EVERYTHING NEW IS OLD AGAIN:

Angry Brown attacks Blair over Labour's true values (FRASER NELSON AND JAMES KIRKUP, 9/27/04, The Scotsman)

GORDON Brown has rejected the olive branch offered by Tony Blair over his demotion in the coming general election campaign, and today will launch a robust defence of his role as the guardian of Labour’s core values.

The Chancellor will tell Labour’s annual conference that they must be "based on more than a set of individual policies announced by politicians" - a remark that will be seen as a direct jibe at the Prime Minister and his allies.

He will also raise the issue of "trust", a delicate point for Mr Blair, who is now facing a vote on Iraq after delegates forced the issue as a topic for debate at a conference already overshadowed by the fate of hostage Kenneth Bigley. [...]

[M]r Brown will go on to challenge the assumption - championed by Mr Milburn - that campaigning on the economy is a vote-losing cliché that cost Labour dear at the European Parliament elections last June.

"With the economy central to people’s concerns at the election, as at every election, that is the way to maintain, entrench and retain the trust of the people and pay for the much-needed reform and investments in public services," Mr Brown will say.

He will launch a coded attack on the idea - popular among Mr Milburn and his aides - that the best strategy for the election is to forge a list of individual promises, spelling out to voters what a third Labour term will do for them individually.

He will say: "I want us to build a shared national purpose, a British progressive consensus much more than a set of individual policies announced by politicians, but a set of beliefs that come to be shared by the British people."

Bring back Clause IV!

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Tony Blair needs a big idea. Adam Smith can provide it: No need to return to old Labour thinking to combat inequality (Gareth Stedman Jones, September 25, 2004, The Guardian)

[L]abour is terrified of the E-word because it fears the reaction to higher taxation for the rich. This would be understandable if it were simply a tactical concern. But it seems more basic. For the evidence suggests New Labour agrees with the new right critique that greater equality could only be at the expense of a free-enterprise economy, and that its pursuit would consequently lead back to an ever more entrenched public sector. In short, a return to Old Labour. Therefore, giving up "socialism" means abandoning the goal of greater equality as well.

This is a fallacy. It is based upon a foreshortening of history, in which the intellectual origins of neo-conservative laissez-faire are dated back to Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations, of 1776. Omitted from the story is the fact that Smith's original reputation was that of a progressive whose work provided the foundation of the radical critique of aristocratic monopoly and of the bellicose state that protected it.

It also forgets that the first thinkers and activists to build on Smith's work were libertarians of the left. They included people such as the English radical Tom Paine and the French revolutionary Condorcet, both of whom believed growing inequality was not the inevitable price of a free-enterprise economy, but could be remedied by science and "the social art". They were the first to propose universal pensions and schooling, death duties and tax-based systems of social insurance as remedies for poverty and ignorance. For them, two obstacles confronted social advance: "force" (aristocratic or oligarchic rule and the laws that protected it); and "fraud" (unreasoning superstition and prejudice born of ignorance). Unshackled from this legacy of injustice and oppression, capitalism went together in their minds with scientific progress, increasing equality, free trade, feminism, anti-slavery, anti-colonialism and anti-racism.

This was not the founding moment of neo-conservatism. That came a few years later at the end of the 18th century with the frightened reaction to the French revolution. In England, loyalists burned Paine's effigy. In France, Condorcet died in prison. In this climate, anti-revolutionaries such as Edmund Burke and Thomas Malthus denied the radical implications of Smith's work, ridiculed Paine and Condorcet and set in motion the long-term association between liberal economics and conservative politics.

But an accurate account of this period shows that the pursuit of equality can be conceived in terms quite other than those of socialism. The language of Paine and Condorcet was that of the coming together of commercial society and the modern democratic republic elaborated in the era of American and French revolutions. Greater equality with a minimal state, universal education, moderate redistributive taxation and social security belonged together in a language of reason and citizenship. As little reliance as possible was to be placed upon the state, since it was associated with a legacy of tyranny and corruption.

Instead, the inequality and uncertainty constantly generated by a modern exchange economy was to be curtailed by a democratic constitution in which a framework of law was maintained by a combination of voluntary associations and local authorities - in modern terms, mutual associations, friendly societies, cooperatives, elected local boards, ethically oriented companies and trade unions.

In the 19th and 20th centuries, this new language of citizenship and democratic enlightenment was increasingly pushed aside by opposing extremes: on the one side, laissez-faire individualism and a language of markets; on the other side, socialism and the language of worker and capitalist.

Bill Clinton, Tony Blair and George W. Bush have tried to thread this needle with varying levels of success, but because it does involve departing from the respective parties traditional core values the effort can apparently not withstand, at least in the early stages of the process, any situation where the leader has to lean upon his base. They end up being able to dictate terms to him and demanding a return to orthodoxy.

Posted by Orrin Judd at September 27, 2004 10:43 AM