2 - Democracy: knocking on doors and changing the world

Summary

Introduction

The Labour Party is, quite often, in a state of what the Italian political scientist Giovanni Sartori once termed “democratic confusion” (1987: 72). Democracy, as Charles Taylor set out (2022: 19), is in part a telic concept: in short, a values-led political effort that may never be fully realized (Calhoun 2022: 48). As such, some in and around the Labour Party are restless for a democratic politics of greater participation and cooperation: building solidarity and democratic practices that can survive electoral ups and downs. After the Blair and Brown years, the party had withered as a democratic force. It had lost a general election, of course, and needed to rebuild a relationship with the electorate. Yet that was not the only sign of decay. The party had, it was argued, ceased to be a “movement”. Richard Sennett wrote of a divide on the political left between “top-down” and “bottom-up” approaches to solidarity (2013: 39). In other words, a bureaucracy at the top dispensing social justice, or grassroots campaigning demanding and sometimes enacting change from below. The Labour Party has both traditions within it, and wrestling with this conceptual difficulty can be productive. As is often the case, both traditions have a role to play. The fear after the New Labour years was that the party had become all top down, squeezing out bottom-up creativity and renewal.

Labour activists have long believed in an organizational mission of being rooted in communities, and for much of the twentieth century there was a clear expression of this through the organized working class, the institutions working people built and the construction of shared narratives (Lawrence 2020). The party's origins in trade unionism mean “the party” and “the movement”, Labour and labour, have a longstanding democratic relationship. It has never been an uncomplicated one, and it remains key. But being in the business of minimizing the gap between those who govern and the governed now requires new efforts and new ideas, in no small part because of economic and social changes, with the superseding of traditional measures of class and a smaller trade union movement. New Labour began with aspirations to be a “mass party”, in part to respond to these changes.