Switching the leader will be a waste of time if the party does not radically change direction.
The end of every summer marks a moment of potential political renewal. Pundits and commentators urge leaders to modernise, consolidate, shift left, move right or die. Reality rarely matches the hype. But the tail end of the wet summer of 2008 lives up to the hyperbole. Labour really must change or die.
Whatever Gordon Brown decides to do as he considers relaunches and reshuffles, something is glaringly apparent: the new Labour project, initiated, perhaps unwittingly, a quarter of a century ago by Neil Kinnock and accelerated to dramatic effect by Tony Blair after 1994, is finished. The centre left needs a new paradigm in thinking and action, one as different from new Labour as this was from the creed it superseded. But a new left project that mixes commitment to principle with a lust for power in equal measure has to be built on an understanding of the rise and fall of new Labour.
For the century before new Labour, the centre left put all its hopes in the basket of the bureaucratic state. The combination of economic Fordism and the elitist politics of Fabianism and parliamentary Leninism created a bureaucratic model of top-down state reform. For the 30 years between 1948 and 1978, the bureaucratic state ruled supreme. It died as society became more complex, decentralisation became popular and we witnessed a welcome end to the age of deference.
The failure of the state was the most important cause of the right-wing response, a market state which ruled for an equivalent 30-year period from 1978 until now.
Servants of the market
Historians will bracket new Labour with this era and with Thatcherism. That does not make it the same as neoliberalism. New Labour was a contradictory and limited response to the free-market forces unleashed during the 1980s. But its failure to make a decisive break with Thatcherism meant new Labour’s response to the crisis of the left and of the state was doomed, containing the seeds of its own destruction.
After four electoral defeats, new Labour inverted the principle of social democracy: Labour governments would no longer try to make society the master of the market; it would make society its servant. Social justice would become a product of economic efficiency. Globalisation would not be regulated in the interests of society but would be accommodated.
Unlike under Thatcherism, people would not be left totally alone in the face of open market competition. New Labour believed that, for Britain to compete effectively on the world stage, people had to be trained, educated and encouraged to become flexible and adaptable. So the state would be modernised. Labour would invest in people to help them become individually competitive.
Crucially, in the name of social justice, the private sector and market forces would be introduced into parts of the public sector Margaret Thatcher had not dreamed of.
As Lord Tebbit, of all people, said recently: “There are some things that just shouldn’t be privatised.” New Labour was better than Thatcherism, but not different in character.
The nature of the new Labour project was contradictory and it is vital that the positive aspects of its legacy be rescued. Its period of government cannot end up as 13 wasted years. There are three aspects of new Labour the centre left must hold on to: first, the will and ambition to modernise and win; second, the active use of the state to determine different social and economic outcomes (despite the now obvious limitations for motive and method); and, third, completion of the social liberalisation project started by Roy Jenkins in the 1960s.
But Labour’s next stage should not be a modified form of Blairism, unable to deal with such market failures as the credit crunch because it doesn’t have the belief, the will or the institutional mechanisms to do so.
For new Labour, the market must always come first. Lab our’s electoral strategy is similarly in tatters. Its foundation was the belief that voters had nowhere else to go if it pushed the Tories to more and more extreme positions. To which the answer from Glasgow East, Crewe and probably Glenrothes is “Oh yes we do”. A hugely destructive pincer movement is at work. A mixture of boredom, Iraq and illiberal policies such as 42-day detention has led to new Labour’s contract with the middle classes being broken. The working classes are tired of their interests being ignored. Both social groups breathe the same free-market air and want no more of it. David Cameron poses as a friend to all, but has no prescription for the security people are seeking.
New Labour has equally little to offer. It has only the policies of state Thatcherism, a declining rump of supporters and party members, a crisis in Scotland and no money to fight an election campaign. In fact, it is worse than that. An election defeat could leave Labour without a hated enemy (the role Thatcher played after 1979) to galvanise renewal. Cameronism is the heir to Blairism. Even now, the instincts of many new Labour ministers on welfare reform and housing pro vision are clearly to the right, paving the way, as George Osborne has said, for the Tories.
Important Labour policy successes are unlikely to survive Tory rule because they were never advocated on grounds of social morality, but presented as requirements of economic efficiency. The minimum wage will not be updated. Sure Start will be quietly bled dry. They were created by stealth and they will die by stealth.
