Labour is the real alternative
Issued : Friday 16 April, 2010
Delegates, comrades, friends
It is an honour to address you all as President of the Labour Party and I would like to begin by welcoming all of you to Galway for our 2010 conference. During our conference we will debate some positive, real, alternatives which Labour proposes in every area of policy.
I wish to outline some significant issues which I feel are being neglected in the political discussion that is now taking place at this time of great distress for so many people. That discussion is avoiding some fundamental questions of a political, social, economic and even moral kind- questions no serious consideration of politics can afford to avoid.
Political parties and candidates seeking support from the public, seeking either to remain in office, or to be an alternative, must clearly answer these basic questions. Are they in favour of reviving an economic model that has clearly failed, or are they willing to offer a real alternative which recognises the failure of unregulated speculative capitalism, a failure which has produced so much misery through unemployment and poverty, not just in Ireland, but in Europe, and the entire world?
Today we in Labour are challenged to campaign for, and invite the public to support a real alternative. How we might live as citizens in the future, might exit a time of lost trust, great anger, and a numbed realisation, too, by the public of the consequences of misplaced loyalty for them of so much trust having been placed in a speculative capitalism based on market fundamentalism and extreme individualism. For indeed, it was public support for individualist social policy, for speculative financial policy, for growth without substance that brought us to where we are now.
It is important for us to state very clearly it need not have been so. Labour's policies would have delivered a different Ireland.
There was a very clear ideological base to that form of politics which prevailed since the 1980's. Those political parties that advocated market fundamentalism as a sole hegemonic model for the entire world rejected any interventionist role for the state, in terms of regulation of markets, as well as opposing the extension, even the existence of the most elementary social protection. These political parties began by advocating a version of the minimal state in relation to public investment and social protection, and then they sought to extend the role of the market into every area of social life while calling for minimal regulation- Charlie McCreevy style 'light touch regulation'.
Yet even while the most conservative critics are now driven to admit that market fundamentalism has failed, any admission of responsibility by those who were responsible for the economic model which has failed, is avoided. Neither is there acceptance of responsibility for the consequences of this policy. At a scholarly level there is a desperate and despairing clinging to the assertion of market rationality by rightwing theorists. In speech after speech it is suggested that the market response must take precedence over any democratic responses to human welfare and need. This constitutes a real and fundamental difference between the political parties of the right and the policies of Labour and the left. It is a fundamental difference at European level between those who insist on an unaccountable market model and those struggling to build a social economy. At global level it is at the heart of development theory and practice.
I repeat: market fundamentalism has been exposed to the degree that it cannot be defended any longer yet market rationality, and the extension of the market, to areas of social provision where it is singularly inappropriate, is clung to in every area- health, education, recreation, even arts and culture. This ideological imperative strikes at the very basis of an inclusive citizenship and the solidarity that is implied in the very concept of a republic.
Those responsible for holding on to the failed paradigm, to the economics of misery, are not only to be found in the ranks of politics. There were many privileged by access to the media or who enjoyed academic freedom who, by choosing to remain silent and not question the fundamental assumptions and consequences of what was being imposed, also bear a heavy responsibility.
A collaborative scholarship that may have begun with evasion of critical responsibility goes on easily to accept the inevitability of capitulation to the suggestion that market rationality is the only rationality- in fact, that it is inevitable. This represents the degradation of scholarship and media comment and its complicit role in the latest immiseration of our times on the part of so many from whom we might have expected so much. Indeed, many public figures who now moan about the abandonment of ethics were cheerleaders for the 'we're up with the best of them' boast of a decade ago.
There are exceptions, of course. The members of TASC are a significant and valuable group of critical scholars, committed to intellectual rigour and emancipatory politics, Every Labour member should read, popularise and campaign on their analysis. After all, political economy and its choices are the business of us all.
Members of the public seem anxious now to awaken from the nightmare of the assumptions they took for granted, that greed was good, that property defined your worth, that everybody's turn for the grossest expenditure would come. The poison of this view of society and the economy infected many of our institutions. Education, even culture, was to be evaluated in terms of the usefulness to market demands of such institutions in the short term. This utilitarianism of the markets, developed as a politics of the right, was sold to the public and the media as some kind of inevitable post-ideological new reality. It is from this that the Irish people must now awaken and move on. We must be our own social theorists, campaigners for the alternative political economy, knowledgeable, informed, courageous, and energetic.
