Wouldn’t start from here

Much as I dislike giving any publicity to “newsletters” (or any other way of monetising the blogosphere), this piece by Jonn Elledge has been nagging at me since I first read it a week or so ago. Elledge opens by asking:

what do you imagine my politics are? Where do I fit? … The reason I ask is I have absolutely no idea. I mean, I can list policy preferences … but what name to give the resulting package I don’t know. Maybe this is just because I’ve never been an activist, and thus have never got into the sort of factional battles that result in you defining or being defined as one thing or the other.

Elledge goes on to argue that “the boxes don’t actually fit”, and that the box that fits him best is “soft Left”; he squares this circle by suggesting that the label of “soft Left” – as well as applying to people who are firmly convinced that they are in fact “soft Left” – may also designate a whole range of people who have left-wing commitments but hold them with a sceptical, loosely-bundled, engaged-but-not-committed attitude. (And that this is a good way to be, of course.)

Well, maybe – but let’s go back a bit. I’m sceptical about this idea of not ‘fitting’. Not feeling as if you fit is one thing – a very common thing – but actually fitting (or not) is another. As I wrote in this piece from the period of the first Corbyn leadership election, nobody who wants to achieve anything in politics acts entirely alone, or speaks solely for him- or herself, for the simple reason that acting alone achieves nothing. (It may get you re-elected, it may even get you into the papers, but it won’t achieve anything – not unless what you’re saying or doing gets taken up by your party, by the government or by some other group of people who are acting collectively.) So politics is about having allies – indeed, it’s about assembling allies, and achieving a rough match between the group of things you want to achieve and the different things your allies value most highly.

In this perspective, though, the question of where I “fit” – or where any political actor (including political commentators like Jonn Elledge) “fits” – is trivial, because “fit” is an active verb. Where you fit is where you want to fit and try to fit: you fit in with A rather than B by making an effort to go to A’s meetings and push A’s arguments rather than B’s. You may claim that this isn’t really you – you never got into factional battles, you aren’t strongly committed either way – but that only gets you so far, because what you actually do is verifiable: you fit where other people can see you fitting. You may claim that you’re equally interested in traditional songs and traditional music, but if you go to song sessions once a week and you haven’t been to a tunes session since before lockdown, people may reasonably conclude otherwise. Equally, anything you believe that you don’t act on, with other people, is only of interest to you; you can’t really claim you’re a staunch republican if you never talk about the royal family outside your own home. What you do, not what you think, is where you fit: no one who writes for the New Statesman and not Tribune is neutral between those two publications’ political positions, even if they’ve been thinking for a while that they’d rather like to write for Tribune.

All this suggests that Elledge is entitled to claim “soft Left” as the label of his preferred group, but not to claim that it means something along the lines of “holding left-wing positions in a judicious and detached way” – not least because such an attitude would be basically pointless and of no interest to anyone else. Even those who claim to have this kind of attitude are in practice working with other people, making it possible to see where they ‘fit’ – those who anyone’s heard of, anyway. (And yes, I have heard of George Orwell; he wrote for Tribune, he fought with POUM, he collaborated with the CCF and IRD.)

Can we define ‘soft Left’ any more precisely? In that piece from 2015 I said quite a lot about the “soft Left” label, and about my own journey in the early 00s from (vaguely) soft Left to (reluctantly) hard Left. I argued then that the division between “soft” and “hard” Left was “at once very deep and very impermanent, like a crevasse in sand” and that there was “something cultural – almost temperamental” about it. I related my own changing position to Kosovo and Iraq: “the old soft Left has ended up positively committed to supporting aggressive wars conducted by imperialist powers”. This, I suggested, brought an opposition into play that was different from, and bigger than, the differences of priorities and emphasis that had fuelled past divisions between soft and hard Left:

If Jeremy Corbyn wins this election, he’ll be the first genuinely anti-imperialist leader of the Labour Party for a long time – possibly the first ever. Many people, unfortunately, will oppose him for that reason. I just wish they’d acknowledge that they do oppose him for that reason .. Maybe … this isn’t just another case of rivalry within the Left. Maybe we’re not actually on the same side here.

