'Conservative in Feeling and Radical in Politics': In Defence of 'Blue Labour'

The critic Isaac Rosenfeld once remarked that George Orwell was a “radical in politics and a conservative in feeling”, a phrase that I like to steal for myself. However, to describe anyone thus is complete anathema to many of my comrades on the knee-jerk Left. To them, invoking the term ‘conservative’ in any sense is completely verboten. You are, in the lazy world of political labelling, either conservative, i.e. an evil baby-eating monster, or ‘progressive’, which ends up being a kind of watered-down euphemism for (mildly) ‘left-wing’. These terms are seen as being, by definition, polar opposites. Indeed, with the decline of the term ‘liberal’, these two terms are increasingly used to define the central dividing line of politics in the United States, and such a tendency is also discernible in British politics, where Labour politicians too squeamish to use the word ‘socialist’ describe themselves, rather pathetically in my view, as ‘progressives’.

Progress, however, is not central, in my view, to the point of socialist politics. Of course, it is true that historically elements of the Left have attempted to present themselves as the motor of human progress, of technological , scientific and economic advance. Marx claimed that a socialist society would be more efficient than capitalism, since capitalist relations of production fetter the development of productive forces, in stark contrast to the dynamism released by a system in which “the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all”. Many scientists were attracted to Communism in the 1920s and 1930s because they saw state planning and the elimination of the ‘anarchy’ of capitalist production as the rational guarantor of objective human progress. These delusions reached perhaps their final expression in the Soviet Union of the late 1950s and early 1960s, when, in a fit of optimism prompted by the accession of Khrushchev and the apparent economic successes of communism, the Soviet Communist party proclaimed that they would reach ‘communism by 1980’, by which point the Soviet system would finally defeat capitalism by proving how much more efficient, technologically advanced and wealthy it could make human society. The point of Khrushchev’s optimism was not just that Soviet-style socialism was fairer than capitalism, but that it could maximise objective measures of human value, such as wealth or scientific knowledge, more successfully than capitalism.

Of course, this has been shown to be so much verbiage and delusional claptrap. Which kind of social organisation has delivered greatest objective ‘progress’, in the sense of the greatest amount of wealth, technological advance, scientific research, and consumer goods is debatable. The obvious answer is liberal US-style capitalism, but the statist capitalism of many Asian countries or the social-democratic mixed economies of Europe also have a claim to this label. We can, however, say with some certainty that Soviet-style centralised state planning was not, in these narrow terms (and more generally), very successful relative to various models of capitalism.

The point, however, is that the ‘progress’ attendant on capitalist development has not necessarily given rise to more humane, civilised or decent societies. The maximisation of human wealth and utility under capitalism has not been an unalloyed good, for several reasons.

The obvious problem is that the highly unequal distribution of wealth and power that capitalism, particularly Anglo-Saxon neoliberal style capitalism, tends to create has meant that many of the objective benefits of ‘progress’ have not been equally shared out, both in class terms and geographically, and have actually been created via a process of exploitation and economic coercion that is deeply unjust. Capitalism, and especially neoliberal capitalism, perpetuates social injustice and prioritises the needs and desires of shareholders, corporations and the wealthy over the common good and the social rights of the majority, a process exacerbated by globalisation, which intensifies competition and leads to a race to the bottom in terms of welfare standards, labour rights and wages. This is a simplification of the arguments, and the general leftist critique of neoliberalism in these terms is well-known, and hardly needs elaboration here. However, it is a critique that I broadly support. Devising alternatives is trickier, but it seems likely that the most plausible and pragmatic solutions will be based, to some degree, around old-fashioned social democratic principles such as state regulation, collective provision of social goods, a redistributive welfare state, organised labour movements and progressive taxation, adapted to individual cultures and political realities.

However, as a critique of capitalism this is necessary, but not sufficient. What the Left also requires is an appreciation of the limits of ‘progress’ in terms of the mere maximization of simple utilitarian value. It needs to inoculate itself against the philistine disregard for the intrinsic value of the particular, the traditional, and the ‘given’ that is evident both on the Thatcherite economic right and the bureaucratised and distant Left. The Left, in short, needs to marry its concern for egalitarian and justice with a conservative, even ‘romantic’ appreciation of the needs of ordinary human beings for identity and stability; the perspective that can appreciate the value that humans attribute to institutions, places, and social arrangements in terms that go beyond the mere coldly calculating and instrumental.

In order to understand what I mean, it is perhaps best to consider the basic nature of capitalism. Capitalism is, as Marx rightly pointed out, a ruthlessly unsentimental, even revolutionary force. The forces of competition and the unregulated market are no respecters of persons, traditions or institutions. The following quotation from Marx sums this up perfectly:

“Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real condition of life and his relations with his kind.”

Under an unregulated capitalist system, objective calculations of such phenomena as profitability, market price, the costs of production and so on are the ultimate determinants of social organisation and social change. Furthermore, as Polanyi was to point out in his work The Great Transformation, places, environments and people are commodified. Human beings are effectively bought and sold on the labour market. Natural resources become raw materials to be traded on the market place. Institutions will only survive so long as they adapt to the rules of the market with its competitive pressures on price and quality.

