Vol. 12 No. 16 · 30 August 1990
pages 7-8 | 2678 words
What a progressive government will have to do
Ross McKibbin
- The Alternative: Politics for a Change edited by Ben Pimlott, Anthony Wright and Tony Flower
W.H. Allen, 260 pp, £14.95, July 1990, ISBN 1 85227 168 X
British politics at the moment seem curiously provisional. The failures of the present government are so gross and obvious that hardly anyone, even its nominal supporters, attempts to defend it ideologically. Yet at the same time hardly anyone believes that Labour will really win the next election, or that it could cope even if it did. There is also a strong sense that the re-ordering of continental Europe, whose outcome is itself indeterminate, has rendered our political life even more provisional: it has obliterated the old landmarks but made it quite unclear where we now go. This collection of essays, occasional pieces and personal and poetic reflections is thus intended to suggest new paths. The Alternative is a product of Samizdat, a journal founded late in 1988 when any alternative seemed rather unlikely. It hoped to create a ‘popular front of the mind’ – a kind of intellectual tactical voting – which would dispute what was widely perceived to be a right-wing ideological hegemony. The contributors to Samizdat, whose founding editor, Ben Pimlott, is one of the editors of this book, were adherents of the Labour Party, the old Alliance, the Communist Party and of no party at all. Many of the contributors still are these things, though some, like Michael Young, have returned to the Labour Party de jure and others de facto. It was a measure both of the successes of the Conservative Party in the Eighties and the apparent decay of the social-democratic and Marxist alternatives that such a popular front was possible.
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Letters
Vol. 12 No. 18 · 27 September 1990
From Jonathan Clark
You cannot have it both ways. Ross McKibbin (LRB, 30 August) blames Conservatives because hardly any attempt to defend the present government ideologically; Peter Clarke (on the next page) blames them because rather a lot do so. Comparing their reviews, a Conservative might conclude that there is still too little agreement among the discontented for them to be ideologically effective. Both reviewers try their best to demonstrate that Conservative ideas are outdated because British politics currently ‘seem curiously provisional’. If change discredited Conservatism, as Peter Clarke implies, their argument would be easily won; but things are somewhat more complex, and an argument which seeks to build so large a superstructure on little more than mid-term blues is likely to persuade few beyond the already committed. We need better analysis. I would have been happier if we could have carried the argument further, and been eager to include both authors, could they so have carried it, in the collection I edited, Ideas and Politics in Modern Britain. Yet where McKibbin treats the eclectic nature of the contributions to The Alternative as a merit, Clarke find the eclecticism of Ideas and Politics a demerit. You cannot have it both ways.
I would rather that McKibbin and Clarke had had a positive vision which deserved inclusion. It was the absence of such a vision which my collection and Roger Scruton’s provoked them to reveal, as when McKibbin recorded how many contributors to The Alternative had absorbed Eighties Conservative ideas (a point established repeatedly in my collection) and Clarke advocated that the good ideas of my volume be ‘plucked and pilfered and purloined’ by the opposition. It is once again unfortunate that a lack of new thinking has left these two reviewers with that tone of bitterness and resentment which, to outside observers, too often both characterises the LRB and limits its effectiveness. Marxism Today and the Salisbury Review both lack that tone. By contrast, the essayists reviewed, whether from the background of Marxism Today or All Souls, seem to share much common ground in their analysis of the current situation. Is everyone out of step except your reviewers?
Jonathan Clark
All Souls College, Oxford
