Between a cross and a sword

One would much rather have socialist care under an avowedly capitalist government than capitalist looting under the pretence of socialist concern

If Indira Gandhi’s socialism meant being slightly left of self-interest (as Peter Hazlehurst of The Times put it), Tony Blair’s capitalism was more than slightly right of self-interest. Economics yielded precedence to the politics of economics for both. But just as P V  Narasimha Rao overturned Indira Gandhi’s socialist affectations, Britain’s current Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, seems all set to repeal Blair’s modernising innovation and restore Labour’s original credentials.
 
Ideology has long been kicked about in British politics like an unwanted football. I remember the mocking graffiti “Vote Labour to keep out the Socialists” when Hugh Gaitskell, a conservative upper middle class politician, led the Labour Party. The Labour leader India knows best, Clement Attlee, was drawn from the same privileged milieu as Gaitskell and was sometimes mocked for his drawling Haileybury public school accent. Unlike Keir Hardie, Labour’s legendary founder, both were socialists by conviction, not because of necessity.

 
Now, socialism can seem a tactic. The surprise gain of 30 parliamentary seats in the June general election has convinced Corbyn that his chances of succeeding Theresa May as prime minister will improve if he makes a show of returning to the founder’s cloth cap orthodoxy. Hardie was the illegitimate son of a servant, who later married a carpenter. Aged eight and without any schooling, he was sent to work as a baker’s delivery boy, the family’s sole wage-earner. By the age of 11, Keir was a coal miner. By 17 he had taught himself to read and write. The causes he advocated most passionately in parliament included women’s rights, free schooling, pensions for the old, and self-rule for India. It’s a coincidence but a nice one that Hardie should have been born on August 15, albeit 91 years before India’s tryst with destiny.

 

He had been relegated to the dustbin of politics long before 1995 when Blair, who is believed to have admired Margaret Thatcher’s hard-headed pragmatism, exulted, “A New Labour Party is being born.” In some ways, the change was more symbolic than substantive. Blair didn’t dismantle Attlee’s welfare state — it was Thatcher who cut benefits and threw many poor people out into the street — but he did remove the hallowed Clause IV in Labour’s 1918 constitution describing it as a “socialist party”. The substituted Clause IV promised “a dynamic economy serving the public interest in which the enterprise of the market and the rigour of competition are joined”.

 
Gaitskell, who died without becoming prime minister, had attempted a similar change in the 1950s. But a left-wing rebellion instigated by the then powerful Trades Union Congress, which many saw as the tail that wagged the party dog, prevented him. Blair persuaded rank and file members that Thatcherism’s popularity would make Labour seem outdated and bureaucratic and play into the hands of Conservatives.
 
Corbyn proposes to rewrite Clause IV to read “Labour is a democratic socialist party working for a fairer, healthier and more equal society”. Belying his somewhat mundane appearance, and proving wrong all those jeremiahs, who predicted his speedy downfall, Corbyn has turned out to be a surprisingly imaginative, astute and popular politician. He ended his last election campaign speech with some stanzas from The Masque of Anarchy, the poem Shelley wrote after the 1819 Peterloo Massacre when cavalry charged a crowd of nearly 80,000 people seeking electoral reform. The verses recited were “Rise like lions after slumber/In unfathomable number/Shake your chains to earth like dew/Which in sleep have fallen on you/Ye are many, they are few.”

 
Articulating the principle of Satyagraha, the poem inspired Henry David Thoreau’s essay, “Civil Disobedience”, which Gandhi made his own. Labour’s manifesto “For the Many, Not the Few” also quotes Shelley’s poem as Corbyn talks of taking over contracts worth £200 billion for schools, hospitals and prisons, and promises to nationalise “rail, water, energy and Royal Mail”.
 
Socialism is a dirty word nowadays, especially in profit-driven India. But even while decrying the term, British governments provided help and facilities that must be the envy of countries whose leaders are loud in their boasts and promises while tying poverty-stricken people up in knots of bureaucratic red tape. Whatever the political ideology, Britain’s is a caring society.

 
King Edward VII knew what he was about when he declared tongue-in-cheek “We are all Socialists nowadays.” I would much rather have socialist care under an avowedly capitalist government than capitalist looting (like destroying 86 per cent of the currency) under the pretence of socialist concern.