I have had a few testy comments about my last piece, in particular my description of the English left having no politics just policies. It is clear that to some people the distinction is not clear. Perhaps I should explain.

A policy is some measure that one would like to see put into practice. Politics is about how one goes about exerting enough power to actually get a particular set of policies in place. The two are not wholly separable. If one wants, for example, to nationalise all the banks or create an independent Scotland then the kind of politics one engages in will be different to that if one wishes to, for example, alter the capital-reserve ratios of banks or give greater freedom to local councils to build houses. There are levels of policy change which imply different levels of political action. But there is a clear distinction: politics is about power, policy is about how power is used. And just as the formation of alternative policies requires a culture in which policy can be debated so any politics requires a culture in which alternatives can be considered, compromises reached and differences resolved ─ or not.

The English left (and specifically the English left) has taken a decade to find itself a culture of policy formation after the intellectual battering which it took under Thatcherism culminating in the sneering and condescension which it suffered in the early years of New Labour when just the curling of Peter Mandelson’s lip or the raising of Tony Blair’s eyebrow was enough to see off any faint effort to resist free market liberalisation. No longer. Mandelson’s reported histrionics in Cabinet, when he banged his head on the table at voiced opposition to privatising the Post Office, are no longer effective. The recession has clearly spelled an end to extreme neo-liberalism, simply on the grounds that it obviously doesn’t work, but there is also some solid spadework being done on what kind of policy alternatives might exist to this discredited paradigm. The Compass seminar just before the G20 summit showed off some of these and the current issue of Soundings magazine provides other examples. (http://www.lwbooks.co.uk/journals/soundings/current.html).

But what the left lacks is any political culture which is concerned with how these policies could be comprehensively implemented. I described in my previous piece how the English left has become almost an extension of progressive charities and think-tanks, bodies which are good at forming policies but whose political purchase is essentially one of lobbying the existing power centres. Such lobbying can be effective. The environmental NGOs such as Greenpeace have shown that strenuous lobbying combined with good PR can get results. But lobbying has its limits, ones shown most clearly in a time when some kind of fundamental shift in the way a society runs may be on the cards. There has been enough talk about the ‘end of capitalism’ to suggest that we may in the midst of such a moment now. In this situation, the limits of lobbying are very apparent for in the end all the left is able to do with its new policies is write a letter to Gordon or, after the apparently inevitable election defeat for Labour, hope that someone better turns up. A good example of the limits of such lobbying is the Compass campaign to stop privatisation of the Royal Mail. In the end its alternative plan, a good policy proposal, culminated in a meeting at No 10 with ministerial aides which ‘failed to convince’ them.

We all know that Britain in a political as well as an economic crisis with the former arguably being more serious than the latter. Already the Labour Party seems to be writing its own suicide note as the wrangling over the Brown succession begins. There are strong rumours that the right of the party is preparing an exit strategy based upon some kind of organised defection to the Lib Dems or, possibly, the Conservatives. However the left, both inside and outside the LP, seems frozen, unable even to think about its political response. The one independent action taken so far is the NO2EU campaign fronted for various far-left fractions by the RMT union-leadership (though without any consultation with its members). Apart from its slightly racist overtones (how could they dream up the slogan ‘It’s a Black and White Issue’ straight from the BNP lexicon), the very name seems like a throwback to the 1970s when opposition to the EU was devised as a substitute for genuinely radical policies. (See Gayle O’Donovan’s diary for more on this).

Apart from this bizarre distraction, there is a vacuum. There remains an almost pathological aversion to discussing the one obvious way forward ─ that the LP should split and that that the left should reform around a new political formation along the lines of those already formed in Germany and Italy. A key demand of this formation and one which could make it instantly popular would be the reform of the British electoral system. This aversion has long historical roots. Any suggestion of a split has been anathema on the left since the 1930s after Ramsay MacDonald’s defection pushed Labour outside government for a decade and more. The entire left, within and without the LP, from then on uniformly believed in the general strategy of winning it for the left though, of course, the precise tactics for achieving this differed acrimoniously between the various groups. There was a moment around 1980 when this strategy appeared to have been successful only to founder on the rocks of an intransigent right-wing prepared to sabotage electoral success to prevent any left victory. The same is likely to be true now unless the left is prepared to take a much tougher and more strategic approach, ditching the Labour machine which now wholly controls the party and preparing to face the task of rebuilding the left around a different organisation. It would be a difficult choice and one which would involve a great deal of hard negotiation. But it would at least be about politics.