Mick Hume looks at the sorry state of the left in the wake of the Labour Party conference (via Butterflies and Wheels). After pouring cold water on the notion that Gordon Brown – “the political equivalent of a bank manager – and a dour Scottish Presbyterian bank manager at that” – offers some kind of leftist alternative, he neatly sums up the extra-parliamentary left:
The Stop the War Coalition, driven by the Socialist Workers’ Party, has mobilised big (though steadily shrinking) demonstrations against the war in Iraq. But what do these represent in political terms? To my slightly jaundiced eye, it appears that the SWP has gone from tail-ending the trade union movement in the Seventies and Eighties, through tail-ending middle-class revolts against the Tory poll tax or New Labour’s university tuition fees, to tail-ending Muslim alienation (through its RESPECT coalition) today. What basis any of that provides for radical political change is anybody’s guess.
And concludes that “[W]hat little remains of the left has, in short, abandoned any attachment to progress and the future”:
We [at spiked] don’t want to return to the past, but to see those gains of humanity defended and developed in the changing context of the twenty-first century. It is apparent that project will not be pursued through hanging on to the coat tails of Gordon Brown, or imagining that there is any more of a left-wing vehicle for political change today than there is a right-wing one.
There is a pressing need to rise above all this and debate the need for a new future-oriented idea of human liberation. However, this will not necessitate, as people used to say, ‘breaking the mould’ of left-right politics. That mould has already been shattered beyond repair.
Debating “the need for a new future-oriented idea of human liberation” sounds fine, but what does it mean outside of being standard leftist boilerplate? Much of the old left’s problem was precisely this belief that we (the people, the working class, the proletariat) needed liberating, when it was transparently obvious that the old battles had largely been won and that people in Western liberal democracies didn’t (and don’t) regard themselves as being in any need of liberation by some supposedly far-sighted revolutionary vanguard – especially when the language of liberation was the same language that was being used to justify the far-from-liberatory politics on the other side of the Iron Curtain. We don’t react too well when told that human liberation lies in some distant future that we have to struggle towards. We’re already free, thanks. It may not be utopia, and it could and should get better, and we can discuss how that might happen, but what we don’t need is to be liberated.
Many people do, though. Or did. Like for instance people living under the appalling cruelties of Saddam’s tyranny in Iraq. And they were liberated. By, um, George Bush and Tony Blair. Against the bitter opposition of much of the left.
So yes, the left-right mould has been shattered.
Mick Hartley 
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