It doesn’t take a genius to work out that the overall effect of this is deeply destabilising, and not in any way ‘conservative’. This is what makes many modern Conservatives such bafflingly contradictory figures. Tory MPs from the shires droning on about how the villages in their constituencies have lost their corner shops, or their local pubs or whatever is wearyingly familiar. Strangely, however, the same Tory MP is likely to support Thatcherite economic policies that deregulate markets, unleash competitive pressures, and ultimately allow massive capitalist corporations, who enjoy economies of scale and massive economic power, to destroy small businesses and enterprises. Like, for example, corner shops or local pubs.

Likewise, we can see the destabilising and dehumanising implications of neoliberal capitalism in terms of its effects on human beings. The assumption that human beings are commodities whose labour power can be traded in a market is ultimately based upon a false view of human nature. Humans have their own dynamic that is incompatible with being treated as a mere commodity. Adjustments in the labour market are not mere movements in the demand, supply and therefore the price of an object. They affect the job security, living standards, reasonable human expectations, local connections, mental health, pride, and self-respect of real, flesh-and-bone human beings. Likewise, treating land and the environment as a commodity ignores the impact that the dynamics of the creative destruction of markets has upon the landscapes that we enjoy and ecosystem that we rely on, both of which have an inherent value not easily reduced to the cost-benefit analyses of the bean-counters of late capitalism. As Polanyi argued, land, labour and money are not really commodities. Capitalism depends upon the fiction that they are in order to function, but it will always remain just that: a fiction, which contends against the reality of the inherent nature and particular values of human beings and Mother Nature ultimately in vain.

The root cause of the problem is that the market is incapable of appreciating the particular value embodied in human life, in social institutions and in the environment. By ‘particular value’ I mean inherent value that is difficult or impossible to translate into universal or general terms or a ‘common currency’. I mean the value that inheres in existing institutions or practices for particular people, things that are given, that provoke emotional ties and are not necessarily explicable in utilitarian terms. It arises from the simple fact that most or many human beings have a desire to, in the words of G.A. Cohen “conserve the valuable at the expense of maximizing value” because of their need for stability and identity.

For example, consider an elderly man whose house lies on the route of a new proposed motorway. He has lived in this house for 50 years. His children were born and grew up in it. He lived in it with his wife for many happy years. He is used to it, and likes it just the way it is. It evokes a whole series of memories for him, an intricate network of the associations of a lifetime. The motorway developer, desperate to demolish the house, offers the old man a huge payout to quietly move and let the bulldozers move in. The old man could buy a far bigger, far more expensive and, objectively speaking, far nicer house with the massive sum of money offered. However, he doesn’t want to, because, for all the advantages of having a bigger living room and a built-in dishwasher, it just isn’t the same. The house is a part of his identity, and no amount of money can destroy the personal bond and attachment he has to that house.

Is such a man irrational? I would say not. The idea that he is irrational springs from the mistaken idea that all human value can be reduced to some universal calculus, separate from the individuality and particularity inherent in human nature. As G.A. Cohen puts it, “it is an error to think that being rational about value requires the sort of abstract accounting of it that denies the value of particular things as such”. We can all find traces of the old man's conservative outlook in our own perspective. My own emotional attachments and particularities - to the Labour Party, to old school friends, to the house I used to live in Chelmsford, to my old school, to the films of Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn, to many of my old books, to Scunthorpe United, to the Railway Tavern (a pub in Chelmsford) and to my old teddy bear - many of them are scarcely comprehensible in any utilitarian or calculating terms, but still incalculably valuable to me.

However, as Cohen also points out, the problem is not just the economic forces of the market, which, in their attempt to reduce all human value to the universal, objective measures of profit and loss ignore the particularities and eccentricities of human value that make life bearable. The pragmatic dictates of state planning are equally problematic. If someone argues that a row of trees, to take a completely arbitrary example, ought to be conserved because of the particular and historic value that they have for local residents, then this argument is likely to cut little ice for council planners next to considerations of function or pleasing the majority. As Cohen puts it, planners will “usually... prefer a general consideration, something that the thing does well, or even the general consideration that a majority want it kept there – which is not, of course, the reason for keeping it there that the members of that majority themselves have.”

Now, the idea of prioritising the conservation of institutions, relationships, objects, environments or practices that have built up personal, customary or emotional values for human beings over ‘progressive’ or ‘objective’ measurements of utility is obviously open to question.

It can be pointed out that many such institutions and relationships may embody injustice or exploitation. Conservatives have used such a defence in order to justify continuing the worst kinds of cruel or unjust social phenomena. For example, Edmund Burke tried to defend the worst abuses of feudalism and the French ancien regime in a similar way, contrasting the supposedly intrinsically valuable trappings of the “age of chivalry” with “that of sophisters, economists, and calculators”. Just because the impersonal relations of the market might have their drawbacks, surely it is better than the partial, arbitrary and deeply hierarchical system that proceeded it?

