Labour needs more than a lust for power — it needs bold new ideas
Lust for office is precisely what has stalled the progress of the Labour Party in recent years because it enabled Fine Gael to recover seats at its expense while at the same time it ensured Labour, during the election, was the only political party arguing that the leader of another party should be Taoiseach.
Listening to his comments, I was reminded of the words contained in a recent thought-provoking book by the Jesuit Edmund Grace on public happiness and democracy.
Grace suggests it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that there is a lot of public fatigue with politics and that “public life is now an exchange of prepared scripts between well-rehearsed performers playing to the middle group, which by definition excludes those on the margins”. The “lust for office” is what has created this scenario.
Much of the comment on Rabbitte’s departure had been negative and maybe I’m guilty in this regard, too. To be fair to him, it is not an easy job to lead the half party in a political establishment that is dominated by two-and-a-half parties, and Rabbitte worked long and hard to change the government.
But just how much sympathy should one have for the dilemma the party is in?
First of all, it is worth dispensing with the notion that the party is doomed and damaged beyond repair. It did not have a good election, but neither was it a particularly bad one and, historically, the party has been in bigger trouble and not only survived, but also improved its fortunes.
True, the age profile of the party is a problem, but that can be dealt with in time.
Some of the clichés about the party that have surfaced during the past week are continually and lazily trotted out without any serious analysis — including the idea that Labour is too radical for the conservatives and too conservative for the radicals, and the notion that in relation to pre-election accords and entering coalition, the party is “damned if it does and damned if it doesn’t”.
That last cliché has been used many times. The day after the general election in May, Rabbitte expressed his frustration when he commented in relation to the party’s historic dilemma on whether or not to form an alliance with Fine Gael before an election: “It’s a perennially difficult question for the Labour Party. Labour are damned if they do and damned if they don’t”.
The difficulty with this assertion is that it absolves the party from having to take responsibility for its own failures and, like the lust for power mentioned earlier, it helps to revolve discussion about the party around a single issue — getting into government — instead of focusing on the issue of whether it has a coherent identity. For many decades, the real problem has been trying to establish what the party stands for, not what power will do to it.
Earlier this year, the historian Niamh Purséil published a history of the Labour Party between 1918 and 1973. Her conclusion was harsh: “How is the success or failure of a political party to be evaluated then? In votes, transfers and seats? Or in the prosperity, health and security of a country’s citizens? Judged on the former, Labour does not fare well. Judged on the latter, its results are possibly worse. Offering little and delivering less, Labour received the support that it deserved”.
HISTORICALLY, there are many reasons that can be cited for the shambles that the party periodically found itself in: internal rows, a troublesome relationship with the trade unions, internal structures that facilitate dissidents and lack of funds.
But the real difficulty was how to deal with the contention of Fianna Fáil that it is the real Labour party in Irish politics. This was something frequently claimed by senior members of Fianna Fáil over the years; de Valera once maintained that on social and economic issues he would “stand side by side with James Connolly”, and Seán Lemass frequently taunted the Labour Party during his time in politics by insisting it was redundant because Fianna Fáil commanded the allegiance of “natural” Labour voters.
There was more than a grain of truth in this, particularly in the 1930s and 1940s. Last Sunday, on RTÉ radio, former Labour party leader Dick Spring summed up this problem for Labour by recalling how his father Dan, who was Labour TD in North Kerry for many years, used to receive support from people he had helped to get housing, but “once they got the houses, they became Fianna Fáil voters”.
When Fianna Fáil became ensconced in its capitalist comfort zone in the 1960s, the Labour Party came out of the political closet and in 1969 declared itself socialist. In retaliation, Fianna Fáil presented itself as the staunchest defender of the status quo against the Labour Party red devils, some of whom were academics. Charles Haughey, who served as Fianna Fáil’s election director in 1969, explained that his party would not be issuing a manifesto because “manifestos have a Marxist ring about them”.
A few days after the campaign began, a Fianna Fáil advertisement set the tone for much of what was to follow: it described Labour’s policies as “alien doctrines which are foreign to our people’s traditions and beliefs”.
What was at work here, of course, was a profound anti-intellectualism and an antipathy to new ideas. The Labour Party was burnt in that election, losing four seats with its total reduced to 17. But what was interesting was that there also seemed to be a subsequent reluctance to embrace ideas and to promise to do things fundamentally differently than they were being done, and this has remained the case.
Michael D Higgins, the current Labour party president, hit the nail on the head recently when he maintained that the party must not capitulate to a version of economy and society which the larger political parties maintain is the inevitable and only one, and that “Labour will be judged more by its adherence to principle… than by its capacity to manage the models of its political opponents”.
It needs not to be preoccupied with a lust for power, but to propound bold new ideas and stop playing safe and to the middle ground.
It also needs to remember the lesson imparted by Dick Spring, the party’s most successful leader. From the opposition benches, Spring managed to expose the myth that Fianna Fáil is the real Labour party and did not back the party into a position where it was waiting for Fine Gael to rescue it from irrelevance.
As political scientist Peter Mair pointed out in 1992: “For the first time in its history, Labour found itself in a position in which it could choose between alternative governments, and its bargaining position appeared to have become immeasurably strengthened”.
