Changing the agenda

It’s hard to believe now, but only three years ago the country was not divided between Brexiters and Remainers. In fact, the very idea of such a split would have seemed as absurd as Swift’s division between big-enders and little-enders. Yes, there were a few fanatical Brexiters but most of us gave the matter no thought - including, we now know, most Brexiters themselves. It was a low-salience issue.

This fact has enormous implications for how we should think about Labour party policy.

It shows that it is possible for a government to shift the political agenda. Cameron’s simple trick of holding a referendum transformed our political priorities. Despite the fact that the Brexit negotiations have been an utter shambles, this might actually have benefited the Tories as it has distracted people from the government’s many other failings. If the media weren’t obsessed with Brexit, it might devote a little more attention to the collapse of the railway network, inadequate mental health care, rising homelessness, wage stagnation and the many other effects of austerity.

Cameron has shown that we don’t necessarily need a popular political movement to change the agenda. It can also be done by one-off top-down policies, which can themselves then build movements, as Cameron created Leavers and Remainers.

It’s in this context that we should interpret Labour’s plans to give customers a say on executive pay or to expand worker ownership. It is of course wholly reasonable to question whether such policies, as they stand, will work*. Doing so, however, sometimes misses a Big Fact – that these are not merely technocratic fixes.

Instead, they are efforts to change the political culture. For too long, the question of how much pay and power bosses should have has been off the agenda. Giving workers and customers a say on such matters is a way of showing that such issues are important, and a means of getting people to question bosses’ rapacity and incompetence. It's a stepping stone towards worker democracy and socialism, and a step away from Westminster-centric politics.

We can also read Labour’s – ahem – constructive ambiguity towards Brexit in this light. The party’s dominant attitude to Brexit should be (and I suspect is): “this is Tory shit; they should shovel it.” Their priority is to keep the party together, maximize electoral advantage, and move onto the issues that really concern them: ending austerity and moving towards socialism. (This is quite consistent with opposing Brexit when necessary).

My point here is to stress a point that’s often overlooked. Politics is not merely about finding technocratic solutions to existing issues. It is also about deciding what is an issue in the first place. Those who judge Labour only on the former grounds are framing politics wrongly. And they are neglecting an important political question – of how, and by whom, the agenda is set.

* The details can be fixed later. If it’s acceptable for Microsoft to release beta versions of Windows and fix them months later, it’s acceptable for opposition parties, which have vastly smaller resources, to do so too.

Comments

[rogerh]

I don't care whether the Tories are in or Labour is in. Just so long as the place seems competently run and my life does not change very much. I don't care what their agenda is or what their manifesto contains, neither seems to mean a thing.

I don't think Cameron had any notion of agenda when he called the Referendum, it was something he was forced into. As we can see, those who did the forcing had very little idea what their agenda really was, or did they?

Brexit seems irrelevant to the real problems facing the UK. How does a rather over-stable, over-mature country make a living? Not by giving up a big market in order to sell mint cakes to the South Seas. There really does not seem much room for manoeuvre. No scientific miracles, a few railway lines will not make much difference and it is not obvious that making the teachers work a bit harder will achieve much either.

A large corporate in such a position might be a takeover target for an asset stripper and perhaps that is the real agenda behind Brexit. In which case it is an agenda to keep well hidden. Then there was the racial agenda. But that was self inflicted through lousy housing policy. Now we will pay a much bigger price than a few green fields.

I agree the Tories are doing a lousy job and Brexit is a good cover story. Our main problem seems there is never enough money and bandwidth to achieve more than small temporary fixes. A lack of long term planning makes us compare badly with the French and Germans. Our agendas seem to change with the wind and that has been the way for the past 60 years. Our parliament seems a very very efficient way of doing nothing at all.

The real agenda is money. Where is it coming from and where can it be chopped. Traditionally Labour is short on finding money and short on chopping it, the Tories short on making money for us and long on chopping services. Post Brexit I think neither Tories nor Labour will have any money and that nice plump Christmas goose the NHS looks ripe for plucking, chop chop, another well hidden agenda.

Agendas, bah humbug.

[Jimweibo]

In true Swiftian fashion, can I point out that the disputatious groups are actually Big-Endian and Little-Endian!

[Dave Timoney]

One of the characteristics of the neoliberal era has been the idea that the agenda is set by global forces beyond the control of any domestic political party: "I hear people say we have to stop and debate globalisation. You might as well debate whether autumn should follow summer." - Tony Blair, Labour Party annual conference, 2005.

Leaving aside the ideology for a moment, one result of this may have been to lead politicians to assume that they had limited influence on the agenda. I wonder whether a politician from an earlier era might have been more cautious than Cameron in agreeing to a referendum. In other words, the charge that he was insouciant perhaps doesn't account for the extent to which he simply couldn't imagine the agenda being changed in such a dramatic fashion.

[Jim]

"It can also be done by one-off top-down policies, which can themselves then build movements, as Cameron created Leavers and Remainers."

Nonsense. The Leave vote existed for decades, growing steadily post ERM, Maarstricht, the Euro debacles, and the Lisbon Treaty referendum promise betrayal. The political class had completely ignored it, allowing it no voice whatsoever, until UKIP arrived on the scene and gave those people a voice. I've been anti-EEC (as then was) since the late 80s, and haven't had a chance until UKIP came along to make my democratic voice heard. I'm not the only one either.... there's 17.4m of us now, and we didn't all suddenly become of the anti-EU opinion because David Cameron decided to give us an outlet for our views on the matter.

How arrogant are you to state that 17.4 million people casting their votes in a way you don't like have been 'created' by a politician giving them a vote? You just want to ignore their views in the same way you have for 40+ years.