This argument has some validity, but does not answer the central point, for the simple reason that the ‘conservative’ viewpoint I am defending aims to conserve social relationships and systems that have customary and particular value and as Cohen puts it, “wanting to conserve what has value implies no tenderness towards exploitation and injustice, since they lack value”. Even where unjust things do contain some inherent value, one can maintain a viewpoint that is conservative and simultaneously socialist by prioritising social justice where the conservative and egalitarian points contradict, while bearing in mind that in many cases they will not, and prioritising the conservation of the particular and the customary over the maximisation of utility will actually often tend to coincide with egalitarian aims. For example, protecting small local businesses against the competitive pressures of multinational firms or promoting the co-operative fan ownership of football clubs as an alternative to commercialisation and the depredations of the Abramovichs of this world are cases where the conservative attitude meshes nicely with the egalitarian.

All of this brings me, rather belatedly, onto ‘Blue Labour’, the much talked-about new trend of thinking within the Labour Party championed by Maurice Glasman.

‘Blue Labour’ has attracted a lot of criticism. Some are alarmed about its ‘social conservatism’, others about its economic prescriptions. Let me consider how what I have already said reflects the thinking of ‘Blue Labour’, and answer some of these criticisms of it.

Firstly, the ‘social conservatism’ of Blue Labour closely ties in to the idea of ‘particular value’. Some, faced with the term ‘social conservatism’, have panicked, imagining that this must instantly mean being a homophobe or a racist. What I understand Glasman to understand by it, however, is actually close to Cohen’s ideas about the validity of human beings valuing the customary and the particular in order to give them a sense of security and identity. It is a ‘social conservatism’ that embodies itself in fans of a local football team opposing being taken over by a billionaire investor who will not respect the club’s traditions or ethos. It is a ‘social conservatism’ that manifests itself when people oppose massive, soulless breweries taking over local pubs and turning them into homogenised, bland nonentities that serve a poor selection of badly-kept ale, or closing them down altogether. It is ‘social conservatism’ in the sense of conserving the local, the peculiar and the traditional in the face of the dictates of the market and large corporations. It implies a great deal more economic interventionism than New Labour ever advocated.

It is true that some of the socially conservative attitudes of ordinary people are not so honourable. Some people might think that intrinsic value inheres in being anti-immigrant or homophobic. Glasman and ‘Blue Labour’ are not advocating the validity of such a stance. They are arguing that we should take seriously the desire of ordinary people to have their sense of identity and desire for stability and social security valued over the imperatives of the market, instead of just dismissing these concerns as being ‘backwards’ or primitive, or unrealistic in an age of global neoliberalism. In many cases, this desire overlaps with views that are perfectly understandable and compatible with liberal stances on race or homosexuality. ‘Blue Labour’ advocates stressing these cases, and, as such, focussing on the areas where ordinary working-class people have completely valid concerns about the impact that neoliberal capitalism has on their security, identity and livelihoods. Furthermore, their valid attachments in terms of their local area, their religion or their families, which are natural and understandable, should not be looked down upon by snobby, ‘superior’ liberal-left types, but seen as valuable and compatible with a scepticism about markets and the effects of globalisation that should be central to the Labour Party’s egalitarianism. In some cases unattractive social attitudes may continue to exist, but if the Labour Party focuses on the valid social and economic concerns of working people rather than obsessing about identity politics in a way that is seen by many of them as irrelevant or low priority, then a trade off can be secured – we can win back working class support by taking their concerns about security and identity seriously and endorsing their conservatism when it is just, while in turn they will tolerate the Labour Party’s socially liberal views on many issues.

I know that some have argued that the general attitude of social conservatism, even defined in this sense, is wrong. They argue that it embodies a backward-looking and somewhat myopically nostalgic attachment to things past, when actually the reality is that we could be maximising the value that can be obtained from new institutions, relationships and practices. However, I think this is to completely ignore the reality of how most people, myself included, think and feel. Most people crave continuity, identity and security, and feel a sense of loss when familiar attachments or bonds are destroyed that can never fully be compensated for by the future. No-one can really escape this conservative mentality to some degree. The vast majority of human beings feel a sense of tragic and irreversible loss when, for example, their mother dies that can hardly be compensated for by the thought that you might meet someone else who is as nice tomorrow. Indeed, the family attachment is ‘irrational’ in a sense – looking at it in purely objective and impersonal terms, family bonds are arbitrary and there is no reason why one should have anything in common with one’s father or mother, or value their lives over anyone else’s. Hence Godwin’s famous argument that if you had to choose who to save in a burning house out of your own mother or Fenelon, you should choose the latter, because he has the potential to benefit the whole of society more. However, this attitude is so remote from how most people perceive the world as to make for a wholly unrealistic and emotionally shallow politics. Every ultra-rational utilitarian might deny the value of customary, arbitrary and traditional relationships and attachments in their arguments, but every action and sentiment of their lives belies such an attitude. Even William Godwin loved his mum, and I suspect that if he’d actually had a choice regarding whether to save her life or that of an Archbishop he didn’t know, his decision would not have been entirely consistent with the argument of An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice.

