What should Labour moderates stand for? Empowerment!

Matthew Parris is an annoying man. There are some columnists, like Simon Jenkins, who are so consistently wrong that I feel safe knowing that if I never read another one word of theirs for the rest of my life I will be no less well-informed. Others, like Janan Ganesh, are so consistently right that my weekly appointment with their dose of wisdom may as well be a recurring window in my Outlook calendar.

Parris, on the other hand, is a yo-yo. One week’s blindingly bright blast of explosive intelligence can be followed just seven days later by the half-slurred ramblings of the 19th hole bore. So I never quite know whether to expend three or four minutes of my precious time on his thoughts.

Yesterday, however, I am glad I did. Like the very best columnists, Parris put into words the half-coherent thoughts many have been half-coherently thinking. In this case, the thinking is being done by Labour centrists.

Parris argues that the Party is not being killed by the morons of the left but by the minnows of the right. Every party has its share of “imposters with crazy convictions to peddle” but they only secure power when there is a vacuum on the centrist wing. Parris says:

Until the moderate majority of the Parliamentary Labour Party turn their anxious gaze inward upon themselves and their failure to find and express with simplicity and power what a 21st century centre-left party is for, they will encounter just as much resistance to electoral take-off as the Corbyinte version of Labour.

And quite rightly he points out that the real long-term threat to Labour comes not from the Corbynites who will at some point be ejected but from the “carefully drab crowd” led by Yvette Cooper and Andy Burnham who will replace them. They, he writes, will turn Labour into a political equivalent of the Church of England: “cautious, ideologically confused, going nowhere, never taking wing yet refusing to die”

The Beginnings of a New Centre Left Vision

Parris admits he has no idea what that new centre left vision should be. In this he is certainly not alone. One place to start, however, is in enumerating the things that vision should do.

• It must revitalise centrist socialism as a creed of passion and hope. The Party’s organisational vacuum may have been filled by the superannuated graduates of Grosvenor Square scuffles but the intellectual vacuum within the moderate camp itself has been filled by a worldly-wise and technocratic mind-set worthy of a decrepit Treasury mandarin rather than a Party seeking to inspire.
• It must engage the electorate by addressing mainstream values and concerns rather than ignoring the reality of voters’ views. This is, of course, the core belief that divides the sensibles from the deluded. It is the principle that might secure the Party a shot at power but, even more importantly, it is what makes the right of the Party far more true to the spirit of democracy than the socialism-or-death blowhards of the left.
• And finally, it must hold true to socialism’s historic goals of creating a freer and more equal world otherwise why bother.

This may seem like the political equivalent of Fermat’s Last Theorem but strangely the beginnings of a solution can be found by understanding the shift in popular values that has made socialism such a hard sell in recent decades.

The shift has been studied with enormous rigour over the last forty years by Ronald Inglehart through his capacious World Values Survey. His findings are simple to explain even if their implications are enormous. The primary goals of the majority of people’s lives for most of the twentieth century were materialistic. Most individuals sought financial security and what comes with it: a decent dwelling, enough to eat, peace of mind and, if possible, some luxury and entertainment.

However, as the economies of the western world grew rapidly in the second half of the twentieth century, populations came to expect and possess those material benefits their elders so valued as a matter of course. As a result, their perspective has shifted towards the ‘emancipatory’ or ‘post-materialist’. As the chart below shows, each new generation in ever greater numbers values self-determination, creative expression and individual rights and freedoms as their primary goals.

This shift goes a very long way towards explaining why socialism has become an increasingly minority taste since the 1980s. It is primarily concerned with addressing material hardship which means it fails to address post-materialist, emancipatory concerns sufficiently. Moreover, socialism is still attached to employing top down, bureaucratic techniques to address that material hardship. Such techniques no longer command the support of the ever larger numbers who seek self-determination and creative self-expression.

Seizing the Age of Empowerment

The very fact that many Labour moderates now see giving lugubrious local councils more power as some sort of panacea to their ideological woes is a sign of what bloodless, technocratic statists they have become. Instead, Labour should be seizing the historic shift towards emancipatory values with greater enthusiasm and vigour than any other party.

Millions demand influence, control, choice as never before and they are being given it by new technology and new business models. Elites in sector after sector are giving way to the empowered individual and where they don’t frustration and resentment follows. The centre left can break out of its dolour by relaunching Labour as a Party fit for this age placing greater power, choice and influence at the heart of every reform.

The monopoly of the Westminster elite could be blown away within one Parliament by giving constituents a direct say over how their MP votes. The bureaucrats and politicians who run public services could hand decision-making power over to users particularly the poorest and most vulnerable who are so often pushed to the back of the queue. Business oligopolies that disempower staff and customers and stifle the innovative businesses that should be challenging their dominance could be broken up.

And yes, the bureaucratic, tax-funded state might be necessarily smaller but this would be compensated for by new rules that require firms to pay well and share out the wealth they generate more fairly because ultimately empowerment without the resources to use that power is a fraud.

In this vision of an empowered population lies a passion and a hope for a freer, more equal world to that generated by the hard left. But it is one fired by the popular values of the 2010s not the 1950s. It starts with where people are rather than where the left wishes them to be. In short, it meets our three imperatives for a new vision.

Whether it is one that would endear Labour to Mr. Parris, I very much doubt. On his off days, Matthew is as dismissive of the empowered masses as it’s possible to be. But then, as we know, he is one of those columnists you only have to read half the time.

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