The ‘universalist’ approach to politics makes an arrogant claim which satisfies only the ego of the one who benefits. In this sense Thatcher was a better democratic leader because she accepted she would have to face down the opposition which unified against her, because she was providing the conditions for choice. Whether you agreed with Thatcherite conclusions or not she didn’t play to our prejudices in the way that both Cameron and Brown do, she challenged our preconceptions and redefined the terms of debate.

The problem both the Conservatives and Labour face is that political correctness flies in the face of political reality – of course we all agree that carrying weapons is wrong, but if you’re not prepared to run the risk of taking hits the only defence is to get your retaliation in first and you’re going to load up.

In this risk-averse climate our politicians also begin to fear breaking ranks – such unconditional loyalty changes from a bond of trust into a bond of slavery.

The recent publication of the trade unions demands of the Labour party leadership is a case in point – none of these demands are unequivocal, they comprise together a basis for negotiation which promises continued support whatever the compromise. Union reps may be highly experienced negotiators, but they’ve prejudiced themselves against the outcome of this one by removing their biggest bargaining chip from the table – it’s almost like they’ve started a knife fight by slashing their own wrists!

Labour has now been in power for the consequences of their policies to be unavoidable and clear to see for all – any blame to be lain at their door is blame they deserve. If they want our support at this point in time they must stand up and take responsibility for their decisions and justify any weaknesses in their track record without making more empty promises or refrying all the old empty rhetoric which got them here.

By dumping the spin doctors and showing some contrition, Gordon can show that honesty is the best medicine – and by implication that Cameron is selling snake oil.

However, I fully expect the complete reverse. The growth of the political-media industry will continue unabated with ever more meaningless conferences and boring public discussions and ever more predefined conclusions to lead any willing attendees into the welcoming arms of the organisers. Is it worth the wait?

Where is the spontaneous dissent? Why does politics need to be pre-packaged and controlled and refined to indistinct conformity? Where is the diversity? Where is our freedom?

Having said that the discourse of a social recession/broken society has been a right wing moral one. Compass uses it to highlight structural inequalities and their social consequences, and teh commercialisation of people’s lives. I agree that a story of our times that will give the left traction has to be positive and hopeful.

Thomas – are you right? I’m not sure. We just don’t know how deep the schisms go in the Conservative Party, and how willing they are to hold the contradictions together for the sake of election victory. Also their thinking is not as thin as people might like to believe. If anyone is interested it’s worth reading Compassionate Conservatism and From Here to Fraternity, two essays which capture Cameron’s Conservatism. You can download them at:
http://www.jessenorman.com/politics/

I don’t think its strategic incompetence. New Labour has now been in power for long enough for people to laythe blame at its door. It’s only lefties who try and keep an historical perspective and point back to 1979. At the moment I’d guess the election is Labour’s to lose.

In the autumn comment is free and Soundings journal are organising a series of public discussions on ‘who owns the progressive future’. The first will be on ‘Is the future Conservative’. We’re hoping this might be an opportunity to try out some of the ideas that came out of the bloggers meeting organised by Sunny – a collective discussion in the left/liberal blogosphere about our future, post New Labour.

I don’t disagree but the big question is that if we end up, as the “left”, managing to finally get these ideas moving…are we just giving power to a group of people that are no worse than the tories by using Labour as that vehicle and giving it direction? I know that I for one won’t exactly feel like we’ve won anything if we’ve just supported a Labour government to continue as they are if they stay in power or end up back in power. I can’t imagine many other people, yourself included, would either.

I don’t think that we’re necessarily devoid of ideas, on many levels we have to accept that in certain areas of what Labour has done has been of great benefit, and we also have to be proud of the fact that we’ve got a whole lot of things we want to see changed as a group. You’re definitely right about the energy, but will energy come back to the movement if the vehicle we’re moving with is Labour given what is said above?

Separating ourselves from party politics is, to me, the only way that we have any hope of unifying the cause and movement. The only way I could get on board with any kind of “solving labour’s problems for them” brigade is if they completely drop the illiberal policies that they have seen as key in the last half a decade, ID cards, 42 days, etc. Do you too see this as a hurdle the left needs to negotiate? How do we recognise this and stay true to our core principles while still trying to help out the people that go against them?

Jonathan:
moral breakdown, collapse of civilisation as we know it etc – but he is addressing people’s disquiet that society is not in good shape.

Mmm… I think its difficult to argue in this climate that we’re living in a great era, especially since the economic climate is rubbish, we’re stuck in two intractable wars and standards of living have floundered.

However, my view is that the left still needs to put forward a positive vision that doesn’t rely on making out that society is currently broken. In other words, the narrative is important in not only where its going but where we stand from..