A few extremely confused commentators have suggested that Blue Labour is a cover for a kind of re-heated neoliberalism. Billy Bragg wrote a spectacularly ignorant and ill-informed piece accusing Glasman of pursuing an ‘economically liberal agenda’ in the Guardian recently. Bragg has been losing the plot for some time, as his hilariously naive endorsement of the Lib Dems, not to mention his touching, if completely misguided, faith in the power of electoral reform to re-energise the left has shown. Indeed, Maurice Glasman has ably answered Bragg’s risible argument himself. Nonetheless, I think the economic radicalism of Glasman’s arguments needs emphasising. Glasman is seriously arguing against the dominant neoliberal assumptions of the last 30 years. He stands completely against the tendency of capital to reduce human beings to mere chattel to be bought and sold in labour markets, against the tendency to reduce land and resources to mere private investments, the return on which is to be maximised quite heedless of the social cost. He stands for defending and protecting the intrinsic, unmarketised human value of lives lived unharried by the logic and power of capital. His agenda seems to me to be trenchantly against privatisation and in favour of a considerable re-regulation of capital flows.

I think the source of the deeply puzzling attempts to pigeon-hole ‘Blue Labour’ as a cover for an anti-state or neoliberal agenda is the fact that Glasman is sceptical about the role of the post-1945 bureaucratic state in creating the kind of egalitarian society we socialists yearn for. He points to Labour’s pre-1945 traditions of mutualism, reciprocity and solidarity separate from the state, embodied in radically democratic organisations designed to challenge the domination of capital – co-operatives, trade unions, credit unions and so on. He points to these as an antidote to the excessively elitist and managerial style of elements of the social democratic state. I think the point that he is making here is similar to the critique made by Cohen of central or state planning, in the sense that it tends to be quite insensitive to local, customary and ‘particular’ assessments of value, and tends to make people into passive recipients of state aid, rather than citizens ready to collectively muck in to build the New Jerusalem together.

I would make two points here, one supportive and one marked by a note of caution. Firstly, heresy as it is for me to argue this, Glasman is right to a large extent. The 1945 government did many excellent things and was a great reforming government. However, its approach was undoubtedly too top-down, distant and statist. Its nationalisations, for example, didn’t really contribute much towards socialist aims. Private industries were merely transferred to an unresponsive and arrogant bureaucratic elite, as remote from the concerns of its workers and those who used its goods and services as the old private managers. Many noticed little difference between the old privatised industries and the new nationalised state companies. A genuine way to transfer power to working-class people would have been to have made such companies into co-operatives, responsive to the needs and values of the community at large and their workers, rather than run by the state in the interests of a small unaccountable elite. Democratic self-organisation is more vital, accountable and effective in many cases than top-down statism.

However, the state is, this point notwithstanding, still a great force for good. Making capital and economic power accountable to and working in the interests of ordinary working people is not best done via the state alone, but the state clearly still has a huge role to play in regulating private capital, protecting the rights of organised labour, and the collective provision of social goods, such as in the case of the NHS. Indeed, I strongly suspect that Maurice Glasman would agree with me here. He advocates a great deal more state interventionism in many spheres, since it is obvious that action at the level of the nation state (or indeed, beyond) is necessary to combat the dominance of capital in addition to autonomous democratic movements. It is not a case of either the state or civil society, but of both working to challenge the impersonal destabilisation and commodification of the market.

It strikes me that ‘Blue Labour’ sums up many of the impulses I and other Labour activists have had for some time now. We have become increasingly dominated by a bossy liberal elite who think that the working class should just ‘come to terms’ with globalisation and the rapid, destabilising change that it brings (while the Guardianistas enjoy their comfortable existences), who dismiss traditional social bonds and institutions, and the pastimes and passions of ordinary working class and lower-middle class people, as not being sufficiently ‘progressive’ or avant-garde enough for their tastes, and who often give the impression that the identity politics of the cultural left is more valid than the concerns of working people worried about their jobs, wages or housing. Too many people in the Labour Party live such separate lives from the majority of working people that they end up being insufferably patronisingly towards just those people whom we exist to represent. To put it bluntly, we need more people in the Labour Party who feel comfortable watching a football match, or going down the pub, or using the local library.

So, Blue Labour’s mixture of Cohen-esque conservatism in terms of our social, parochial and familial attachments and radicalism in terms of socialist economics strikes me not only as more coherent than the Conservative Right and liberal Left, not only as intellectually correct and emotionally satisfying, but also as a real vote-winner, marrying the most popular bits of the Labour movement’s traditions and carrying us away from the insufferably metropolitan and liberal emphases (both economically and socially) that have lost us so much support in recent years. Blue Labour might help us to remember that the egalitarian aims of the left are not incompatible, and in some ways are curiously consonant, with the human need for a sense of belonging, a sense of attachment to the familiar and the past, an attachment to family and country, and that being a conservative Socialist is, in many ways, the most consistent position of all.

'Whatever is...': Library fines, hangovers and that Mancunian Jesus

It has often occurred to me that many things in life generally considered to be Bad Things are, in fact, Good Things. Leaving aside some of the obvious ones (emotional repression, 2am corner shop £3.99 red wine, Quote Unquote, Martin Jarvis), let’s consider library fines. Few people relish paying library fines, and, speaking as a particular veteran of this eternal book-based war between laziness and fear of embarrassment, I have more reason than most to detest them; the toxic sense of disapproval oozing like radioactive sludge from the fearsome bespectacled shrew of a librarian (why are 90% of librarians now women?), the rapid disappearance of those useful pound coins and fifty pees from the bottom of one’s wallet (so much more usefully spent on wine gums. Or, indeed, wine), the vague sense of self-loathing.

