Vol. 15 No. 20 · 21 October 1993
page 8 | 2426 words
Here we go
Peter Clarke on the Opposition
So far the Nineties have given us the politics of bewilderment. It all began with John Major becoming Prime Minister, to his own apparent bewilderment, in November 1990; since when his performance has, by general consent, become increasingly bewildering. The Labour Party was bewildered to lose the General Election of 1992, which it had counted on winning. The Liberal Democrats, by contrast, for whom the course of politics is constantly bewildering, felt lucky that the electoral system did not cheat them wholesale, just retail for once; and they saved themselves for a couple of bewilderingly spectacular by-election upsets in 1993. Do the Party Conferences herald the end of bewilderment? Have we reached a moment of truth in British politics?
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Letters
Vol. 15 No. 22 · 18 November 1993
From Keith Graham
Peter Clarke asserts that ‘the idea of a “labour party” ’ made sense only ‘on the sub-Marxian postulate that capitalism could be superseded by socialism through class war’, in which ‘organised labour was to provide the shock troops, fighting for the working class as a whole’ (LRB, 21 October). Fair enough, as long as it is recognised that sub-Marxism has little to do with what the Old Man himself thought. Marx insisted throughout his life that the working class had to emancipate itself, always resisting the idea that a vanguard either from within or from without could discharge that task. Moreover, this class was constituted for him not by the horny-handed of so much Marxist tradition, but by all those who were constrained (rather than choosing) to sell their mental and physical energies on the market. Now that constitutes a very large section of the population, and there has never been a visible political party whose raison d’être was to represent the interests of people as so described, above any other consideration.
Professor Clarke says that if a ‘labour party’ did not exist it would be unnecessary to invent it. But it is surely plausible to say that all those who (to put it bluntly) are dependent on the necessity to work for their well-being constitute a significant interest group. It is even possible, though more contentious, to hold that what unites them under that description is of more fundamental importance than what separates them via cleavages of ethnicity, language, gender and so on. When the traditional Labour Party and the particular section of working people with whom it was closely associated, manual workers, have faded into history, these difficult questions of political identity and interests will remain.
Keith Graham
University of Bristol
