INTRODUCTION

David Coates

"Social democracy is at a dead end, but is by no means dead" Ingo Schmidt

"Europe's centre-left progressive politics is in crisis, maybe in its most existentialist crisis since the foundation of the social democratic movement in the late nineteenth century"

Christian Schweiger

"The unique place of the social democrat to be the champion of the people is over and is never coming back"

Neal Lawson

"Labour is becoming a toxic brand. It is perceived by voters as a party that supports an 'open door' approach to immigration, lacks credibility on the economy, and is a 'soft touch' on welfare spending" Jon Cruddas

"People are fed up" Jeremy Corbyn

If further proof were still needed of the fact that one swallow does not make a summer, try comparing the performance of the Labour Party in the UK's June 2017 general election with that of the French Socialist Party in the elections for the National Assembly, the first round of which occurred just three days after the UK election. In both cases, centre-left parties went down to expected defeat: but whereas in the British election, the Labour Party's unexpectedly strong performance cost the Conservative Government its majority, in the French one the Socialist Party and its allies, in government as recently as the previous month, lost all but 44 of their 284 seats. Given that the French performance was by far the more typical of the two, given recent results in both American and European elections, it remains the case, therefore, that – the results of the 2017 UK general election notwithstanding – these are not great days for centre-left parties in developed capitalisms. And a hundred years out from the Russian Revolution, they are even worse days for the revolutionary Left. Indeed, it is quite difficult to think of a recent time in which left-wing prospects of either a moderate or a more radical kind have looked so problematic. Which means, among other things, that reflecting on the future of the Left against such a background is likely to be neither an easy nor a pleasing affair; but then, precisely because it is not, the need for such a reflection has arguably never been greater.

As I have long understood it, the first rule of politics is always this: that if you are in a hole, the initial thing that you must do is to stop digging. Across the western world, the contemporary Left is in a serious hole: which is why the precise nature of the hole, the manner of its creation, the immediate consequence of its existence, and the best way to find the ladder out – understanding all these dimensions of the Left's present predicament are now key requirements for the successful achievement of any political project designed to return progressives to power. The only way to ensure that the present underperformance of progressive forces becomes the lowest point of their political trajectory over time, rather than part of their permanent condition, is to have all of us who care about progressive values concentrate on trajectory improvement. We need, as a matter of urgency, to find a combination of institutions, strategies and programmes that is capable of recreating a broad basis of support for left-wing causes. And because that is so, quite what those institutions need to be, what strategies they should follow, and what policy commitments should go with them – these basic design questions are collectively the subject matter of the essays gathered here. The purpose of this introduction is to set those essays in their shared context, and to explain how and why they have been pulled together.

I

Labour Party supporters in the United Kingdom woke on 9 June 2017 to discover an overnight improvement in the Labour vote, and in its representation in Parliament, that few had anticipated just 24 hours before: and for very good reason. Because until that point, and over the last half-decade, support for left-wing political parties across Europe and North America had steadily sunk to a new low: so low indeed that Arni Arnason recently asked "is 6% the new norm for the progressive left" and Sheri Berman recently wrote that "the European centre-left risks irrelevance". The 2017 UK election stands now as an oasis of hope amid the more general desert of centre-left fortunes across western Europe to which Sheri Berman referred, as in its own way did the size and character of the vote accruing to Hillary Clinton as she fought Donald J. Trump for the US presidency just seven months earlier. But on either side of the Atlantic, it is still a desert out there, when examined calmly from even a moderate (and certainly from a more radical) progressive point of view. Hillary Clinton fought, but she also lost – and lost to Donald J. Trump of all people. Jeremy Corbyn's Labour Party did better than expected, but still lost – and lost in a general election in which both main parties increased their share of the vote. How different is all this from the heady days of 1997, when an untested set of New Labour parliamentarians could sweep to power by inflicting on a Conservative Party once led by Margaret Thatcher its heaviest electoral defeat since 1846; or from 2008, when a young and charismatic Barack Obama could reach the White House merely by asserting that "yes, we can!"? Just two decades later in the UK case, and less than a decade in the American one, power in each political system has shifted into highly reactionary hands: leaving progressive forces in the United States facing a deliberate deconstruction of the regulatory state by ultra-libertarian Republicans and a charlatan president; and leaving the Left in the UK watching a minority Tory government (one now suddenly entirely dependent on the support of right-wing Ulster MPs) preparing to pull the United Kingdom out of the European Union – out of the one supra-national institution, that is, within which centre-left values and practices had until recently found their firmest embodiment.

Quite why this change of political fortune had occurred remains a matter of both central importance and huge controversy in left-wing circles on both sides of the Atlantic, as a later reading of the essays gathered here will only underscore. But four things are at least clear, and worth noting as a shared framework for everything that follows.

The first is that, on both sides of the Atlantic, significant numbers of voters in traditionally left-wing voting constituencies have, in a series of recent elections, stopped voting for centre-left parties. They have turned instead either to conservative parties...