"Build the bloody Ark!"

Labour leadership hopefuls

Following the General Election result of last month the Labour Party are in some disarray. Ed Miliband, probably rightly, has stood down as leader, although I suspect it won’t be many months or years before it is realised that he was rather more correct in his views and overall leadership than he is currently being given credit for. In the past few weeks several leadership wannabes have been throwing their hats into the ring and making pronouncements as to where Labour went wrong and what should be done. As I read of each potential leader I am rather less than inspired – mostly because they really don’t inspire - which seems to me to be a damning indictment of any potential leader! I don’t think I would ride into battle on behalf of any of them. My main anxiety and disappointment is that, mostly, they seem (and each in their different way), to be crypto-Tories talking the same talk and walking the same walk as their Tory counterparts. They have swallowed the Tory narrative and are simply repeating it in more acceptable fashion; there is now no question about austerity measures but merely how you want them applied: savagely as with the Tories or in rather pleasanter dollops by Labour. Understand that and one can understand why the Tories will always win – they are dictating the message. Additionally, each leadership hopeful appears to have analysed how the Tories won and decided that this is the course that Labour must now follow. This is simple reaction politics;  aping Tory ideas in the hope that it will work for them. These leadership contenders talk, as do their Tory counterparts, of wealth creators, strivers and hard working families. They emphasise how they will ally with the City and with the business community. They talk of value for money, GDP, empowering people  and most of all are fixated with the term “aspirational voters”  who seem to be equated with the John Lewis or the Waitrose shopper -  what many might define as middle England. Maybe there is some mileage in this, I am not a political analyst, but to me in using these terms and in reciting this message they are subliminally reinforcing the Tory policy albeit with a Labour sticker attached. 

The only message we seem to be getting from leadership  hopefuls!

Now it might be that the think tanks and clever spin doctors confirm that this is the way forward and how a future Labour Party or leader has to project itself – firstly, snuggle up to those with the most potential power (media, the City etc) and voting potential (the middle class) and secondly be friends with everybody and by saying nothing of substance so that no one will be annoyed. Be all things to all men. Maybe this is correct but I'm put off. Despite all the spin and trendy vocabulary, all the nods and winks towards the media, all the vague promises that a future Labour government will not make the alleged 'mistakes' of the last and that they will be good boys and girls by making sure that all these various power groups, vested interests and sections of society are paid heed of I cannot, for the life, of me discern what they will actually do if elected leader. Each potential leader has been very loud in telling how they and the Party will behave in the coming years but nowhere am I advised what they will stand for and do. Of course, they will argue that Party policy is determined by the Party membership and will be made plain in a future manifesto. Further, it may well  be that the political analysts will suggest that it is a good policy to have no policy – or at best only a very vague one - but I’m not so sure.  If one is electing any kind of leader then one needs to know what they intend to deliver – what are their aspirations, goals and ideals; where will they, as the leader, take us and what they will fight for. Not to do so is, to use the old idiom, like asking us to “buy a pig in a poke”. One of the leadership hopefuls, Liz Kendall recently confirmed this when she commented that “During the election, lots of people told me they agreed with our criticisms of the Tories, but didn't think we said enough about what we would do ourselves”. Quite, my point exactly! As a Labour Party member I have a vested interest in the leadership contest so in the end, I want to know what my subscriptions will be paying for and what will comprise the New Jerusalem, if there is to be one. I also want to know how it will be forged - but that is secondary to what it is. That is, too, I believe, what the wider electorate want and need to know.

Attlee during the 1945 election

So what should any prospective leader be offering me if they want my vote and continued membership? Well, I do not want a closet Tory whose ideas, aspirations and ideals are indistinguishable from those projected and enacted by our current government. If I wanted those then I would vote Tory – quite frankly they are much better at them than the Labour Party are or can ever be. Privatisation of essential services, cosying up to the City, right wing policies, jingoistic vocabulary, John Bullish anti-foreigner rhetoric, Euroscepticism, tax cuts, increasingly divisive education policies, marginalising of welfare budgets and the rest are all the natural hunting ground for the Tory party and have been from time immemorial. They are past masters at that game and if that is my choice then the Tories are the ones. No, I want something different.

