2012 as reverse 1975: further evidence

Shiraz Socialist think Jon Cruddas is hopeless and any new ideas Labour might have are futile.  Well, with the best of respect (and they deserve quite a bit, not least for being one of the few left blogs not to put opposition to "the West" in totality before the right of the Jewish people to a place of safety), they would.  They're theorists, so obsessed with ideological purity that they're above concern about people's actual lives.  The left equivalent, in some ways, of those on the right (and there were quite a lot of them, though very few would admit to it later) who thought neoliberals were already permanently defeated by 1975 so shouldn't even bother trying to seize power.  And this is where the key comparison steps in; as I've written previously, almost every aspect of current British politics is redolent of the mid-1970s, only with the right in the position the left were then, and vice versa.  Dominic Sandbrook's recent work has been well-timed in a manner he probably did not intend, and may well disapprove of.

Raised as my generation have been in an environment where capitalism has seemed unalterable, irreversible and unreformable, we cannot easily consider a time when, having recently made a stalled and overpowered attempt to assert itself over the dominant ideology of corporatism, it momentarily stood on the sidelines, humiliated, forced out of government almost overnight, genuinely seeming doomed in the eyes of quite rounded and educated people (it is incredible how little the Barber Boom / Slater-Walker Government period, so rapidly overthrown and so widely seen as ineffective and compromised, but in fact so crucial as a blueprint for what now had to be enforced much more aggressively and forcefully, is even talked about now, and I'll give Sandbrook his due for recognising its importance - I'd be surprised if 1% of the people who've heard The Dark Side of the Moon, which however codified and vague and globally-applicable its lyrics may be wouldn't exist without that context, know who those people and organisations were).

Hauntingly, a Welsh miner in the 1975 polemic The Miners' Film - repeated, with rueful introduction and epilogue, on Channel 4 during the strike a decade later - says, without irony or ambiguity, "we're gradually understanding now that the greatest power, the most important people, are the people that produce.  And I believe that 1974 was the turning point, when this power was realised for the first time".  At that point, few could see that it would be the turning point, but the turning point for a counter-revolution; not the moment where the working class began to take over, but the moment which unleashed and set free the neutering of that class's political power. There is, I'll confess, not a day - sometimes not a moment - when I don't imagine how different my life, and the norms I came to take for granted, might have been had the Tories won the February 1974 election (and they very nearly did) and the radicalisation of capitalism had not been given the platform to grow.  Might we have become a completely different country; no destruction of industry, no Murdoch empire, no commodification of politics?

But when the radicalisation of capitalism gained irresistible traction - despite having come about merely through an accident and a fluke of history, and despite being institutionalised after its early struggles in government through, as we've all been reminded this year, an even greater accident and fluke - it did so out of a sense of emergency, of absolute determination and now-or-never politics-of-apocalypse, out of a genuine and justified fear that if they didn't get back in next time, their whole world would have crumbled and could never be restored (when do you think you the phrase "late capitalism", which seemed a sick joke by the time I became familiar with it, was first used?  Why do you think, even though Roger Waters is so clearly a nihilistic cynic with little if any faith in the radical potential of humanity, Animals ends with the hint of genuine revolution?).  In Cruddas' Observer interview, the same feelings in reverse - a determination that this radicalisation of a three-decade consensus, by its creators now turned far more fundamentalist and fanatical than they could ever have been when the seeds were first planted, has to be reversed for everyone's sake and not just the sake of the class the party may be seen to represent (part of Thatcherism's genius - and it was a genius; hardly anyone else could have sold such ideas to the working class and won - was its ability to convey essentially pro-ruling-class politics as more democratic than those which had preceded them, to redefine the position of the working class as making Andy Gray rich rather than allowing Trevor Griffiths to exist) - can, fascinatingly, be sensed.

However tentatively, and however problematic some of the communitarian ideas may be in practice, Cruddas is hinting at the idea that what may be presented by the ruling class as "unalterable reality" may, in fact, be reformable by those with the will - in other words that it is time for the left to "think the unthinkable" as the right did then (and this is where many left blogs are, ultimately, as relevant to the lives of the people they claim to represent as those who felt neoliberals should remain in their academic fringe groups rather than push to "change the way a generation thinks about politics" were relevant to the capitalist class and its self-interest in 1975).  His talk of "the edge of a crisis" has not been heard in quite this way from thinkers in a recently defeated party, seen as lacking in vision and confidence and with a need to reinvent itself, since that time, when those with an interest in maintaining their own privileges blamed an economic implosion caused by global forces wholly outside Britain's control, even then, on the strength and power of the British working class, and interpreted any kind of working-class role in the institutions of the state as a harbinger of the collapse of the state itself.  The sense of time running out before neoliberalism becomes utterly irreversible - that the even flow of politics, with one ruling party seamlessly giving way to another and little really changing, has to be replaced with something more dramatic and fervent - is also redolent of the Tory radicals who emerged in the wake of Heath's humiliation; a desire to remake/remodel politics as an urgent battle, a fight to the finish that must be won by the side remaking itself in opposition, lest everything that side has ever fought for be destroyed irreversibly.