Acting together
New Labour has run as far as it can up the down escalator of believing that economic efficiency delivers social justice. Free markets tend to inequality: the statistics now show a country more divided on class and mobility lines than the one Labour inherited from Thatcherism.
The starting point for centre-left renewal depends on determining what offers a radical and popular alternative to the market state: the ideas, organisations and vested interests that make the political weather to which leaders have to respond.
Here, there are grounds for optimism. People want security; Thatcherism gave it to them in the form of markets and individualism in the 1980s, just as Attlee did after 1945 with the welfare state. Today, there is no demand for a return to free-market fundamentalism. Even Eddie George, the former governor of the Bank of England, has criticised the effect of free markets. The issues we face today demand collective responses, from climate change to the housing market, from pensions and public transport to rocketing fuel prices.
There are two Rubicon issues for a post-new Labour Party. Globalisation has to be made to work in the interests of society, and democracy must be viewed as an end in itself. The two are linked; democracy is the form by which the management of markets is legitimised and constructed. The future of the centre left rests on the creation of the democratic state as the means by which people can take control of the world around them in ways that individual choices can never match.
A new policy agenda for the 21st century must centre on a democratic state capable of addressing market failure in ways that mix the desirable with the feasible. A windfall tax on the energy companies would be a quick start. It could be followed by taking the railways back into public but accountable ownership at no cost to the Treasury; a graduate solidarity tax to replace the market system of variable fees; a ban on advertising to children under the age of 12; abolition of tax for people earning less than £10,000 and the introduction of a new upper rate; the election of local health boards and the co-production of public services; the creation of a national well-being index; and proportional representation in the Commons, along with an elected second chamber.
Thatcher said people should stand on their own two feet. New Labour said it would help. But people cannot withstand the pressures of globalisation alone. We cannot go back to the bureaucratic state, but we do need ways of acting collectively.
The last time Labour was desperate not to lose power, it lurched to the right and grabbed Tony Blair as a saviour. The party could be in danger of repeating its mistake. A change of leader must mean a change of direction, towards a country that becomes more equal because it is more democratic.
Tony Blair said on 2 May 1997 that “we ran for office as new Labour, we will govern as new Labour”. The task now is to ensure that the party does not die as new Labour.
Neal Lawson is chair of Compass: http://www.compassonline.org.uk
Peace and Justice Post 
Afghan Peace Talks Widen US-UK Rift on War Policy
October 10, 2008Analysis by Gareth Porter | Inter-Press Service
WASHINGTON, Oct 9 – The beginning of political talks between the Afghan government and the Taliban revealed by press accounts this week is likely to deepen the rift that has just erupted in public between the United States and its British ally over the U.S. commitment to an escalation of the war in Afghanistan.
According to a French diplomatic cable that leaked to a French magazine last week, Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s government is looking for an exit strategy from Afghanistan rather than an endless war, and it sees a U.S. escalation of the war as an alternative to a political settlement rather than as supporting such an outcome.
The first meetings between the two sides were held in Saudi Arabia in the presence of Saudi King Abdullah Sep. 24 to 27, as reported by CNN’s Nic Robertson from London Tuesday. Eleven Taliban delegates, two Afghan government officials and a representative of independent former mujahideen commander Gulfadin Hekmatyar participated in the meetings, according to Robertson.
Brigadier Mark Carleton-Smith of the British command in Afghanistan enthusiastically welcomed such talks. He was quoted by The Sunday Times of London as saying, “We want to change the nature of the debate from one where disputes are settled through the barrel of the gun to one where it is done through negotiations.”
If the Taliban were prepared to talk about a political settlement, said Carleton-Smith, “that’s precisely the sort of the progress that concludes insurgencies like this.”
The George W. Bush administration, however, was evidently taken by surprise by news of the Afghan peace talks and was decidedly cool toward it. One U.S. official told The Washington Times that it was unclear that the meetings in Saudi Arabia presage government peace talks with the Taliban. The implication was that the administration would not welcome such talks.
A U.S. defence official in Afghanistan told the paper the Bush administration was “surprised” that it had not been informed about the meeting in advance by the Afghan government.
Defence Secretary Robert Gates, on his way to discuss Afghanistan with NATO defence ministers in Budapest, made it clear that the Bush administration supports talks only for the purposes of attracting individual leaders to leave the Taliban and join the government. “What is important is detaching those who are reconcilable and who are willing to be part of the future of the country from those who are irreconcilable,” he said.
