I come out on Phil’s political taxonomy at the same place as him, despite not having a fixed view on the goodness or badness of human nature. I think that being a hippie historian combines, in my case, a conservative temperament with radical politics. But then, how radical would my politics be in relation to another political configuration? And how much more enthusiastic would I be in those circumstances about change?
In passing, I think that its people’s conservative impulses that make them feel the Labour Party is dead to them. It’s not really a political programme at issue here, which after all can be changed, but a civic identity. At the time of the first general election I was old enough to vote in, I was an actual anarchist in politics, and so theoretically hostile to the whole business of reformist politics and engaging with the state on its own terms. But then again, I was Labour: it was how I’d been raised, and it was an identity which encompassed everything from the outlook of my ancestors (on my mothers side at any rate) to the physical shape of the place in which I grew up (my constitutuency at the time, Stoke-on-Trent Central, has been Labour since 1924). So I sneaked home to vote without telling anyone. These days, I’ve diluted into a left wing libertarian, and I wouldn’t vote Labour under any conceivable circumstances.
Which is a shame, because the Labour party’s background is in anti-state socialism, or so it's always seemed to me. The party’s roots are in a tradition of free association and public bargaining in the name of the general welfare that goes back through the Chartists and corresponding societies way back to the Putney debaters. New Labour's authoritarianism, amongst other things, undermines the legal basis of the tendencies that brought about the Party's original formation. Of course, if you start from a position whereby taking control of the state is a disagreeable necessity, you can ultimately end up in a position where you valorise government at the expense of general welfare and individual rights which is where we seem to be now. But I don't think it's a coincidence that New Labour has embraced statism with a vengeance at the same time that it's abandoned socialism.
I’m also, incidentally, mildly annoyed at having to qualify libertarian with left wing. Hayekianism is not a libertarian doctrine. If you apply the idea of the conceit of reason as a guide for the permissability of opinion and combine it with rampant capitalism, the country you get is very much like China, where dissidents are arrested because their opinions “disturb social order.”
Comments