Labour's race for 2025 (sic)

The calculations of most political observers about Labour's electoral chances in 2020 focus on seats, Scottish Nationalists and political dynamics. Yet, there is also a broad consensus that, at the last election, the party had the wrong leader. Anybody who carefully listened to Diane Abbott on This Week any time before May 2015 knew it. Miliband was never going to be prime minister (Abbott always put it diplomatically: 'he might win'). The fact is that the gut feeling of moderate centrist floating voters (of which Abbott is none, yet I am indeed) is often right. Ed Miliband never looked like a prime minister in waiting and everybody knew it from the moment he looked flustered (and haplessly) around on stage as his victory was announced.

This 'gut feeling test' does not just work for the Labour Party. It goes for Conservative candidates as well. Michael Gove just won't be living in Number 10, no matter how radical he is in the various jobs he will hold in the next 5 years.

Much has to do with fluency of delivery in front of cameras and rhetorical discipline (both things easy to credit Gove with) but there is also stature and self-belief. Take all of these things together, and you have a credible prime minister in waiting.

This brings me to the four leadership contenders of the Labour Party who are currently slugging it out at hustings. Anybody of moderate central political views will see the same: four candidates with the calibre of leading the party in opposition but none to lead them to power in 2020.

First there is Liz Kendall, who still lacks the rhetorical fluency of Tony Blair and his polished media performances. Then there is Yvette Cooper who will probably make a suitably ruthless party leader (though with an unappealing hairstyle). Next there is Andy Burnham who would be clobbered with his dire role in the Staffordshire NHS scandal every time he would appear at the dispatch box (I also find his looks slightly creepy). And finally there is Jeremy Corbyn who probably would induce laughter on all benches if he ever makes it to the dispatch box at all (does he have a duffel coat for the celebrations at Cenotaph?).

The most interesting feature of this leadership campaign is who stayed away. Labour has credible candidates indeed, yet they have decided not to put themselves forward. There is of course Chuka Umunna who probably still needs some time to clean out some skeletons from his cupboards before he can safely stand. I would not be surprised if his girlfriend quietly fades from view over the next years.

And then there is Tristam Hunt, probably the strongest candidate for prime minister in waiting at some time in the future. He is also the most dangerous opponent for the Conservatives, given his background and already polished media performances. What he lacks (and that may have played an important role in his decision not to stand) is a top front bench job in a difficult portfolio like defence, health or foreign affairs.

There is of course no guarantee that either of them will ever have the chance to put their names forward after 2020. As George Osborne is doing a Merkel and moves the Conservatives to the centre, the Labour Party's reflex is to seek solace in the socialist nirvana of unmitigated nostalgia. But once the Coopers, Burnhams and Corbyns had their stab at failure, the Labour Party will be able to look for a credible candidate. At that time, people like Umunna and Hunt should be ready.

On 'being ready' for government

Popular wisdom has it that all it takes to win a general election is to have better answers to the problems a country faces than your opponents. A coherent vision and narrative may help too, plus a consistent message articulated on the door steps when canvassing the great British public.

A recently published study in the academic journal however questions this view (Hartwig Pautz, The Thinktanks behind Cameronism'. It argues that opposition parties that are successful at general elections undergo a period of intense debate about ideological renewal, often leading to political re-orientation. The arena for this debate are often think tanks that are more or less associated with the political party in question. Labour underwent such a period before it emerged as New Labour under Tony Blair. The hallmark of such a renewal, and measure of success in readying the party for government, may be the extent to which new policy ideas are being generated, debated, rejected or endorsed. Idea generation, in essence, is an indicator of how effectively a political party functions as a powerhouse for policy formulation necessary to formulate future government programmes. 

The Conservative Party experienced a similar period of internal debate and renewal under David Cameron before the general election in 2010. The jury is still out whether or not it was sufficient to make the Tories a genuinely modern party, but hardly anybody denies that the party has undergone fundamental changes with modernisers, such as George Osborne, in key positions. 

