British public have very much in common with an increasingly closed political and media elite whose prime characteristic appears to be its own self-referential agenda.

If you are on Twitter, you will probably have noticed the flood of excitable Tweets about this 'great event' - an excess of political emotionalism that reminds us of the French Third Republic at its most asinine.

But if New Labour suffers from this announcement, it will not be because the Sun can speak unto kings and make them tremble but because New Labour's historically craven attitude to Political Editors has returned to bite them.

New Labour 'strategists' (an inappropriate word for the motley crew who have succeeded the original winning team led by Mandelson, Gould and Campbell) created a narrative that gave the media far too much power in its drafting.

Between the mid-1990s, when manipulation of the newspapers was a critical factor in acquiring power, and today, New Labour lost track of important changes in mass communications and it has failed to create a communications plan that would eliminate the stranglehold of editors over the political agenda.

High Noon for New Labour

New Labour has far more fundamental problems than communications, of course. In our view, its socio-economic strategy may well be in ruins and, at best, taken a bad knock. Less contentiously, it looks tired, it has a string of failures to its name and it seems unable to connect with the population.

We still think that New Labour might recover to do creditably in an election, based in part on a slight recovery, in part on electoral distrust of Tory slipperiness and in part on the standard last minute bribery required to get the worker and regional votes out on the day.

But even if it gets its ducks in a row on the leadership, develops a distinctive policy position to fit the new times we are in and has luck on its side, its organisational and communications operations are in utter disarray. Much of this will have something to do with its appalling financial situation.

In politics, the illusion of success creates success - the prospect of power attracts funds which can be spent on political marketing. This creates an aura of success that increases the prospect of power and so funds ad near-infinitum ... and the converse.

Obscured by Clouds

Around two years ago, there were serious doubts about whether the Party was technically solvent. Since then, there has been relative silence but the open secret is that the trades unions have been holding things together in return for more influence behind the scenes.

There have been mutterings recently about the way that Jack Dromey of Unite has been lined up for a safe seat 'coincidentally' with a large union contribution, although trades union strategy for some time has been to increase union representation in Parliament.

With events in Germany showing that dissident Leftists can win votes - over 22% for the Left and the Greens virtually matching the 'official' Left - fissures are now opening up between radical mid-level union activists and the established political leaderships of the big unions.

The pressure is on now to stop any drift of funds and voting power to any putative Marxist-union breakaway. The traditional union leaderships, subject to some democratic pressure, must ensure that they can point to pro-working class representation and policies in a weakening official centre-left.

This, more than some ideological conversion, explains Brown's apparent shift to the Left and away from the language of markets this morning on Radio 4. Both conference and interview rhetoric were designed to unite a collapsing party and chase off the Left challenge - and shift back to the centre-ground later.

No2EU made a great thing of the fact that all its candidates in the Euro-election were front-line workers. The political wing of the working class has had enough of middle class representation and it is returning to the original purpose of the Labour Representation Committee with a vengeance.

Mandelson's job is to reassure the centre ground, especially big business, and keep the trades union right-wing (the manufacturing-orientated unions) in line with sufficient state aid (such as extension of car scrappage) to keep as many members' jobs as possible through to the next economic cycle.

The Twilight of the Gods

So, the journalists and bloggers who obsess about the opinions of one Editor and his proprietor are exhibiting all the signs of being a flock of oozlum birds.

Many of those who are active in demanding representation for workers in Parliament through Labour are also readers of the Sun, as likely to be so as readers of the Daily Mirror.

Liking Page Three girls and good sports coverage and being instinctively patriotic against Argies and Germans ought not to be associated with solid Menshevik values but people are complicated. My family took the Daily Telegraph every day and voted Labour every election.

A lot of Sun readers are going to enjoy these escapades but will still vote for a Labour candidate if it is the one that their union recommends. And a lot of trades union members will continue to vote Tory and Liberal Democrat - even BNP - regardless of what their union bosses advise.

The contempt of political nerds - whether obsessive activists, bloggers, mainstream journalists, policy wonks or armchair theorists - for the ability of the average voter to weigh up his or her own material and psychological interest beggars belief sometimes.

