JT

It is an uneven process. It was never going to be easy. Tony Blair built his Labour Party on the premise of accepting the 1979 Margaret Thatcher settlement. His deal with those in power was, “I will tinker around the edges but I’m not going to challenge the fundamentals of this.” That kind of politics can’t work now.

The way I see British history there are two big settlements since the war. One happens in 1945 and endures until roughly the mid-seventies. This is a loosely social-democratic settlement in which a lot of progress is made by working-class people, with strong economic growth. But then in the 1970s there is a fiscal crisis and other problems which cause a rupture. Thatcher comes in with a reforming, neoliberal model that gives control back to business and the market.

If we think about it as 1945 to 1979, that’s thirty-four years. From then until 2008 is a similar period of time. We are now in between settlements, in one of those moments Gramsci talked about the old dying and the new not yet being born.

The Labour Party needs to break through to end this prolonged period of blockage. Inevitably this creates a problem. For a party which has accepted for quite a long time the lines of the 1979 settlement now to say we are going to try to be the engine to give birth to a new set of social and economic arrangements necessitates substantial change. It is going to be turbulent. It has been! But in the end there can be no going back.

This is true for the whole European left. There is hardly a country in the West where new social and political movements are not emerging.

In Proportional Representation (PR) systems sometimes there are new parties. In fact, in a number of cases, such as Greece and Ireland, social-democratic parties have been almost replaced.

In others, they are much weaker than they once were. But these changes manifest differently in Britain, and in the United States, where the political systems dictate that the battles happen within those parties.