Chasing Unicorns? Orwell, socialism and patriotism

“England has got to be true to herself”, a famous English socialist once wrote. “She is not being true to herself while the refugees who have sought our shores are penned up in concentration camps, and company directors work out subtle schemes to dodge their Excess Profits Tax”.

George Orwell typed these words in 1940, in the middle of the Blitz as German bombs were raining down. His short book, The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius, has subsequently become the ur-text of a patriotic vision of socialism. Corbynism, it is claimed, fatally lacked this essential ingredient of popularity – indeed stamping on any tendencies in this direction. This was a major reason why it crashed and burnt in the 2019 election. Socialism still – in Orwell’s phrase – has not “really touched the heart of the English people”.

Keir Starmer, on the other hand, is determined to avoid such a fate, wrapping the Labour party (literally) in the Union Jack and signalling a deep emotional attachment to the monarchy. He even ordered in his MPs to abstain on a bill authorising the security services to commit murder and torture without legal repercussion – for fear of appearing ‘patriotically’ suspect.

Don’t sing ‘Rule Britannia’

But the interesting thing about The Lion and the Unicorn is that the patriotism it pays homage to is not the same patriotism that the Labour party in 2020 is seeking to identify with. Starmer’s conference speech was trailed to the media as rebranding Labour as the party of “flag, forces and family”. Blue Labour, the Labour faction which heralds ‘conservative socialism’, is committed to the triad of “family, faith and flag”. There is a subtle difference if you look carefully.

However, Orwell explicitly rejects the idea that the patriotism of the English working class revolves around these cornerstones. Its patriotism is “profound” but “the working man’s heart does not leap when he sees a Union Jack”. Rather, there is an ingrained hatred of war, militarism and uniforms, and – outside of war – a widespread refusal to join the army even in times of mass unemployment. “So deep does this feeling go” writes Orwell, “that for a hundred years past the officers of the British Army, in peace time, have always worn civilian clothes when off duty.”

In Orwell’s view, “all the boasting and flag-wagging, the ‘Rule Britannia’ stuff is done by small minorities”.

Of course, The Lion and the Unicorn was written nearly 80 years ago. Attitudes may have changed – witness the ubiquitous uniformed soldiers before kick-off at football matches and the pressure of conformity about poppy wearing. But Orwell made a crucial distinction between nationalism or jingoism and patriotism.

It is a similar story when it comes to religion or ‘faith’ as modern-day adherents like to call it. “The common people” says Orwell, are not puritanical and “without definite religious belief”. Though there is a “deep tinge” of Christian belief, in terms of organised religion, the Anglican Church is mainly the preserve of the landed gentry and the Nonconformist sects only appeal to minorities.

Defining patriotism

So what then is patriotism? According to Orwell, it is a purely defensive attitude and protective of a particular way of life. “It is bound up,” Orwell writes, “with solid breakfasts, gloomy Sundays, smoky towns and winding roads, green fields and red pillar-boxes.”

Mercifully he soon becomes less misty-eyed and then makes an astute point about English culture which, I believe, is still true decades later. The English – despite the contentedly defeatist attitude of much of the liberal-left which sought salvation, oddly, in the neoliberal European Union – are not irredeemably conservative, capitalist or right-wing. This fatalistic stance should have been exploded by the 2017 election in which a left-wing Labour party gained nearly 42% of the vote in England. But there is, Orwell says, a definitive privateness about English life:

The liberty of the individual is still believed in, almost as in the nineteenth century. But this has nothing to do with economic liberty, the right to exploit others for profit. It is the liberty to have a home of your own, to do what you like in your spare time, to choose your own amusements instead of having them chosen for you.

Undeniably, this feeling can be used to fuel a seemingly endless housing boom – rooted in the comfort induced by seeing the value of the house you own continually rising and in viewing your home as a haven against the world. But it can also be – and would be by a serious Left – utilized in the opposite cause. In a country where millions have scant security as private tenants, and are being evicted as we speak, and where wealthy individuals and businesses buy up hundreds of flats and houses for no other purpose than renting them or selling them on, “the liberty to have a home of your own”, but not necessarily one you are free to sell, is the kind of aspiration the Left should champion. In Marxist terms, we live in a world where ‘use value’ (the function of a house or flat to provide security, stability and shelter) has become the slave of ‘exchange value’ (seeing them as simply ‘units’ to make money from). That is why Orwell could proclaim a fervent belief in the ‘liberty of the individual’ but also advocate (in the political programme that accompanies The Lion and the Unicorn) the abolition of private land ownership in urban areas – and see no contradiction between the two.