Cruddas' refreshing indifference to the power of the Daily Mail and its ilk is redolent of the mid-70s Tory radicals' lack of concern for the Daily Mirror, then still the most read and most important newspaper for the mass of the population and a key cipher in its relationship with the elite, a paper that - even with the fast-rising Sun nipping at its heels - it was still felt you did not mess with if you wanted the working class on your side.  And the fact that the elite ideology of the last 30 years was created in what seemed the least welcoming and receptive environment imaginable to capitalism reigniting itself and owning the near future - and indeed that of its two defining newspapers, The Sun in 1968 did not even exist in its current form and the Mail was on the racks, facing a seemingly insoluble identity crisis and inability to find a niche for itself - should remind us of an important fact; that what seem like unalterable, unchangeable ideologies only become so because a few people think the unthinkable against all the odds and against both subservience to the elite ideology on the side that created it and "you can't change anything now" cynicism on the side that didn't.  This is so both for the current ruling ideology and for the ruling ideology that came before, the one that radicals of both sides were tearing at by 1974.

This is the sick joke behind those who say that rejecting neoliberal capitalism now would be like rejecting breathing or eating, that it is an unchangeable reality on a par with air or water.  It only became so because a few people believed that the world didn't have to work like that.  If it can happen once, it can happen again.  This is the main lesson we can learn from the 1970s; that predictions that a change is "unworkable" and "impractical" may well be viewed by history as, quite simply, wrong.  And just as the knowledge that in the 1930s most of the ideas written into the British state after the war would have been seen as hopelessly romantic and deluded probably convinced many Institute of Economic Affairs ideologues that there was mileage in practical politics for them after 1974, it is this which keeps me away from the anti-political cynicism of the far-left, however accurate some of their other analyses may be.

Of course, I'm acutely aware that I could have got all this wrong. Perhaps, out of sheer desperation and desire to escape from the world that made me and which I rejected as assuredly as the makers of modern Britain rejected the corporatist world they had been brought up to see as unchangeable, I am seeing things where they don't exist. But it does seem as though, just as the radicalism of a minority Labour government convinced a previously marginalised and embattled right that the platform was there for the unthinkable to be thought and the future redefined, so has the radicalism of a government without a mandate, which was formed out of almost nothing and which speaks for nobody except the privileged, opened the door for ideas which it seemed might never have a place in the Labour Party again.

Had the right confined itself to theoretical writings and Peterhouse debating societies, Britain might well have become permanently socialist; that alone should convince far-leftists who see practical politics as beneath them that for those of us who care about any kind of social justice and equality, this is an emergency, a time when normal rules of politesse cease to apply, every bit as much as it was for those of the other side in the mid-1970s.  Just as was the case then, there is a straight choice of outcome for the next general election (the Lib Dems' involvement in the coalition has effectively ended the century-old centre-left divide and, surely, pushed much of their support towards Labour): either the paradigm shift that history teaches us should happen every 35 years or so, or the inverse of the ending that to many seemed most likely in the mid-70s, neoliberalism's long march through the institutions being completed beyond repair.

Last time, they won, and successfully changed the ending from the one widely seen as inevitable to the one that created the only world I've ever lived in.  This time - however much it would compromise some people's self-regard - we need to make sure that we win, and change the ending to our advantage.  They only won because every last one of them joined in.  If we realise that, then 2015 could well be remembered as the next in the lineage of 1945 and 1979.  Anti-political cynics should not complain if Cameron leaves office, never seriously challenged, in about 2021.  They will have got precisely what they deserve.  Amid that 70s tumult, Roy Harper correctly wrote that the victor writes the books but the loser speaks the lines. But in moments of crisis and uncertainty - such as we have now entered again - losers have the chance, which comes along perhaps only three times in a normal human lifetime, to become victors off their own back, a chance that simply is not open to them in normal times of complacency and certainty.  This is such a moment.  Even if "reformism" seems narrow and restrictive, we must remember that the initial ideas of the Centre for Policy Studies, which were to revolutionise much of the world, initially seemed merely the Tory equivalent of reformism.  The door is open.  To help our enemies to close it in the name of our own sectarianism and purity would be the most dangerous decision of anyone's lifetime, one for which our grandchildren will hate us.  The time simply isn't there.  Critique and question Cruddas' ideas by all accounts; there are certainly plenty of holes there.  But don't, whatever you do, ignore them.