And yet, I put it to you that the library fine is actually a monument to human ingenuity and moral sense.

For a start, one has to wonder – why would they exist, if not without damn good reason? I may not go so far as Alexander Pope and say ‘Whatever is, is right’, but I would say that whatever is, certainly deserves lengthy consideration. Has a successful borrowing library ever existed without a fines policy? Could you get away with returning your scroll to the Great Library of Alexandra late with no fines? I don’t think so. The reason is simple – we are a few library fines away from anarchy.

Human beings, doing good, as they do, usually (but not exclusively) only out of necessity and fear, would, without library fines, almost cease to bother returning books within squinting distance of the return date. To take away the library fine would be to take away a hugely important moral sanction, based, not so much out of fear of pecuniary disadvantage, as out of fear of disapproval. When I return a library book, I’d willingly pay double the fine to avoid the thousand exquisite mental tortures of the look on the face of the librarian. That species of glare, when you hand back a tome and she notices that it was due back in 1974 or whenever, has, etched onto it, that most hateful and soul-grinding of all phrases: ‘I’m not angry. I’m just disappointed’ (a maxim becoming frighteningly near consideration for the epitaph engraving on my headstone).

The exquisite and explosive implication of this sentence is due to the fact that it sets in motion one’s own conscience. Outright anger rarely has much effect on the sinner – if one has done wrong, the only way to penance is through internal realisation, not unreasoning external ire. No alcoholic recovers by being berated – they recover by having their own finer (lesser?) inner sensibility awakened by acceptance – and, in the same way, no library finee is going to find absolution for their borrowing lapses by the lash of the librarian’s tongue (which is, incidentally, why librarianship invariably attracts the passive-aggressive type). The librarian, in many ways the superego of the keen reader, depends upon the existence of the fine for this awesome moral power. The payment of the fine gives her the ritualistic opportunity to highlight one’s transgression. Having to actually mention the lateness of a return in some vulgar overt way would put the onus on her and make her look petty – the fine makes it clear that she is merely impartially upholding the eternal laws of library-based justice, and it is you, importunate reader, who is in the wrong.

Without this admonitory force, libraries would descend into chaos. People would return books later and later. Shelves would empty. Holds and reservations would become meaningless and futile gestures towards the unobtainable. Public libraries would be ransacked.

Library fines would, however, still be a Good Thing even if they did not underpin the system of moral discipline that facilitates the smooth functioning of the library. Their effect cannot be seen in mere utilitarian terms. They are a just and fitting marker of ethic transgression. It is only right that if one does wrong –if one neglects one’s social duty to return one’s books on time, thus upsetting the delicate ecosystem of mutuality, duty and rights that underpins the library - one deserves to be punished. It is a matter as simple as that.

This is all by-the-by. The real subject of my consideration in the category of ‘Things considered Bad which are actually Good’ is the related-but-different phenomenon of the hangover.

It is a seemingly obvious commonplace that hangovers are, basically, fucking awful. P.G. Wodehouse’s categorisation of hangovers into six types (The Broken Compass, The Sewing Machine, The Comet, The Atomic, The Cement Mixer and The Gremlin Boogie, since you ask) says it all. Hangovers, one instinctively reflects, are curious, compressed oceans of pain and disgust, invading your brain with stabbing pricks of light, heightening the senses to agonising degrees, making you feel like an elephant with diarrhoea stamped on and then shat upon your cerebral cortex.

And yet! Look, or rather feel, a little closer and a different impression emerges. I would call myself not a veteran of hangovers past but a connoisseur of hangovers to come. A friend of mine claims that he never gets hangovers (which given how much booze he shifts makes it one of the wonders of the world). I do not envy him.

Firstly, every hangover is a complex thing. It has its shift in moods, its changes in tone, its quirks of personality. Any seasoned aficionado of the hangover knows that each hangover is an individual, a unique phenomenon with a different character. And within this maelstrom of sensation, it seems obvious to me that patches of real pleasure emerge. I cannot be the first to point out the existence of that warm inner glow, that sense of internal displacement and floating tranquillity that makes up the middle part of the truly thumping hangover.

However, not even a masochist like me can ignore the obvious sensual torture that often accompanies the hangover – the lurching stomach, the swimming nausea, the knifing headache. Within the internal moral economy of the hangover, this is only right. The warm buzz only gets it effect from its contrast with the hellish torture of the initial shock and pain.

This illustrates the wider meaning of the hangover. When one is hungover, one languishes within one’s own depravity and sensual excess. One has a constant physical reminder of one’s own stupidity, a lingering moral commentary on the extravagance and squalor of the night before. This internal reminder motivates us, at least temporarily, towards sobriety, towards internal cleanliness, productivity, wholesome and upright conduct. One rarely feels a more bracing tendency towards and love of virtue than when emerging from the self-imposed depths of the hangover. It is only the contrast with the self-degradation of, among other things, the hangover that gives rectitude and diligence their value.