Orwell the Red

Indeed, what is striking about Orwell ‘patriotic socialism’ is that the socialism involved is of the deepest red. The second half of The Lion and the Unicorn is devoted to espousing an “English Revolution” that would set free “the native genius of the English people”. Railways, banks, major industries and land would all be nationalised (Orwell recommends allowing private ownership of land of up to 15 acres in rural areas, but as seen above, would completely abolish private land ownership – and thus landlordism – in town areas), incomes would be restricted to a ten to one variation, the House of Lords abolished and private schools flooded with state-aided pupils or simply closed. Orwell even envisages the stock market being torn down!

However, it is interesting that despite Orwell’s intense anti-Communism, his economic beliefs do not seem vastly different in their fundamentals. Orwell defined himself explicitly as a “democratic socialist”, not a Communist, and clearly saw great danger in vesting political power in an all-seeing political party, but in economic terms, did not see any alternative to state socialism.  “From the moment that all productive goods have been declared the property of the State,” he writes, “the common people will feel, as they cannot feel now, that the State, is themselves.” Despite fighting in an anarchist/syndicalist revolution in Spain, and with a Trotskyist battalion, just four years previously Orwell seems to have imbibed none of their critique of state socialism, nor their advocacy – indeed living example of – workers’ control.

Nonetheless, by comparison with Orwellian socialism, Corbyn’s mellow social democracy appears – notwithstanding the hysteria it generated – quite tame. And Blue Labour, which might claim to be the inheritor in the Labour party of the Orwellian vision, seems oblivious to his decrying of the party’s “timid reformism”. In aligning with – at best tolerating – insipid centrist leaders like Starmer and Miliband there is an all too common wilful blindness to Orwell’s radical side.

Ashamed of their own country

But the incongruous thing – and probably a large reason Orwell is claimed by divergent political philosophies – is that he combines a frankly revolutionary socialism with unvarnished contempt for left-wing intellectuals. Orwell berates the “shallow leftism” of intellectuals and the “mechanically anti-British attitude” which was de rigueur on the radical left of the time. Much of the contempt stemmed from widespread left-wing support for Stalin and the Soviet Union. Orwell, by contrast, had seen Stalin’s inherent brutality – and well as his anti-revolutionary stance – at first hand during the Spanish Civil War. However, some of the critique transcends the circumstances of the time. In The Lion and the Unicorn and elsewhere (for example the essay ‘Notes on Nationalism’), Orwell develops the idea of “transferred nationalism” – taking all the emotions, affection and loyalty that might have been attached to your own country and simply directing them somewhere else – the Soviet Union, primarily, in his era. Despite its pretentions, this mental transference gets the protagonist no closer to “genuinely internationalist outlook”.

The same transference was in evidence during the EU referendum campaign and the endless negotiations that followed. Implicit in much of the liberal-left embrace of the Remain cause was the idea that virtually everything that made life bearable in England came from ‘civilised’ European influence, without which the country would descend into a corporate free-loading, racist hell-hole (ironically, in devoting most of their energies to taking down Jeremy Corbyn – and thus helping Boris Johnson – liberal Remainers ensured this vision would come to pass). The idea that a home-grown socialism was even possible was dismissively rejected as a contradiction in terms.

Thus, Europe (the institutions of the EU) became a purely benign endeavour, without conflict or desire, pitted against a country whose temporary, austerity-wreaking rulers (a trait they shared with the EU) were seen as representative of its eternal character. But genuine internationalism involves the recognition that all countries (including pan-governmental entities and repressed or colonised nations), have their own elites and plebeians, their own fractures between capital and labour, their own bigots and mobs, and their own interests which leaders will attempt to pursue.