We need, I stress, to recognise what it is that has failed so as to be able to go on and develop a real alternative. This alternative, must be one which reintegrates politics, ethics, economics and social policy: and it is possible.
That is a challenge to which I believe many people will respond: Labour's invitation to break away into a new form of political economy if we are to achieve the fullness of what is possible and thus address not only our own problems but also the global challenges of poverty, climate change, hunger, and sustainability.
The present disastrous social circumstances in which Ireland now finds itself is also, tragically, a legacy of a time of deep anti-intellectualism, short-term planning, and the consequences of a fracture within the social sciences between politics, economics, ethics and philosophy. The public world created in recent decades was one based on consumption, that installed celebrity as an alternative to concern or conviction, one that, far from lifting all citizens through social protection, offered a coarse, aggressive form of relationship among consumers not allowed to be citizens.
In such an atmosphere everything was degraded: language no longer served a moral purpose. Politics is always at its lowest ebb when language fails. A current example of the abuse of language is the suggestion that the current economic circumstances represents some kind of inevitable visitation from abroad, or that it constitutes a failure on the part of the public in general. Even the shrewdest commentators frequently fall into the trap of using a 'we' without the slightest discrimination as to who the participants were in the speculative property bubble, in the fiasco that was the Celtic Tiger. This 'we', of course, did not include those who are now the victims and are left without jobs, whose public services have been cut, and who may even have to lose their homes.
If I might offer a further example of an abuse of language- in recent decades even the best of intentions have had to be expressed in a language of evasive reductionism. The discussion of citizenship, for example, became, at best, a discussion on volunteering. Social solidarity was not to be mentioned. It was replaced by an invitation to a type of philanthropy of guilt. The economy became the disembodied economy, of which I have spoken of at other conferences, a system of transactions, separate from human welfare or agency, and assumed to possess the magic of self-regulating rationality.
All of what I have discussed was based on an ideological position, one that seeks to separate politics from economics that refuses to see economic policy as instrumental to social policy democratically decided by citizens.
The political system itself is not beyond reproach: it has leaked many of its functions to non-accountable administrative structures and has not stood its ground in seeking the deepening of democracy, or the strengthening of democratic institutions. Rather it has bowed to populist evasion- for example in fuelling the misconceived notions of a public that seeks flaws in the institutions of representative democracy while refusing to accept the consequences of voting for political parties which have policies based on individualism rather than social solidarity, parties that place market fundamentalism before the social economy and real citizenship.
Crucially, our property bubble is not about real builders or their workers. It is the fruit of speculative land hoarding and irresponsible banking policy. For example, in 1998 Capital Gains Tax was cut from 40% to 20%. Bank lending between 1998 and 2007 increased five fold. Of this, 67% went into property. The price of a new house in 1994 was €73,000. Allowing for increases in materials, wages and other costs, that same house in 2007 should have cost €191,000. The actual cost was €323,000. The difference was the speculative dividend.
Re-establishing political economy as real scholarly and practical work, as a substitute for forecasting speculative trends is a challenge that faces not just politicians and political commentators but economics itself; indeed, all of the social sciences. What has passed for trend analysis within a speculative model in these areas has neither been scientific nor socially responsible. Frankly, it constituted an evasive and cowardly apologia for the economics and politics of misery - derived from the market fundamentalism to which I have referred.
The destruction of trust in our institutions has of course been calamitous and must be faced. This destruction, too, was assisted by the degradation of their profession by accountants, auditors, those charged with regulation and probity who did not uphold the ethical standards of their privileged position.
Describing the results of market fundamentalist politics, with its speculative version of the economy as some form of "turbulence in the markets", as our Minister for Finance has done is more than an abuse of language. To the more than 430,000 unemployed it is offensive. Suggesting that tackling unemployment must come after bank capitalisation and a return to growth is simply scandalous and irresponsible. It is a suggestion which Labour rejects with our own real alternatives in our job creation strategy and investment bank, and in calling for the building of real inclusive citizenship.
Amartya Sen, the Nobel laureate in economics defined democratic participation as "the ability to participate in one's society without shame." The loss of one's income reduces not just the material necessities of living but changes entirely the forms of participation one has in society. One is condemned to a lesser version of citizenship. In Finland the level of unemployment did not fall until a full five years after return to growth had happened.
We cannot have five years of unemployment-created poverty, five years of a lesser version of citizenship, that reflects a shameful politics without hope. Labour in government will make job creation its top priority.
