Principle
I was spouting off about Nye Bevan on Twitter the other day, something about Labour MPs having principles back then, and the wit to argue for them. Probably unfair to a few modern MPs, and overly reverent to the sainted Nye, I expect he could pull a few dodgy strokes when he had to and I expect some modern MPs do try to stick to their principles, which must be a tremendously difficult thing to do in that shit-spattered world. Twitter doesn't really lend itself to caveats and clauses, one thing I dislike about it.
Pragmatism is supposedly the name of the game these days anyway. "Principle without power is pointless" is the mantra, though I think if I learnt one thing from the New Labour years it's that power without principle is pretty pointless too, for all the good things they did (and there were some) they never really changed the face of this country, not in the way that people like Bevan did, and - this might sound a bit like "It's All Labour's Fault", which isn't true but it's also not true that they bear no responsibility - they weren't really pragmatists either, they just swapped one ideology for another and called it pragmatism, they completely abandoned co-operation and went for competition instead, we all know how well that worked out.
I think that's why sticking to principles matters, more than the power to put them into practice even, the pre-Blair Labour party wasn't perfect, it needed modernizing, policies needed to be adapted to the modern world but they dropped too much of the central principle that the world is a better place if we co-operate, which is still a pragmatic one when it's used appropriately. It works. The 'appropriately' does matter too - the left has its conservatives as well as the right and they've been shown to be just as wrong - competition still has a place in life but it's in the High Street rather than the Health Service. I'm not looking for some cure-all panacea, the kind that has failed time and time again but a truly pragmatic approach to life, one that understands the subtler, longer term factors of a cost-benefit approach to problems, something I think the market ideology grievously fails to do.
For me, the modern Labour party's biggest failing is that it has stopped arguing for that pragmatic principle and almost thrown up its hands in exasperation and surrender to the ideology of the market. The 'realists', as they laughably call themselves these days, argue that that's what people want, that's what they'll vote for and principle without power...etc, and then we're back where we started. How long shall we keep going round in circles?
Pragmatism is supposedly the name of the game these days anyway. "Principle without power is pointless" is the mantra, though I think if I learnt one thing from the New Labour years it's that power without principle is pretty pointless too, for all the good things they did (and there were some) they never really changed the face of this country, not in the way that people like Bevan did, and - this might sound a bit like "It's All Labour's Fault", which isn't true but it's also not true that they bear no responsibility - they weren't really pragmatists either, they just swapped one ideology for another and called it pragmatism, they completely abandoned co-operation and went for competition instead, we all know how well that worked out.
I think that's why sticking to principles matters, more than the power to put them into practice even, the pre-Blair Labour party wasn't perfect, it needed modernizing, policies needed to be adapted to the modern world but they dropped too much of the central principle that the world is a better place if we co-operate, which is still a pragmatic one when it's used appropriately. It works. The 'appropriately' does matter too - the left has its conservatives as well as the right and they've been shown to be just as wrong - competition still has a place in life but it's in the High Street rather than the Health Service. I'm not looking for some cure-all panacea, the kind that has failed time and time again but a truly pragmatic approach to life, one that understands the subtler, longer term factors of a cost-benefit approach to problems, something I think the market ideology grievously fails to do.
For me, the modern Labour party's biggest failing is that it has stopped arguing for that pragmatic principle and almost thrown up its hands in exasperation and surrender to the ideology of the market. The 'realists', as they laughably call themselves these days, argue that that's what people want, that's what they'll vote for and principle without power...etc, and then we're back where we started. How long shall we keep going round in circles?