“How can we live together?” This is the fundamental question that politics is supposed to answer. So at a time when it seems that even our politicians cannot stand the sight of each other, perhaps it is time to take a sober look at the fragmentation of UK politics and society.
Pluralism has been the driving fact behind political theory now since the Copernican revolution and the wars of religion that were spawned from it. Since then any adequate theory of social justice must allow for a diversity of conceptions of what it is to live a good life.
The pluralist society must be pragmatic. It does not say that “God is dead”. It does not say that “God is alive”. It says if we are to answer the question of how we can live together then we must remain agnostic on all such matters – at least so far as our civic association is structured.
But by allowing us to hold our moral views only outside this realm, the pluralist society has given us not a concession but a poisoned chalice. It makes of us not rational and reasonable civic actors, but gives us moral and intellectual split-personalities.
We engage in the public institutions of work and school and club and team, because it is there that we find meaning and purpose. But sometimes when we engage, we find confrontation not affirmation. The problem with pluralism is that it doesn’t allow you to say “This is the right way to live”.
The more we engage with others, the more we find people with whom we do not share the values and truths that we consider so fundamental. In virtual places, by contrast, we are able to select the precise individuals with whom we associate to ensure that we obtain the affirmation we require.
In the UK the political right has been far quicker to spot the social tensions that arise from an increasingly plural society and use them as a means of shoring up an essentially 19th century view of the nation state. The conservative narrative is that: “The old order still exists. There are still antecedent ethical truths. And we are the guardians of them.” This is a narrative of comfort in a destabilising global environment and it has been broadly successful – particularly with the older generation. But it sounds increasingly improbable to the young.
The political left in the UK has been far quicker to embrace diversity and has championed the extension of civic rights and equalities to those whom the old order had excluded. For this reason it has tended to attract the young, those who are internet educated, ethnic minorities and those who feel at home in a globalised culture, but the left has failed utterly to construct a political narrative that encapsulates this. It remains torn between loyalty to its traditional base of mine and manufacture, and the political realism that recognises that small, sovereign political units are simply unable to regulate the movements of global capital.
The current division in the Conservative party hinges around the old social nostrums: paternalism, noblesse oblige and the delusion that we are still one nation with a shared set of social values. David Cameron probably believes that deep down everyone in the country is really just like him – or at least would like to be. That is his mistake.
The new Conservativism of Andrea Leadsom and Michael Gove does not share this at all. They recognise the inequalities and wish to accentuate them. Theirs is the vicious delusion of the grammar school kid that says – “I made it, so everybody else can too – they just need to work hard enough.” Theirs is a party that uses pluralism and people’s differences to weaken their social power and to gain economic advantage over them.
The current intellectual incoherence of the Labour party has been nowhere more evident than in the extraordinary attempt to steal the clothes of Disraeli and become the “one-nation” party. Any understanding of Labour history shows that we are not a party of one nation. We are the party of the oppressed, the marginalised, the underdog, the exploited, the excluded. We are the Labour party because we recognise that society is divided into a minority with power and a majority without. We are the Labour party precisely because we are determined to redress that inequality.
One hundred years ago that inequality was clearly manifested in the broad categories of social class and gender inequality and it was Labour’s mission in the 20th century to erode those inequalities. With the tragic help of two world wars we largely did so. But that is an agenda that will not fit the next 100 years of social struggle. The current division in the Labour party is not (unfortunately) a struggle of ideology between left and right. It is a division over the question of who forms our constituency.
The rebels rightly believe that in order to win power and help people the party needs to appeal to those who still occupy the politics of place. We need the support of those whose certainties and confidence has been swept away, along with their trades and apprenticeships, their clubs and their churches, their cuisine and their culture. But we cannot, because our message to them is change – and change is what they are trying to resist.
The leadership rightly believes that increasingly people self-identify around issues. Young people associate themselves not so much with place but with a specific cause, campaign or grievance. A more proportional electoral system finds its justification in this more fragmented view of how we now relate to our fellow citizens. Politicians need to engage with these new communities of solidarity but the fact of pluralism means we find it impossible to persuade them that their interests can only be progressed by political cooperation with others with whom they have no desire to associate.
The Labour party’s current struggle is over which constituency it should direct itself towards. In the process of resolving this issue we are splitting ourselves apart.
