Vol. 19 No. 7 · 3 April 1997
pages 3-6 | 4021 words
Very Old Labour
Ross McKibbin on the prospect before us
Unless the electors intend to play an even more fiendish trick on Labour than they did at the last election, which is not impossible, the Wirral by-election does suggest that Labour will win some sort of majority in May. The size of the victory, however, matters less than the nature of the Party – New Labour – which seems likely to win it. And we must accept the fact that it really is new. When Tony Blair assures us of that he is not, as the Tories insist, merely pretending. Much of this ‘renewal’ had, of course, been achieved by Neil Kinnock and John Smith, while the numerical and political decline of the unions, together with a change in the composition of the electorate and the Labour Party’s membership, made ‘renewal’ much easier and, at least to some extent, necessary. Nevertheless, Mr Blair has carried it deeper and further than Mr Kinnock or Mr Smith could or would have done. They were still attached to the basic ideology and structure of Old Labour while, for all practical purposes, Tony Blair is now attached to neither. No one could have predicted in 1979 or 1983 that the historic Labour Party would have disappeared so fast, and probably for ever.
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Letters
Vol. 19 No. 8 · 24 April 1997
From Neil Forster
In his poignant lament for the now invisible values of Old Labour (LRB, 3 April), Ross McKibbin wonders whether the attitudes of the electorate might not be more ‘complicated’ than the tabloid papers, and now, along with the tabloids, our brave New, let’s-keep-our-principles-to-ourselves, Labour suppose. I’m sure they are. The attitudes of the amoeba are probably more complicated than those daily conceived of in the columns of the Sun. However, McKibbin goes to a rather suspect source in search of an example of attitudinal complexity. He finds the present devotion of Manchester United supporters to Eric Cantona, and of Chelsea’s tifosi (as we surely ought now to call them post-Vialli, Zola and Co) to Ruud Gullit ‘astonishing’. But is it so astonishing? The fans are devoted to success, to seeing the lads win, and if the star player or the manager happens to be a foreigner, so be it. What McKibbin’s example actually shows is that your average Frog-baiter down the popular end at Old Trafford is prepared to put his xenophobia on hold, for just as long as Cantona or Gullit deliver the results. But the moment they start failing to do that, the xenophobia will be back, to add, I suspect, a nasty edge to the resentment supporters always seem able to drum up for a team that is suddenly fading. McKibbin writes as if Cantona or Gullit-worship were a sign of some permanent improvement in our social health, ‘an aspect of our national culture whose significance we have not fully absorbed’. But the truth is that this ‘aspect’ could vanish as easily as it came. The obvious precedent is that of black footballers, whose enormous success on the pitch is often complacently quoted as having done a great deal to help race relations in Britain, though the evidence for this is scant. By a coincidence, the baseball season in the United States that is just starting has been ‘dedicated’ to Jackie Robinson, the first African American to play in the major leagues, who made his début fifty years ago, in the 1947 season. Robinson made it in baseball, in a big way, and many other African Americans have done so since. What they did not do was fundamentally to disturb what Roger Angell, in a recent New Yorker, calls ‘the lumpish, Jabba-the-Hutt immobility of racial prejudice’ in the USA. Ross McKibbin reads the Cantona-Gullit phenomenon too cheerfully.
Neil Forster
London NI
