Alex Hochuli
posted 22 January 2007

While last year's Fabian Society New Year Conference attempted to divine a new 'Britishness', this time speakers and delegates to were invited to consider 'The Next Decade'. The intention of such an open-ended theme was to encourage free-thinking and emphasise 'renewal' for the Labour party, and its affiliates like the Fabians. Although the title 'The Next Decade' works on the problematic assumption that Labour will be in power for the next ten years, it also recognises the challenge that some new thinking must inspire the party's future, or there will be no future.

The point was not simply to declare 'stay the course, full steam ahead'. We're talking about new Labour after all - the party that ostensibly cares little for what has come before. The imperative to seek new solutions in a changing world, ruthlessly to 'modernise', is all pervasive. Further, since the conference was hosted by the Fabian Society, not the Labour Party itself, the constraints normally imposed by media scrutiny of politicians and by the imperative to devise specific policies were not so present. Why, then, was the conference dominated by the language of marketing, not politics, and the overwhelming feeling that the government could not hope to change anything in the world beyond citizen's private behaviour?

The well-organised conference began with a relaxed 'in conversation' session with the PM-in-waiting, Gordon Brown. Delegates were then to attend various sessions during the day - the morning focusing on 'politics' and the afternoon on 'policy' - before joining up again for a final 'Question Time' session in the main hall. To no one's surprise, Brown's speech was as stage-managed as anything New Labour has done, with carefully rehearsed 'witty anecdotes' and friendly questions from the floor throughout. It was a mildly convincing portrayal of Brown as a 'personality', in spite of Brown's own explicit claims to be the serious, heavyweight candidate to Cameron's charismatic featherweight.

Let us excuse this cheesy populism for a moment; we were anyway not there to watch Brown play to the (quite numerous) cameras. Away from their glare, what was the substance of the conference? I unfortunately never stopped asking the question. A morning debate on identity politics, 'Divided by difference - can the left handle the new politics of culture and identity?', presented a panel meekly edging away from the official multiculturalism of the past years, yet never coming to terms with the monster that they as the cultural left had themselves created.

The received wisdom that the Right won the economic battle but the Left won the cultural one is relevant here. Much is also made of the fact that now politics is defined along the axis of culture rather than economics. However, anyone thinking that this means a net victory for the Left - since the game is now being played on the terrain the Left helped define - would be seriously mistaken. The fact that the Right has by and large accepted the new cultural landscape only highlights the continuing importance of material questions; for in all this debate about culture, the economic structure of society remains unchanged, and thus determined by (what used to be) the Right.

Which is why it was a tedious experience watching the panel flail about trying to rescue the concept of 'equality' when it was precisely they who were so keen to emphasise - and so keen to have everyone else emphasise - 'difference'. Only at the end did two of the panellists, Sunder Katwala (Fabian Society General Secretary) and Trevor Philips (Commissioner for Equality and Human Rights), stress the need for a departure: Katwala problematised the contemporary political discourse which tends to dwell on symbols of difference rather than emphasising unity and solidarity. The soon to be Commissioner for Equality and Human Rights was more direct: 'Shut the fuck up and get on with it,' Philips charged. It was surely directed at himself as much as to anyone else.

No one else heard or heeded the call though; and the conference was worse for it. Addressing the question, 'Democracy - what would restore trust?' in one of the afternoon sessions, Michael Wills MP, Kirsty McNeill - a councillor and activist, and Gerry Stoker of Southampton University succeeded in demonstrating beyond all doubt the sheer vacuity of the New Labour project and the marketisation of politics they have ushered in. 'Why doesn't anyone vote, go to party conferences, or march on the streets', they asked. Surely it's because it is too demanding in terms of time and effort, was the response. This lament was heard throughout the day. The solution proposed by McNeill, but also endorsed by the others, was campaigns such as 'Make Poverty History', to the extent that it was held up as 'the greatest civic movement in history'. Let's ignore for a moment that these spurious words were spoken by an organiser of that movement and might have been an exercise in self-aggrandisement. The fact that an event better described as 'mass assuagement of moral guilt via text message' was compared to the civil rights movement was a little bit bewildering, and more importantly, demeaning to those who once campaigned for real social and political change.

