Review of the alternative, edited by Lisa Nandy, Caroline Lucas and Chris Bowers--how realistic is the alternative?.

Calder, Gideon

The Alternative: Towards a New Progressive Politics, ed. Lisa Nandy, Caroline Lucas and Chris Bowers (Biteback: London, 2016).

Doctrine doesn't win elections--resonant stories do. Carys Afoko's point, in the concluding chapter to this book, shouldn't be surprising. It wasn't Chicago School economic models which worked well on the doorstep in 1979. It's not some wholesale popular conversion to this or that model of civic nationalism which accounts for the SNP's recent joys. It's not Nigel Farage's preferred philosophical framework (or whatever) which swung the EU referendum. The midwives of each of these successes are narratives that somehow won out. A coherent enough story, hooking up and chiming enough with what enough people had enough reason to be thinking. Simple stories can make for bad denouements, sometimes because of their simplicity--the Brexit vote may become a kind of mascot for this point. Even so, they're needed to get things moving.

Of course, the left--in its broad sense--has been split by doctrine, often definitively so. The elegance or rightness of one's commitments is no guarantee of buy-in, even from those one wants to impress the most. Yet only very rarely have progressives forged a single, compelling story about what needs changing and how. Could they, now? Should they? For the editors of this fertile and timely collection the answer is yes. The job of the book is to get us thinking how we might forge such a narrative, and acting on that. Its importance and value sit, in striking ways, in just the same place as its limitations.

There's much of promise in this project. Its starting assumption is that often, the differences between the parties of the broad left (for which, read, in order of Westminster size: Labour, the SNP, the Liberal Democrats, Plaid Cymru and the Greens--and presumably Sinn Fein and the SDLP, about whom we hear little here) are less than those within the Conservative Party. In early July, the Conservatives did that quasi-magical thing they do, in uniting almost spontaneously around a new leader, just as it looked like they had reason to splinter over Brexit. What progressives need is a similar, affirmative 'realignment of minds' (p. xvii). So we hear from partisans from Mhairi Black to Peter Hain, Sian Berry to Tim Farron, on what might bind them across party lines, and how working together might work. We find policy areas from trade to public services, migration to (of course) electoral reform. And other voices, eminently well-placed to think through and around the parameters of 'progressive' causes: Frances O'Grady, Neal Lawson, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, Zoe Williams. Often, as with Ruth Lister's chapter on social security, the contributions would happily stand alone as pithy, positive assessments of key principles to inform any attempts to move the 'centre-ground' leftwards during the May years. The book is full of such insights, usually from people we're not used to hearing talk this way. It's really not normal. Which of course, is partly why it's such a good and vital read.

But there's a sense throughout that the very familiarity of the names of the book's contributors illuminates the limits of this kind of conversation. The issues best placed to unify self-identified 'progressives' are not necessarily those which play best with the electorate, or the ones most people think are most important. In the last few years, two places have become emblematic of the disconnect between politicians and 'ordinary' people: the bubble, and the echo chamber. Westminster, of course, is the definitive bubble. Social media--where we may blanket ourselves with the views we feel most comfortable with--might as well have been designed to be an echo chamber. It's not as if politics can be done ignoring either place. But there is a lot of evidence--for example, in the shock felt by many at the Brexit vote--of the dangers of inflating either. If it seems that 'progressive' causes aren't hooking up enough with what enough of the electorate think, then maybe one problem lies with the word itself. Does 'progressive' work on the doorstep, or on billboard ads? Do most people in the country really understand what the contributors of this book would understand by the term 'progressive'? Recent polling evidence suggests many do not. (1)

The importance of these questions is reinforced at the harder end of the evidence the book presents. John Curtice, doyen of poll-readers, concludes (p. 200) that on the one hand, 'A majority feel that Britain is too unequal, that civil liberties should be respected, that changes do need to be made in order to protect the environment, and that ordinary citizens do not have enough say in government decisions.' Yet these sentiments don't readily translate into support for specific 'progressive' measures. Resentment of inequality does not carry over into enthusiasm for redistribution, or worries about the environment into support for increasing the cost of the things we do which damage the environment.

Presuming that the party is a means to an end, rather than an end in itself, it seems obvious that too much partisanship gets in the way of achieving what partisans seek. This book is dead right about that. It's dead right too about the need to get outside of our bubbles--and to think, as Neal Lawson stresses, in terms of incubating bottom-up projects rather than settling the matter at the level of cooperation between party representatives. It's less conclusive about how to pull that off. There are plenty of seeds and pointers here for a more grown-up and pluralist Left, in terms both of doctrine and practice. Is there a single story? No. A sure sense that this kind of collaboration is possible, as well as desirable? This emerges, in bits. There's room and urgent need for a sequel--but, with the greatest appreciation of this project, it needs to be more than another book.

Gideon Calder teaches at Swansea University. His book How Inequality Runs in Families: Unfair Advantage and the Limits of Social Mobility has just come out with Policy Press.

Notes

(1) Emily Robinson and Joe Twyman, 'Speaking at Cross-Purposes? The Rhetorical Problems of 'Progressive' Politics', Political Studies Review 12, 2014.