Labour’s preoccupation with ‘values’ is a basic
political error
Alan
Finlayson
Demands for change are the raw material of politics.
Keir Starmer needs to start addressing them
‘A party that isn’t explicitly, consistently and
loudly recognising and reorganising political demands isn’t doing politics, no
matter how proud it is of its historic “values”.’
Fri 6 Aug
2021 16.04 BST
Labour
leaders love to talk about values. Gordon Brown and Jeremy Corbyn both paid
homage to what the latter called “shared majority British values”. Last month,
Keir Starmer held up the party’s narrow win in Batley and Spen as proof that
“when we are true to our values … Labour can win”. More recently his new chief
strategist, the pollster Deborah Mattinson, was reported as arguing that
Labour’s primary challenge is to develop “clearer, sharper, more uplifting
messaging about the party’s values”.
So far the
Labour leader has adhered with particular intensity to an orthodoxy according
to which “values” are the wellspring of political engagement – and therefore
Labour can do nothing until it convinces the electorate it shares their values.
This is a terrible mistake. Politics is not grounded in values but in demands.
For most of
us, party politics matters but is not the centre of our moral lives. Politics
is how collective decisions are made about things the government might (or
might not) do – things that we do or don’t want. Such wants come in all shapes,
colours and sizes: higher pensions, no restrictions on planning, more national
flags on public buildings, fewer wars, capital punishment, no workplace
harassment, affordable housing, the cancellation of student debt, more
windfarms. The list is endless.
Some may
categorise these wants as cultural or economic, materialist or moral. It
doesn’t matter. They aren’t exactly “fully costed policies”, but they aren’t
abstract values either. They are things people may (and often do) demand of
society, economy and government. And they are the raw material of politics.
Political parties identify, mine and refine them. If they are good at politics,
they reshape and organise those demands into an overarching, unifying,
emblematic and encapsulating proposition – “spend more on the NHS”, “education,
education, education”, “leave the EU” – around which a coalition large enough
to win power may be built.
Because
participants in such a coalition are united around demands, they do not need to
share the same values. Maybe your values come from Methodism; maybe I got mine
from my mother. For us to be political allies, I don’t need to be converted to
your religion and you don’t need to meet my parents. I might want windfarms for
environmental reasons; you might want them for job creation. I will support
your call to end student debt if you support mine for higher pensions. Our
reasons may be different but we still agree on the demand.
Political
alliances are successful despite values not because of them; they thrive when
people stop trying to agree on fundamental philosophies so as to get something
specific done. The groups and individuals supporting leave in 2016 included
anti-immigration obsessives and free-market fundamentalists, retired miners on
the Lincolnshire coast and the chairs of parish councils in plush Norfolk villages.
These do not share culture or values. They had a range of different demands
that, in 2019, the Conservatives promised to fulfil by getting Brexit done.
Labour’s problem right now is not that values held by its electoral coalition
are too diverse but that their different demands are not being appealed to and
aligned. Forging that unity is what is known as political leadership.
Political
advisers probably think that “values” are more important than demands because
political scientists’ research seems to say so. Specialists in voting behaviour
have found that if you want to guess how someone voted in the last election
your chance of being right is higher if you combine information about
individuals’ social, economic or occupational situation with their response to
so-called “value statements” (about, say, capital punishment, schooling or
legal authority). That’s an interesting and important finding. But it doesn’t
translate into a simple means of winning votes.
If I tell
you that in a particular country there are lots of palm trees, you’d be
sensible to think it is probably often hot there. But you’d be mistaken if you
concluded that planting a million palm trees will make the UK a tropical
paradise. Similarly, if I tell you that lots of voters say they like waving the
union jack, that’s useful information. But it doesn’t follow that planting
flags everywhere will make the political climate more hospitable to the growth
of Labour voters. Arborists and politicians both sow seeds in complex ecologies
kept verdant by the meeting of fundamental demands.
“Values” do
have a place within that ecology. But they grow there as political “character”.
A party’s promise to meet our demands is useless if we think it is lying, or is
sincere but naive. But demonstrating your political character is more
complicated than simply announcing you are “trustworthy” or “competent”.
Character is not – most of the time – something we evaluate in an abstract way.
What counts is that someone is trustworthy or competent in relation to specific
demands. For instance, I don’t ask my barber to look after my money, my bank to
get me to the railway station on time or the cab company to cut my hair. I
trust them to do the thing they are good at. If we are to trust a politician
with power, we first need to know what they will do with it – which of our
demands they might meet.
Consequently,
perceived political character is inseparable from the demands to which it is
linked. Voters who “trust” Boris Johnson know that they aren’t lending him
money, having his child or publishing his racist novel. They want Westminster
brought down a peg or two and the “political class” punished for arrogance and
indifference. Playing the role of chaotic wild card unconstrained by the rules
of normal politics, and intimating that Westminster is a sham he doesn’t take
seriously, Johnson definitely looks like he can be trusted to mess up the
place. That is his answer to the demand. And when Labour politicians play
themselves as responsible, mainstream professionals, they imply that the only
demand they will meet is for Westminster politics to go back to business as
usual.
There are
lots of other raw demands waiting to be forged into a political movement. There
is the demand for a post-Brexit trade policy that understands the problems
leaving the EU has created and does more than make the government look tough in
newspaper headlines. Labour has begun to speak about this but needs to say
more. Demands about work – availability, pay and conditions – are beginning to
be listened to, and ought to be seen as part of larger demands for security,
dignity and the time and space to plan one’s future. There is the demand of the
majority of people for whom the climate crisis is a top priority. But Labour
too often seems embarrassed by its own Green New Deal, even as Joe Biden
implements his. There is the huge demand for the provision of adult social
care, but a Labour frontbencher says the party is too frightened of the Tories
to talk about it. And there is the democratic demand that our politics be
reformed so power and control are dispersed rather than further concentrated in
the hands of Downing Street officials eager to hand out procurement contracts
to their friends.
Starmerism
generally avoids the language of these demands, preferring inoffensive
reiterations of values. “Labour only wins when it glimpses the future,” he
correctly informed the Financial Times this week, yet he chose to emphasise
only his “passion” for changing the country and “pride” at the accomplishments
of past Labour governments. Confusing means and ends, Starmer says that his
strategic vision is “to win the next election”. Politicians don’t get to
declare themselves the winner before they have won over voters. To do that, you
have to take hold of the raw demands waiting to be forged into a political
movement.
An
opposition doesn’t need a “fully costed manifesto”. But a party that isn’t
explicitly, consistently and loudly recognising and reorganising political
demands isn’t doing politics, no matter how proud it is of its historic
“values”. Many liberal, centrist and leftwing activists like to think and talk
in abstractions with capital letters: Hope, Trust, Decency. Many of them are
happiest when confident they are living up to these values. Politics is their
church. But most of us don’t attend that church. We demand a more secular
redemption.
We see –
correctly, I think – that politicians acting out their values won’t sort out
our parents’ late-life care, protect our democracy or improve our children’s
education. We need to know what politicians will do with the power they ask us
to grant them. Their character is revealed when they choose to respond to some
demands and not others – by their response to the call to action. When they
fail to act, the judgment of character that follows is swift, merciless and
very hard to rewrite.
Alan
Finlayson is professor of political and social theory at the University of East
Anglia
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