And, to look at it from completely the other direction, the debasement of the hangover ends up as a tribute to the profound joys of the grain and the grape. Nothing is a more eloquent testament to drinking than the fact that, despite it all, despite the nausea and vomiting and pain, we still return. Just as the folly of the Trojan war is the most potent illustration of the beauty of Helen, the pain of the hangover says more about the power of the joy of alcohol than anything else ever could.

As such, the hangover is a moving part in the complex mechanism of human motivation. We get drunk, and enter a wonderful period of openness, relaxation and sociability. We continue getting drunk, in an attempt to prolong the sensation, until we get sick. We wake up hung over. The hangover is a natural self-corrective to our heedless self-indulgence. In reaction, we seek contrast and veer towards the other direction, towards abstinence and sensible behaviour, gaining from this a due sense of virtue. Sensible behaviour soon cloys and makes us desire the release of booze and drunkenness as a suitable (gin and) tonic. An eternal cycle ensues, wherein one state creates the necessary precondition for the experience of the pleasure of its opposite. The smooth, as ever, requires and gains its meaning only from its contradistinction to the rough, in the case of the hangover, to feeling rough.

My point, insofar as there is one, is that we condemn too many things too easily, without duly considering their indispensability in the general scheme, the fact that they are part of and inseparable from the overall phenomenon, which must be understood and valued in its entirety, or not at all.

Consider The Fall, the longstanding band fronted by Mark E Smith (part genius, part utter-fucking-headcase, all Mancunian Jesus). The curious thing about The Fall, other than the fact that it has had more band-members than the average hedgehog has spines, is the sheer mass of music the ban has produced. There are God-knows-how-many Fall albums, singles and EPs. Listening to every Fall song would be the musical equivalent of reading every Charles Dickens novel back-to-back, like Tony Last in A Handful of Dust.

Of the hundreds and hundreds of Fall songs, many are utter snarling gems – Eat Y’Self Fitter, Hit the North, Totally Wired, Oh! Brother etc etc etc . However, the undoubted truth is that there are many, many deeply shit Fall songs, some practically unlistenable. Mark E Smith is such a bizarre, scattergun, addled mind that he tends to produce brilliance or dross.

However, this is the unalterable excellence of The Fall. You can’t cherry-pick The Fall. You have to accept the whole kit and caboodle, or it means nothing. The peak only exists due to the trough. The Fall is everything, or it is nothing.

And just as without the shit, there is no Fall, similarly without the fines there is no Library and without the hangover there is no Drink. With that in mind, let us judge things that are ostensibly Bad more judiciously, and remember that even in the most seemingly harsh and unforgiving concept – say Noel Edmonds – there may be but some scrap of good.

‘How You Played the Game’: The Far Left, the cuts and barren purism

Churchill famously said that the best argument against democracy is a five minute conversation with the average voter. Similarly, I would say that the best argument against the Far Left is a five minute conversation with the average SWP member.

This thought occurred to me whilst at a demonstration this morning protesting against the County Council’s budget cuts at Shire Hall. Some of the protestors had some sense, but some of them, it seemed to me, really are clueless about the realities of politics not only in the current climate, but in general.

Some of them were advocating that all councillors, including Labour ones who are opposed to the cuts, should resign and force by-elections in light of the budget, as if that would achieve anything meaningful. It might provide a few restless SWP activists with an opportunity to vent some of their rage and satisfy their lust for frantic, albeit toothless, activity, but it would not make one iota of difference to the cuts that are coming to bus services, social care and libraries, and it would cost thousands of pounds that councils can ill afford.

Others, overwhelmed with misty-eyed fantasies of romantic 1926-style resistance, advocate a General Strike. Given that a General Strike didn’t work when we had a far larger trade union movement and the realities of the law would mean that any unions involved in sympathy strikes would probably be bankrupted by legal action, this is possibly even further away from a viable or vaguely sane tactic.

In other parts of the country the Far Left argues that Labour councils should attempt to set illegal budgets and not implement any cuts at all, despite huge cuts to their formula grant from central government. This tactic, which worked so well in the mid 1980s (er...), is possibly the stupidest. Due to changes in the law, council officers would merely be legally empowered to implement a legal budget, which would contain huge cuts made with no reference to anyone’s political priorities. It would see a return to ‘grotesque chaos’ and end up being counterproductive, probably hurting the people who we, as Labour councillors, come into politics to protect worse than would otherwise be the case. The argument is seriously put forward that if every Labour council refused to set a legal budget, with mass public support, we could somehow bring down the government. Such unanimity and public support simply does and will not exist, and even if it did, central government still has, ultimately, both the money and the legal power to make any fight between local government and Whitehall so uneven as to be a pointless waste of time.

