Social democracy and the problem of agency.
| Author | Prior, Michael |
| Position | Responses - Critical essay |
This essay is prompted by Renewal's issue on 'Futures for social democracy' (Vol 15 (2/3), 2007), specifically by three personal responses to it.
The first of these is that that the left (1) is not short of policies, both strategic and immediate. There is really now a cast-iron case that the market-centred policies of neo-liberalism produce a society with a recurrent and intensifying social malaise. A left government should have little difficulty in preparing a shortlist of policies to counter this and to work towards longer-term objectives of the 'good life'. The problem, of course, is just how to get this government into power.
The second is that social democracy has a good long-term historical memory, but suffers from a form of short-term amnesia. It is all to the good to recall that the political left in its wider meaning had its roots in issues of democracy, liberty and equality and that the socialist hegemony over that left with its emphasis on the over-arching question of ownership led to a number of false alleys, notably that of believing that nationalisation was the primary tool of a socialist government even compared with other forms of social ownership. However, this memory, as seen in this issue of Renewal, comes to shuddering halt about forty years ago when the post-war consensus in Western Europe, largely brokered by social democracy, began to break down. That breakdown, effectively complete in Britain, is still underway in other parts of the continent. One rather seductive idea for social democrats is that it never has gone away in Sweden and that this survival still offers us a model, and there may be some truth in this. But the fact remains that short-term amnesia is a disabling condition for short-term actions. It is possible to gain considerable happiness in life from full possession of long-term memory but it is difficult to function socially if one cannot remember what happened last week.
The third observation is that, however well-constructed are possible left policies, the evidence of the Renewal essays is that even a revitalised social democracy struggles with the problem of agency: that is just how the policies so clearly detailed can become enacted in some way. David Coates' largely admirable essay really highlights this. It is, of course, true that
The left ... needs to view the Brown government as the gateway to a more radical future, rather than an agent capable of delivering that future if not pushed. Pushing and pulling will therefore be vital. (Coates, 2007, 114)
Similarly 'It is time for New Labour ministers to face underlying class realities, realise who their true dancing partners are, and incrementally re-design their dance routines accordingly'. Metaphors have their place but politics does require that one names the names. Just who are these 'true partners' and just what is the dance they are being asked to perform?
In this essay, I want to investigate the problem of agency in a more concrete way, using as my starting point political opposition to the Thatcher government in the 1980s (a longer analysis of this can be found in Prior and Purdy, 2007), in particular focussing on four key struggles of the period: the miners' strike of 1984; the assault on local authority independence after 1984; the camp at Greenham common beginning in 1981; and the protracted campaign against nuclear power.
The struggle against Thatcherism
The suicidal attempt by Arthur Scargill in 1984-5 to use the miners' union to promote what amounted, at least in fantasy, to an anti-Thatcher uprising over the bodies of his hapless miners needs little recitation. It was a traumatic disaster for the whole of the left whether or not they opposed the strike. What is less recognised is that the strike was the final act of a drama involving the entire British union movement and its contradictory role in the social-democratic post-war consensus, and not an unfortunate aberration.
The second struggle was the assault by the re-elected Thatcher government on the power of local councils. This was a more complex, though less heart-breaking, issue than the miners' strike, centring around the democratic rights of locally-elected bodies to resist central diktat as to how they should raise money. At the beginning of the Thatcher government, Labour councils were confident in the electoral mandate which had been handed to them in 1981 when Labour regained several important cities, notably Liverpool (from the Liberals) and the GLC, a huge metropolitan council which had been originally constructed to have an apparently inbuilt Conservative majority. These bodies had independent revenue-raising power over both business and households which, when Thatcher attempted to cut council spending centrally, they used in defiant compensation. At this time, such independent council spending amounted to nearly thirty per cent of all state expenditure. In 1984, after re-election, the Conservatives brought in new law which removed the power to set business rates and gave central government power to cap domestic rates. There was a widespread effort by councils all over England, amongst them the GLC (led by Ken Livingstone), South Yorkshire (David Blunkett) and Islington (Margaret Hodge), to refuse to abide by capping and to set 'illegal' rates, defying the government to take over council administration by the appointment of commissioners. The key twin foci were Liverpool, which seemed resolute in its intent not to set a balanced budget within the limits of the rate-capping imposed by central government, and the GLC. They seemed set upon the same path as George...
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