Squeezing through - Ed Miliband - Man without policies?

The picture is different for Labour under Ed Miliband. After five years of relative discipline and few internal squabbles, the party emerges almost empty handed to face the electorate in less than 2 months. Whilst Miliband himself tried to provide an overarching narrative in the 'cost of living' argument (a debate that is vanishing fast with wage rises gathering pace), the party is casting frantically around for policy ideas even at his late stage (note the recent speech of Shadow Education Secretary Tristam Hunt on 'innovation' in the classroom). Whatever Labour wants to be (a force for good in society) and who it wants to represent (the long suffering middle classes or people on zero hour contracts?) it lacks the wealth of ideas and the history of constructive policy debate that characterised New Labour in 1997. 

If it squeakes into government on 8th May, it will resemble the government of Miliband's political mentor: Gordon Brown. Having exhausted his energies and political capital in the fight against his own party and the Blair camp, Brown, when he finally moved into Number 10, had nothing to say and no policies to implement. If it hadn't been for the economic crisis, Brown's government would have quickly been revealed as one without purpose or direction. With Britain on the path to economic recovery, Miliband wont be so 'lucky'. The lack of ideas will come to haunt him as he steps into Number 10. If he gets that far. 

The blind spot in Marx's notion of capitalism

The most fascinating aspect of the current debate about capitalism is the general lack of ideas about any alternative. I have previously in this blog talked about why this may be the case. However, one interesting detail of the debate has so far escaped my attention. It is the view that, as Tristam Hunt pointed out in a Newsnight debate, 'capitalism can never be moral'. 

There is no doubt that this a widespread view amongst socialists. Capitalism, they maintain, is all about the generation of profit. Whether this happens within a tightly regulated environment and whether or not tax revenue from profits are used to alleviate some of the ills of capitalism, does not alter the fundamentally amoral quality of the capitalist market system, so the story goes. 

Although we often speak of the failure of the vision of Marxism, the paradox is that this opinion, that capitalism is fundamentally amoral, echoes Marx' view. In a sense then, even those who defend capitalism yet concur that capitalism is amoral express nothing less than a Marxian view. 

The curious result is that the debate about capitalism is actually fought on a premise that is profoundly Marxist, and, so I would say, profoundly false. 

How did Marx arrive at the thesis that capitalism is amoral? Famously, he turned Hegel upside down, or, as he said himself, 'turned Hegel's view from standing on its head back to its feet again'. What did he do? 

Marx argued that there is a clear distinction between the economic sphere (the substructure of society) and its social and political dimensions (the superstructure). The former, so he maintained, determined the nature of the latter. He endorsed nothing short of economic determinism. The separation between these two spheres allowed him to extricate the questions of morality and ethics from the actual moral constitution of societies. In essence, he superimposed on his economic and political analysis a simplistic moral framework that rested on the notions of exploitation (immoral) and equality (moral). How did this represent a change to Hegel's notion of society? 

Hegel's notion of society offered a far more complex and sophisticated account than Marx's. For Hegel, morality was an aspect of human interaction which manifested itself in the development of human freedom. One critical aspect of personal freedom, according to Hegel, was to engage in economic exchanges, or what he called 'civil society'. 

So, in contrast to Marx, entering an economic relationship with somebody to exchange goods represents a fundamental aspect of being free. Today we would say, the market therefore presents people with the opportunity to realise their personal freedom in society. Capitalism hence is an essential expression of personal freedom. As we engage with others in economic activities, we not only manifest the extent of our personal freedom, but also establish the ethical quality of society. Capitalism is moral, as long as it permits us to engage freely in economic exchanges. 

This demonstrates how much we have accepted an arguably skewed picture of capitalism that originates in Marx's analysis, rather than in Hegel's liberalism. We should always bear in mind, that Marx never accepted the economy as an arena of personal freedom. How wrong he was.