peter wrote:The question is, should a political party be prepared to sacrifice everything it was founded to stand for in the pursuit of winning political power; or should it stick rigidly to its founding principles, even if doing so makes it virtually unelectable in the pertaining political climate in which it operates?
I refer of course to the dilemma that faces the Labour Party as it goes into its current annual conference week amid a storm of controversy and animosity over leader Kier Stamer's failed (in part at least) attempt to prevent the left wing of the party from fielding candidates in future leadership elections. There will be those who take the pragmatic approach that there is little to no point in putting together ideas for how Government, the country and our society should function if you don't stand a cat in hell's chance of getting into the place where you can see them put into practice: and those who will say that it is the purity of the idea that is the important thing and that the moment you start to accept concessions or compromises in order to simply secure power is the moment that you sound the death knell of your vision. From this moment on you will compromise more and more until you become little more than a watered down version of what is already in place.
This is the criticism that is levelled against Stamer - and not without justification - that his version of what a Labour Government would be is simply a 'Tory-lite' version of what we already have. This, they say, is why the establishment are prepared to accept him - because he represents no threat to the established order, has no real intention to wrest power away from the interests where it currently lies and place it into the hands of the working people. If there must be an alternative to their own party, the party that represents their interests (and there must be in order for us to be able to present the illusion of being a democratic nation to the rest of the world), then let it be an alternative that 'passes muster' in terms of establishment interest. Let it not be radical to the degree where the existing status-quo threatened.
And Stamer certainly fits this brief. He is effectively (his critics say) the representative of the elite, the acceptable face of socialism, the fifth columnist in the establishment take over of the party that came into power with a specific purpose of representing the interests of the common man in the face of an establishment that benefits in inverse proportion to his degree of well-being. Herein lies the reason why Jeremy Corbyn could never be allowed to remain as Party Leader, why the left of the Party must be for ever excluded from holding the reins of power: because the moment they take them up, the possibility of real change emerges, the possibility that the purpose that the party was founded for might be realised, the established order of vested interest and unequal benefit might be threatened..........And that can never be allowed to happen!
None of which answers the original question.
My opinion, for what it is worth, is that you compromise your position at your peril. Tony Blair did this with his New Labour project and yes, it carried him to power - but where are we now? I believe that the existing hierarchy is its own worst enemy; even in the face of an apparent impossibility of achieving electoral success, the greater the inequality grows the faster the beneficiaries living in their gilded cages hasten their own demise. Support for the true Labour project must be built from the ground up, not by making concessions to the existing power structures; when the time is ripe that support will flower and find its true voice. Stamer's way is not the true Labour way and what he has tried to do in the last few days shows that he knows it. Labour must be the broad church that he promised to make it in his leadership campaign or it is nothing.
Enjoyed this post.
Agree with your position on the perils of political parties pursuing power ahead of promoting their prime principles; i.e. power for power's sake.
I don't follow UK politics too closely but it sounds as though our respective country's Labo(u)r parties are failing in a very similar way; the Liberal/National coalition down here (which you probably know is roughly analogous to the Tories) is an absolute shambles; horrifically bad.
Scott Morrison, the PM himself, is a pretty slick operator, I will give him that - the smug twat has basically held the LNP together single-handedly, with many of his colleagues seemingly determined to crash the gravy-train in any number of distasteful ways.
The LNP has a historical reputation for being good with the public purse, yet this current Govt has been hugely wasteful through a poorly designed mechanism that allowed big business to exploit the 'jobkeeper' scheme to the tune of $285m during the height of the pandemic.
It's stance of Climate Change is archaic and surely one of the most science-averse in the developed world.
On an individual level characters like Christian Porter and Barnaby Joyce (the deputy PM for God's sake!) constantly force Morrison into damage control through their myriad bad choices.
Yet at a time when Labor might offer the Australian public a genuine alternative of
any kind, we are instead being sold a pale rendering of the party it once was.
I listen to opposition leader Anthony Albanese, but I can barely hear him.
He has none of Morrison's forcefulness or guile.
Worse than a un-charismatic leader though is that Labor barely differs from the LNP on the type of emotive policy that might inspire change in the (perhaps mythical) younger voting age bracket.
The status quo will no doubt prevail at next year's election, a part of me thinks it will barely matter either way.
). Douceur. In the dictionaries you'll find it defined as a bribe, a financial inducement, but in reality it's much more subtle than that. It refers to the system of little perks, the privileges, the luxuries, that grease the wheels of governance and diplomacy, and keep everyone in line and things running just tickety-bo.
