Time, like an ever-rolling stream

It is, as eagle-eyed readers of my previous missive will have noted, New Years Eve. Hurrah!

A cursory glance at the TV schedules suggests that the way to celebrate this is with footage of Scottish people singing. Not wanting to deprive you, digital comrades, here we are:



As fortune would have it, Thatcher did die this year. And parties were had:



Predictably, the moralists came out of their coffins even as Thatcher was put into hers. Isn't it wrong to celebrate death, they urged. The religious left, to which your host finds himself attached by creed if not by the details of politics, were especially tiresome on this score. Doesn't all death diminish us, they asked. Shouldn't we refrain from politicising the passing of one of our fellow human beings? A funeral is no time for protests, let alone celebrations. They stood, pious and sombre, as the establishment roared.

What these people failed to recognise was that this was never just a funeral for the frail old woman who succumbed to a stroke this year. It was always from the word go a political event. From the word go this death was narrated by Thatcher's political heirs: the State funeral (the first for a British premier since Churchill), the nostalgia, the silencing of dissent, all invoked Thatcher in death in support of austerity in the present. Like one of the undead, she exercised power beyond the grave, digging a subtle knife into those suffering under policies of which she was the remote architect. Ironically, it was her supporters in life who would not allow her to rest in peace, for she was needed in death.

All of this was entirely foreseeable, and was pre-empted by the party-goers. "No," they said, "we will not allow this story about the Thatcher years to pass unchallenged. We will not celebrate what she represents, we will celebrate the opposite of that". And celebrate they did, a joyful collective refusal to be bundled into State-orchestrated grief. And however much Owen Jones may ultimately be right that the ultimate prize is the death of Thatcherism, not of Thatcher, will all need a party from time to time.

There is a politics to remembering the dead. That was clear in the case of the other great political departure of 2013, as Nelson Mandela's one time foes raced one another aboard the mourning bandwagon. In death, the radical Mandela died absolutely; an ideologically cleansed global statesman took his place.

Next year, marks the centenary of World War I. We will be invited to remember, to misremember, or somehow recall not world leaders, but millions of conscripts, slaughtered in the cause of national boundaries. The question will be whether we are content to see them called into a horrid afterlife by politicians intent on bolstering national unity in the face of austerity, and on justifying present-day wars, or whether we can wrestle back the friends, husbands, daughters, girlfriends, lovers, sons, the millions upon millions of ordinary, wonderful, largely non-heroic, flawed, beautiful, wasted, human beings, and allow them, finally, to rest in peace. There is no glory to be had.

Should auld aquaintance be forgot

So, um, anyway, yes, your host returns to the blogosphere after an extended absence. And he does so on the very cusp of a new year, brim-full of possibilities and dreams of tomorrow, threatened by regrets from the past. This surely calls for a special post, something gripping that will set the electronic world alight.

So I'm going to write about the internal politics of the Labour Party.

Before my one remaining reader disappears for a really urgent bit of nasal hair removal, I should qualify this by explaining that I want to say something about the position of socialists in the Labour Party. By 'socialists' here I mean people committed to the workers control of the means of production, and the like, rather than simply people who once voted for Ken Livingstone and try to buy fair-trade coffee. One has to be clear about such usages these days.

There are a good few socialists in the Labour Party, in spite of everything. Now, in my experience, anyone much younger than myself finds this frankly inexplicable, and probably laughable. In between my formative years and theirs fell Blair, Blairism, and the presidential project of identifying, in the popular imagination, the Labour Party with its leadership. Here is not the place to present a detailed argument in favour of socialists being in Labour. That argument needs to be had, and will no doubt find a place on these pages in future months. For now, to summarise: people like me tend to point to the peculiar situation of British labourism, to the working class base and trade union link of the Labour Party, to the need to heal the divide between the political and industrial implicit in labourism, and to both the party and the wider movement being important ground for socialist ideas. Thus the idea is not supposed to be that socialists join the Labour Party and do nothing, but rather that we actively intervene in Labour. How are we doing at that?



In fairness to the Labour Left, the entire British Left is in something akin to meltdown. Leaving aside the splintering and collapse of the SWP in the face of their leadership's resolute rape apologism, the Left has singularly failed to mount any kind of effective resistance to the Coalition government and its ongoing austerity-based response to the financial crisis of 2008. Lacking co-ordination and any sense that it could win, the best opportunity for a focus for resistance - the public sector pensions dispute - fizzled out. Meanwhile, the defeat of Unite at Grangemouth this year stands as an emblem for the weakness of an entire movement. So things are a bit rubbish in general.

That said, things are especially rubbish for the Labour Left. The Left has had no impact on the Labour Party, its policy, membership, or leadership, in opposition. It has singularly failed to transmit any of the struggles of recent years - the activism around UK Uncut, the student movement of 2010-1, or trade union disputes - into the Party. It has failed even to seriously facilitate conversations around these areas. There is a palpable feeling of lethargy in the air, of resignation to the inevitable triumph of the Right in both society and Party, without so much as a shot being fired in defence.

The reasons for this are myriad, and a proper analysis would involve detailed discussion of the nature and impact of Blairism. But one reason for our ineffectiveness strikes me as being an uncertainty as to whether we should be in the Labour Party in the first place, and about what, if anything, we should be doing if we are. A significant number of people in and around the LRC strike me as half-heartedly involved in Labour at best. Meanwhile a good proportion of the CLP-orientated 'old left' seem content to sit around grumbling that things aren't what they used to be, this activity being interrupted only by the occasional felt need to propose a resolution sent to them by the CLPD, a duty discharged in the solemn expectation of the motion's failure.

Now, this won't do. There is a perfectly sensible debate to be had about whether socialists in Britain should be in the Labour Party. Some of the best socialists I know and pretty much all of the best minds on the Left in Britain take a different view from me on the matter. But given that socialists should be in Labour, I can see no argument whatsoever for being half-hearted in our use of that membership. Our indecision and failure to commit ourselves in terms of activism to the implications of our continued membership - and I'm at fault as much as anyone here - is one important cause of our current malaise. We need to pull our finger out. As well as vital support for workplace and other struggles in the coming year, we need to put in a lot of party work, and make efforts to link the two. And in all respects we're playing catch-up.

And it's worse than that. Because we're not even playing catch-up on a stable basis. In March we face the unmitigated joy of Ed Miliband's special conference on the Collins Review. And depending on how that goes, we could face some very serious questions about the future. So, I suggest, defending the link has to be an absolute priority in the next couple of months.

But all of that is for the day after tomorrow. Tonight, dear, kind, readers, we drink. And I'm not talking latte.

Hello again, cruel world