If you want to fund large-print purchases for the library and I want to fund food banks, we’re rivals. If you want to bring freedom to Afghanistan (or anywhere else) on the point of a bayonet and I want to bring the troops home, we’re not actually rivals – we’re opponents.

All of this suggests three different ways of looking at the “soft Left”/”hard Left” division, to which my experience since 2015 as a Labour Party member adds a fourth:

1. Ideological: revolution, yea or nay? Which side are you on when it comes to the big stuff?
2. Political: what do you want the next Labour government to do? How far and how fast should they go?
3. Cultural: do you identify with the “hard Left” (i.e. Corbyn) or the “soft Left” (i.e. not Corbyn)?
4. Organisational: are you a Trot (actual or suspected) or someone who will fight the Trots?

These aren’t hard-and-fast categories so much as a blurry spectrum; both 1. & 2. and 3. and 4. have a lot in common with each other. (Arguably so do 2. and 3., but let’s not over-complicate things.)

The distinction between 1. and 2. – “are you an anti-imperialist or are you committed to Britain’s existing alliances?” versus “would you bring in a 50% tax on high earners or leave it at 45%?” – seems clear enough, but applying it in practice is far from being an exact science. A mistake people often make – and which my argument in that 2015 piece fell into to some extent – is assuming that there’s a bright line to be drawn between issues of principle, which are broad, distinct, stable and generally visible from space (“Capitalism (with reforms) or socialism (via revolution)?”), and political issues, which are made up of insignificant minutiae. The reality is that defining the scope and content of those issues of principle is itself a deeply political issue.

Ideological disagreements don’t come ready-labelled either as “good-faith divergence within a commitment to shared principles” or as “fundamental disagreement precluding one side ever working with the other again”; those labels have to be applied. Suppose I believe in principle {X} and key policy issues {a} and {b}, and your beliefs are different from mine. I don’t ask whether what you’re talking about is policy issue {c} (potentially compatible with {X}) or a completely distinct principle {Y}: the fact that the belief you’re professing relates to a policy issue, rather than constituting a principle in its own right, isn’t in dispute. The judgment I make is whether you believe in {c} as part of a version of {X}, or conversely whether believing in {c} shows that you can’t possibly believe in {X} even if you claim to. And that’s a question that can be answered different ways, even for the same {c} and the same {X}: whether disagreements are understood as good-faith divergences (etc) depends on… well, it depends on whether that’s how we understand them or not.

I think Elledge’s version of the ‘soft left’ grasps this to some extent – specifically, to the extent of approving of the first, inclusive alternative and disapproving of the second. The trouble is, drawing lines in this way isn’t necessarily the wrong thing to do: people do have red lines (even you; even Jonn Elledge), and sometimes people do in fact claim to be on the same side as you while also having beliefs that cross those lines. The judgment that anyone who believes {c} can’t possibly be a genuine believer in X (and hence isn’t one of us) is often made cynically, but it can be made with complete sincerity.

So there isn’t a hard-and-fast line between the principles ({X} and {Y}) of point 1. and the policies ({a}, {b} and {c}) of point 2. – or rather, there is in theory, but it’s not reliable in practice. (In theory there’s no difference between theory and practice, but in practice there is. Thanks, I’m here all week.) What we can say is that there are times of lower and higher polarisation within the Left – times when different factions on the Left are more, and less, willing to think in terms of lower-case policy differences within shared upper-case principles – and that we’re currently in a period of higher polarisation.

The questions in points 3. and 4 also look distinct, and also have a tendency to bleed into each other. At first blush “Soft Left” certainly seems like a real thing, with definite reference points – the current version of the New Statesman, the old version of Tribune, Andy Burnham, Compass, electoral reform, that kind of thing. That’s the soft Left, inasmuch as those are the kind of people who call themselves “soft Left” or don’t object to other people doing so; they’re good people, they do a lot of useful stuff. But that doesn’t answer the question of what makes them “soft Left” as distinct from the “hard Left”.

