A moral crusade won't work. To defeat Faragism, Labour must revive a vision of social cohesion and collective responsibility.
Last month, as the Nobel peace prize eluded Donald Trump's covetous grasp, the Harvard professor Michael Sandel received an accolade sometimes described as a Nobel equivalent for philosophers. The $1m Berggruen prize is awarded annually to a thinker deemed to have helped humanity find "wisdom, direction, and improved self-understanding". Somewhat wistfully, given the state of the polls, I found my mind wandering back to the early 2010s, when Sandel was recruited by the Labour party to deliver just these benefits to the British centre left.
At the time, under the leadership of Ed Miliband, Labour was trying to develop a One Nation politics to address deepening social fissures which - we now know - were soon to turn our politics upside down. Having addressed the Labour party conference of 2012 on responsible capitalism and the "moral limits of markets", Sandel was interviewed at a fringe event, where he elaborated on the challenges he believed modern progressives faced.
In that interview, Sandel was asked by the veteran centre-left thinktanker Nick Pearce: "What would you say to people in the Labour party in the UK, and people interested in progressive politics more generally? What should we be aiming at, if not an abstract notion of equality or justice?" He replies: "I think that it would be important to anchor the concern for social justice and equality in the longer tradition of the Labour party, which draws on resources of solidarity, civic virtue and community."
This synthesis never came to pass. As post-Brexit Britain has polarised, it is Faragian "national conservatism" that has come to monopolise the politics of community, and lay claim to other forms of unity rooted in place, culture and identity. Think flags of St George, Christian symbols and Robert Jenrick lamenting the absence of a friendly white face in Handsworth. Progressives have responded by rallying to the defence of universal rights and a vision of global justice and equality founded on the celebration of diversity. See Green party leader Zack Polanski's viral video from Birmingham, in which he recites Benjamin Zephaniah's poem British - a lyrical celebration of a melting-pot country.
For many on the left, this showdown between two ideological blocs, on everything from immigration to net zero, is likely to be lived as a moral crusade. Liberal tolerance v reactionary authoritarianism. Diversity v racism. Hope v hate. Universalism v a narrow and defensive Little Englandism. Such binaries will be accompanied by warnings that it is both futile and immoral to try to "out-Reform" Reform in the public square.
The attraction of a strategy of No pasarán is understandable, given that a virulent and repellent strain of ethno-nationalism has entered the national bloodstream. But resistance politics is not enough, and it oversimplifies the complexities of the moment. To truly see off Faragism, progressives will ultimately need to understand and outthink Reform's broad appeal, as well as denounce its malign consequences. That will involve dialling down the moral self-certainty, analysing rather than anathematising, and confronting some inconvenient truths.
In the second half of the 20th century, liberal ideas about justice and equality - embodied in the radical new social movements which emerged towards the end of the 1960s - transformed for the better the lives of women, ethnic minority communities and LGBTQ+ people. Crucially, in the ecology of the left, these new sources of inspirational energy developed alongside the collectivist politics of more culturally conservative blue-collar communities. But a creative tension - in evidence each year on the Labour party conference floor - was lost as deindustrialisation stripped working-class Britain of the power, influence and prestige it once enjoyed.
The consequences have been philosophical as well as political. From the 1980s onwards, the cutting edge of progressive thought became overwhelmingly preoccupied with the rights and freedoms of the individual. This shift in tone was, in part, pragmatic. Tony Blair's defining repudiation of commitments to public ownership, for example, was deemed essential if the party hoped to be elected again after the defeats of the Thatcher era. But it was also seen as ethically desirable. The cumulative impact of the social revolutions of the 60s, and the epochal collapse of communism a generation later, led to a suspicion of communitarian-type thinking, and an emphasis on deepening minority rights and promoting individual aspiration.
The ongoing migration of less well-off voters to the nationalist, authoritarian right tells us that not everyone felt "seen" or represented by this politics. In 2019, the historian Timothy Garton Ash acknowledged this downside, invoking the thought of the Romanian-French philosopher Pierre Hassner to observe that "humankind does not live by liberty and universality alone".
Sandel would agree. In an interview this autumn, he suggests that the centre left urgently needs to develop an "alternative idea of national community" to the ominous, racialised versions on the far right. For progressives, this phrasing may generate considerable queasiness. But it is becoming a political truth that the modern left's guiding assumptions are, in fact, no longer modern; they belong to the socioeconomic settlement which dominated the decades after the end of the cold war and is coming to an end. Is it a coincidence that nationalist parties lead the polls in England, Scotland and Wales?
Something new is required; a collectivist politics that preserves the ethical insights of universalism but that also foregrounds the values of social cohesion, collective obligation and communal wellbeing—and is willing to negotiate tensions that might result. Within Labour, there are signs that, in different ways, both the home secretary, Shabana Mahmood, and the Greater Manchester mayor, Andy Burnham, have begun to move in this direction.
Mahmood argues that to establish "order and control" in relation to the country's borders, seeking to win back public trust on immigration, is not to betray the ideal of a more outward-facing and generous politics; it is the first necessary step towards achieving it. She is right, but the Labour left will take some convincing that her reconstruction of Britain's asylum policy is not an ethical capitulation.
Similarly, Burnham’s much-derided observation that it was “time for the UK to stop being in hock to the bond markets” identified the need to develop a politics that gives people a sense of sovereign control over the country’s economic choices. Overcoming the subjection of democracies to the arrogance of rootless international capital is arguably the greatest progressive challenge of the age. Yet 40 years on, the left has still to find an answer to the big bang in the 1980s.
In new times, a journey without familiar maps is required. To redeploy Blair’s famous 2001 formulation, “the kaleidoscope has been shaken. The pieces are in flux”. The British left needs to quickly adapt to that fact or risk handing over the next chapter of the nation’s political history to the forces of deep reaction.