Fresh thinking needed from the left

HubMP2012

FEBRUARY 5, 2025

We can all can get dispirited by the sloganistic and ritualistic offerings of some on the left in response to today’s crisis. We need new thinking about the situation we face, suggests Alan Simpson.

Traditional production economics has already pushed us past some of the climate boundaries humanity must learn to live within. Consuming less and sharing more must occupy more of our analytical time than we’ve given it. Of course, that’s easy to say, but it carries little meaning to the poor who struggle to earn enough to survive on. It also carries less and less weight with those in fragile employment.

The big challenge for the left, as I see it, is in founding a politics that unites the planet, the proletariat – the traditional working class – and the precariat – those in fragile employment, often unorganised. Unless we include the latter, we will see increasing numbers of (younger) insecure workers drawn towards the politics of authoritarian leadership.

My take on this is threefold. First, we have to rebuild democracy from the base. Social media moguls – and authoritarian governments – have become adept at spreading doubt and mistrust via the internet. The abject quality of national political leadership aids this process, but public cynicism and mistrust is now at record levels. So we will have to rebuild trust and accountability from a local level outwards. Some issues skip past this process more easily than others – for example, taking back ownership of water and rail – but others are more nuanced and multi-layered.

The second is my belief that the main problem is in the left’s key failure to grasp the shift in the Thatcher/Reagan era from production capitalism to finance capitalism. Today’s most wayward excesses live within the Wild West of financial capitalism. Our failures to address and control this are at the root of disempowerment that then pervades society and the world of politics.

And my third, and most perplexing, point concerns the labour movement. We’ve lived off the Lucas Aerospace Plan for more decades than we were entitled to, without ever really embedding it within the precepts of organised labour. Many parts of the union leadership are quite conservative when it comes to this kind of creative thinking.

In his lone battle to maintain Labour’s climate commitments, Ed Miliband often finds himself with barely a union leadership to lean on. In the face of threats to existing production mentalities, the rank and file left have gone silent on the transformative thinking needed to avoid climate breakdown. As Jeremy Corbyn discovered to his cost, when the forces of reaction came for him, trade union leaders were amongst them, particularly on environmental and defence issues. How we tackle this is something Labour has largely ducked.

Organisationally, the left may have taken something of a beating in recent years. But that doesn’t mean it can’t do some fresh thinking of its own.

Alan Simpson was Labour MP for Nottingham South from 1992 to 2010. His various articles and other writings can be found on his blog here.  

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