Nick Cohen's book

Its about time I wrote something about this. If I was to sum it up I would say it is a book of real insight and polemical power, but ultimately flawed in important respects.

First, the insight. Cohen is right to identify a number of key problems with the contemporary left. The first of these is the danger of a corrosive moral relativism that has led much of the left intelligentsia to drift away from universal standards. So human rights are not as central for the citizens of the poor world as they are for the citizens of the rich world, because the defence and advocacy of human rights and enlightenment values are a form of cultural imperialism. Abuses that such intellectuals would be the first to criticise in their own societies are thus contextualised and even legitimised when they occur elsewhere. We are too often left with 'a free-floating gutless state of frantic evasiveness that preferred to twist and temporize rather than take a stand which required commitment to defend'.

What else? His demolition of the then Conservative government's appeasement of the Serbian state's aggression against the people of Bosnia is a passionate critique of the complete moral bankruptcy of Britain's position during that war. He contrasts this with Tony Blair's principled stand against that same nationalist state when it attacked the Kosovan Albanians some years later.

His attack on the appalling degree of snobbishness on the middle class left in this country is again spot on. I once remember canvassing for a Labour candidate on a very leafy road in Oxford - when I explained that our candidate was an active and effective trade unionist, I was told by a resident (who fashioned herself as disillusioned with Labour beacuse we were 'too right wing') that 'oh, but trade unions are so passé'. So very last season.

Cohen's critique of the Bloomsbury set and of Virginia Woolf in particular is acerbic and brilliant. Here is Woolf on the Armistice Night celebrations of 1918:

'everyone seemed half drunk - beer bottles were passed round - every wounded soldier was kissed by women; nobody had any notion where to go or what to do; it poured steadily; crowds drifted up and down the pavements waving flags and jumping onto omnibuses, but in such a disorganised half hearted sordid state that I felt more and more melancholy and hopeless of the human race'.

And yet, by contrast, when Woolf and fellow Bloomsbury bohemians take a holiday in Wales they take offence that locals are shocked that a woman among their number was smoking a pipe:

'What rather appals me...is the terrible conventionality of the workers. That's why...I don't think they will be poets or novelists for another hundred years or so. If they can't face the fact that Lillian smokes a pipe and reads detective novels and can't be told that they weigh on average 12 stone - which is largely because they scrub so hard and have so many children - how can you say that they can face 'reality'... What depresses me is that the workers seem to have taken on all the middle class respectabilities which we - at any rate if we are any good at writing or painting - have thrown off'.

So the workers are damned for simultaneously being a drunken sordid mob, on the one hand, while being too uptight and conservative, on the other. You don't need to go very far into contemporary middle class commentary on 'chavs', 'binge drinking culture', football fans flying England flags and single mothers to locate a similar strain of naked class prejudice today.

So where does Cohen go wrong? First and most fundamentally, on Iraq. The basic thrust of the book is to build up a case for arguing that those of us who marched against the invasion of that country are basically appeasers of fascism. The problem with Cohen's analysis is that it implies an ethical imperative to launch a hundred bloody invasions of countries all across the world where dictatorships rule and where human rights abuses are rife. It implies that the single superpower can shun international law and act without multilateral support to impose its will (perhaps not to defend human rights but for other more dubious motives) anywhere across the world.

I am not a pacifist. I am supporter, like Cohen, of intervention by military means where necessary in a humanitarian crisis. But that cannot mean we should launch unilateral invasions against every authoritarian regime. Military force must be a last resort. Humanitarian interventions are much more likely to effective if they are backed by multilateral support and not in reckless ignorance of international law. The humanitarian consequences of using military force itself must weigh in the balance. The motives of the major players have to critically assessed.

At one point Cohen suggests that non-democracies (China, maybe Russia?) should be expelled from the United Nations. I agree with him we have an imperfect international system and that on occasions that system lets authoritarian regimes unacceptably off the hook. However, surely in the interests of peace we need an international system? The alternative would be global anarchy in which the very human rights Cohen defends would stand little chance.