It would be nice to turn the clock back and say I want a party and eventual government that was unashamedly socialist – say like that of Attlee in 1945. But in this day and age that is neither realistic or appropriate. When Attlee set out his plans in 1945 he called them “a New Jerusalem. He was surrounded by a group of high minded and well intentioned individuals who intended to build a new world from the wreckage of two World Wars, a terrible depression and centuries of inequality.  The world that they inherited had no mobile phones, precious little money, no computers, no celebrity culture, no CDs, not enough material goods and a majority of the population who were genuinely poor and subject to varying degrees of privation and need. But there was one thing they did have: both Attlee’s government and the populace had hope and the desire to make things better. From a seemingly hopeless situation they carved out and laid the foundations for a more liberal world, a more affluent world and a world which would rapidly become more equal, fair, caring and just. Today we have a world that is full of mobile phones, loads of money, millions of computers, a thriving celebrity culture, technology that our fathers could not comprehend, living standards and personal wealth undreamed of by my parents  and an obscene desire to fill ourselves and our lives with the acquisition of material goods. But at the same time, large sections of the community are increasingly disaffected, our formerly liberal world is increasingly threatened by security services, the war on terror and intrusive global power players. Despite being one of the richest nations in the history of the world great swathes of the population are effectively excluded from enjoying its benefits as zero hours contracts, austerity, privatisation and cuts in welfare provision take their toll. And finally, seventy years after Attlee’s New Jerusalem dream was born we are increasingly becoming less equal, more unfair, less caring and certainly less just. We are indeed a very different world from that of 1945; the Labour Party and its new leader need plan for this.  In short, we need a Labour leader for 21^st century Britain who, like his illustrious forefathers, is a man or woman of vision and imbued with Labour ideals and idealism as were those men and women of 1945. He or she needs to not only have a dream and ideals which they can verbalise but needs to be unequivocal, unbending and unapologetic about how it will be implemented. This is what a leader does and it is what gives people hope, inspiration and the will to succeed. 

What the current leadership hopefuls need - a little of the same
 spirit so beautifully captured in Ken Loach's recent film on the
1945 election

In my last blog I wrote at length about the wonderful autobiographies by Labour politician and elder statesman Alan Johnson. In his second instalment, Please Mr Postman Johnson related a particular episode that occurred during his time as a trade union representative. The event itself is unimportant but the comment, made by a trade union member was:”.........the job of a [trade union] leader isn't to predict rain, it’s to build the bloody ark”. Absolutely, I would not expect any leadership hopeful to forlornly and despairingly tell me tell me how bad it is – we all know that. I would want him to inspire me with his/her vision of what it can be.  Nor do I want him or her to give me spin or talk in crypto-Tory jargon. I want him to make me feel a valued part of and integral to his plans and in a language I can relate to - not have the very things that I despise most repeated ad nuasseum so that as an ordinary member of the electorate I begin to believe (as I and I think many others do) that all the parties are the same because they talk the same talk and walk the same walk. When people think that then they become disaffected, they believe their vote is useless for it appears that all politicians and parties are the same and so, they believe, nothing will change. This disaffection and cynicism is becoming more and more a part of our political landscape - it is something we should be worried about. It is absolutely crucial that Labour and its new leader sing a different song – not to do so will not only condemn them to failure in any election, for the Tories will always win out. But more importantly, it is crucial to the long term health of democracy for there to be choice, for that is what democracy at the end of the day is rooted in. If there is no choice then there is no democracy.

Margaret Thatcher's legacy still marks out and defines our
social economic and political landscape. Labour's "ark" should
spell out its death knell with something better.

So, I want him or her to show me the Labour ark not simply recycle the Tory ark. I want to know what this Labour craft is like that will take us across the stormy seas to the New Jerusalem. How  will it address and resolve the fractures in our modern society and drive real and fundamental Labour change? How it will end once and for all the growing inequalities, the injustices? How will it overcome the real threats to the wider world such as environmental issues and the nonsense and growth of the security threat to liberty? And last but not least, how will it slay the culture of the “me, me, me world” that has grown in this country since the days of Margaret Thatcher - a culture which would truly horrify not only Attlee and his colleagues but the 1945 population at large – so much have we changed. We, and our society, are the offspring of Margaret Thatcher not Clement Attlee. We need someone who has a plan for an ark that is going to change all that.

In April 1964 American President Lyndon Johnson summoned Richard Goodwin his advisor and speech writer to the White House. Goodwin recorded in his memoirs that he found Johnson in the White House swimming pool, where the President often went to think.  Johnson was naked, doing a slow sidestroke and told Goodwin and aide Bill Moyers to doff their own clothes: “Come on in, boys. It’ll do you good” said Johnson. As they bobbed up and down, the president “began to talk as if he were addressing some larger, imagined audience of the mind,” Goodwin  wrote that night in his diary. And, Goodwin went on, he was drawn by “the powerful flow of Johnson’s will, exhorting, explaining, trying to tell me something about himself, seeking not agreement — he knew he had that — but belief.” All this happened a little more than four months after Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas had made Johnson president. “I never thought I’d have the power,” Johnson told Goodwin and Moyers. “I wanted power and to use it. And I'm going to use it..... Hell, we've barely begun to solve our problems. And we can do it all.”

The White House pool - where the Great Society
was born

A few months later, Johnson announced the Great Society programme to America:

“......The purpose of protecting the life of our Nation and preserving the liberty of our citizens is to pursue the happiness of our people. Our success in that pursuit is the test of our success as a Nation. For a century we laboured to settle and to subdue a continent. For half a century we called upon unbounded invention and untiring industry to create an order of plenty for all of our people.

The challenge of the next half century is whether we have the wisdom to use that wealth to enrich and elevate our national life, and to advance the quality of our American civilization.