This is why buying into the idea that we’re going through a knife crime epidemic is a dangerous starting point.

I’m not a pessimist by nature, unlike most of my fellow travellers on the liberal-left it seems Even with regards to the current debates around immigration, identity and terrorism I think its possible to create a more positive narrative.

Jonathan – why do you think we’re in a social recession?

D Harkin:
I think it might be a question of what sort of forum actually influences. Internal party democracy might not be the most successful forum. Look at how influential the Fabian Society and other liberal left think tanks have been. Many of these have run out of steam. The left in the blogosphere simply hasn’t kicked off like the right. The comment pages in The Guardian and The Independent are dreary and generic.

I also think this is spot on. Lee, pull back from the blind loyalty bit to Labour for a second. The point D Harkin is making is that the left in general isn’t exactly brimming with ideas and energy – hence Labour isn’t going in any direction and is thus stuck with trangulation.

The problem here isn’t just that Labour is authoritarian – its also that this Labour govt just doesn’t have any good ideas or intelligent people in power (ok, there are a few but generally no one is listening to them).
The Libdems are hardly coming out with much exciting stuff to be honest, and I’ve been looking at their stuff too. Hell, even the Greens are all over the place.

We can blame Labour for its problems… but what exactly should they be doing? What is the grand narrative? What are the big ideas? Those questions still have to be answered.

I think it’s a little disingenuous to suggest that my solution was blind loyalty to Labour. I was merely saying that giving up on Labour isn’t going to help. I also said that the left had a collective responsibility to re-energise itself and come up with new and compelling ideas that, if they won’t be useful for now, can be part of a new left-liberal government (whichever party suits that description) in the future.

The trouble is that this type of attitude is precisely the one that puts barriers up in the online liberal left’s quest for change. Some here simply don’t like Labour and what they’ve become. They recognise that even if Labour started listening we’d still be lumped with ID cards and 42 day legislation because to U-Turn on them would be seen by them as political suicide through indecision and lack of conviction. Some of us simply cannot support a government that is as illiberal as Labour.

So lets find some solutions to moving forward that don’t revolve around “staying loyal” eh?

Neither is he addressing public concerns or engaging our interests. What he is doing is trying to set the agenda and make debate be fought out on his preferred territory and on his terms.

Cameron is in fact treading on thin ice – he depends on the charisma of his personality and his individual self-confidence not faltering as he tries to keep the party unified while a vicious ideological debate goes on around and beneath him. David Davis is one reflection of this yawning chasm that threatens to open up between the different factions of the Conservative party – between the right and centralist wings, between the paternalists and the libertarians, the self-interested and those with a social conscience, the tax-cutters and the financial-sensers, as well as the cautious moderates and the radical ideologues.

So far Cameron has only survived by avoiding any too overt display of alleigance, but he has only managed this feat by throwing crumbs of comfort to all sides and by buying off his rivals (one thinks of Boris Johnson, DD) with greater autonomy of action. He can only continue to hold them all together by postponing the day when he makes any policy announcements – and he will continue to struggle while no satisfactory form of reconciliation can be found. But he can only do so for so long, before the membership tires of his continuing failure and says ’so long’ to him.

It must be the cause of real frustration to listen to ‘true blue’ vehicles such as the Telegraph consider their options and reasess their positions quite as obviously as has been done recently, and one wonders how long the brinkmanship can go on before all the long-supressed instincts explode in a torrent. And it must particularly grate all conservative supporters to be forced now to enter the run-up to the next general election as the party of tax rises – so I, for one, don’t believe Cameron will further risk the outbreak of open warfare by going strong on intervention in private life, at least not while David Davis presents an alternative rallying point on the backbenches and therefore it is just one more example of making the right noises without making any moves – style over substance.

The narrative of a ‘Broken Society’ is strategic incompetence of the highest order. It not only shows the Conservative party admitting its own legacy of failure, but it has them doing so by drawing attention to the policy area of their greatest failure in a way which shows the ongoing impact of their failure, all the while expecting us to believe that they are the ones to solve the problems they created in the first place!

Frankly, Cameron has overestimated the extent to which he has decontaminated the conservative ‘brand’ by underestimating the extent to which the public feels it is the party which needs purging. It was a task that couldn’t be achieved through personality alone, nor (considering his own background of privilege) was he ever likely to be the person able to do it.

I think that the latter factor is rather more important. Cameron doesn’t seem to be addressing people’s disquiet so much as notifying it.

http://www.compassonline.org.uk/programme/

“What do you mean by this? I like Jon Cruddas a lot. John Denham is another one. ”

I was referring to this article:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/may/10/labour.conservatives

“My view is that we wait for Labour to get chucked out, and then get involved in the fight to ensure a more left-wing alternative is created. Right now New Labour is intent only on winning, not only developing any coheren ideology.”