2010/11 = 1974/5 in reverse?

In March 1974, a minority government came to power following a hung parliament, which despite its questionable remit proudly and unashamedly attempted to push the consensus of the previous three decades measurably further than anyone had taken it before. A sense of triumph and pre-revolutionary fervour among the working class, and an equal sense of paranoia and pre-revolutionary fear among the ruling class, spread through the country. For a brief while, the Tories seemed utterly out-thought and outflanked, and something close to a workers' state seemed tantalisingly near, really far more so than in 1945 when the working class had been far more conservative and had far more faith in the quasi-feudal institutions (it is one of the great tragedies of British television that the changing climate in television drama and political pressures on the BBC ensured that Trevor Griffiths' Country, set on that first post-war election night, remained a one-off rather than the start of a sequence of plays, running up to that 1974 moment, as initially planned).

But that Labour government had a fatal fault; it didn't have enough broad-ranging public support for its remarkably radical agenda (whereas in 1945 it very definitely had). It wanted to take the populace in a direction not enough of it wanted to go, and thus opened the door for another kind of radicalism. Even though Labour later shifted to a more consensual position under Jim Callaghan (who, intriguingly, recently won Peter Hitchens' seal of approval, and would surely be considered underrated, with both his proto-SDP and hard-left opponents seen as overrated, by the Blue Labour tendency) the semi-revolutionary circumstances in which it had come to power and the electoral fragility of its remit did for it - and, by extension, for an entire set of assumed norms of the organisation of the economy and society.

The similarity of the mid-1970s situation to the present one seems intriguing, at least from the perspective of those who believe that electoral politics - despite its profoundly, inherently flawed form with which an early heatwave, a royal wedding and a late Easter may have ensured we are now stuck for the rest of our lives - have to be worked with if significant change is to be effected. Once again, a hung parliament has given us a government with an unequivocally radical agenda, taking the consensus of the previous three decades considerably further than anyone has previously dared. Once again, we have the logical conclusion of what would have happened had those who had built a three-decade consensus abandoned all residual halfway houses with the previous assumed norms. And once again, it is happening at precisely the moment when significant numbers of people, who would not previously have questioned it, are wondering if that consensus, and the people it has empowered, have been good for the country.

The economic crisis that began in 2008 is now emerging as to the post-1979 consensus what the industrial strife of 1972-4 was to its post-1945 equivalent - the moment when much of the population began to question what it thought it knew unequivocally and forever. And just as those circumstances, which were the direct reason why it was in power at all, made things far more difficult for the Labour government of 1974 than they would otherwise have been, so are the present circumstances, and the way they are similarly encouraging many to cut loose from their fixed economic and political moorings, creating hostility to the current government among people who would once have supported it unquestioningly. Even in Thatcher's darkest hours in the very early 1980s, there was a broad public consensus (at least outside the heavy-industrial areas) that industrial relations had to be reformed - a view that was already developing across much of society by the mid-1970s. Today, the closest thing to a broad public consensus is that banking and the financial service industries need to be reformed - and this is as profound a problem for the current government as dissatisfaction with union abuses was in 1974/5.

This is where Ed Miliband has much of the public - indeed, much of the public that would never previously have accepted his views or thought they were necessary - on his side in a manner remarkably akin to the way Margaret Thatcher, right at the start of her Tory leadership, was already, quite unexpectedly, winning over some who had voted Labour with pride and the desire to create a new society in 1945, and who had broadly stuck by them for the subsequent quarter-century. I do not want to over-emphasise my hopes for the current Labour Party. There is a long way to go in the party's rebuilding, a long way to go before I can believe unequivocally that an Ed Miliband government would be what can only be vaguely imagined now. But at least the germ of questioning and change is there in a place where it seemed it might never be again.

Could it be, perhaps, that the current government will be viewed by history very much as the Labour government of the mid-1970s is viewed today - as an extreme assertion of a set of ideas on the economy and society just before they were decisively challenged and overturned - and Ed Miliband's conference speech will be viewed as Thatcher's early speeches are, as a statement that was widely mocked and viewed as marginal and unworkable when it was made, but eventually stands out as the beginning of a fundamental change?

