New Labour’s double bluff: actually quite socialist after all

“An idealist is one who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a cabbage, concludes that it will also make better soup.” —H.L. Mencken

New Labour Soup, the snazzily-packed, dark red gloop with an oddly-familiar aftertaste that is the chosen brand of the most important 21 per cent of people ever to have graced Great Britain is an odd concoction. Decried for placing false hope in the minds of many, while concurrently denounced for failing to fulfil the different desires of many more, the story of Tony’s gang is at the very least an interesting one.

This is partly because no one has ever worked out just what the hell was going on: what did this gobble actually mean? Francis Wheen’s assertion that the Third Way “was somewhere between the Second Coming and the Fourth Dimension” remains as good as any.

One of the main reasons the New Labour product has been so hard to pin down (no back-reference to earlier analogy intended) is that, to some extent at least, they’ve stolen a lot of the policies that Old Labour spent so long fighting against. This was a bold political move and it worked really rather well. However, in doing so, it did make things terribly confusing; “whatever works” may have simultaneously made easy headline-copy and good men grumble, but it came no closer to explaining what, if anything, was happening inside Tony’s head.

Another part of the problem stems from an equally hazy concept of the old ideological terms which New Labour shelved so successfully along the road to power. They may have publicly ditched being socialists, but what did that sort of talk mean anyway?

Originally, and still holding down the top spot in most dictionary definitions, ‘socialism’ was all about the collective ownership of the means of production. Technically anything differing too wildly from this is pseudo-cheaty socialism, and is subscribed to by people keener on the name than the implications.

However, thanks to the unarguable work of people like Ludwig von Mises, and other economisty types, this hardcore-brand socialism now only exists in worlds inhabited by fairies and people whose hair-grease has seeped into their brains and caused chaos among the circuits. It is a place not too dissimilar in its delusory ways to some of the worlds envisioned by Charles Fourier and his merry band of crazy-communist underlings, for whom the move to a fully centralised economy would have ushered in a world where we would live in a grand Utopian harmony and where we would travel to work on the back of helpful animals, some of whom had now learned to talk. Another of the entertainingly eccentric early socialists, William Godwin, was probably relieved not to witness a pure socialistic revolution, as to him the socialisation of the means of production would have made mankind immortal, which would have been something of a political headache.

Leaving the nutters alone for now, however much fun they may be, socialism in its modern context (finally rubber-stamped by Labour’s ditching of Clause 4 in April 1995) is a more nebulous beast. It has stuck with tradition in being devoid of any political power outside of states with walls high enough to keep the corrupting influences of the big scary world at bay, but in pretty much every other respect it has moved on.

So what, in this day and age does being a socialist entail? One can talk of wishy-washy concepts such as ‘making people better off’, ‘lessening inequality’, ‘equal opportunities’ and the like, but these are the central goals of the stupid baby-eaters on ‘the right’ too, except they believe it’s best gone about in a different (and usually equally erroneous) manner.

The simplest way to separate the socialists from the rest actually goes back to our original definition and the concept of government interference. Fair enough, it may be suicidal to push for complete collectivisation, especially when people work so jolly hard to get one over on their neighbours, but that doesn’t stop a government from getting a bit grabby with what’s left. However, in party-political terms at least, this comes up against a rather imposing stumbling block as well, and one that illustrates one of those fascinating democratic dilemmas: the other parties like to interfere too. People like to interfere. It gives them a sense of power, a sense of belonging and a distorted sense of existence-justification. And everyone likes a bit of that.

“As Hobbes observes, all mental pleasure exists in being able to compare oneself with others to one’s own advantage… Nothing is of greater moment to a man than the gratification of his own vanity.” —Arthur Schopenhauer

Unfortunately, the same people hate to be interfered with, which can make the whole process rather destructive (not that this is intrinsically bad, as creation requires destruction, but in this context, things can get a tad messy). In a way, therefore, all party-political aspirations are in a socialist vein. This, however, apart from being horribly, (and a bit wilfully) crude, is largely wrong and gets us nowhere anyhow; and we wouldn’t want to let practice get in the way of theory either.

For ease of argument then, we’ll say modern socialism is to be seen in an overriding urge to tell people what to do, or as von Mises said: “The Socialist idea is nothing but a grandiose rationalisation of petty resentments”. On the other hand, non-socialism, or, I suppose, ‘liberal-conservatism’, if we are to revert to theoretical concepts for a second, is to be seen in stepping back and seeing how things pan out, only stepping in to stop people murdering each other and the like, believing that there has to be scope somewhere for ‘the freedom to be rubbish’, rather than simply imposing rubbishness from on high.

And herein lies the key to New Labour’s secret socialism: its legislation-happy legacy. It is not a simple proliferation of Bills (although it’s very hard to tell for sure given the role of the Lords in blocking or amending legislation, New Labour is crudely no more legislation-happy than previous governments), but rather the nature, approach and foolhardy visions that characterise the actions taken in the name of the people, almost all of which take away one freedom or another for little observable purpose.

Some people will at this point, no doubt, claim I’ve confused socialism with authoritarianism. Maybe I have: the logical conclusions of both aren’t all that far apart. However, I think not. Authoritarianism tends to aim at the personal goals of the autocrat, whereas socialism claims to aim at the goals of the allegedly oppressed classes. In modern language, after the massive strides seen in public welfare reform since the time of Engels & Co., this is unfortunately synonymous with the goals of the angry people, the free-lunch hunters and the ones with a constant nagging fear that someone, somewhere, may be having some fun.

Yet if being a socialist these days means being a useless interfering busy-body, then why the constant talk about Tonyism as Toryism?

Partly this was due to the early years—first impressions are always disproportionately important—and the publicised adherence to the previous government’s budget limits. Then there was the refusal to cosy up to the unions once more, flirting with the businessmen instead, rising inequality, lessening social mobility and a budget so increasingly complex that no-one could work out whether it was lefty/righty or just nutsy. There is also the question of arrogance—a belief that you know best is, when combined with actual power, quite often aligned with a desire to prove it. One would think, given the poor proofing witnessed over the years, that this train of thought wasn’t especially sustainable. One would be wrong, for delusions die hard, on both sides of the House.

Recently however, as the phosphorous fumes have made Tony increasingly dizzy, things have changed; Blairism has come into its own. I would blame the terrorists, but that would mean that they’ve succeeded in changing our way of life, which they haven’t, except they have, but they actually haven’t. At least I think that’s the official line.

Despite pretty much admitting that there isn’t really a way to fight these terrorist chaps, the government, rather than ceding to this, has taken a novel stance, known in Westminster as ‘The Somme Solution’. Details are, as ever, hazy, but the gist goes something like this:

When you can’t see an enemy, or work out a decent way to attack it, fire off every type of weapon you can think of in any direction open to you for as long as you can get away with. This should mess up the landscape to such an extent that absolutely anything is now possible. This allows a government to operate on (and in the process reveals) its default setting. New Labour’s default setting appears, therefore, to be something like “do as I we say or die”, a grand “we know what’s best for you, so sit back and watch”. And you can’t get much more socialistic than that.

Liberty, if it means anything, it seems, is the right to tell people to give theirs up.