I think by then it’ll be too late; Labour will be facing the same potential problems the Tories did in 97. The battle has to be joined before in order for any real influence to be retained. I wonder if perhaps we’re facing an SDP moment: not going to the right as they did, but to the left. That said, the union proposals for Brown today on the whole looked encouraging. Doubtless however they will be fought tough and nail.

“know that Cameron is hopelessly exaggerating, but I don’t think it fair to say that the UK is fine. I think he may be on to something with the general lack of civility – but to combat such things calls for a big, touchy-feely, liberal education programme.”

I don’t think anyone’s pretending that everything’s coming up roses. They are distinct problems, and in some places potentially intractable problems which urgently need to be addressed. Cameron’s rhetoric and solutions however offer no solution and potentially may make things worse.

Oh and thanks for Charlie for that post at 10, which was an excellent distillation of some of the problems which don’t revolve around a broken society.

I’m sorry, what does the fact that the man has children got to do with anything, or indeed whether he’s been on a bus? If you’re trying to suggest that his children have been, then it would be nice to have some evidence to back that up. Only his seriously disabled son is of school age; the other two have yet to go. You’re the one making a mountain out of a molehill here.

“In this article you fail to mention family breakdown, drug abuse, falling educational standards etc. For you to then claim that the concept is a broken society is “empty” when it is backed up by over five years of research, some by the Conservatives and some by external organisations, is laughable.”

The reason I didn’t mention any of those is because surprisingly, Cameron didn’t mention any of those in his interview, except on how black families need fathers. And incidentally, where is this five years of research? If you’re talking about Iain Duncan Smith’s Damascene conversion to suddenly caring about the poor and his huge reports which no one read, then that indeed is laughable. No one’s denying, including myself that we do have some major problems in this country, family breakdown being among them. It doesn’t seem to matter that there is also evidence that drug abuse is falling, according to yesterday’s BCS figures, and that unless you completely subscribe to the doom and gloom that the whole education system is dumbing down, that results keep getting better, even if they are still nowhere near good enough in general. None of this is evidence of a broken society: it instead reflects the way we live now, which is fractured and atomised. But broken? No, not at all. Cameron’s rhetoric which is backed up with no substance whatsoever except a bribe for families of £20 a week will do nothing whatsoever to solve those problems.

I think it might be a question of what sort of forum actually influences. Internal party democracy might not be the most successful forum. Look at how influential the Fabian Society and other liberal left think tanks have been. Many of these have run out of steam. The left in the blogosphere simply hasn’t kicked off like the right. The comment pages in The Guardian and The Independent are dreary and generic.

Holding Labour solely to blame seems a bit disingenuous. I think it is more a question of collective failure. Maybe it was the damn baby boomers and their self-defeating cynicism

To conclude, I think to argue for disconnecting from Labour is to mis-identify the problem and its solution.

There comes a time when you have to realise that dialogue has actually just been a decade of one group talking while the other sits there making the right noises and head movements, not actually engaging. It’s all well and good about “changing from within” and I agree completely with that way of thinking…but not when you physically can’t change from within. As Sunny says, it won’t be until they’ve lost that they realise just how much they should have been listening, until then they’ve got their ears plugged.

I take your point that there is something unsettling about the way Cameron combines talk of selfishness with myriad other social problems (knife crime, for instance). The implicit message is that he thinks we need more authoritarian measure – and that is certainly what we’re getting from Bojo in London.

Yet I’m not sure disconnecting from Labour is the way forward. When the liberals left Labour, it meant that many important liberals ideas left the public discourse. I’m still a great believer in dialogue: there are what we might consider “left liberals” in both the main parties as well as the Lib Dems. And those liberals probably have more opportunities to influence things for the better. Admirable campaigns such as Liberal Conspiracy should aim to include not alienate such individuals.

What claims has he made? That people aren’t responsible for their own actions? Then why was he so hesitant to properly spell that out to the people of Glasgow? Perhaps he realised that hearing that other people need to take responsibility is only a good line if not directed at the people you’re actually talking to?

What else has he identified as a problem that all other politicians haven’t already as well? This is the trouble, Cameron is being painted by people like yourself to be the man with the vision for change, and it’s utter bollocks. he’s said absolutely nothing of substance in the last year and has received amazing amounts of press coverage for it. It’s mind blowing.

But I don’t think attacking the tories works for two reasons:[1 &2]

There is a third reason – the public is turned off by negative campaigning. If politicians still don’t understand this very simple fact, they should in good conscience find themselves new ways to occupy their time.

Another pathetic and childish comment about a man who has three young children, one of whom is seriously disabled. Yet again your desperation to make personal attacks on him leaves you looking stupid, not Cameron.

