Opportunities in the fault lines of collective responsibility

Michael Marra

Do you subscribe to the concept of collective responsibility? When do you think it is time to put aside your instincts and convictions, to acquiesce in the desires of your comrades for the greater good? To keep your mouth shut, to hide your passion, to present a united front? It is an idea many on the Left remain uncomfortable with. There have been times it was necessary; no one really doubts the role that readily obvious and hugely public divisions played in keeping the Labour Party out of government in the twentieth century. But will the young socialists of tomorrow have a political life where debate is encouraged instead of stifled, and if they don't will there be another generation for the Left as we know it?

I believe that there is a fundamental shift going on in the Labour Party's attitude to internal divisions and disagreements. The much maligned Newsnight Scotland provided a rare moment of amusement for Labour supporters in August as David McLetchie and Nicola Sturgeon competed to laude Culture Minister Mike Watson for standing up for the interests of his constituents.

And while the Labour MSP for Cathcart's election leaflets should make interesting reading, the long-term message is a painful one for the SNP and the Tories. No wonder they were fighting for collective responsibility to be rigorously maintained because the ongoing collapse of the convention of a single Cabinet voice has pushed them further to the fringes of political debate. There was never any real chance of Watson losing his Ministerial post as a result of his objections to the plan to close hospitals in Glasgow. Contrary to the fears of many in the Scottish Party, Jack McConnell's rule appears to be less authoritarian than his predecessors'. Perhaps he believes that a group of fifty-three Labour MSPs is insufficiently large to disguise the fault lines. More likely it is part of the reaction against the on-message spinners of the late nineties. The new attitude of accepting differences of opinion has been legitimated from on high and is being led by Charles Clarke MP as Blair's Party Chairman. No matter how the change is here, now that it is we have to embrace it. This is one political wind that the Left can use to fill our sails. For the coming four years, at the very least, meaningful political debate will only take place in the arena of the Labour Party - and only then if those of us on the Left ensure that it happens.

There is no real clash of ideas in British politics today. That is an accepted truth and one that plays well to the conservative cynicism of the media. But the death throes of the UK Conservative party in its current incarnation, fast becoming the media side-show that the collapse of the Tories in Scotland has been for twenty years, is what has ensured the arid pondering of trivialities that has resulted in a drought climate of political ideas. Take the story on a step in Scotland and the one-solution-at-any-cost official opposition, and you can see why less young people are voting than ever before.

The way forward for the Scottish Left is to engender a climate of debate and discussion, the rigours of intellectual discourse through which answers are found or forged. Contrary to the suggestions of the Prime Minister at last year's Party Conference, ideology never dies. Tony Blair's belief in Socialism was never born in the first place. If you believe that morality and politics are two sides of the same coin, that only an immoral world allows the poor to starve as the rich wallow in waste and their own corpulence, that political action can be a tool for equality, you might feel indignant at such a proclamation. An ideology does not need to be a programme in itself. It is the skeleton of your vision of the body politic. I would never presume to dismiss Tony Blair's Christianity, the belief system that appears to shape his attitude to his life and his politics. I do not believe it is the place of a Labour leader, or anyone else, to dismiss out of hand the values of equality and fraternity that underpin my attitudes. I hope that this year, instead of being told that ideas are a poor second currency to action, the spirit of the conference hall will be action underpinned by ideas. We need only look to Iraq. How do we know when the time for talking is over if we are denied the opportunity to talk in the first place.

The collapse of conventional collective responsibility can be the long promised new politics of Scotland. Barring a political disaster of quite unimaginable proportions, Jack McConnell will be convening the Scottish Cabinet come 2nd May 2003. If constituency seats are lost they will surely be backed up by list places. Only the SSP are showing any signs of progress, a fact to be turned to real Labour's advantage in the fight to argue the party back to the Left. But there is more to be learned from Tommy Sheridan.

He may be a populist, many of whose policies lack any realistic grounding, but the public sees Tommy as a man grounded in a politics of conviction. That, they respect.

It is little wonder that young people are turning to the clash of Tommy's ideas. He makes debates happen, even if he seldom wins them. He has people listening, even if they disagree. And for all those he repulses, there are those that he attracts. The 2003 intake of SSP MSPs may well prove to be the party's downfall. There is no strength in depth and without support their lone star may well wane. But the ground is there to be won by a party of imaginative Socialist democrats. There are young socialists across Scotland that have lost heart at an earlier age than many of their parents. There is a sizeable base of young trade unionists that have common goals with the Labour left. It is leadership that they need. Today's generation of Labour Socialist MPs and MSPs need to make themselves known. But for a few notable exceptions, over the past few years a belief in true equality, community and the policies of the Left has been the love that dare not speak its name.

Without a public face the arguments of the Labour left in Scotland will increasingly go unnoticed and unheard. If we are to win the hearts of young Scots, we have to speak to their minds. As the debate moves firmly onto our ground for the foreseeable future and the public accepts the Labour forum as the sounding post for the future of Scotland, with the collapse of collective responsibility, both in the Cabinet and the Party, opening up new space for the debates that have lain fallow for too long, we have an opportunity to grasp.

Only concrete ideas tempered by passionate debate and driven by a leadership worthy of the name and the cause will ensure that the young socialists of today can become a governing force in a socialist Scotland of tomorrow. That generation stands to give the term collective responsibility a far better meaning.