Your imagination, your initiative, and your indignation will determine whether we build a society where progress is the servant of our needs, or a society where old values and new visions are buried under unbridled growth. For in your time we have the opportunity to move not only toward the rich society and the powerful society, but upward to the Great Society.

The Great Society rests on abundance and liberty for all. It demands an end to poverty and racial injustice, to which we are totally committed in our time. But that is just the beginning.

The Great Society is a place where every child can find knowledge to enrich his mind and to enlarge his talents. It is a place where leisure is a welcome chance to build and reflect, not a feared cause of boredom and restlessness. It is a place where the city of man serves not only the needs of the body and the demands of commerce but the desire for beauty and the hunger for community.

It is a place where man can renew contact with nature. It is a place which honours creation for its own sake and for what it adds to the understanding of the race. It is a place where men are more concerned with the quality of their goals than the quantity of their goods.

But most of all, the Great Society is not a safe harbour, a resting place, a final objective, a finished work. It is a challenge constantly renewed, beckoning us toward a destiny where the meaning of our lives matches the marvellous products of our labour.......”

Johnson, of course, was in a very different position to any Labour leadership hopefuls: he was President, he had power, he was operating in a very different age and in a different political climate to our own. But equally, he was also in a potentially weak position  - judged suspiciously by many and constantly compared with the iconic Kennedy with whom he could probably never have competed. In short he was following a very hard act! But he had a dream and an ambition that drove him: he grasped the nettle, he caught the mood, he was brave, he was stubborn, he challenged vested interests, he had a vision, he bullied, he cajoled, he compromised, he used every trick in the political book.......and, most of all, by the power of his argument and his personality he not only got his way but he inspired.

The aspirational voters that the Labour
leadership are obsessed with

There is no talk in Johnson’s words of aspirational voters or Waitrose shoppers, no reflecting on how bad things are, no talk of getting value for money or necessary austerity packages, no cosying up to those with power or being everything to everyman, no reference to wealth creators or strivers. The message is clear, unequivocal and unapologetic – and crucially, it is positive, it’s a “can do” message just as Attlee’s was in 1945. In short it inspires and gives everyone listening a share and an ownership both in it and of it; they, the electorate, are the vehicles of change. Not everything worked out, some initiatives were failures, many problems were found and battles lost but Johnson’s vision galvanised people into action: legislation on poverty, civil rights and racism, community action, employment initiatives, educational support and legislation to improve educational opportunity and success, Medicare and Medicaid, welfare and social security, arts and cultural initiatives, transport legislation and programmes, consumer protection, environmental action.......it was an all encompassing programme.  Today, the laws enacted through Johnson’s programme are woven into the fabric of everyday American life, in ways big and small. It has knocked down racial barriers, provided health care for the elderly and food for the poor, sustained orchestras and museums in cities across the country, put seat belts and padded dashboards in every car, and planted oak trees in Washington and across the wider country. "We are living in Lyndon Johnson’s America,” said Joseph Califano, who was LBJ’s policy adviser from 1965 to the end of his presidency,“This country is more the country of Lyndon Johnson than any other president.” 

It is worth remembering that fifty years ago this month (June 2015) Head Start,  one of the main planks of the Great Society programme was founded. “Young children”  said Johnson “are the inheritors of poverty’s curse, not its creators”. Head Start, a programme for deprived children and their parents was the inspiration and impetus for the Labour Party’s Sure Start Programme which was put in place in 1998 and which is now increasingly under threat because of the present government’s austerity cuts.  One of Head Start’s early beneficiaries, Darren Walker, is now president of the American Ford Foundation, and he recalled recently how he was sitting on the porch of “our little shotgun shack in Ames, Texas” with his mother, when a woman approached to offer a Head Start place. “It changed my life”  Walker confessed, “It allowed me to imagine, to think creatively about the world beyond my environment and what my life might be.”

Quite – making people think about the world and what life might be. As the Tory government press on with a message of austerity, divide and rule and openly promoting inequality and injustice there is a ready battle to be fought and a ready political narrative to be proclaimed and spelled out as to what life might be. Lyndon Johnson’s programme and the comments of Darren Walker are the sort of narrative that the Labour Party needs to be addressing and shouting from the roof tops. It is the story that any would be leader needs to  tell. Johnson’s message was for his country at his time; like Attlee’s New Jerusalem it is not, in content or words, the panacea for us in 21^st century Britain. Nor did it solve all the problems – it never could. But it put into the mind of all Americans what they and their country could (and maybe should) be; that was both its inspiration and its legacy.  Its thrust and its clarity, its drive and its enthusiasm, its commitment and ideals were its strengths. And verbalising  these ambitions, painting the picture of a better life, raising the expectations and aspirations of everyone is what being a leader of any kind - in business, in the military, in schools, in politics - is all about. Lyndon Johnson clearly knew this as he swam naked up and down that pool; in short, he knew how to “build the bloody ark”. Our prospective Labour leaders would do well to think on that.