The New Left did not cause the riots

Neil Clark's analysis of the socio-political causes of the riots is typically simplistic and kneejerk. While I agree wholeheartedly where Thatcherism is concerned, I sympathise with the argument that much of it was merely acquisition and not legitimate, thought-out political protest, and I abhor those who think there is something Left-wing about defending McDonald's or market-led film distribution simply because David Starkey or Peter Hitchens don't like them, he is on profoundly shaky ground when he starts playing the Mail/Telegraph card and suggesting some kind of almost mystical, spiritual link between the intellectual-Left's rejection, during the 1960s and 1970s, of the old hierarchical structures of what was considered to be of worth and value, and the elite corruption and social alienation and dislocation - the institutionalised social divisions and poverty - which reached their horrible, inevitable final manifestation this week.

As in much of his previous work, he greatly romanticises the social position of the working class in the Macmillan era, which teaches us the significant lesson that full employment, and free Oxbridge education for a lucky few, is not enough in itself; not if the elite wants to trap the working class within an ordained, fixed culture which was simply no longer enough for their aspirations and desires; not if the majority are given an education only slightly more advanced and challenging than they had had in the pre-war world; not if the state is on the side of those who would freeze them out of their communities for having sexual or emotional desires which, for some, are natural and unavoidable. If that social order was so wonderful, why did millions of working-class people - most of whom had little or nothing to do with the New Left as an intellectual movement, and would barely have recognised such a concept - embrace R&B and rock so enthusiastically? That alone shows that there was dissatisfaction with the certainties Clark longs for - but which he was not alive to experience himself - far beyond the theorems of intellectuals (whom he almost dehumanises in an unsettlingly tabloid way). No matter that these forms have become the establishment culture for the present neoliberal elite; in their day, they were genuine forces for liberation, and the working class could not have lived in "the cultural 1930s with better pay and better job security" (pretty much the 1951-64 government's safety-valve plan; certainly, that seemed a much less quasi-socialist era at the time than it does to retrospective popular historians) forever.

If taken to its logical conclusion, Clark's argument - as would be expected of someone whose idea of a collective, mutual, socialist statement within pop is JJ Barrie's "No Charge" - is that any kind of invention, innovation, challenge or argument within popular culture is in itself a neoliberal, anti-socialist act. Quite apart from also suggesting an apologist (as Clark also is) for the autocratic abuses of power enacted in the name of "socialism" in the former Eastern Bloc, it reveals a cretinous failure to distinguish between the multiple forms within pop - between true, multi-layered, expression of an oppressed class which involves a solidarity with all those struggling throughout the world, and the mere indulgence of the ruling class and its playthings. Clark is wilfully ignoring the difference between Justin Bieber or The Wanted, and the sort of passive, one-way fandom they encourage and are defined by, and the active involvement of - and here I'm confining myself to those who are part of mass pop, and thus a problem for those (whether of Left or Right) who hold autocratic views on culture - Katy B, Chase & Status, Nero, even Tinie Tempah (those who think, pace "Till I'm Gone", that he's automatically selling out if he shakes Prince Harry's hand should consider that there are just as many people who think Prince Harry's selling out if he shakes Tinie Tempah's hand; Peter Hitchens, for whom Clark has expressed admiration in the past, is very clearly among them).

As is an inevitable, inherent condition of Daily Mail Socialism, Clark is lumping elite safety valves and messengers with a form of - however confused, however compromised - genuine expression of an oppressed class's feelings. He is suggesting that the working class have a perfect, ordained role in society, as long as they do not actively challenge the ruling class's preferred forms of expression. How can such a quasi-feudal method of social organisation provide any kind of answer to the urgent social questions asked by the riots, when it failed the test of post-war mass education half a century ago? Clark, who has expressed kneejerk tabloid anti-hip-hop prejudice on previous occasions, is coming dangerously close to siding with David Starkey's grotesque Newsnight comments, where the adoption of black pop (which, as Tupac definitively said, was given this world; it didn't make it) by the mass of the working class is seen as a bigger cause of the riots than decades of institutionalised quasi-apartheid. He detracts from the accuracy of his own attacks on Thatcherism by bringing a wholly understandable desire to break from the narrowness of the other long period of post-war Tory rule into his argument.