If we start to blame Labour councillors for the effect of the cuts that are being caused by Eric Pickles’s decision to slash central government funding, we are falling into the neat trap set for us by the government. Their strategy is devastatingly simple, and potentially very effective. They are making the biggest local government cuts in the poorest areas, which are almost uniformly Labour -dominated, safe in the knowledge that Labour councils will have little realistic choice but to try to deal with the huge black holes in their finances by making cuts. Then, Cameron, Clegg and co will turn around and blame Labour councils for the cuts despite the obvious fact that they are being caused by the decisions being made by central government. It will obscure the nature of the cuts in the minds of voters and could allow the government to wriggle out of the blame for the pain that is coming. Our message must be clear – cuts to this degree and at this speed are the result of an ideological, political choice on the part of the Tory-Lib Dem government, and the responsibility rests unambiguously with them, not Labour councillors put into impossible positions by cuts to their grants.

It is hardly surprising that the tactics advocated by the Far Left are, to put it politely, highly ineffective. This is because serious people who are realistic about actually having a concrete impact on the policies of central and local government, who want to actually get rid of this government at some point and implement an alternative, are not in the SWP or the Socialist Party or Workers’ Liberty or the Communist Party or whatever the fringe party de jour is. They are in the Labour Party and always will be, and, as such, they realise that we are constrained by the need to carry the public with us, to convince actual voters of the justice of our cause, and to pursue realistic strategies which may involve compromise and complexity.

The psychology of the Far Left is, in general terms, a mystery to me. The essence of being on the left is, I would have thought, the desire to right the wrongs of the world, to change our society for the better, to make concrete improvements in the lives of ordinary people. This desire necessarily, to me, implies pursuing strategies that might actually result in the achievement of power and the actual real-world implementation of the kind of policies we want. The strategies for implementing change advocated by the Far Left are so unlikely that the only way that anyone can take them seriously is by colossal amounts of wishful thinking. Their thinking goes along the lines of: ‘All it takes is for the revolutionary consciousness of the masses to be awakened, and lo! The glorious day is upon us!’ – if we continue to plug away and make the same old arguments for the same old dogma, eventually everyone will come round to our way of thinking. Anyone with a modicum of common sense can see that this is nonsense. It degenerates into a senseless clinging to the purity of principle at the expense of the acquisition of power, which is utterly useless to the poor, the elderly, working families and the other people whom the left exists to protect. It reduces the left to a toothless pressure group, with as much influence on public policy as that implies.

A Labour veteran – former branch Chair, active in the party for many decades – recently summed up my feelings on Labour politics. He said that the most radical elements of the left, those on the hard-left of the Labour Party, are always the well-off ones who are not greatly affected by government policy. This is a generalisation of course, but if you are at the sharp end – if this cut will hurt you or if that policy is something you rely on – then you are likely to want to a strategy that will actually work. The knowledge that you remained completely faithful to your principles while losing power and letting the Tories in is, to such people, absolutely no consolation at all. As Kinnock said in his famous 1985 speech against Militant, some on the Left end up like “latter-day public school-boys”, since to them “it matters not whether you won or lost, but how you played the game”.

This mental attitude embodied by so many on the Far Left is what Weber called the ‘ethic of ultimate ends’ which, if not tempered with an ‘ethic of responsibility’, leads to people obsessed with the salvation of their own soul but completely heedless of the consequences of their actions. Indeed, it seems to me to be a mutation of the religious impulse, the idea that “the Christian does rightly and leaves the results with the Lord” (to quote Weber again), that what matters is being right, being acceptable to God, not the unworthy temporal concerns of the veil of tears. Unfortunately, politics is not like religion. Religious belief is a matter of saving your own soul according to your individual conscience, whereas politics is necessarily a question of collective change in the real world, which, if it to avoid inane infantilism, must recognise that holding unimpeachable principles and supporting justice does not necessarily lead to good in the world. In other words, the idea that “from good comes only good; but from evil only evil follows” is clearly not true in the world in politics. The actions of good people, if are irresponsible or without a realistic appreciation of actual circumstances, can often, despite the best of intentions, have bad consequences.

I cannot emphasise enough how the Labour Party must avoid lapsing into this attitude, which characterised much of our reaction to the last Tory government. I have only been a councillor for 3 months, but already the reality of being in opposition is getting very boring. Opposition is shit. You have very little power to help people, you oppose and shout and berate and get nowhere, or at best you manage to achieve occasional minor and tactical successes whilst the general course of Tory policy continues unabated. You can only do what we come into politics to do with power. I can only imagine what the 18 years of Tory government last time round was like – it must have been mind-numbingly awful. We cannot fall into the same traps. We must avoid the siren voices on the hard left who want us to make exactly the same mistakes of the 1980s. The Labour Party must remember that it is NOT a pressure group. This is not to say that we need to revert to power without principle, which at times seemed to embody New Labour. Just as principle without power is sterile idleness, power without principle is an utterly soulless and pointless exercise in managerialism. Nonetheless, the danger we face most keenly at the moment is falling victim to the siren voices of the hopeless day-dreamers of the Far Left.

Of course, luckily, most people who are sensible enough to realise this are already in the Labour Party, and those who embody the mindset of the public schoolboy, for whom winning the game is unimportant, are on the Far Left fringes. However, to those on the Left outside of the Labour Party, I leave you with a wonderful quotation from Nye Bevan, hardly a right-winger or a soulless New Labour hack: “I have no time for those who appear to threaten the whole of private property, but who, in practice, would threaten nothing; they are the purists and, therefore, barren.”

