Looking to Labour’s pioneers for leadership

Policy Network - Opinion

A new model of Labour leadership is a crucial precondition for centre-left renewal. By recapturing the essence and ethos of leadership promoted by the movement’s pioneering thinkers, the Party can reconnect with its fractured electorate.

The UK Labour Party needs new leadership. It does not need a new leader. It has one of those already. And he is there to stay, whatever his brother’s remaining allies may think. But the Party does need a new culture, style, and structure of leadership if it is going to be able to compete with the Liberal Conservative coalition.

Developing this new leadership will not be easy. Labour has struggled with leadership of late. In the last decade, the Party has tended to swing dramatically from excessive leadership-critique, when no-one in authority at any level within the Party is trusted or respected, to leadership-frenzy, when the national Party leader’s image appears everywhere and he is left to determine the course of policy and strategy entirely from his office. In the last years of the Brown government, the Party would swing wildly between these poles even within the same week.

This bi-polarity is seriously unhealthy, as anyone who worked in the offices of Labour’s last Prime Minister will be sure to tell you. When Labour is in its leadership-critique mood, it generates the kind of disorder and dissent that is incompatible with effective governance. When it is in is leadership frenzy mood, it falls into a narrow-minded and ill-conceived consensus that prevents legitimate and much-needed debate.

As Labour faces its most serious electoral challenge for nearly thirty years, therefore, it is vital that the Party develops a new way of relating to its leaders and its leaders find a better way of drawing the best out of themselves. Unless it does this, it will be entirely incapable of responding to the demographic, geographic, and strategic challenges that Patrick Diamond and Giles Radice have so powerfully described in their Southern Discomfort Again.

As Labour looks for new ideas about leadership, it has many different directions in which it could turn. It could, for example, draw upon the expertise that undoubtedly lies in the private sector, where small fortunes continue to be spent on “leadership development” courses, even if they are of variable quality. If not there, it could look instead to the inspirational advances made in political leadership in other countries. Labour could look, for instance, to the campaign of Barack Obama for suggestions on how to organise and mobilise effectively behind a leader who really does represent a new generation.

Labour is fortunate, however, in not needing to look so far for ideas on how to lead effectively. It has, instead, only to examine its own past. In its early days, the Labour Party faced a difficulty not unlike that it faces today. Geographically, it was confined to small sections of the country, especially South Wales and the North of England. Ideologically, it was unable to reach the political mainstream, destined always instead to speak for the theoretical interests of a minority. And electorally, it was unable to compete with the sleek Conservative machine, bank-rolled by large corporate interests and supported by an unceasingly right-wing press.

Effective leadership, the early pioneers argued, was required to turn the Party around and that leadership consisted of four crucial tasks. When we look at these tasks closely again today, we will discover that they remain as vitally powerful today as they did in the origin of the Labour Party. It is worth spending time on recapturing them.

The first task concerned Party organisation. The early pioneers of the Labour Party knew that in order to build an effective, fighting force capable of being led effectively, the Party needed organisational structures that enabled previously alienated, disconnected people to find relationships with each other. Local Labour Parties were thus designed to provide meeting places for those with different opinions and different interests who nonetheless wished to discover shared interests and learn to campaign together. The broader Party was then designed to bring these geographical groupings into alliance with industrial groupings through its connection with the Trades Unions. The socialist societies and affiliated organisations then further brought people with other differences in aspirations and outlooks into the coalition.

This effort to generate a broad coalition through effective organisation was combined with a commitment to developing a series of meetings, rituals, events, and struggles that cemented the relationships, ranging from annual conference to festivals, picket lines, marches, galas, and demonstrations. In the early years of the Party, commentators even talked of a “religion of socialism” and they did so not because the Party demonstrated a fanatical belief in the truth of its own dogmas but because the Party had grown by devising structures and practices that mirrored those of the non-conformist churches. If there is to be Party renewal, the Labour leadership’s first task is to address itself to the creation of a set of organising structures and practices that can do this once again.

The second task moved from structure to style. In order to help release relational energies and move out from their ideological confinement, the early Labour leaders recognised that they needed to communicate in a way that respected the communities in which those they aspired to lead actually lived. It is for this reason that they insisted that the Labour Party’s leaders are ill-served by the language of ahistorical, abstract, theoretical language. Instead, they needed to find a language that is rich in respect – even love – for the actual relational strengths of the British people, be they grounded in traditions, stories, or places. This was an early identification of the true importance of “narrative” that is so often trumpeted by experts in “political communications” today. Real narratives, the argument went, are recognisable in their concrete references to real people, places and actions; they celebrate the connections between people and help us to stitch together those who currently stand outside the group. The first generation of Labour leaders thus made a constant effort not to rally their forces through the language of “socialism”, “justice”, or “class”. They sought instead to draw on the historic roots of Englishness, and the concrete experience of working people in the communities in which they lived.