Orwell, notwithstanding his unabashed patriotism, is aware of this. Thus, in his treatment of India (at the time part of the British Empire) he can recognise both that Britain, out of fear of trade competition and a desire to make rule easier, has artificially held back Indian development and that, partly as a consequence of British domination, the average Indian suffers most keenly at the hands of his fellow-countrymen. “The petty Indian capitalist exploits the town worker with the utmost ruthlessness,” notes Orwell, “the peasant lives from birth to death in the grip of the money-lender”. That kind of analysis seems strangely sophisticated today.

Return of the ‘drowsy years’

However, in one important way, Orwell’s essay is rooted in its own time; a time when Britain (and its Empire) seemed the only obstacle to the total domination of Nazi Germany. He likens Britain to a family with the wrong members in control – the dividend drawers, the landed class, the “functionless” owners of industry – who are holding back the intelligent and capable. The ruling class, in Orwell’s view, are not corrupt so much as “unteachable” and mired in self-deception. While Nazi Germany has the SS man, we have the rent collector.

War, said Orwell, was the greatest of all agents of change. It speeds up long-term processes and brings previously unacknowledged realities to the surface. In the midst of the Blitz, the “drowsy years”, as Orwell encapsulated the 1930s, were well and truly over and it was possible, necessary actually, to become both revolutionary and realistic.

But now the dividend drawers, the owners of industry, the tax evaders are back, if they ever really went away. Rent is the (anti)-lifeblood of the economy. Students are cajoled into returning to halls of residence so that they can pay rent to the owners. The spectre of city centres devoid of commuters petrifies the owners of commercial and residential properties who see their rental streams drying up before their eyes. Hedge fund managers and bankers are exempted from quarantine regulations because of their alleged contribution to the economy. The company directors of Orwell’s time who try and dodge “Excess Profits Tax” have been superseded by a multi-trillion dollar tax avoidance industry orchestrated by banks and green-lighted by governments.

The outright treachery that frightened Orwell has been replaced by ordinary corruption. The reverence for the impartiality of the law even if it is unjust, which Orwell believed characterised England, now pales before the staging of show trials of those who embarrass the rulers of the world. The “right to exploit others for profit” is deemed sacrosanct while a bill allowing MI5 agents to murder British citizens with impunity is waived through the House of Commons with the connivance of the Labour party. The drowsy years are back with a vengeance and nothing seems likely to jolt us back into attentiveness.

So let us not talk falsely now, the hour is getting late

I haven’t posted much about Brexit on this blog. Partly this is because other people are more than happy to do so I’d just be repeating what someone else has said. But it’s also because I’m convinced that in future years, in the aftermath of a future economic crash, the level of attention devoted to something that really doesn’t change the economic fundamentals much will seem bizarre.

However, I think the leaked US-UK free trade negotiations are very interesting and do merit comment because they indicate that the form of Brexit matters. Johnson’s regulatory disalignment with the EU and liberalisation-based free trade agreements represents a definite fork in the road compared with continue customs unions membership and single market alignment (the Labour party plan) or remaining.

To recap, the leaked documents reveal that US negotiators are pushing for “total market access” to be “the baseline assumption” of the talks. This primarily means services because services are the dominant part of the British economy. And this definition includes the NHS because the NHS is considered a service.

British officials have promised to “fly the good for flag for services liberalisation”. The NHS could only be excluded if, as is the custom with trade negotiations, it is specifically exempted. And the British side has declined to exempt the NHS, just as David Cameron refused to do in the doomed TTIP negotiations between the European Union and the US a few years ago. That is extremely revealing.

Other elements of the nascent US-UK negotiations include introducing lower food standards (chlorine-washed chickens), banning any mention of climate change and establishing the right of corporations to sue the British government, without any right of appeal, for practices they regard as unfair.

The EU and total market access

But before we rush to put our bodies on the line for the status quo, it’s necessary to recall what is already happening in the absence of a newly-minted trade agreement with the USA. Because it’s eerily similar. The afore-mentioned TTIP free trade agreement (FTA) between the EU and the US was considered to pose “real and serious risks to the NHS”. There were genuine worries it could also have undermined food safety, bank regulations and environmental standards. It was negotiated in secret (you had to go into a secure reading room to examine it) and it would have established exactly the same ‘corporate court’ system as the US-UK negotiations. In fact, as a result of EU FTAs with many different countries, and also within the EU, so-called investor-state dispute tribunals are extremely common. 