It is in the definition of citizenship that we clearly encounter a fundamental difference of politics of the right and the politics of the left. Labour believes that the right to participate in society should not simply be circumscribed by economic capacity. The public world, public space, public institutions are all needed even more by those who are unemployed. We believe that there is a floor below which no citizen should be allowed to fall. That is a fundamental solidarity rejected by the two larger parties. We believe that there is a universality of provision which is necessary to achieve real citizenship in health, in housing, in education, in culture and every other aspect of life.
An adequate political discourse must be able to address these issues, to forge a language that has meaning in terms of the lives that are at stake in present and future generations. This requires the reconnection of politics and economics in a meaningful way, and in a way that makes the assumptions of the different political projects of the left and the right transparent. Political choice is, I repeat, about much more than changing the personnel. Neither is it merely about greater efficiency or technocratic skill. It is about political beliefs, and values that are given practical expression in politics in the short-, medium- and long term.
We in the Labour Party must be courageous, confident and informed in declaring where we stand in relation to these issues of equality, justice, solidarity, social protection and how economic policies underpin these.
We stand for a politics that distributes according to the needs of citizens in universal provision. Labour stands for an inclusive citizenship with economic and social policies aimed at the progressive achievement of a just society.
The challenge that now faces us is one of building that real alternative, one that sees the economy as an instrument of social inclusion, of social harmony, and we have moreover to acknowledge new challenges such as the demands of intergenerational justice that asks us to build sustainability into all of our policies.
The view of the right and those interests whom it represents is that an adjustment to our present economic circumstances must be made by cutting the minimum wage or reducing the basic payments to the unemployed people and their families. At the same time as such views are being canvassed, the present government has given priority to recapitalising the Irish banking system. It suggests that Ireland's international reputation, even in the short term, requires the satisfaction of the most speculative part of the international bond market. It fails to see that emerging from the present economic morass with increased social protection, and an inclusive society, with new forms of work and occupation defined, is what is possible, is more creative, is what would really enhance our reputations with substance.
If one wanted to reduce unemployment in the short term, to fill the gaps in missing infrastructure, create demand, is it not silly to suggest that the provision of schools, community facilities, playing fields and hospitals must wait until the reputations of the banks has been restored? At this time so many areas of social provision can be met, at the lowest cost, with readily available workers, with sites and assets transferred to a State agency with 49% ownership by taxpayers, with tendering prices at their most competitive in decades. The opportunity to provide vital infrastructure is obvious. The economic and social benefits in terms of employment and facilities, in every aspect of social policy are obvious. Yet we are told that architects, engineers and construction workers must wait until the government turns from its banking recapitalisation concerns to finally engage with the real economy.
Labour rejects this. We see the emergence of such a large number of unemployed people as a policy failure. It is the version of the economy followed by successive Irish governments that has failed, not the people. It is a core value of Labour since its foundation in 1912 that one's work is a crucial part of how one defines one's life. That is why Labour has been the Party that has defended the rights of workers in the workplace, of women and children. Work as fundamental means of achieving one's human potential should not be reduced or commodified as a unit in a labour market.
So, let us hear answers from all of the political Parties to these basic questions- do they accept or reject that speculative form of the economy, divorced from any social responsibility, which has failed or do they seek to revive it? Do they or do they not believe in the achievement of an inclusive citizenship, with a new form of social economy, and universal access to the requirements of citizenship?
At this conference, as the Party that offers a real alternative, Labour appeals to the public to join with us in building for a radical new departure, one that is truly different in the version of society, economy and politics it offers. It is understandable that the public is angry. To deliver a change, however, they must be engaged with the political decisions made in their name. We in Labour invite the public to be with us in making this new politics - building a real republican citizenship.
Yes: It is possible to build a new economy accepting these values of an inclusive citizenship.
Yes: It is possible, even in the short term, to do so much that will have a lasting value, and to do so in a way that combines a current income for communities at the same time and into the future.
Labour is the real alternative. We are not interested in being the new managers of a system which has failed. We invite the public to join with us in building something entirely new- a form of inclusive citizenship based on a creative society capable of providing, in an innovative way, forms of economy that serve solidarity and sustainability.
The coming decades must be made the decades of the achievement of this real republican citizenship. Labour- the party of the real alternative- will achieve this and we invite all our neighbours, our fellow citizens to be with us in making this change. To have embarked on this alternative politics- this is an achievement we can celebrate as we leave the worst of times behind.
Bí linn san obair tábhachtach cruthaíoch seo!
