A mild-mannered proposal
Running on Empty: 'Modernising' the British and Australian labour parties
By Andrew Scott
Pluto Press, 2000
330pp., $29.95(pb)
Review by Sue Boland
In the 1980s, Britain's Labour Party (LP) officials were forever scurrying back and forth between Britain and Australia seeking to learn the secret of Australian Labor's governmental "success". Since the Australian Labor Party lost government in 1996 and the LP won in 1997, the scurrying has reversed: now it's ALP officials making the round-the-world trip to learn the secret of PM Tony Blair's success.
Running on Empty, written by Andrew Scott, a former officer for the Australian Manufacturing Workers Union and a Labor policy adviser on employment and training between 1996-1998, compares the "modernisation" of the ALP and the LP.
Scott pinpoints the origin of the debate about "modernisation" in 1950s Britain. The central issue, says Scott, was whether or not "capitalism was now substantially different from the harsh beast known in the 1930s" and whether "traditional socialist objectives needed to be rethought accordingly".
The discussion in the two parties about what it means to be a "modern" labour party wasn't an insulated discussion. Scott outlines the extensive level of interaction between the two parties, party officials regularly spending time in each other's countries to participate in election campaigns and compare, and swap, policies.
As a result, the central ideological question confronting both labour parties is the same: according to Scott, "whether the future lies in a return to the 'traditional' post-war democratic socialist philosophy and Keynesian economics, as some are arguing, or whether that option has been rendered obsolete by economic and social change".
Scott, seeking to influence the policies of a future federal Labor government here, argues that both of these positions are inadequate.
The main reason for Labor's 1996 loss of government, he argues, was widespread disenchantment with the neo-liberal polices that it had pursued, including privatisation and "free trade".
To win government, the ALP needs to break with neo-liberal policies, says Scott. He claims that, between 1996-1998, the ALP did seem to be reverting to traditional policies, such as emphasising full employment, greater public investment in health and education, and centralised wage-fixing. He credits the ALP's partial poll recovery at the October 1998 election to this change.
However, Scott claims, since October 1998, leader Kim Beazley and the ALP nationally have "shifted towards rhetoric which extols further 'modernisation' and which repudiates many very good aspects of Labor policy tradition as mere 'sentimentality', rather than recognising them as the essential ideological fuel which the party in fact needs to keep on running".
Scott argues that the ALP needs to "adopt more interventionist and redistributive economic policies to consolidate and further extend Labor's support", rather than "punitive and regressive social policies".
While Scott's comparison of the ALP and the BLP provides some interesting information, his book is frustrating to read — it suffers from a very limited political perspective.
For example, while Scott criticises 91×ÔÅÄÂÛ̳ of the Labor left for caving in to neo-liberal policies, Scott is content with very little. He concludes, "The challenge now is to enhance rather than erode the 1998 platform; to follow it through rather than ignore it in drafting the party's forthcoming election policies; and then to implement that platform if elected to government."
Despite Scott's claims, the Labor Party's 1998 platform did not break with neo-liberal policies.
While Scott would like a future Labor government to be kinder and gentler than those led by Bob Hawke and Paul Keating, all he proposes is to abandon "free trade", increase health and education spending, and for government intervention in the economy to create jobs. He doesn't even call on the Labor Party to abolish the GST.
Rather than Scott's mild-mannered proposals, what is really needed is a program of radical social change which could improve the lives of workers and other impoverished people at the expense of the corporate elite. Such a program, however, could not be implemented by a party like the ALP, a defender of capitalist exploitation if ever there was one.