Of course there is a tribal element in voting but even this is an aggregation of special interest habits from the past or derived from shared experiences that can easily result in changed loyalties under provocation.

The next Government will be created out of a calculus of personal interest tempered by the oddities and biases of the FPTP electoral system. Good communications is there to give some sense of which horse might be worth backing in that interest. It's still the fundamentals, including the economy, stupid!

If New Labour is to be re-elected, it has to deal with these fundamentals and then create a narrative that includes fresh understanding of why the new technologies are half-way to transforming and weakening the power of the old priestly class of journalists and metropolitan intellectuals.

The next election is not going to be the first online media election - that experience is likely to be the election after that - but it should be the first election where the stranglehold of the old media is finally seen to be broken. It should start with a robust stance towards Mr. Kavanagh and his ilk. 

Labour's New Vision

We are about to see the re-launch of the Government’s policy platform, an event originally intended when Brown came to power as his ‘vision’ but pushed aside by the credit crisis. It is now made necessary by the indisputable fact of an election within the next year.

What is interesting is that Brown’s position is now so weak that he had to have the general outline of the platform pre-announced by Lord Mandelson, an unelected but powerful ‘Deputy Prime Minister’ in all but name, in order to build some momentum.

Building Britain’s Future

Later today, the Prime Minister launches the main policy document. It has the typical New Labour-ish title, Building Britain’s Future. It is believed that the main theme will be the promotion of increased consumer choice in public services.

This, for those with long memories, reminds one of John Major’s consumer-directed response to an economic crisis in an earlier era. John Major lost his election, amidst a climate of ‘sleaze’.

Mandelson is also suggesting (a position fully shared with the Prime Minister) that the Government intends no compromise on its New Labour message. There will be no serious concessions to the Left of the Party just for the sake of Party unity.

This rings true. Labour solidarity after the disastrous June elections has now kicked in. Any bloodletting will come only after an election. Brown has everything to win and nothing to lose personally in sticking to the original narrative of the 1990s.

In his warm-up act, Mandelson put forward a programme that is still not entirely credible to the analytical community. Mandelson is claiming that, despite the massive borrowing required by the credit crisis, New Labour will spend more and undertake better reforms than the Tory Party

His authority, which he has earned rightfully despite significant party unpopularity and occasional errors of judgement, is being used to direct Government communications at the wider population (where he is better liked). The pointy-heads are less important when votes are being courted.

That this PR drive is also intended to consolidate the party’s wobbling traditional support is indicated by Mandelson’s one concession to Left critics - he says that the privatisation of Royal Mail might not take place before the Party Conference because of lack of space in the legislative timetable.

Coming Clean on Spending?

The bet for New Labour is on observable recovery by the Spring of 2010 but there is still widespread concern that New Labour is failing to ‘come clean’ on the scale and direction of future spending cuts.

This suspicion grew with the news that the Chancellor decided to abandon plans for the comprehensive spending review. This should have been held this year but it is apparently being deferred until after the General Election. The decision seemed to have been confirmed today by Mandelson.

The Government is engaged in a massive political punt on the economy. What the Government (through Mandelson) is claiming is that the ‘worst is behind us’. A return to growth before the election will, he claims, allow Government to maintain spending and investment.

This is a very big ‘trust us’ from the Government that failed to predict the original crisis and when the general trend from responsible analysts is to see global growth as slow and vulnerable - and Britain’s fiscal situation to be on a knife-edge.

It is now difficult to convey the general mood of the country during what amounts to a phony war between its people and its government. The expectation of most thinking people is of the chickens eventually coming home to roost on public spending and industrial restructuring.

To make things worse, news is now feeding back from overseas that the country has become a laughing stock over the political expenses stories, It is not so much the fact of corruption (lots of places are corrupt) as the petty and pervasive nature of the corruption, what with duck houses, moats and all.

A more serious effect is that, under New Labour's progressivism, the UK has been wandering around the tax havens and emerging countries of the world moralizing on fraud and corruption. Now it has been shown to have feet of clay.

It scarcely assists the UK’s moral standing in relation to its ‘enemies’ – whether Russia, Iran or Mugabe’s Zimbabwe. As we write, FCO officials are said to be (according to the FT) deleting those parts of speeches that call for higher standards of governance lest they cause mirth.

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