A few words on ‘Authentocrats’ by Joe Kennedy

I can’t remember a politics-related book that I have enjoyed reading as much as ‘Authentocrats’ — at least, not in a long time. Mike Marqusee wrote an excoriating book on Kinnock-era Labour, Leo Abse wrote an early and prescient, if somewhat strained, personal biographical attack on Tony Blair. But ‘Authentocrats’ is actually funny, witty, and self-aware — especially for a book about UK politics. As the author writes, most UK political journalism has become incredibly lazy, dealing in stock stereotypes, cliches, grey-hero worship, lack of context. Joe Kennedy’s book stands out from the crowd: he’s also helped to invent an Alan Partridge of the centre-left, perhaps.

But… I also felt that there were parts of the story missing, or a little bit obscured. And this is perhaps, shall we say, from a labour movement perspective. Most of what I have to say in response to ‘Authentocrats’ is anecdotal — I don’t have material or empirical evidence to hand. But I was there, in a way, in the early and mid-1980s, and maybe I saw some things emerge, and coalesce, at first-hand.

I think it is crucial to understand that ‘centrism’ — or post-Blairite, post-liberal politics — has its origins in the early- and mid-1980s. A classic example would be Michael Ignatieff, for better or worse, a leading liberal intellectual, who, having previously been regarded as very much on the left, responded to the defeat of the miners strike with a very public shrug. I think the genesis of centrism in the political class comes from that shrug — those political frontrunners who hadn’t defected to the SDP were quick to distance themselves from being seen ‘merely’ as representatives of the labour movement and the working class.

As Joe writes, the history of groups such the Labour Co-ordinating Committee (LCC), which began as the Bennite vanguard, and then whose members ultimately became the Blairite vanguard, is that of a conscious distancing from the ‘Monty Python Four Yorkshiremen’ — but this was underway at an early stage. Through the 80s and 90s, this caused an ongoing rupture: Old Labour was both Old Labour Right and Old Labour Left. A politician such as Austin Mitchell, with his Gaitskellite euroscepticism, combined with a commitment to council housing, found himself on the ‘left’ — or at least, on the outside. The political centre of the Party — say, for example, a lot of the late 1980s trades union leaders, or centre-left politicians such as Robin Cook, or Mo Mowlam — didn’t seem to realise, or really want to highlight, just how much a neo-liberal right had taken control of the party. Even Peter Kilfoyle, an old enemy of Liverpool Militant, supposedly on the Right, soon found himself on the outside, by the late 1990s, wondering what the hell was going on.

A classic example relates to Labour Party Young Socialists. In the early 1980s, Militant were strongly involved in LPYS. With the expulsion and purges of Militant, LPYS, a highly effective and dynamic organisation, with a background in direct action and campaigning, was effectively wound up. Young Labour, which replaced it, was a deliberately toothless and anaemic entity, entirely in thrall to a Labour Students universe which was both careerist and obsessively anti-Trotskyist. Throughout the structures of the party, people involved in LPYS were deliberately rooted out and excluded. Not only was a whole generation of MPs purged in the 1983 Thatcher landslide, with many potential future leaderships effectively gutted, but radical youth was pushed outside, with little reason to return — and this was really how Peter Mandelson was hoping to achieve the ‘tomb’ in which the Labour left would die. Careerism began to underpin the mechanics of the Labour Party, in a very fundamental sense.

Accordingly, trades unions themselves became incredibly cautious — partly because of the effects of legislation, but also because union finances became a priority, as unions themselves increasingly became economic actors with unit trusts and other stakeholdings in capitalist endeavours. Most significantly, with the recession in the late 1980s and early 1990s, they failed to highlight or mobilise against the emergence of what we know as zero-hour contracts, the wanton use of agency staff, the attack on terms and conditions, the abolition of the Wages Councils. These were either late-era Thatcher or Major years developments, and I don’t think I agree that there is a big a difference between Thatcher and Major, at least in this sense.

And this takes me to perhaps one of my biggest quibbles, which is that, as part of late-Generation X, the late-1980s, early-1990s recession was quite a formative experience. Lots of late GXers were exposed to a really harsh lower-end labour market in the early 1990s, and the UK labour movement, in general, wasn’t that interested. Unions didn’t aggressively lobby Labour MPs about employment agencies or casualisation. If we wanted activism, we had single-issue, environmental campaigns, and climate-related activities were picking up speed. But we had a Tory government, elected by almost 15 million people!

