Labour and cultural change

A renewed cultural strategy will help Labour thinking on both organisation and ideas

In the 2015 Labour Party leadership elections, a number of candidates, from the right and left, raised the notion of building Labour as a strong social movement, implicitly acknowledging the need to reach beyond the standard functions of an election-focused party machine. This occasional suggestion in internal party debate, however, is rarely considered in practical terms. Indeed, it is sometimes deployed simply to encourage higher membership recruitment or to underline the traditional alliance between the party and the trade union and cooperative movements. Given where the party now stands, though, with a much larger membership on the ground, and a significantly expanded middle-class and professional component within those ranks, there is currently a rare opportunity to engage the party more fully with the cultural and working life of the UK. Alongside other innovations, a thoughtfully designed project to extend the party’s ideas and activity into key areas of modern society, on an open and democratic basis, and in the vein of today’s ‘new politics’, could assist the party to become a real movement, capable in time of decisively shifting the national political consensus away from a widespread acceptance of narrow austerity economics and the casual scapegoating of the vulnerable or foreign for the country’s ills. This should assist the party in terms of its necessary electoral ambitions. The objective of a Labour Party that once again speaks out with confidence for the working- and middle-classes - and offers a viable future unscarred by today’s creeping insecurities in incomes, work prospects, housing, social protection and environmental safeguards - is well worth the effort needed to build such a movement.

Jeremy Corbyn’s election as Labour leader reflected party members’ desire for change, and it was followed by a sharp increase in membership - in remarkable contrast to the long-term trend of decline still afflicting other traditional European social democratic parties. A different Labour strategy, focusing on the serious root problems of the UK economy, is now anticipated. Will these projected economic policies be supplemented by similarly strategic cultural initiatives to help devise a joined-up programme for the country?

A renewed cultural policy would certainly involve a serious review of the party’s national education policies. Consistent Tory school reforms under Michael Gove and Nicky Morgan have seriously fragmented a fairly cohesive school system which hitherto nourished teacher professionalism and fostered some effective local school improvement strategies. At the same time, the closer coordination of schools with other important children’s services - a limited New Labour government initiative reflecting some of the benefits of Europe’s strong interdisciplinary traditions of social pedagogy - has been allowed to wither. Yet Labour’s response, while exposing immediate problems such as teacher shortages, has not consistently disowned the fragmentation or outlined new strategic directions. Policies to enhance the quality of genuinely creative education in schools, and indeed for people of all ages, are a necessary condition of future cultural advance. But there is not space here to deal with educational reform in the detail that is needed. Instead this article focuses on two main areas - building up party-linked social and cultural networks and finding ways to challenge deeply embedded ‘commonsense’ prejudices.

Social and cultural networks

Here there are some immediate steps available to the Labour Party as a national organisation. A more middle-class and professional component is visibly growing within today’s party membership (as is also the case inside the other - mostly declining - European social democratic parties, partly in reflection of broader occupational trends). Most of these new members want opportunities to discuss politics, not just to attend traditional branch meetings and discuss elections for national leadership posts. As a supplement to the unavoidable party focus on immediate municipal and Westminster issues, small-scale initial plans could therefore also be devised to involve a wide range of these new members to help build a direct or indirect party presence inside an array of important socially useful sectors. This would have the beneficial effect of involving more members, helping to change the...