In Britain, the NHS is already being privatised with mental health services on the frontline. Moreover, under EU laws on fair competition, companies such as Richard Branson’s Virgin are able to sue the NHS on the grounds of putatively poorly-run tendering processes.

However, I think there is a difference between EU free trade and a future in the US orbit. That relates to public opinion. The TTIP, which was negotiated between 2013 and 2016, is dead in the water – in April 2019, the European Commission declared that TTIP was “obsolete and no longer relevant”. Partly that outcome is a result of mushrooming governmental and public opposition to TTIP provisions as they were gradually exposed. Doubtless the European Commission would have liked to proceed, without opposition and scrutiny. But it couldn’t. The same European public opinion will influence what a future Labour government can and cannot do and what is politically possible.

The same could theoretically be said of the British government. But if Johnson wins a majority on December 12 he will take that as permission to blithely ignore public opinion for five years, by which time a US-UK FTA could be negotiated and sealed.

Not all people’s votes are the same

There is also a question here about how Brexit is negotiated which has been overlooked. The leaked negotiations revealed that a no deal Brexit (still on the cards if the UK doesn’t reach an agreement on future trade arrangements with the EU by December next year) is the US’s preferred option. Conversely if the UK is still in the Customs Union and aligned to the single market – which is Labour party policy – a US-UK FTA is seen as a “non-starter”.

So if Labour wins the election and negotiates a deal in which Customs Union membership is maintained and organises a referendum with that deal going up against Remain – as is its stated policy – that will specifically rule out any future US-UK trade negotiations which lead to the privatisation of parts of the NHS or dilution of food standards. Regardless of which side wins, it won’t happen.

However, if there is a 2^nd referendum between Johnson’s deal and Remain, a future US free trade agreement – with all that that entails – is eminently conceivable. Indeed, such a scenario – propping up a minority Conservative government to allow a ‘people’s vote’ – was put forward by Lib Dem deputy leader, Ed Davey, now that Lib Dem ‘Plan A’ – revoking Article 50 – has been conceded to be pie in the sky.

Ironically, a putatively principled opposition to Brexit could result in the worst kind of Brexit happening.

Johnson and Cameron: A Tale of Two Extremes

We are, we are told, suffering under the yoke of one of the most right-wing governments Britain has ever had. Before coming to power, Boris Johnson chewed over tactics with white supremacist Steve Bannon. Upon achieving it, he has suspended Parliament, appointed a Home Secretary who has registered her support for capital punishment and wants criminals to “literally feel terror” and dog-whistled to racists, the far right and empire nostalgists that he is on their side.

Indeed, the person who first came up with the idea of proroguing Parliament is a former Conservative special adviser, now Brexit party supporter, who convinced himself that ex-PM David Cameron was leading a “homesexualist movement” and infecting Britain with ‘cultural Marxism’ lifted straight out of the Frankfurt School.

So it’s plausible – for those of us who inhabit Planet Earth – to believe that Britain is now led by a hard right nationalist party that has brutally severed its ties (by expelling 22 MPs for example) with the saner, moderate, liberal conservatism that preceded it. Plausible, indeed believed in by many people, but not correct.

In fact, we are confronted by two extremes – undoubtedly different in certain ways – but united by a dogmatic, ideological conviction that the damage they inflict is justified and necessary.

It’s hard for people not of the Conservative persuasion – and not under the age of 60 – to understand how David Cameron upset traditional conservatives. Commitments to equal marriage, to disowning Section 28 and to prioritising more female and ethnic minority candidates, which appeared to successfully‘detoxify’ the Conservative brand, were anathema to many Conservative members who think wearing ties should be de rigueur and that Christianity should lie at the heart of public policy. Such people are economically Thatcherite but culturally traditionalist, which might appear contradictory, although not to them. They are also invariably anti-EU. Cameron was tolerated while he won elections and referendums, which all came to juddering halt in June 2016.

But all the while, and despite protestations from esteemed academics that he was a one-nation Conservative at heart, Cameron deepened Thatcherism. Austerity took public sector cuts to places Thatcher could only dream about, privatisation was driven as far as it could go and the NHS was starved of funding like never before while being opened up to the private sector. Anti-trade union laws were extended, while protection against unfair dismissal was diluted. And for the poor and disabled, Cameroonian Conservatism made the Thatcher era look positively compassionate by comparison. The Con/Lib Dem coalition government – followed by a year of ‘pure’ brand Cameron – left a trail of ruined lives, deaths, suicides, destitution, homelessness even self-immolation.

