http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/sep/17/collapse-of-the-leftHas the British political left, just like free-market capitalism it tried to harness, untamed, simply collapsed under the great weight of its own unacknowledged contradictions? It's certainly worth asking, at this point, whether economic neo-liberalism and social liberalism, were ever such very different beasts.
Many insist that now is the time for Labour to return to its core socialist values, after its long dalliance with the busted neo-liberalism it fretfully continues to work on resuscitating. But socialism is actually anathema to many on the left, even some of those who think that they believe in it. Socialism and social liberalism may hunker down together in the broad-left church – though religion is just one of the things that liberals often fail to be liberal about. But they are contradictory bedfellows, and blending them has already proved difficult.
Socialism needs collective commitment to, and respect for, the state, and a personal allegiance to the greater good, even if it is not necessarily in your own interests or even your family's. But if Gordon Brown stood up and asked that of the British, as I'm sure he'd love to, then he'd be greeted with mutinous disbelief. Social liberals, while they of course tolerate the saintly conformity of those who used to be called "the respectable working class", sometimes with genuine admiration, and sometimes with a sneer about sad suburban straights, insist that individuals must be gifted with the freedom to make their own mistakes and learn from them if they choose to. When things go wrong, if free choice is to be self-regulating, people have to bear the consequences of their own actions. Yet left-Liberals, just like neo-liberals, turn to the "big state" out of self- interest, because it protects their own freedom to do as they choose, while ensuring that others help clear up any damage that ensues from granting similar freedom to those without personal safety nets.
Liberality, like neo-liberality, is a rich man's game, though no one dares any more to point out that freedom from conformity is an expensive luxury, whether you are buying it in cash or in costly self-discipline. Repeated errors, if you don't have the money to buy yourself out of trouble, and sometimes even if you do, tend to wreak havoc. We have seen that in the collapse of the banks. Someone had to pick up the tab, when liberal banking was exposed as neglectful banking. But even before the banks collapsed, there was a sense, acknowledged more by the right than the left – which mocked Tory claims of a "broken society" – that the state, big as it was, found it "hard to reach" the people who needed the most help. In part, of course, that was because Labour's redistributive ambitions were hampered grotesquely by its reluctance to interfere with what business said it needed. But it was also, surely, because in an exaggeratedly free and liberal society – as in a similarly gifted economy – a lot of damaging activities are hard to mitigate.
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