As an Old Left partisan - someone who cannot accept, however firm and unquestionable the evidence may be, that his "side" ever abused its power and caused long-term damage to Britain - Clark blames Thatcherism purely on the New Left because he cannot face the truth; that the organised Old Left, as manifested in the trade union movement, created the platform for the Thatcherite reaction by misusing their considerable privileges during the early 1970s, and effectively intimidating Labour into power at a time when they simply weren't ready. The resultant social context - where the Old Left (vast numbers of whom posed, as Enoch Powell correctly stated when defending his fatal intervention in the February 1974 election, no threat whatsoever to his own belief in racial and cultural hierarchies) had left a moderate Tory leadership looking weak, ineffectual and out-thought/fought on every front - has infinitely more to do with the Thatcherite takeover of the Tory party than any amount of academic radicalism and relativism could ever have done. To suggest that Thatcherism did not gain strength and pick up popular support - especially from what used to be called the upper working class, who were its greatest electoral foundation stone - as a result of Old Left belief that they owned Britain (and were as determined to keep out those who were facing great working-class struggles in other parts of the world comparable to those in Britain in the 1930s, or the liberation musics of working-class movements worldwide, as "scabs" or "blacklegs" from their own movement), and never needed to compromise on any issue, is as deluded as it would be to suggest that the desire of millions of servicemen in the 1940s to vote Labour once the war had been won had nothing to do with the entrenched attitudes of the officer class and military establishment.

It is perfectly true that New Labour combined elements of New Left cultural thinking and Thatcherite economics, but to suggest that because this happened in the 1990s there must have been some inherent, organic connection between the two ideologies from the start, is a form of historical retcon - one of many tendencies in Clark's writing that serious historians (among whom Clark is not numbered) would never indulge in. The Thatcherite movement had little, at heart, to do with culture, certainly much less than the Blairite movement did; the increased dominance of pop culture (through media deregulation) and decline in the assumed hierarchical position of high culture (through the reduction in school funding for concert and museum visits, etc.) which have come to be regarded as among its key legacies were merely incidental aftereffects, not central policies. It was purely and simply about crushing British socialism and marginalising those within the Tory party who were seen as having appeased it, not about spreading within the Tory party the ideologies associated with the then-new universities and polytechnics. Keith Joseph, in 1975, would have had no more time for those views than Norman St John Stevas would have.

Clark would no doubt assume that Thatcher's deregulation of British broadcasting increased the amount of airtime given to the ideologies and values of his hated New Left, which of course would show how little he knows about modern British history; the old structure, which he praises only for its heritage dramas and Perry & Croft sitcoms (loved in vast numbers by GB75-ers in the actual 1970s, as opposed to the xerox of the era he half-remembers from childhood), also allowed New Leftists to reach the largest possible audience through radical drama and documentary. The Broadcasting Act of 1990 was intended specifically to marginalise and freeze out to the point of oblivion this New Left influence, not to get rid of "hearty family entertainment". Dad's Army and Upstairs, Downstairs are still endlessly revived; Days of Hope and The Price of Coal are only now being made available commercially, and BBC Four rarely represents that era as it did when many/most people couldn't yet receive it. Clark's belief in cross-class politics - which would be perversely touching were it not so dangerous - means that even when he praises something that was fundamentally good, he does so for all the wrong reasons.

There are multiple reasons and multiple causes for the riots, which do indeed reveal a profound corruption and desolation throughout vast swathes of British society (which is why Clark's simplistic, wrong-headed "blame every single aspect of the modern world" rhetoric is a million times more enraging than someone blithely insisting that nothing is wrong at all). It should be obvious that every single suggestion Cameron has made will, if anything, make things even worse, will merely increase social exclusion, thus alienation, thus despair, thus the platform for something like this to happen over and over again. But Clark would, in all likelihood, agree with Cameron that Facebook, Twitter and BlackBerry Messenger are somehow "to blame" - (literally) shoot the messenger, shoot the messenger, shoot the messenger, you might as well have blamed 2Tone and the existence of the 7-inch single 30 years ago - and that is where I differ as profoundly from him as from Cameron himself. Institutionalised nostalgia and anti-modernism will get us no further than Cameron's headline-chasing short-termism. Only a more profound change will get us anywhere - but the society that change would lead to would have to be at least as different from the society of 1961 as from the society of 2011. Anything else is institutionalised lying and delusion, as much so as any of the political ideologies and institutional inequalities and unfairnesses which led to the riots.

Daily Mail Socialism is no more a way out than Cameron's straight-down-the-line Mailism. It is important to remember that, at this low point of British life and society, and to regard Clark's rhetoric as merely the flipside of Cameron's papering-over-the-cracks populism, rather than any kind of answer. For that, we will have to look far beyond. To, indeed, a reinvented and re-radicalised - and de-Blairised - version of the New Left. For all that movement's eventual faults, a belief in the liberating power of oppressed classes expressing themselves through mass culture, and in the global unity of the proletariat, is far more likely to offer some kind of way out - of the nihilism and desperation and disenfranchisement which was so horribly manifested this week - than magic wand politics and semi-feudalism. Ed Miliband should listen, carefully.