This was, by any fair assessment, an extreme and intensely ideological government but its leading lights presented themselves as centrists, modernisers and “liberal internationalists”. That they were taken seriously by large swathes of the media can be explained in part by the fact that their amplifiers had no personal experience of the depredations the Tories and Lib Dems inflicted. Those that did – though they number in the millions – were largely silent in public debate. Hence, Brexit, which was rooted in deprived areas hardest hit by austerity, appeared to many commentators to come out of the wild blue.

This political mind-set has been described, by Tariq Ali for example, as emanating from the ‘extreme or far centre’. Its manifestation certainly wasn’t limited to Britain. The EU imposed savage austerity on countries such as Ireland, Portugal, Greece and Italy and in order to get its way was quite prepared to overthrow governments and override the will of national Parliaments – in fact proroguing the House of Commons seems almost quaint by comparison. But neither this, nor the pursuing of secretive trade deals with the United States, has dented its reputation as a bastion of enlightened liberalism surrounded by populist sharks.

In Britain, the transition from David Cameron to Boris Johnson – in which the failures of the first flow inexorably into the predominance of the second – reveals several things. One is that the liberal conservatism Johnson is determined to expunge from the Tory party is very selective in the principles it is willing to stand up for. It is pro-EU and against overt bigotry. But, as shown by the voting records of Tory dissidents such as Dominic Grieve and Anna Soubry, strangely unmoved by the social callousness of the Cameron-Lib Dem government. Hence, contemporary liberal conservatism should not be mistaken for a rebirth of the Tory Wets of the 1980s. They – Ian Gilmour for example – would have been outraged, primarily, by Cameron’s inherently Thatcherite approach to social and economic policy and the human damage it inflicted. Unfortunately, they no longer exist.

Another is the strange sight of strict austerians reneging on their previous iron commitments to reducing public spending and controlling the deficit, obsessions which have defined politics for the past eight years. The chancellor, Sajid Javid, noted The Economist, “is a fan of Ayn Rand and hangs pictures of Margaret Thatcher his office. Yet on Mr Johnson’s instructions he announced an extra £13.8bn in election-friendly giveaways, paid for with extra borrowing.”

However, as highlighted by this blog last year, such flexibility is simply what happens when the Right realises that patience with austerity is at breaking point and the consequences of persevering with it are worse than performing an intellectual volte-face.

Undoubtedly Britain now has a ‘hard Right’ government under Boris Johnson. But it has already experienced one for the past eight years, although one whose sheen was that of modernising conservatism. Now some of the elite are getting a taste of the ruthlessness that Cameron routinely meted out to ordinary citizens. But don’t worry too much – they won’t starve.

The social democratic moment

Some time ago I tried to point out that, despite the endless barbs being hurled in his direction insisting he was barely disguised Marxist, Trotskyist, Stalinist etc., Jeremy Corbyn was and is a mainstream social democrat. In fact, much more so than other people who proudly ordain themselves social democrats.

This wasn’t in order to denigrate him from a far left perspective. Social democracy, like all political traditions, has flaws but also distinct characteristics that mark it out from other allegedly ‘progressive’ currents such as liberalism. At this moment in British politics, the distinctiveness of social democracy needs to be loudly proclaimed. It isn’t liberalism and if it is drowned in a sickly sea of liberalism, this once-in-a-generation chance to alter the British political system will be lost.

A century ago

Historically, social democracy emerged in the early 20^th century as way of advancing the interests of the working class through the Parliamentary system. This was to mark it out from syndicalism – before the First World War a massive movement – which dismissed the Parliamentary system altogether and advocated that workers themselves should democratically control industries and workplaces. This is why the ‘Labour’ party was created – to represent the interests of labour (i.e. workers) in Parliament.

Social democracy also, in time, broke from orthodox Marxism in that it sought immediate improvements in workers’ conditions, rather than waiting for some inevitable collapse of the capitalist system. And it also repudiated Leninist revolutionary socialism. Social democrats upheld the Parliamentary, ‘democratic’ system, fought (fitfully) for universal suffrage, were consciously reformist and rejected ‘democratic centralism’ – the idea that an authentically Leninist (or Trotskyist) political party should work out an agreed line and then rigidly enforce it amongst its membership. In theory, social democratic parties should be democratically run and encourage free and open debate.