The third task began with a recognition of the centrality of responsibility in effective leadership. Early Labour pioneers always insisted that real campaigning relationships are built on trust. They therefore require that people who have the greatest role in shaping the destiny of the group are willing both to acknowledge their errors and accept that the consequences of any mistakes fall on their own heads. Leaders who resist this responsibility engender a sense of nervousness among the group with whom they identify. A failure of responsibility frays relationships and makes collective action far more difficult. Effective leadership thus demands a distinctive sort of courage. It requires the ability to take real responsibility for the direction in which the group moves, to accept blame if that direction turns out to be misjudged, and to vocally acknowledge mistakes that have been made by those who have gone before us.

The fourth task required acknowledgement that leadership can never be invested in a single person. However crucially important the national Party leader’s own behaviour, communication, and administrative expertise is, the pioneers insisted that a Party that is committed to building strong relationships in order to campaign effectively has to have leaders throughout the organisation and across the country. Labour’s pioneers always thus insisted that the Party required a detailed programme of leadership development, especially among the young. They argued that the Party had to train individuals to ensure that they were capable of fostering relationships at a local, regional, and national level. Individuals who can bring people together, help them identify shared concerns, provide strategic guidance, exhibit courage in the face of difficulty, inspire others to step out of the protected privacy of their domestic lives and engage in acts of solidarity.

Directing the Party’s energy toward these four tasks served the early Labour Party extraordinarily well. They helped the Party change from a small splinter group, representing the interests of a distinctive section of the population but standing outside of the political mainstream, into a national Party of government.

Each of the tasks remains vital today. There can be no doubt, however, that the Party currently does badly in each of these four domains. On organisation, no-one who has been to a local Labour Party meeting in the last decade could imagine that they were at one time the source of valued friendships and transformative relationships. On relational communication, no-one who has listened to the Party’s language, and especially the continual invocation of “progressive values”, “fairness” , and “social justice”, could describe Labour’s leadership rhetoric as located in the lived-experience of the people to whom it is directed. On the centrality of responsibility, no-one who has heard the new leader’s continual unwillingness to acknowledge the dangers of the deficit could feel comfortable that he will acknowledge future failures and the need for new directions. On leadership development, no-one could fail to notice that the potential political leaders of tomorrow currently find their political kicks outside of the Party.

The fact that the challenge of turning Labour’s leadership around is daunting, though, does not make it in any sense avoidable. A new model of Labour leadership is a crucial precondition for the Party’s renewal. The Party’s electoral situation is simply too desperate for it to return to the comforting pathologies of leadership-critique or leadership-frenzy. Those at the apex of the Labour Party thus need to display some of the other capacities that have long characterised effective political leaders: the qualities of courage and the ability to act in time. In order to be practically effective, that is, a commitment to relational leadership will require action on a scale and of a sort that we have rarely seen in the British Labour Party. It will need more than statements of intent, more than wily shifts of shadow Cabinet positions, more than even the most far-reaching of policy reviews. It will require the leader of the Labour Party to acknowledge that a problem with leadership lies right at the heart of the tradition and to demonstrate a continual, open-ended, bold, and experimental effort to resolve it.

The cosmopolitanism of the left – An answer to globalisation

Policy Network - Opinion

he left needs to work hard to recreate an effective and convincing transnational political programme. A cosmopolitan social democracy can lead a new social front to tame and regulate the most disruptive forms of capitalism whilst preserving its dynamism.

Globalisation is often considered responsible for increasing, rather than decreasing, inequalities. And it is increasing inequalities both within countries and across countries. The reason is rather simple: globalisation in financial capital, trade and production has reinforced the position of capitalists and has weakened the bargaining power of labour.1 It has created greater opportunities in peripheral parts of the world, but it has also increased the number of dispossessed, eradicating them from their traditional social and economic environment. In a nutshell, globalisation may be seen as good news for the right and bad news for the left.

At the dawn of capitalism, Adam Smith noted that “Masters are always and everywhere in a sort of tacit, but constant and uniform, combination, not to raise the wages of labour above their actual rate.” It took a long time for the labour movement to learn the lesson and to find appropriate measures to contrast entrepreneurs. Through trade unions and other labour organisations, the left has managed to counter-act the economic power of the tycoons, but mostly at the national level. Through electoral franchise, left-wing political parties, supported by the working class, managed to access government or to counter-balance the policies of right-wing political coalitions. This led to a wealth of regulations that limited the freedom of the entrepreneurs to the advantage of the population at large. The left-wing political parties also pushed to expand the protection of the disadvantaged parts of the population through the welfare state, a system of social protection financed by taxation and aimed at delivering services to everybody.

Globalisation is creating a lot of problems for the regulatory actions of national governments and for the welfare state. Most regulatory mechanisms were developed and, above all, enforced, at the national level. In a globalising economy these regulations are much less effective: they are often baroque and they can be circumvented through the ordinary skills of an average manager. At the same time, it is increasingly difficult to identify who should contribute to the costs of the welfare state and who should be on the receiving ends of its benefits. Through globalisation, it seems that capitalism has managed to unbind the progress that the left and the labour movements had made through national level political action. Adam Smith’s insightful thoughts could today be rephrased: “Global capitalism is always and everywhere in a sort of tacit, but constant and uniform, combination to circumvent costly regulations, to pay the minimum taxes and to hire the cheapest labour worldwide.”

