Posts Tagged ‘Gordon Lynch’

Moral conflict and the splitting of Labour (or what we love will tear us apart)

09/12/2015, 03:40:18 PM

by Gordon Lynch

In 2011, the Yale sociologist Jeffrey Alexander published a book, ‘The Performance of Politics’, in which he argued that moral symbolism plays a crucial role in shaping democratic political processes.

Political communication, Alexander claimed, was based on fundamental distinctions between the ‘sacred’ values that were taken to define a society’s identity and ethos and ‘profane’ outsiders perceived as dangerous, polluting threats. Electoral success required politicians to convince voters that they were on the positive side of this moral binary and that their opponents were tainted by the ‘profane’.

Whilst many other social and economic factors weigh on how electorates view politicians, Alexander’s analysis provides a valuable perspective on certain moments in political life. The current crisis enfolding the Labour Party is such a case. Although it is less than three months since his election, Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership has become increasingly defined through such moral binaries.

One of the most damaging for him amongst many voters is the sense that he does not stand in patriotic solidarity with Britain, generated unfairly by a relentless communications campaign by his media and political critics. But another ‘profane’ trait, identified by Alexander’s analysis of political communication, is the perception of a politician favouring particularist loyalties rather than the wider public good.

His appointment to key posts of individuals such as John McDonnell, Andrew Fisher and Seaumus Milne, who are highly divisive in terms of public and party opinion but ideologically close to Corbyn, has for many people demonstrated this undesirable quality.

When individuals close to Corbyn act in incompetent or uncivil ways but are allowed to continue in their roles, this sense of personal loyalty and ideological factionalism trumping public responsibility deepens.

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Labour must be more than technocrats. The challenge is to lift Britain out of its moral depression

17/07/2015, 03:37:48 PM

by Gordon Lynch

A common observation about the Labour leadership contest this summer is that the candidates, for all their relative strengths, have not yet succeeded in providing a compelling vision of our country’s future and the role of the Labour party within it.

Where this wider debate has begun to open up it has been primarily in terms of differing positions towards deficit reduction and austerity. But whilst Labour’s ability to provide a credible economic plan for Britain’s future is undoubtedly the threshold that must be met for it to be taken seriously by the electorate, it is not sufficient to provide a powerful vision of our collective future. Nor does a focus on the failings of Labour’s last general election campaign provide a sufficient analysis of the depth of electoral disillusionment with progressive politics at the moment.

The roots of this disillusionment do not lie simply in the public blaming Labour for the current financial deficit. It lies in a moral depression which began before the financial one.

Since the relative euphoria of Labour’s electoral success in 1997, there have been three significant moral traumas in which public confidence in progressive politics has been deeply damaged. The first was the decision of Tony Blair’s government, with strong Conservative support, to engage in the 2003 Iraq War against unprecedented popular opposition. The party that had won in 1997 by articulating the public’s moral aspirations betrayed this six years later when it embarked on a war that was so deeply at odds with the ethical foreign policy that it initially espoused. The fact that the 2003 war set in motion a chain of events that has now led to the horrors of the rise of ISIS only perpetuates a residual sense of despair at such a fundamental failure of Britain’s political institutions to respect the moral convictions of its people.

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