Another mournful moment for the old left was the octogenarian Tony Benn demonstrating the Seatcase: a suitcase that comes with a seat attachment, a device which he co-invented with a member of the Conservative party. The Daily Mail loved the irony of this so much that its editor gave over a page to Mr Benn and his contraption. In the early Eighties heyday of Bennery, when he and his fellow travellers came close to seizing control of the Labour party, the Mail was so terrified by "Wedgie Benn" that the paper strained its larynx to denounced him as an extremist lunatic. Now he's so unthreatening that the rightwing tabloid treats the former tribune of the left as a mildly eccentric, rather adorable national treasure. The Mail chortled affectionately: "The scourge of capitalism has turned entrepreneur (in coalition with a Tory!)" There was a sad metaphor in pictures of Tony Benn sucking on his pipe while squatting on his invention. Where once the forward march of socialism was never supposed to be halted, now one of its grand old men invents a device for weary travellers to take a rest. The third humiliation for the left was its struggle to get a candidate into the Labour leadership contest. When Tony Benn was at his zenith, his followers were so rampant in the Labour party that he came within an eyebrow of defeating Denis Healey for the deputy leadership. Thirty years on, the spiritual heirs of Bennery in the Labour Campaign Grouphave such a pathetic level of support that Diane Abbott only made it on to the ballot a minute before deadline – literally so. She got the final signature she needed to become a competitor just seconds before nominations closed. She is only in the contest because she was loaned nominations, donated in the name of diversity, from Labour MPs who have absolutely no intention of voting for her and would slit their wrists if she became their next leader. One of those signatures even belonged to David Miliband, both a generous and a calculating gesture by a serious candidate to one who is not, which was slightly spoilt because he could not spell her name correctly. This has provoked anger among some Labour veterans who spent the Eighties in vicious battles with the impossibilist left to return the party to electability. But this is surely the point. The hard left is now so unfrightening that it seems harmless to fix things so that they can have a token candidate. Ms Abbott is not on the ballot because there is any thirst to revive the days and ideas of Tony Benn. She is there because the four, fortysomething, Oxbridge-educated, former cabinet ministers contesting the leadership became embarrassed by the charge that they are so lookalike that they needed a black woman to do hustings with them to liven things up. I expect Ms Abbott will do that and she will probably find more support among trade unionists and party members, who between them have two-thirds of the vote in the electoral college, than she did among her colleagues on the Labour benches. Still, she is realistic enough to know that she is in it for the ride. The BBC has suspended her from her perch next to Michael Portillo on the sofa of This Week. Ms Abbott does not expect to be missing out on the appearance fees for long. Were she actually to win, it would be a stunning shock, most of all to herself. She represents a collection of causes and postures rather than a leftwing programme which would be a coherent alternative to either the government or New Labour. She dissented from the Iraq war, but then so, according to the testimony they gave to the Chilcot inquiry, did almost the entire British establishment. After the event, at any rate. She rebelled against ID cards, but then they are being scrapped by the coalition. She is against Trident, but then so are plenty of respectable people in the military and the former Tory defence secretary with whom she snuggles up on the This Week sofa. Even Ms Abbott combines her criticisms of New Labour with praise for its achievements. The hard left only has a candidate from borrowed nominations. As for what used to be known as "the soft left" of the Labour party, it hasn't got an official candidate at all. The position of leader of the "soft left" has been vacant since the death of Robin Cook. Many of its adherents hoped the role would be filled by Jon Cruddas, the MP for Dagenham, who proved his popularity when he performed extremely well in the last contest for the deputy leadership. It would have been good to see him in the contest for his ideas and arguments, even if you don't agree with all of them. Or even any of them. Yet he has declined to come out of the dressing room. His friends put that down to natural diffidence combined with insufficient desire to step up to the demands of leadership. Perhaps Mr Cruddas also thinks that a leftwinger of his stripe cannot win an election in Britain. This speaks to a wider failure on the left. When markets were crashing and banks were imploding two years ago, there was a lot of talk among socialists that this was their moment, the beginning of a great revival for the left. The financial crisis was a spectacular demonstration of the vices and failures of markets. This was the crisis of capitalism that the left had predicted. Yet when the opportunity came, they did not seem to know what to do with it. The threat of another Great Depression initially moved the global political climate leftwards. Keynes was rediscovered. State intervention suddenly gained unexpected converts. Even Republican rightwingers in America nationalised banks. Yet that "leftwing moment" is already evaporating. Governments are now more spooked by the size of their deficits than they are by the fear of another depression. Ferocious fiscal retrenchment is beginning not just in Britain, but across Europe. The politicians of the left did not produce a leader capable of seizing the hour. Their intellectuals, the few of them who remain, weren't a great help in remaking the case for socialism. The best book from the left to be published since the financial crisis is Tony Judt's Ill Fares the Land. It is a roar of rage against "the way we live today", a moral indictment of the inequalities and depredations of globalisation. Yet it no more offers an outline of what an alternative leftwing programme might look like than anyone else has managed. This failure of the left in Britain is being replicated across most of the western democracies. Austerity, it appears, is working out to the political advantage of the right. France has a Gaullist president. He is not popular, but Nicolas Sarkozy is blessed that his opponents in the Socialist party are riven with suicidal civil war. Germany and Italy have governments of the right. The Dutch have just swung that way and Spain looks likely to go in the same direction very soon. The quartet of former cabinet ministers who want the Labour leadership are suddenly discovering various things they objected to about the recently deceased government of which they were prominent members. They are broadly agreed that New Labour went too far in its embrace of the rich and free markets. There is a bit of tacking and pandering to the left, a trait most notable in Ed Miliband. But not one of the quartet comes close to articulating a passion to try to turn Labour back into a party red in tooth and claw. This lack of an avowedly socialist candidate for the Labour leadership with a chance of winning breaks a pattern. Historically, the party has tended to swing left when it has just lost power. It did so after the 1979 defeat to most disastrous effect. Labour fought the 1983 election on a nationalise-the-solar-system manifesto which Gerald Kaufman accurately and famously called "the longest suicide note in history". Only Tony Benn could have described the colossal defeat in that election as a "triumph for socialism". The memory of what followed Labour's last great lurch to the left – four lost elections and 18 years in opposition – is part of the reason it isn't happening again. History that calamitous is not history anyone sensible wants to repeat. This may be depressing news for old lefties nostalgic for the days when Tony Benn scared the elderly rather than invented luggage for them. It is probably better news for Labour's chances of not again consigning itself to many years of opposition.
Sunday, 13 June 2010
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