CommonSpace columnist and Common Weal head of policy Ben Wray says Labour must spot the gap open to it in modern British politics – and fast
‘CONSTITUTIONAL POLITICS’. Google it and what will come up is a bunch of academic law essays. Unlike identity politics or class politics, it’s not a term that is used in common political parlance. That may be about to change, because it conceptualises a political context that is defining our era, and not just in Scotland.
Constitutional politics is politics at the level of state structure and organisation. It goes beyond policy making within the existing framework of government power – it’s politics that questions the very way in which government and democracy itself is constituted.
Constitutional politics is not in and of itself left or right – it is a battleground in which left or right fight on. Avoiding the constitutional battle is in effect surrendering the terrain to your opponent, i.e. defeat.
Constitutional politics is not in and of itself left or right – it is a battleground in which left or right fight on. Avoiding the constitutional battle is in effect surrendering the terrain to your opponent.
Want evidence of this? Exhibit A is the Labour party.
When independence first emerged as a serious possibility, Labour thought it could be swept aside as backwards, narrow nationalism with nothing serious to offer about the real problems of the world.
It couldn’t see that by taking a No position it was in practice articulating the constitutional politics of British nationalism, associated most explicitly with Toryism.
It still hasn’t learnt that lesson in Scotland. But neither has the UK party learnt that lesson in the EU referendum and its aftermath, where its fence-sitting and general attempts to ignore the whole thing have seen it fall between the two stools of constitutional politics, leaving the liberal centre and the far-right to do battle over the issue.
Still today you get the feeling that Labour thinks “this constitutional stuff will all blow over and we’ll get back to talking about the crisis in the NHS”. Comrades, it’s not going to happen.
When independence first emerged as a serious possibility, Labour thought it could be swept aside as backwards, narrow nationalism with nothing serious to offer about the real problems of the world.
Last week I heard Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn speaking at the STUC congress in Aviemore. Most of his speech was pretty good, but he almost entirely ignored the two big constitutional issues of the day: Scottish independence and Brexit.
The problem with this is that it undermines his other arguments: millions of people in Britain will agree with Corbyn about the super rich, about inequality, about rights at work, but they won’t believe he can seriously do anything about it if he doesn’t appear to have answers to the enormous, era-defining constitutional questions of the day.
There is a widespread myth that exists on the left and right of politics that voters are motivated mainly by “bread and butter issues”. Copious academic studies show that this is wrong: it is stories and feeling that drive voter preference, with very few consciously attempting to align their material interests with party policy on jobs, housing, wages etc (which is sad to say, for a policy geek like me).
In the current context, voters frame those stories and feelings through the issue of the day: the future direction of the nation state, or more specifically – constitutional politics.
And in many ways the public are right to prioritise this. Constitutional politics matters: not just in Scotland, and not just in the UK. It matters everywhere. It is an essential feature of politics in a condition of deep crisis, where the fundamentals of state power and democracy are in flux.
It couldn’t see that by taking a No position it was in practice articulating the constitutional politics of British nationalism, associated most explicitly with Toryism.
Class politics, for instance, is refracted through constitutional politics – Brexit, and what sort of Brexit we have, will not be class neutral, far from it. By allowing Ukip and the Tory right to dominate the constitutional agenda, it’s more likely Brexit will be utilised to reduce workers’ rights, increase Britain’s role as a major global tax haven and so forth.
Constitutional politics is therefore the “key link in the chain”, as Russian revolutionary Lenin wrote in his famous pamphlet ‘What is to be done?’: “… Political life as a whole is an endless chain consisting of an infinite number of links. The whole art of politics lies in finding and taking as firm a grip as we can of the link that is least likely to be struck from our hands, the one that is most important at the given moment, the one that most of all guarantees its possessor the possession of the whole chain.”
Exactly a century after the Russian revolution, it is worth remembering Lenin’s political philosophy in these turbulent times. Those that understand that constitutional politics represents the key link in the current political crisis in Europe – and embrace it – are likely to reap the rewards.
Take a look at the French election, for instance, where the second round of voting will take place this weekend. Central to the whole debate has been France’s constitution and its constitutional relationship with the EU.
Still today you get the feeling that Labour thinks “this constitutional stuff will all blow over and we’ll get back to talking about the crisis in the NHS”. Comrades, it’s not going to happen.
The stunning rise of Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s France Insoumise movement – which I wrote about in this column a few weeks ago – took him from nowhere to within touching distance of the second round, ending up just two per cent behind the far-right’s Marine Le Pen.