To reiterate, there are flaws within social democracy. The lack of interest in the fate of the capitalist system, or how it is changing, means that social democrats rather blindly assume the state can always be deployed to improve people’s conditions when those conditions also depend on capitalism functioning well. In the context of spiralling climate change, the connection between healthy capitalism and prospering social democracy is a glaring contradiction. Admittedly, social democrats do sometimes envisage life beyond capitalism, a hazy end point called ‘democratic socialism’ which is always seemingly in the distance and evasive of exact definition.

Moreover, the commitment to democratic, Parliamentary means papers over, not just Leninism, but also other forms of democracy as well, such as syndicalist ‘workers’ control’ and democratic councils, or soviets, the directly democratic, face-to-face forms of government that, as pointed out by Hannah Arendt, appear spontaneously in every revolutionary outbreak and aspire to permanence.

After neoliberalism

However, there are also valuable features in social democracy which now need to be brought to the fore. One of these is – or should be – a commitment to class politics and to represent the interests of its class. Whereas in the 1950s and ’60s this class element meant social democracy was fundamentally a conservative force, protecting post-war gains, now – in the aftermath of decades of neoliberalism, privatisation and the privileging of the power of employers over employees –  to be true to itself, it has to be radical.

One instance is collective bargaining. At their height, collective bargaining agreements covered over 80% of workers, but now they apply to just over a fifth of the workforce and less in the private sector. In that they presuppose negotiations with trade unions, they symbolise a recognition of the rights and dignity of labour, in contrast to the current attitude of treating workers like civilians in an occupied country – constantly under suspicion and surveillance. Plans for a resuscitated Ministry of Labour – which will spearhead attempts to revive collective bargaining across the economy – are redolent of Ernest Bevin’s reign as Minister of Labour in the Second World War coalition when for the first time in British history a rough, day-to-day industrial democracy prevailed.

This highlights an integral difference between social democracy and liberalism. Social democrats – in common with liberals – should be in favour of democratic norms, equality before the law and human rights. They should be implacably opposed to the ethno-nationalism of Donald Trump or the hard-right culture warmongering of Boris Johnson. But social democrats have to be about more than this.

Without practical rights and popular organisations that mediate between government, powerful institutions and ordinary citizens, democratic norms are just formal and empty (which isn’t to say they are without value) and can easily be co-opted by wealthy interests. For example, the introduction – by current Liberal Democrat leader Jo Swinson – of fees of up to £1,200 for attending employment tribunals is something no social democrat can ever countenance because it assumes, in time-honoured liberal fashion, that the formal, theoretical right to justice no different to the practical ability to access it.

This acknowledgement that the formalities of liberal-democracy and abstract human rights are insufficient can lead social democrats into interesting areas. It can lead them to attempt to democratise the economy and contest the divine right of capital to rule in the ‘private’ sphere of the economy. To be sure this is not inevitable. Historically, there are numerous occasions when social democrats have been mind-numbingly unimaginative and cemented the rule of bureaucracies and managers. Famously, Herbert Morrison (Peter Mandelson’s grandfather coincidentally), as deputy Prime Minster in the post-war Labour government, insisted that the newly nationalised industries be run in a top-down bureaucratic fashion – much like the private companies they superseded – with absolutely no concession, beyond the rights of trade unions, to the right of workers to have any say in how they were run.

The other social democracy

But there is another social democratic tradition – call it more radical social democracy if you want to – that believes in socialisation, not merely nationalisation and wants to open up both public and private enterprises to the influence of citizens and workers. This can be seen in post-war demands from some trade unions that nationalisation equate to a rough economic democracy, the Institute for Workers’ Control in the 1960s and the 1976 ‘Lucas Plan’, a blueprint to transform a weapons’ company into a worker-controlled firm, producing for social need.

Internationally, this current in social democracy can be discerned in the 1976 ‘Meidner Plan’, the Swedish endeavour to create ‘wage-earner funds’ that would accrue a steadily rising proportion of private company shares, eventually coming to own the firms – and thus most of the economy – outright. The plan was belatedly introduced in 1984 but in extremely truncated form (a ‘pathetic rat’ in the description of its original author, economist Rudolf Meidner).

