Paul Anderson, review of A Rational Advance for the Labour Party by John Lloyd (Chatto, £2.99), Tribune, 30 June 1989
Written before the publication of Labour's policy review, John Lloyd's pamphlet, for Chatto's inaptly named and over-priced CounterBlasts series, has a curiously dated feel to it. It is an eloquent plea for Labour's leadership to do much that it has already done or signalled its intention to do in the battle for the centre ground: endorse "enterprise" and the market, drop the idea that public ownership is a matter of principle rather than expediency, abandon unilateral nuclear disarmament and antipathy to the European Community, weaken links with the trade unions, and adopt policies to make welfare bureaucracies more "transparent" and accountable — in short, turn Labour into a modern consumer-friendly social democratic party.
There are places where:Lloyd differs from the policy review. He embraces the rhetoric of °democratisation" much more enthusiastically and is much keener on constitutional reform, proposing proportional representation, an elected second chamber and a reduced role for the monarchy. He wants much swifter action to end the block vote than any Labour leader would dare suggest. And he is more open to electoral pacts with the centre parties than are most of the Labour right — at least in public.
Nevertheless, Lloyd must be well pleased. Labour has gone a long way to meeting his demands: only sentimentality now stops Labour from describing itself as social democratic. The right of the party is everywhere triumphant, and the left is marginalised.
But that doesn't mean that Lloyd's arguments are very convincing.
Most obviously, on defence and foreign policy, he displays the naive optimism of one who hasn't yet realised that George Bush is President of the United States: oblivious to the increasingly apparent deadlock in super-power diplomacy, he trots out all the tired old stuff about drifting with the tide of international relations and acting responsibly in international forums to encourage detente, disarmament and development.
But the main problems with his argument are to do with domestic policy. He's right in some rather trivial ways. Labour should be distinguishing its programme from "free-market neo-liberalism which allocates no place to democratic politics beyond periodic electoral contests" and from "extreme visions or realities of socialism which put politics in charge of everything and allow little or no choice". But only a few nutters believe otherwise. The key question dividing left and right in the Labour Party is not (and has never been) whether markets should have some role: it is how far markets should be left to their own devices and how far they should be over-ruled.
The Labour left wants democratic politics in firmer control of more markets than does the Labour right. It's a difference in degree rather than, as Lloyd pretends, a difference in kind, and it's a difference that has to be argued out market-by-market and control-by-control. Lloyd, however, is effusive about the wonders of markets in general. Markets mean "prosperity" and "choice", he believes: Labour should be trying to appeal to the beneficiaries of Thatcherism on Thatcherism's own terms. He seems to have forgotten that markets also mean insecurity, exclusion from prosperity and choice, economic instability, concentration of power and damage to the environment.
Indeed, the environment is the loose thread that threatens to unravel Lloyd's whole case. Firstly, his assumption that Labour's priority is to chase "never had it so good" Tory voters into the political centre with promises of more of much-the-same is seriously undermined by the willingness of 15 per cent of the electorate to vote Green in the European elections earlier this month. That shows that a significant proportion of the well-off are beginning to have doubts about the supreme value of ever-increasing consumption.
More important, though, there's the question of dealing with the environmental crisis itself. Lloyd himself writes that this may "require a profound change in consumption levels and expectations if disasters for at least part of the globe — they are likely to be the already-poorest — are to be averted". If this is so, as more and more evidence suggests, the necessary changes cannot be managed unless politics is put firmly in command of markets. That doesn't mean emulating the Stalinist command economies, but it does mean measures as antipathetic to market forces as any advocated in the past 30 years by the Labour left. Lloyd's recycled centrism simply doesn't take Green politics seriously.