Right at the centre of Mélenchon’s campaign was a new constitutional vision for France. On 18 March tens of thousands of France Insoumise joined a ‘march for the sixth republic’ in Paris – a demonstration in support of Melenchon’s key demand for a new French democracy.
A national spokesperson of France Insoumise, Raquel Garrido, was asked in an interview with Jacobin about the idea behind his campaign: “The main theme for this campaign is to change our constitution and to allow the French people to do it themselves through a process called the constituent assembly, which is a direct reference to the French Revolution.
“The idea is to abolish the current regime, which we call the ‘presidential monarchy’. We consider it an oligarchy and want instead to have a republic: for the people, by the people.
“I think that’s why we’re being talked about so widely.”
Or look to Podemos (‘Yes we can’) which only came into existence a few years ago but is now Spain’s third biggest party. Podemos leader Pablo Iglesias has put democracy and constitutional change right at the top of its narrative about doing away with ‘la casta’ (the caste) in Spain and Europe (although, it should be said, it does not support Catalan and Basque independence).
In Iglesias’ book ‘Politics in a Time of Crisis’, he writes about the way constitutional politics has been used by the EU to enforce budget rules which enshrine austerity into government fiscal policy: “Anyone who has studied law knows that constitutions are the rationalisation of the will of the winners, the expression of a power relationship between different forces … the Maastricht and Lisbon Treaties, along with the Troika, are the European constitution … [this] made it a ‘constitutional’ obligation to balance the budget in every administration … these constitutional reconfigurations have left Europe’s social-democratic parties with precious little room in which to rule any differently from the liberal-conservatives.”
This naivety about state power in general and British nationalism specifically has been one of the few consistent intellectual themes in Labour’s history.
It’s important to understand this perspective in Scotland, where the SNP and Nicola Sturgeon hold a strong critique of British constitutional power, but don’t follow through with this consistently in their analysis of the EU, which shares many of the anti-democratic and corporate lobbyist-dominated politics of Westminster.
But Labour’s problems run even deeper. Historically the party has seen the state as a class-neutral institution that can be wielded in whichever way desired depending on which party – the Tories or Labour – is in power. As such, it has always shown distinct disinterest in constitutional politics, seeing it as a distraction from class issues; or in the case of Scottish independence, something much worse: a nationalist perversion and manipulation of the working class.
This naivety about state power in general and British nationalism specifically has been one of the few consistent intellectual themes in Labour’s history, running from Nye Bevan’s belief in the possibility of a benign British Empire to Gordon Brown’s view of politics as no more than “a battle of ideas” to Corbyn’s constitutional blindness today.
It’s why, for instance, Corbyn shows, at best, ambivalence towards the idea of PR electoral reform, even though first-past-the-post is evidently anachronistic and serves the interests of an elite who have no truck with government rule by a party receiving little more than a third of all votes (the 2015 Tory electoral victory was won with just 36.1 per cent of votes).
If the Labour party can’t bear to learn anything from the Scottish independence movement it should look back to the history of the labour movement in the UK, which quite often understood the necessity of marrying class and constitutional politics together.
If it was really forward thinking, Labour would be envisioning how an English Parliament could be established in such a way as to constitutionally rebalance class power towards workers.
Take Chartism, for instance, which was a mass working class movement for constitutional reform in the UK, mobilising millions behind The People’s Charter in the early-mid 1800s. Rather than grasping the nettle of constitutional issues today, Labour just want it to all go away. In doing so it misses a huge opportunity to structurally reform UK politics.
It hasn’t led on any serious devolution reforms to North England to address the huge imbalance of political and economic power towards London, allowing the Tories to dominate the agenda with their phoney mayoral devolution and Eric Pickles’ ludicrous local government “quiet revolution” which was really the devolving of the austerity axe.
If it was really forward thinking, Labour would be envisioning how an English Parliament on an island of three equal and sovereign nations could be established in such a way as to constitutionally rebalance class power towards workers. In doing so it could draw on England’s long-held radical history and traditions.
The idea that Labour’s problems are down to Corbyn is totally blind to the trends across the Western world, where social democratic parties stuck in the political centre ground are losing everywhere.
No, Labour’s problems run much deeper in its history, and until they are excoriated and replaced by a new set of ideas more sensitive to the constitutional terrain, any recovery is unlikely.
Corbyn’s mistake is not realising this.
Picture courtesy of The Pinefox
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