But the panel insisted: to make politics more 'appealing' we must make like the voluntary sector and 'trade in hope, not guilt'. I may be wrong, but have liberal charities not been as much at fault of using guilt as a motivator as have politicians? Or perhaps we are experiencing a sea-change here, where politics once again means presenting a positive vision for the future and winning the argument? Are we to expect no more reduction of politics to pictures of starving Africans? No more demands to 'give us your fucking money'?

If Saturday was anything to go by, that is highly unlikely. Marketing and moralising were the order of the day. Governing elites' inability to connect with and inspire the electorate has lead to nothing like a drive to reinvigorate politics. In one of the morning sessions, a very un-philosophical debate entitled, 'Philosophy after Blair', summed up New Labour thinking perfectly: 'people have some "private" beliefs, while Labour has strong values from which policies are derived; if people feel no affinity with those policies, then it is merely because these policies have not been "sold" correctly.' Political 'renewal' thus is approached in the same way one treats a pair of old shoes that have served one well up to that point - give them a bit of a shine and they'll be as good as new.

Those who thought just that little bit harder about the considerable problem of political disengagement suggested that perhaps institutional issues were preventing political engagement from flourishing. Devolution is the buzzword. Local government officials, according to polls, enjoy a higher level of public trust than do MPs. The solution: give councillors more power and responsibility. Follow this logic a little further and you will immediately see why the government feels it is acceptable for pop stars to be the true political leaders of a generation: just keep 'outsourcing' responsibility to those deemed the most popular and trustworthy.

But what to do once that fleeting enthusiasm for whomever you've placed on a pedestal fizzes out? What happens when the electorate again lose interest? The only thing one can do - change the electorate! Here charity managers were lauded as the only ones to have figured out how to string members along effectively: '[charities] send you something once a month telling you what they have been up to, what to feel, and what you can do to help' - if the public do not feel engaged, then we must change how they feel. To say the panel were 'coming at it from the wrong end of the stick' would be a massive understatement.

The government would no doubt like a bit of genuine support, but with little political space left in which to assert moral legitimacy, it only has two ways to go. The first was correctly identified in the Question Time session by Nick Cohen, stating that the future electoral battlefront will be the fight to be the party that speaks to worried parents. Whether he endorses this future is unclear, but he was most probably correct in his analysis. In this neo-Victorian morality politics, demonstrating that one is against, for example, paedophilia, becomes a requisite statement of moral worth.

The second space in which to assert legitimacy is Africa, as Gordon Brown has shown over the past year and did again in his opening speech at the Fabian Conference. 'Sorting out' Africa is not only a moral imperative, Brown argued, but to those for whom moral concerns have little purchase, it is a strategic imperative too. As home to hundreds of 'Al-Qaeda cells' but also as a recipient of considerable investment from China, the imperative for Britain to make its presence felt in Africa is a pressing one. Or so goes the argument. With politics in stasis (or worse) at home, you go abroad. This is the oldest trick in the book. But with the total exhaustion of the Middle East as a political playground, above all due to Iraq, you have nowhere to go but Africa. This is not, it should be made clear, a conspiracy of some kind. The government's desperate search for 'a mission' is not motivated by sinister hidden agendas, nor does it involve covert machinations. It is all too transparent.

New Labour is the party of perpetual renewal, the party with little regard for historical moorings. 'Renewal' is the ideology. So when it comes to a major conference organised by the society closest to the Labour Party, it should be of no surprise to anyone that the discussion should centre not on new policies, but on new stimuli. Demonstrating moral legitimacy and using the right language to get that message across is what it is about, not enacting any sort of practical change. So the question New Labour asks itself is not 'which way are we headed', but 'which is the whitest horse we can jump on to take us there'. And yet, something has changed; something is a little bit different. There is now the definite feeling that the party no longer even cares much for the 'ride' itself. Where once you had a directionless, but energised and ambitious government, now you have a complacent one that is as directionless as always. For all the bluster about 'the next decade', there are no guarantees that the party will be in government in even two years, and little sense of why it should be.

Reports on the various sessions, and press coverage of the event, can be found on the Fabian website.