It can, in fact, be argued that globalisation is just a far-reaching strategy of transnational capitalism to increase its bargaining power against the working class and to reduce the loads, including taxes and regulations, of national governments. Such a vision is not wrong, but it is reductive: globalisation does not just affect financial capital, production and trade; it also influences society, culture, knowledge and even religion. Still, it seems clear that globalisation is creating a new world order where capitalism has enhanced its interests and labour is lagging behind.

Pascal Lamy is quite right in reminding us that the labour movement and the left cannot regain the contracting power that they have developed with great difficulty over the twentieth century just by “impeding” or “blocking” globalisation.2 First of all, national governments can no longer effectively control the flows of capital, commodities and labour. Going along this path would absorb too many resources and its effectiveness is likely to be very limited, while the social and economic impact will be to lower the living standards of everybody, not just of the capitalist class. Second, globalisation does not just reduce the bargaining power of the working class: it is a vibrant economic, social and political phenomenon which creates major opportunities. A coalition willing to limit the speed of the global economy will not manage to become politically majoritarian because globalisation distributes advantages across many social classes and not just to the privileged few.

Pascal Lamy also urgently reminds us of the need to respond to current global trends in economic and social activities with politically responsible action. He calls, and rightly so, for a review and update of regulations and also a concerted effort to make them internationally stringent. He also calls for the production of global public goods. These two areas are of crucial importance since unregulated capitalism can cause wide scale long-term damage (the most obvious area is the environment), while the lack of global public goods will increase insecurity and instability.

The real problem, however, is not just to call for smarter international regulations or for the production of global public goods in key areas for the twenty first century. The main difficulty lies in getting powerful, resourceful and legitimate political players to make this a priority. We can ask national governments to co-ordinate their efforts and to subscribe to internationally binding regulations. We can also ask national governments to provide resources for producing global public goods through international cooperation. Inter-governmental organisations, from the World Trade Organization to the World Health Organization, from the World Bank to UNICEF, should be in charge of these processes. But, so far, international regulations have not been properly enforced (as the case of the 2008 financial crises clearly shows) and global public goods have been severely under-produced.

The left should therefore work hard to recreate an effective and convincing transnational political programme. The first thing that the left should do is to go back to its internationalist roots. Even if the left and the labour movement managed to achieve most of its political, social and economic rights at the national level, they also had a strong propensity towards international solidarity. The left pioneered the first transnational political associations. The labour movement started to think and act trans-nationally long before its opponents. While national governments – often hijacking and manipulating consensus – were waging wars against each other, the left responded by organising international peace congresses. On the grounds of this great intellectual legacy, the left and the labour movement should openly endorse a cosmopolitan political programme.

The left should be able to combine its strength at the national level with its cosmopolitan values. It may appear, as noted by Olaf Cramme, that cosmopolitanism is “more of a problem for the left than the right.”3 But, so far, the right has managed to endorse a form of cosmopolitanism without political and social consequences. It is a cosmopolitanism which allows the manager, the banker or even the tourist to act across borders without any sense of responsibility. The cosmopolitanism of the left, on the contrary, has much deeper implications since it requires acting with a sense of global responsibility.

The political forces associated with the left should therefore openly endorse a cosmopolitan programme that should equally include substantive objectives and institutional transformations.

The substantive objectives pertain to the kind of regulations that need to be introduced, the methods for their enforcement and the nature and quantity of global public goods to be produced. This requires, for example, the political parties of the left as well as labour organisations to explicitly commit themselves to these goals. But there is also a more ambitious institutional issue to be addressed: who should be in charge? Can global governance be left in the hands of the business sector and inter-governmental organisations without any accountability to the people?

For this reason, a cosmopolitan left should also endorse substantial democratic transformations in global governance.4 International Organisations, including the United Nations, cannot be in the hands of diplomats only. The citizens of the world should have a direct access to its operations, as recommended by a variety of campaigns.5 The control of the global economy should not be left in the hands of inter-governmental summits as those of the G8 and G20 that are neither accountable, nor transparent, nor legitimate.

Concerning the United Nations, the Socialist International has circulated a Position Paper which endorses several brave proposals for reform, asking member parties in government to actively support them.6 Something similar is also needed for economic institutions, where often national governments, even when dominated by left-wing political parties, are twisted between perceived national interests and cosmopolitan ideals. A cosmopolitan left should be able to propose a new social front to tame and regulate the most disruptive forms of capitalism whilst preserving its dynamism. If it manages to do so, cosmopolitan social democracy could be as appealing to the citizens of the world in the twenty first century as much as national social-democracy managed to be the driving force of change and social cohesion in the twentieth century.