Park that for a moment while we look at point 4. When I joined the Labour Party in 2015 I understood that a lot of people had been members for some time, and that quite a lot of them weren’t as keen on Jeremy Corbyn as I was; he got the votes of 49.6% of existing party members in the first round, admittedly, but that is less than half. Still, if you put together 49.6% of existing members and all the people like me who had joined since the election, you’d surely have a faction substantial enough to dominate the party, or at the very least to take the lead on a ‘first among equals’ basis, graciously sharing power with pre-existing factions. The hard-core Blairites might be hard to win round, but the soft Left would be up for it, surely – we’d been their junior partners so many times, after all, it was only fair…

Laugh? I nearly cried. What actually happened was that the Corbynite Left dominated a few particularly moribund local parties by sheer weight of numbers – helped along in one or two cases by the organising ability of pre-existing Left factions – and got repulsed everywhere else, systematically, repeatedly, relentlessly, until-we-gave-up-and-went-away-ily. We never got much chance to work as “first among equals”, or as second or third among equals for that matter.

What happened? Speaking as a member of a local group of ‘Corbyn supporters’ (yes, an informal, under-the-radar group of supporters of the current manifesto and the elected leader, that was us), I think we didn’t reckon with two things, one organisational and one cultural. The organisational point was that, while there were large numbers of left-leaning people joining the party, nobody had any way of finding out who they were or how to contact them – nobody, that is, except existing office-holders, and they certainly weren’t sharing the information around. (If we’re ever in this position again we need to think hard, and quickly, about ways round this one.)

The cultural point is more relevant here: we simply didn’t know what we were up against. We thought – well, I thought – that the people in charge of local parties in the 2010s were, broadly, “soft Left”, municipal variety: people who shared our basic principles but were less likely to talk about issues like imperialism, and more willing to think in terms of “half a loaf”, “the art of the possible”, “getting things done for working people” and so forth. I also thought that existing office-holders would recognise the sheer weight of numbers of the pro-Corbyn faction – not to mention that it was our leader who was leading the party – and… well, let us have a go.

What only dawned on me much later was that there was a commitment much more important than those “soft Left” political positions, which took precedence over them and sometimes seemed to displace them completely: the commitment to keep things going pretty much as they were, with pretty much the same people in pretty much the same positions (or, ideally, progressing to more senior positions). The existing in-group’s self-perpetuation was the absolute, non-negotiable top priority; anyone who threatened to interrupt it was a Trot, and a menace. That’s not to say that everyone involved actually was a Trot in party-card terms – or that anyone was, necessarily. But then, on the other side there was only a minority who were positively committed to kicking the Trots (or the “Trots”), or saw it in political terms at all. What united everyone was seeing it as a necessity: if they were in, we were out, and we would need to stay that way. I eventually realised, in short, that for them we would never be part of the conversation – we were what they needed to scrape off their shoes before the conversation could start.

As for distinguishing between points 3. and 4. – “hard Left or soft Left?” vs “Trot or Trot-basher?” – this history shows why it’s hard to do; or rather, this history makes it hard to do. Within the party, it would be absurd to define the “hard Left” without any reference to Jeremy Corbyn – which is to say, to name the “hard Left” is to invoke the leader of an insurgency within the party which was beaten back and ultimately defeated, largely by dogged refusal to budge on the part of existing office-holders. That in turn means that any debate between “soft Left” and “hard Left” is over before it begins: if group A has power and group B doesn’t, and power is both the thing that A most cares about and the one thing that B absolutely can’t be allowed to have, what are A and B going to have to say to each other?