Now this other social democratic tradition is plainly where Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell resides. His Inclusive Ownership Fund (IOF) echoes the Meidner plan, though with the caveat that a maximum of 10% of company shares can be transferred to the workforce. The ‘right to own’ proposal, which will give the workforce the right of first refusal to buy a company if it is sold, dissolved or floated on the stock exchange, is another example. Services to be nationalised – for example the Royal Mail, and the rail and water industries – would not be handed over to civil servants or imported private sector managers to run but would be governed – in part at least – by workers and service users.

Erstwhile doubts about the record of social democrats in government are appropriate here. As the Swedish case above shows (and it is far from alone), proposals are one thing but the actuality is quite another. Even Theresa May wanted to place workers on company boards before the idea was quietly shelved because of opposition from the CBI. France and Germany both insist on worker representation at board level but the effect is negligible. Moreover, a criticism of Employee Stock Ownership Plans (ESOPs) in the US –  which are akin to McDonnell’s IOF and ‘Right to Own’ schemes – is that they boost productivity and wages but do not entail real participation, a classic social democratic fudge regarding the ‘right to manage’.

If and when a left-wing Labour government is elected, its plans will immediately rub up against the interests of the ‘big end of town’ (as the City of London was called during the New Labour years).  Whether they will then be diluted to ‘pathetic rat’ status is impossible to say. Britain’s business sector is heavily financialised and used to – in terms of internal management – entirely getting its own way. Much will depend on whether the power and reach of trade unions is transformed. In a classic social democratic country such as Norway a limited form of industrial democracy – a joint management model which gives workers’ representatives co-determination over company decisions – can apply because managers and owners accept trade unions as legitimate, in fact essential, parts of the negotiating landscape. Such acceptance is thoroughly alien to the mind-set of British business and there will be immense resistance to any change in the balance of power.

The watershed of Brexit

Clearly one question social democrats now cannot bypass is Brexit. The current Labour party position – implacable opposition to no-deal whilst proposing to negotiate its own deal which it then puts to the country in a referendum including an option to remain – is, in my opinion, the best compromise from a bad situation it didn’t create or desire. Many politicians, including Ed Miliband, Nick Clegg and Vince Cable, voted for the referendum and promised to respect its outcome.

However, social democrats, in particular, cannot be agnostic about the government of the EU. In its core institutions – the Council of the European Union, the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the European Court of Justice (ECJ) – the EU embodies a liberal philosophy anathema to social democracy. Deriving most strongly from German ordo-liberalism, this approach assumes that appointed ‘experts’ and judicial ordinances should have priority over democratic impulses. Laws are mainly made by the Council of the European Union (ministers from member states) and interpreted by the ECJ. It is no accident that classical liberal Friedrich Hayek advocated a pan-state single market – many years before its actual creation in Europe – as a way of protecting the free market from the meddling of democratic governments. The fact that many European social democrats have tamely accepted this liberal settlement shows nothing more than the bankruptcy of European social democracy.

The dilemma for the Labour party is that its ‘soft Brexit’ policy (membership of the customs union, close relationship with the single market etc.) almost certainly presupposes acceptance of many of the laws and directives that accompany EU membership. In at least two areas – state aid and public monopolies which don’t permit outside competition – there will be conflict with the priorities of a social democratic Labour government. In whichever of the two states Britain may be in (continuing as an EU member or the halfway house of Customs Union membership) the only coherent option for a social democratic government is to welcome the conflict, refuse to give in to penalties in the form of fines or law suits and attempt to widen the dispute to other member states. Remain and Rebel as opposed to Remain and Reform.

In Britain at the moment a social democratic Labour party faces two adversaries. One is the hard-right government of Boris Johnson committed to job destroying free trade deals, breaking free of the regulations that irritate entrepreneurs and fermenting a culture war. The other comprises liberals in each of the three main parties who – peculiarly undisturbed by years of austerity that have stripped public services to the bone and the conscious cruelty imposed on benefit claimants and sick and disabled people – wish that the last three years simply hadn’t happened. The answer is not reactionary conservatism or status quo liberalism. Social democracy – for all its flaws – approximates to one. If not now, when?