Someone tweeted at me yesterday: “The labels change but essentially our politics is always liberals vs conservatives. Party better at being one or other wins.” This got me thinking again about the election, about the Tory majority, the Lib Dem losses, the SNP “tsunami”. I found myself agreeing with the tweet completely upon reflection. The Tories appeared to offer the best of both conservatism and liberalism with only a few of the downsides of the conservative bit of the equation to have to contend with. Labour offered neither. The Lib Dems couldn’t get a majority and so were deemed an irrelevance. The SNP offered the hope of liberalism with the competence of conservatism (in terms of image, I wish to stress, if not execution), while Scottish Labour had nothing other than stopping the Tories as a campaigning communication device.
So I thought more about how the Left might be more liberal and thus be able to stand a chance of winning an election some time within the next two decades (if the conservatism v liberal axis is true, which like I say, I think it is). And it struck me that one question that politicians and thinkers of the left never ask themselves is this: why is poverty bad? This might seem a redundant question at first, sort of like asking why pain is bad. Because it just fundamentally is, right? But asking the question is worthwhile. Having spent some time in my life in a state of reasonably extreme poverty for an uncomfortably long enough period, when I reflect on what was really awful about it, the first thing I think about is the stress of it all. Worrying about having enough money to simply go on living, coupled with the fear of being homeless, your already bad life becoming worse, perhaps to the point of no return. But thinking about it further, what’s really awful about being poor comes down to something the Left never talks about to its detriment: the worst thing about poverty is the lack of choice it presents you with.
I recall having an argument with an avowed socialist I worked with for a time. He asked me what was more important, freedom or equality? I said freedom, of course. He responded that it was equality, surely. I then told him that without freedom, equality is rather meaningless. He couldn’t even understand my argument. This was because, having never living in poverty himself, he couldn’t comprehend that what makes poverty so terrible is that your life is a series of things you cannot control nor opt out of. You hate your terrible job in which you are ritually abused by your boss? Quitting means starvation as it would take you ages to get another job, if indeed that was even possible, so you keep working there. Live in a terrible flat in which the landlord abuses the lease? The costs of moving are beyond you, besides which you would struggle to have anyone rent to you in your current financial situation anyhow, and added to all of that, you’re three months behind on your rent. You owe everyone everything, seemingly, including your right to continue existing, and thus are entitled to nothing. Including the right to make real decisions regarding your own life and how it is lived.
There is a narrative around this the Left could use, which sadly for the moment, they are not even processing. This is why I think people see a lot of politicians as being out of touch – no one seems able to talk about poverty in any sort of meaningful sense. It’s just b-a-d, like famine or death, and so we must eradicate it. No idea how we do that, but surely we must. It strikes me that if you want a counter-narrative on poverty to balance the conservative outlook (which boils down to a sort of Calvinist, if you’re over eighteen and you’re poor you must deserve it at least a little), you have to come up with something that relates directly to why exactly it is so undesirable in the first place and thus how you ameliorate the bad stuff. Otherwise, the counter-narrative to that will just continue to win out.
Suddenly I’m thinking about the lyrics of ‘Common People’ by Pulp, commenting on the trandy-lefty onlooker ‘…who will never understand how it feels to live your life with no feeling of control’
This all makes sense. I think the problem the Labour Party (and indeed all the Left acrosss Europe: see Adam Lebor’s Newsweek article: http://europe.newsweek.com/all-across-europe-social-democratic-left-dying-327489) has is not only an identity crisis but a fundamental problem with its raison d’etre. The Labour Party grew out of the industrial revolution in opposition to the oppression of the rich and powerful.
Whilst there is still room for that narrative in certain aspects of our society, for most people, it just no longer rings true. Add to that the confusion on the left (the statement by Rachel Reeves that the Labour Party does not wan to be the party fo people on benefits or the former Liberal Democrat voter who told me sincerely she was voting for Labour because of changes to children’s disability benefit her friend had suffered, without realising those changes were an implemetation of a change brought in by the previous Labour government) and the problem grows.
We are living in a post-industrial age and the great struggle of organised labour against the oppression of the rich and powerful is less salient. However, there is the issue of freedom and the related issues of power and opportunity (and all their other guises of influence and control, etc, etc). I believe there is a link here with education (after all, Tony Blair was not wrong about everything). I might even appeal to Antonio Gramsci, the Italian marxist politician and theoretician, and a paper by him entitled “The Hegemony of the Ruling Classes”. In that paper, Gramsci, attempting to find a way for the children of the working classes to escape the hegemony of the ruling classes, comes to the conclusion that the only way of doing so would be to educate them in residential schools away from their parents and free from the influence of their parents and the culture that was holding them back.
This idea of working class boarding schools (turning the current hierarchy of education in this country at least on its head) seems somewhat extreme. However, Tony Blair’s former education adviser, Sir Ken Robinson’s critique of education as a process whereby items of the same date of production are classed together is salient. It is remarkable in this context that at the same time that Tristram Hunt is calling for more innovation in education, Eton College, under the leadership of its outgoing headmaster, the very gifted Eton alumnus of very “working class” origin, Tony Little, is in the process of opening a centre dedicated to the study of innovation in education.
All this to say education and an overhaul of education must form part of the answer. In a liberal democratic capitalist society, why do we not equip young people with the tools to navigate the world that they will enter once they leave school? Why not, for example, one lesson a week from reception to 18 dedicated to a combination of Politics, Philosophy, Psychology, Economics, Personal Finance and Law? Why not allow ALL schools charitable status and encourage them to grow their alumni networks? Why not introduce pupils/students to the world of work and job options at a much earlier stage so that, when they graduate or leave school, they already know where they are going (nothing, BTW, need be set in stone: plans can change but, hey, at least have a half decent plan, eh?)?