The other fundamental problem with Cohen's book is that he takes a series of interesting vignettes about the eccentricities, moral nihilism and absurdity of a number of far left groups (whose political and cultural influence is utterly marginal) and uses them as evidence of a wider moral bankruptcy on the left. These episodes do provide an indictment of some elements of the left - but not of the mainstream parties of the left and the labour movements on which they are based.

'Socialism is dead' according to Cohen. Well, yes in the sense of a centrally planned economy almost entirely publicly owned - but there is another proud tradition on the left, of an ethical socialism basd on egalitarian and democratic values. That is the left that most people vote for and that is in office or a real contender for political power in very many countries around the world. What's left? he asks. Well social democracy for a start, Nick.

A new cultural politics

When Labour came to power in 1997 the main issues on the political agenda were familiar and apparently straight forward: widespread youth unemployment (remember that?), decades of underinvestment in the NHS and school buildings that were falling apart. Labour's almost ridiculously modest 'five pledges' were aimed at tackling exactly these issues.

Today we have moved on: when people are asked in opinion polls which issues concern them most, unemployment no longer figures, health and education are no longer the questions of primary public concern they once were. The reason is straight forward: a decade of sustained economic growth accompanied by social democratic government has corrected some of the worst social legacies of Thatcherism - notably, joblessness and public services starved of investment. One only has to open a local newspaper in London at the moment and you will be confronted by news articles announcing a plethora of new public services: new childrens' centres, out of hours walk-in GPs surgeries, new secondary schools in the poorest parts of the city. Our local park is getting a £4 million makeover. We face a tight public spending climate ahead, but we are to some extent still reaping the benefits of Gordon Brown's second term increase in public expenditure.

So what do people tell the pollsters concerns them most today? Unfortunately for the left, according to Ipsos-Mori, its crime and immigration, not our natural territory - or at least territory in which the dominant public narrative, with its corresponding myths and folk devils, is that of the right.

In the past the left's response on these questions was largely to fall back on a residual economic determinism. If we get the economic structural conditions right, these problems will disappear. Don't get me wrong, this is in my view still the largest part of the solution:

eg) crime has been falling for the last ten years (yes it has, despite what the Daily Mail tells you) and the overwhelming reason for that is economic growth and the fall in unemployment,

eg) the best way to undermine hostility to immigration is to tackle the material causes of people's discontent - especially in the South East providing much more affordable housing.

Having said that all of these take time to feed through - and in the mean time, people remain concerned about gangs of kids hanging around on the street corner (even if they are doing nothing other than just hanging around). This was the political genius behind Tony Blair's 'tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime' slogan - you have to respond to people's day to day concerns, as well as working away at the underlying social and economic conditions that give rise to them.

So, we get into this kind of difficult territory for the left: we carry on with the social democratic reforms necessary to make society fairer and tackle the underlying causes, but at the same time we recognise we have to do something more directly to respond to issues around crime and community cohesion.

Is there a progressive narrative in this kind of space that can overcome the authoritarian populism of the right (and some parts of the left, John Reid)? I think there is - but it means the left has to think harder about 'cultural change' - or about how public policy affects our relations with one another, our attitudes, our values and our day to day behaviour and interactions.

So what does that narrative look like? First, we have to firmly reject authoritarian solutions on questions like crime by insisting on the centrality of liberty to the good society: a human rights framework has to be at the heart of progressive solutions to questions like crime and social cohesion. The Labour government has, despite introducing the Human Rights Act, too often chosen to trade civil liberties to deal with crime. Our appallingly overcrowded prisons are the result. For progressives that liberal rights framework has to be at the core of what a good society looks like.

Second, however, we don't simply stop there - we recognise that a state that simply defends each of our individual liberties and neglects the social capital, communal networks, bonds of trust and mutuality that foster decent relationships between people, would neglect our natural desire to live together in decent communities. We want a society that is more than a bunch of atomised liberal rights-bearers, running around free from each other's concerns. So this is a liberalism plus.

And thats where cultural change comes in.

What does this mean in practice? First, it means doing something more direct about what Robert Putnam called 'social capital', by putting in place the conditions in which social networks and relationships of cooperation and mutuality are more likley to develop.