It’s interesting in this article that you don’t mention ANY of the points that Cameron has raised as indicating that society is broken. In this article you fail to mention family breakdown, drug abuse, falling educational standards etc. For you to then claim that the concept is a broken society is “empty” when it is backed up by over five years of research, some by the Conservatives and some by external organisations, is laughable.

Cameron understands what’s wrong with this country and you don’t. The Left has no response to this because they have provided no evidence to counter any of Cameron’s claims on the various social problems we are facing.

http://lettersfromatory.wordpress.com

But what works depends on what you are trying to achieve, and that’s where people on the left and right will often differ.

At least I think we do. Frankly I have only seen the odd Liberal Conspirator argue that Labour is the answer on here. Personally, as a Liberal, who will vote SNP until that becomes a reality, and then revert, I do not see where some folk on here are coming from. Your vote is a tactical vote, Is it not? To give it over to the son of Thatcher seems to me to be counter intuitive.

Correct me if I am wrong.

BTW, I think Brown is a disaster.

Perhaps the SNP should stand in Central London. Their non devolutionary policies are probably what you guys would vote for…

Y’know:

Free tertiary education

Free subscriptions for medicine

No to 42 days.

stuff like that.

What Cameron’s ‘broken society’ narrative says is that he recognises there is a problem, but he doesn’t know exactly what it is. Because he can’t describe the problem accurately he can’t offer any real solutions.

What this means is that he thinks he can judge when the problems will have been resolved, but that nothing will be to his credit.

What it says is that he can’t identify who is to blame, and he can’t accept responsibility for any personal role either he or his party has had in creating the problem in the first place.

What it means is that he isn’t prepared to apologise for past or future mistakes, because he’s not prepared to get his hands dirty making any changes to challenge convention and vested interests.

If we accept his narrative and we as a country are prepared to vote for him, it says we are gonna get screwed and we better had enjoy it, because we’ll deserve everything we get.

Secondly, septicisle you say:
my thoughts were with Jon Cruddas, but then he seems entranced with Cameron and his “emotive literacy”, which with Blair gone Labour hasn’t managed to provide.

What do you mean by this? I like Jon Cruddas a lot. John Denham is another one.

As you can probably tell, I’m more inclined towards the second option of completely detaching from Labour and going our own way in taking the Tories on.

Well, here’s the problem. For a start the left still needs an electoral vehicle if anything is to happen. With a choice between Labour and Libdems, and with the latter not making any real left-wing overtures to attract that part of the party, I find it unlikely in the short term that people will move to the Libdems enmasse.

I was actually thinking of having a week-long discussion here on what the Libdems need to do to become the effective opposition.

My view is that we wait for Labour to get chucked out, and then get involved in the fight to ensure a more left-wing alternative is created. Right now New Labour is intent only on winning, not only developing any coheren ideology.

This means that it doesn’t need a base until its out of power. Its strategy has been so far, as Pete B says above, to just keep hoping the Tories look worse. Obviously they cottoned on soon enough.

In other words, Labour will have to go out of power if its to realise its roots again. That’s what I think for now anyway. I’m open to persuasion otherwise.

I’m a Labour member – cradle Labour. I Joined the Young Socialists in the early 60s: been in and out of the party ever since; served as Ward Branch Sec., delegate to various constituency bodies, developed septic knuckles knocking on doors canvassing … etc. etc. I stopped renewing my membership shortly after Blair became leader and rejoined the party very shortly after Brown took over. It’s changed a lot and achieved a lot over the years, the tories haven’t changed at all (IMHO), still ‘lower than vermin’ – their leaders, anyway.

One way the Labour Party changed is that the footsoldiers, e.g. union activists of various sorts, ordinary working people – especially working people in the public services, idealists (remember them?) and folk like me with wives, kids, a job … a life – who care enough to spend at least a small number of hours a week working for the party, felt marginalised from the start of the New Labour ‘project’. NL (again IMHO) has achieved things that Old Labour never could have. It’s done whatever it thought necessary to hold on to power, it used techniques (e.g. media manipulation) and people (e.g. Peter Mandellson) that OL would have shied away from and it has attacked and won where OL (again IMHO) would not even have fought ( Minimum Wage, womens, race and gender issues ) but NL looked better than it was because the tories picked a succession of plonkers as leaders. Now they have got someone half competent who can take on NL at their own game and maybe even win, so the old media are feeling their oats again and reverting to type and the leading lights in the LP don’t seem to know how to fight.

Perhaps the best hope of keeping an old-style viciously elitist Conservative Party out of power is to re-enlist the footsoldiers (who may remember how to fight) and look at how best to arm them for the traditional battlefields and new the new battlefields of the Web

Pete