If the criticism of post-1992 Tories tended to be crude, and paint the Tories as strange, repressed and uptight, it is probably because that many people were desperately trying to find a line of attack which would work: such was the level of desperation, after four Conservative election victories. This basis of cultural attack was often, if anything, a call back to Labour’s success in the 1960s, much of which was based on the Douglas-Home Tories being out of touch. It should also be said that this also preceded Blair’s ascendency, following the death of John Smith.

By 1998 or 1999, the internal left opposition in Labour had atrophied. It barely functioned. On a national level, meetings could probably pull in about 150–200 people, almost all of whom were veterans of 1980s battles. Not only that, but intellectually, the situation was barren. As Joe writes, New Labour represented left-liberal continuity in terms of a degree of hip multiculturalism: but not really internationalism. So it is not surprising that the Labour left defined itself increasingly around this internationalism: things like Cuba Solidarity.

We were aware of Seattle and Genoa, and an emerging antiglobalisation movement, but if you were collecting Jobseekers, it seemed culturally isolated, with only some exceptions among more forward-looking trades unionists. Some of us tried to make different forms of communal living or businesses work, none of it gained much traction, and in fact the Labour government’s emphasis on social enterprise eventually became incredibly damaging to the interests of more radical forms of self-organisation, creating an infrastructure of parasitical, pseudo-socialistic and self-serving ecosystems.

Yet as I perceive things, as a late-Generation Xer, my contemporaries did not, in general, benefit from the property market at this time, to anything like the extent which Joe suggests. So either we (1968–1975) are not really Gen Xers at all, or Gen X as a whole were confronted with such limited political redress, that we even now find ourselves blamed by younger people for property inequalities, which very few of us were able to benefit from. For if someone had left university between 1994 and 1998, there would be very little time, in a fairly weak labour market, to even begin to get near the kind of property in London or Brighton that Joe talks about — even back then, the prices seemed outrageous to many.

And this cultural turn to hedonism should really be seen in the light, perhaps, of a ‘Beaten Generation’ — at least one which has been caught between the fading of post-war benevolence (school milk, student grants) versus the politics which has been ‘professionalised’ or ‘career-formulated’.

In fact, I am sure it was only John McDonnell’s establishment of the Labour Representation Committee (LRC) which re-introduced specifically labour concerns into the political life of the mainstream labour movement. Obviously, at the time, this had a fairly limited purchase, recycling existing activist resources rather than adding many more, and the web forums tended to be dominated by Posadists. But nonetheless, this might be seen as historically significant.

So I think an account like this might be useful in understanding the structural-political basis of how 90s and 00s culture became so de-ideological, stripped of intellectual content and unserious. We’d been given such a kicking, it was all we felt that we had.

But the last point I’d make is this: we should be very careful about overestimating the significance of the ‘left’, including centrists and Third Way-type liberals… even now.

As I wrote back in 2013, there are really specific factors that can prevent a discredited, apparently bankrupt order from actually being replaced. There is still a political mainstream, which isn’t entirely a product of media — it is also a case of limited (and given the history of the UK for thirty years, yes, realistic) expectations, especially as people are forced to earn money in a cold economic climate. I have a problem, when people who are experiencing really bad financial crises, with simply promising a Labour government ‘soon’. Especially as a programme for a radical Labour government is still, very much, under construction, and is arguably lacking in the kind of technical detail, and the political assiduousness which would be necessary for implementation.

We may think younger people are siding with Labour and the left. And we have the numbers to prove this. Which is excellent.

But the educational elite —the young people who do best in exams, are being sucked into companies which are increasing their hold upon hearts and minds. Sometimes these companies have interests which are in direct opposition to the public good or social justice. Arguably we have a situation where young people could be both more left-wing than in a long time … and, at the same time, more corporate than ever. The role of all-encompassing employers needs to be looked at. Platform capitalism and Silicon Valley are also becoming a governing ideology, organisations which are capable of swallowing their employees whole.

A final note on Brighton. I wonder if the Britpop aspects to North Laine — all Noel Gallagher guitars, and Pulp Fiction posters, still actually apply? Isn’t it becoming a street dominated by Pret a Manger, Starbucks, Costas, even Nando’s? I wonder if, by highlighting these cultural variants, we’re missing the big picture. Corporatisation of our physical, cultural, psychological reality — still going on, and maybe even intensifying. I think we have a lot of work to do. But if we can show that we are serious in terms of what we would replace late capitalism with, we will take Generation X — a generation which has had an unprecedented amount of rights stripped away — with us. In these ways, I think ‘Authentocrats’ can help us understand what we’re up against, which to an extent, is also our own preconceptions — and encourage us all to engage in better reflection upon our own conceits. It can only be a good thing to apply this critique to all of us.