This is also the context within which the heightened levels of polarisation referred to above – which make it harder to accommodate policy differences on the basis of shared principles – play out. Spelt out like this, it seems like a glimpse of the blindingly obvious: there’s been a civil war inside the Labour Party, in which one faction is now massively dominating the other – how could that not lead to higher levels of polarisation? I think it’s worth overtly taking account of it, all the same. And – let’s be clear – I’m not just observing that heightened polarisation as a sociologist; I’m conscious that I am very much in it. My only consolation is that this also applies to everyone who cares in some way about the Labour Party, which surely accounts for almost everyone on the Left in Britain. What happened in the Labour Party between 2015 and 2019, and between 2019 and the present, isn’t something anyone on the Left can be neutral about, it seems to me – and, a side once taken, it’s hard not to be a bit mistrustful and impatient with those on the other side. Shame, but until the war’s over it’s hard to know what else to expect. (It seems like a confession of weakness to say that my judgment is influenced by recent history, but I think it’s better seen as simple honesty. We can only do anything in the present moment, after all – and this present moment is, still, very much in the shadow of 2015-19.)

So I’m sceptical when Jonn Elledge claims to adopt the Mercutio position (“A plague on both your houses!”):

My politics has been almost entirely consistent. I want a Labour government; I just hate the Labour leadership.

Neat, but it won’t really do. As I said earlier on, where you fit in politics is “where you want to fit and try to fit” – and “what you actually do is verifiable: you fit where other people can see you fitting”. When the options are as limited as in this case – when it really is a case of being either for or against something – this is all the clearer. Where you fit on the Left – in a country where the Left is dominated by the Labour Party, in a period where the Labour Party has been split down the middle – is a matter of where you stood during that split: whether you were for or against the Corbynite attempt to transform the Labour movement and win power on a social democratic platform. And that’s verifiable, particularly if you’ve got any kind of public footprint: what did you say in 2015? 2017? 2019? What did you do? Who did you do it with?

There were only two sides – still are, when you look at it. “Soft Left” isn’t one of them. The label of “soft Left” is pretty meaningless at the best of times – which is to say, it’s defined primarily as “on the Left but not actually hard Left” and secondarily by the combination of issues that people who identify with it bring along. It only makes any sense at all when Left politics is relatively unpolarised, making it possible for there to be productive traffic between “hard Left” and “Left but not hard Left”. At a time of heightened polarisation – when the options are “pro-Corbyn” and “anti-Corbyn”, “is hard Left” and “hates the hard Left’s guts” – there’s really no room for “soft Left”.

I think his attachment to the idea of a “soft Left” helps explain Elledge’s recent New Statesman piece where he sets out all the great things the Starmer leadership would be able to do in government, before conceding that it might not do any of them. At least, it helps explain why that piece was so irritating. A “soft Left” government, if we define “soft Left” in policy terms – a government with portraits of Robin Cook and Jon Cruddas on its wall – would certainly do the things Elledge talks about: planning reform, rapprochement with Europe, revised fiscal rules, bring it on. But… well, so what? It wasn’t the “soft Left” that won the 2020 leadership election; come to that, it wasn’t the “soft Left” that Corbynites to a small extent tried (and to a large extent failed) to oust from their positions in the party.

Even when Elledge is conceding that he might be wrong, he shows no awareness of why he’s wrong:

it must be at least possible that the cynics are right, this isn’t an electoral strategy and Starmer’s Labour is exactly as gutless and unambitious as it seems.

Lurking here is the conviction that the Starmer leadership is itself “soft left”; that, at worst, we’re facing the prospect of principled – albeit “soft” – left-wing government whose key personnel are unfortunately lacking in courage and ambition. Actually, the Starmer leadership has made it very clear where it stands on a whole range of issues, and in the process has made some breaks with Labour orthodoxy that I’d certainly characterise as ambitious, even brave.

Once again: the soft Left isn’t here. If it’s the soft Left you want to support, think again – or at the very least, take a hard look at the people you currently are supporting. Labour has been split down the middle since 2015; there are and were only two sides in that split, and one of them was and is victorious – and those are the people who are going to be running the government. The fact that the next Labour government is in the future doesn’t mean we can treat it as a complete fantasy.