The Labour Party and the perils of Cultural Leftism

That the Labour Party is in danger of becoming a regional party, almost non-existent outside its heartlands, such as Scotland, the North, south Wales and London, has been much remarked upon. However, another danger, less obvious, is that it also seems to me in danger of becoming, and indeed to a degree already has become, in a sense contrary to its founding spirit, a sectional party dominated by cultural leftism and identity politics. Let me explain.

The Labour Party went through a process under Tony Blair whereby, in his banal attempts to soft-soap the middle classes, it came to retreat from its core commitment to the twin views that socio-economic class is the basic source of exploitation in society, and that the elimination, or at least amelioration, of the privilege and disadvantage attendant on untrammelled capitalism and class division is the historic mission of the left. With the changing social structure of Britain, the decline of post-war class loyalties and consciousness, and the cultural revolution unleashed by Thatcherism, Labour arrived at the self-perception that it was no longer possible to secure election on platforms underpinned by this basic analysis. Not only that, but in an effort to make a virtue of perceived-necessity, Blair and some of his more zealous disciples seemed to come to truly believe that class division and privilege was no longer important.

An unintended and unfortunate consequence of this was that many elements in the Labour Party began, in an act of displacement, to focus more heavily in their analysis of British society on other sources of exploitation and disadvantage, such as homophobia, sexism, and racism. If being poor is not the most important and all-pervading handicap in British society, they seemed to reason, then it must be being gay! Or being a woman! Or being a transsexual! And so on and so forth with myriad other identity tags and labels.

Now, clearly racism, sexism and homophobia, etc, are senseless and do act as sources of disadvantage and discrimination. However, the Labour Party’s cultural leftist wing (exemplified by Harriet Harman) has shown a tendency to elevate these problems unduly. Cultural leftism is, so far as I see it, the idea that certain demographic groups, defined by some inborn or culturally constructed characteristic – being a woman, being gay etc - are more oppressed than others and deserve special favours, with a particular proviso; that being poor no longer counts as a valid identity tag of oppression, or is certainly a less important one.

The brute fact, however, is this. Class is far more important than any other source of disadvantage. Undoubtedly, discrimination against women, and gay people, and black people, and so on, does exist, and is despicable, and of course Labour should oppose sexism, racism and homophobia (a role we have performed honourably since the 60s). However, no amount of quibbling can disguise the fundamental fact that being poor is far more of a handicap than belonging to any of these other identity groups. Many people who are female, or black, or gay live fulfilling lives largely free of obvious oppression and disadvantage in modern British society. Why? Largely, because they are affluent enough to be in a position where they have the resources and opportunities to do what they want to do and realise themselves. Being black or female or gay is not as alienating, restricting or oppressive as simply being poor, and indeed generally the injustices suffered by people on the basis of their race or sexual orientation or gender are intensified by poverty.

This is not really recognised sufficiently in the modern Labour Party, with its obsession with non-class based sectional demographic interest groups – the LGBT movement, feminism, the BAME movement, and so on, manifested in such things as all-women shortlists, and a preoccupation with the number of black or Asian representatives we have, for example. Part of me thinks that this is because we are dominated by middle-class Fabians who, having had little experience of being poor, tend to fall too readily into assuming equivalence between class, and race, sexuality and gender. Whatever the reason, internal hacks or MPs are always mithering about the lack of female or black representation in the Labour Party, and we obsess over identity politics to an inordinate degree, but what about the lack of working class representation in parliament? I do not necessarily mean that we should have ‘all working class shortlists’ (such devices seem to me to be, more than anything, a way of imposing central control on local CLPS, and defining who is or is not working class would be fraught with difficulty), or even that questions of personnel are necessarily all that important, but that the interests of working class people need forceful representation in parliament, and that their interests deserve predominance over questions of identity politics. After all, these interests have, in many ways, been neglected sorely in parliament over the past 30 years, in a way that, for example, the interests of gay people (thanks to the last Labour government) have not.

So we come to a situation whereby there is a perception amongst certain elements of the working class, particularly the white working class, which is not entirely unjustified, that the Labour Party stands for gay people, immigrants, and women, but not so much for them. Now, this does not mean that we should abandon our liberalism on issues of race, gender and sexuality, but that we should divert our focus from that liberalism and concentrate instead on what is to my mind the fundamental founding mission of the Labour Party – to ameliorate the causes and consequences of socio-economic inequality and class division.

This is a difficult task, however, because class divisions are far more nuanced and subtle, and more difficult to solve, than other forms of division. Class-war politics is not really feasible, and we no longer have an homogenous industrial working class base. However, a focus on the bread-and-butter issues that shape the contours of class and inequality in Britain, such as housing, public services, education, the welfare state, rights at work, and so on, formulated in such a way as to take account of the economic anxieties of the middle class (who have lost out hugely in relative terms to a small elite at the top in recent years, and in that sense are, relatively, victims of class division too), is feasible, and it is politically viable. What’s more, if accompanied with a toning down of our apparent obsession with gender, sexuality and race, it would reconnect us with our working class supporters and unite us without forsaking our admirably liberal attitudes.