A Guardian view - is the left "trapped in the past?"

One usually expeets to find articles putting the case that the Left "Owns the Future" and the Right is "trapped in the past" in left-wing papers like the Guardian and arguments suggesting that the Conservatives are the party of the future and the left stuck in the past in more right-wing publications like the Spectator or the Telegraph.

But yesterday there was an interesting piece by John Harris in the Guardian expressing the fear (from his point of view) that

The Tories own the Future: The Left is trapped in the past.


The sub-heading reads
 
"Too many progressives remain wedded to nationalisation, the big state and jobs for life. If they can't find a more modern vision the battle is lost"

He argues that
 
"What underlines the sense that Tories are on an upswing is the fact that they, and the right more widely, have come up with a solid vision of the future, and may yet persuade a sufficient share of the public to buy in."

To put his summary of the right's case in more positive language than Harris does without shifting the essential meaning, the idea is to work out what qualities and behaviours will help Britain survive and prosper as we face the challenges of the coming decades and try to reward them. He goes on:

"And the left? Another lesson of history is that Labour wins when it does a good impression of owning the future – witness 1945, 1964 and 1997. On a bad day, though, it can feel like many of the people at the top of the party want to return to some mushy, statist version of social democracy redolent of 1993. Others seem to wish it was still 2006. And too much of the wider left is still rattling out the battles of the 1980s. The academic and Lib Dem peer Ralf Dahrendorf famously said that the SDP wanted "a better yesterday": the same is true of 90% of the left, not just here, but all over Europe, and beyond."

Harris argues that

"Two decades on there is still too much truth to the contention made in the "New Times" issue of Marxism Today, published in October 1988: "It is the right that now appears modern, radical, innovative … It is the left that seems backward-looking, conservative, bereft of new ideas and out of time."

"This runs much wider than the Labour party, out into the people and organisations who think of themselves as "radical", but usually fall short.

Listen to their current noises off, as they demand "a massive house-building programme", or the renationalisation of the railways.

The venerable Ken Loach suggests their task is to belatedly make the Labour manifesto of 1945 "into a reality".

The left's causes – greater equality, a public realm as distinct from the private market, security in an insecure world – are as urgent as ever, but this kind of politics stands no chance of advancing them."

Whether you agree with him or not -and obviously I don't share his politics but even if some of his conclusions were not helpful to my side of the argument, I think Harris makes interesting and useful points about how right and left alike need to adapt to a changing world - you can read the full article here.

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