Gates said he drew line at talks with the head of the Taliban, Mullah Mohammad Omar.
However, representatives of the Taliban leader are apparently involved in the talks, and President Hamid Karzai is committed to going well beyond the tactic of appealing to individual Taliban figures.
Afghan Defence Minister Abdul Rahim Wardak said in a news conference Oct. 4 that resolution of the conflict required a “political settlement with the Taliban”. He added that such a settlement would come only “after Taliban’s acceptance of the Afghan constitution and the peaceful rotation of power by democratic means.”
The Afghan talks come against the backdrop of a Bush administration decision to send 8,000 more U.S. troops to Afghanistan next year, and the expressed desire of the U.S. commander, Gen. David. D. McKiernan, for yet another 15,000 combat and support troops. Both Democratic candidate Barack Obama and Republican candidate John McCain have said they would increase U.S. troop strength in Afghanistan.
Obama has said he would send troops now scheduled to remain in Iraq until next summer to Afghanistan as an urgent priority, whereas McCain has not said when or how he would increase the troop level.
Such a U.S. troop increase is exactly what the British fear, however. The British ambassador in Afghanistan, Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles, was quoted in a diplomatic cable leaked to the French investigative magazine “Le Canard enchaine” last week as telling the French deputy ambassador that the U.S. presidential candidates “must be dissuaded from getting further bogged down in Afghanistan”.
In the French diplomatic report of the Sep. 2 conversation, Cowper-Coles is reported as saying that an increase in foreign troop strength in Afghanistan would only exacerbate the overall political problem in Afghanistan.
The report has the ambassador saying that such an increase “would identify us even more strongly as an occupation force and would multiply the targets” for the insurgents.
Cowper-Coles is quoted as saying foreign forces are the “lifeline” of the Afghan regime and that additional forces would “slow down and complicate a possible emergence from the crisis.”
In an obvious reference to the intention to rely on higher levels of military force, Cowper-Coles said U.S. strategy in Afghanistan “is destined to fail”.
Cowper-Coles is reported to have put much of the blame for the deterioration of the situation in Afghanistan on the Karzai government. “The security situation is getting worse,” the report quoted him as saying. “So is corruption, and the government had lost all trust.”
The report makes it clear that the British want to withdraw all their troops from Afghanistan within five to 10 years. Cowper-Coles is said to have suggested that the only way to do so is through the emergence of what he called an “acceptable dictator”.
The British foreign office has denied that the report reflected the policy of the government itself. Nevertheless, statements by Brigadier Carleton-Smith, the senior British commander in Afghanistan, last week, underlined the gulf between U.S. and British views on Afghanistan.
“We’re not going to win this war,” said Carleton-Smith, according to The Sunday Times of London Sep. 28. Carleton-Smith, commander of an air assault brigade who completed two tours in Afghanistan, suggested that foreign troops would and should leave Afghanistan without having defeated the insurgency. “We may leave with there still being a low but steady ebb of rural insurgency,” he said.
Like Cowper-Coles, Carleton-Smith suggested that the real problem for the coalition was not military but political. “This struggle is more down to the credibility of the Afghan Government,” he said, “than the threat from the Taliban.”
When Gordon Brown replaced Tony Blair as British prime minister in June 2007, British officials concluded that the Taliban was too deep-rooted to be defeated militarily, according to a report in The Guardian last October. The Brown government decided to pursue a strategy of courting “moderate” Taliban leaders and fighters who were believed to be motivated more by tribal obligation than jihadi ideology.
That idea was in line with U.S. strategy as well. Now, however, both Karzai and the British have moved beyond that to a policy of negotiating directly and officially with the Taliban. For the British it appears to be part of an exit strategy that is not shared by Washington.
Defence Secretary Gates responded to Carleton-Smith’s remarks Tuesday by reiterating the official U.S. view that additional forces are needed in Afghanistan and implying that the British’s officer’s views are “defeatist”. Gates said, “[T]here certainly is no reason to be defeatist or to underestimate the opportunity to be successful in the long run.”
*Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist specialising in U.S. national security policy. The paperback edition of his latest book, “Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam”, was published in 2006.
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Tags:Brigadier Mark Carleton-Smith, Bush administration, Gordon Brown, meeting in Saudi Arabia, Nick Robertson, political settlement, Robert Gates, talks between Afghan regime and Taliban, US policy and Britain
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