Strong social networks have been shown to be crucial to an individual's sense of well-being: having someone to rely on to look after your kids in an emergency, having somene who can help with the garden or just having someone to talk to when you feel down. There has been much discussion recently about the gap that exists between our normal measures of social success (low unemployment, economic growth, rising incomes) and 'happiness' (how good people feel). This 'softer' social capital stuff may be the key here.

In the area of crime and anti-social behaviour that means looking at community-level solutions, such as ensuring that the basic network of youth provision is in place so that kids have constructive leisure opportunities open to them. It means looking at neighbourhood based solutions of problems like anti-social behaviour, such as by involving local people in setting forms of 'community pay back' for minor offences, while keeping kids out of prison. Neighbourhood based 'community courts' have been shown to be efffective in preventing re-offending (because of the stigma people feel when being judged by their peers), and they also build community confidence in the criminal justice system (which isn't there at the moment and fuels demands for ever more punitive sentences).

But social capital might play a role in the broader agenda around community cohesion as well. In order to tackle racism and anti-immigration sentiment we should be promoting what Putnam calls 'bridging' social capital so that people develop positive relationships with others from a different background to their own. All the evidence shows, for example, that contact between people from different backgrounds - meaningful contact, that is, not just fleeting encounters - is the best way to reduce prejudice and break down barriers.

So, we should be putting in place an education system that encourages kids to mix at school. The right calls this social engineering. Well any public policy that proposes to change anything is social engineering - presently we are engineering a school system which perpetuates divisions along class, ethnic and religious lines (by promoting faith schools and parental choice, for example). I favour social engineering to create a society free of racism and prejudice and make no apology for it. As the sociologist Jane Jacobs has shown, contact and shared experiences can also be promoted through urban planning: housing estates that are designed so that people bump into each other regularly, on their doorsteps, in the street, in the local shop.

In addition to getting into this terrain of social capital, this politics of cultural change also means getting (to some extent and with plenty of qualifications) involved in the sphere of identity politics. The politics of identity gets played out all the time - racist political parties are trying to ethnicise national symbols, disenfranchised young people are being recruited to extreme forms of identity politics. What this implies is that the democratic state, in addition to providing the space in which all our multiple identities can be celebrated and recieve recognition and respect, also needs to provide some common reference points we can all share.

This doesn't mean imposing some kind of hegemonic national identity on everyone - that would be divisive - but it does mean ensuring that when we do celebrate our local communities or national events, we do so in a pluralist, mutlicultural and democratic fashion. Doing more to celebrate the democratic framework which makes our liberty and diversity possible would be one way of doing this - that is inclusive in that it is essentially about universal values (liberty, self-government) and gives us all a common point of reference or a civic identity capacious enough we can all (at some level) share.

Finally, active citizenship and more widespread participation in the public realm is key to fostering stronger communities. The state should be providing the infrastructure that opens up the opportunities for people to participate when they want. The government's agenda around devolving more power to neighbourhoods - such as by beefing up parish or neighbourhood councils or by introducing the so-called 'community call for action' - is moving in the right direction here. People don't want to be permanent political activists - however, they do want to know that when something major happens in their area (such as a proposal to build a new supermarket on their doorstep), they will have a say in what happens.

Also, however, a democratic state has a responsibility (if it is to remain a healthy and legitimate democracy) to promote the desirability of active citizenship. Its no good opening up more opportunities if people just don't want to take them up. Maybe its something about modern society but I think its regrettable that whereas my grandparents believe they have a duty to vote, regardless of how disillusioned with the political parties they might be, people of my age just can't be bothered. How we change attitudes in this area is difficult but personally I think that if a democracy is to remain healthy it needs a supportive political culture, in which people feel some sense of duty to get involved, listen to the views of others and have their say. Citizenship classes in schools is one way, but we may need to go further - such as doing more to celebrate in the civic calendar or the public sphere how our democracy was won and defended and at what cost.

So this is new, complex and difficult territory for the left. Its not just about people in Whitehall pulling levers, affecting some performance measure and then expecting that to feed into people's sense of well being. Its about shifting attitudes, creating a more progressive public culture and stronger local relationships between people. It involves the state setting some basic parameters, but then stepping back and letting people get on with it. Its difficult and I'm not sure the kind of ideas I have suggested here are adequate - but the right already has its narrative in this space. Its time we had ours.