New Labour Threatens European Social Democracy

All the headlines are about the 'presidency' of the European Union, (although in truth the post is head of the about-to-be-formalised administration of the Council of Ministers, which up to Lisbon has been an ad hoc grouping borrowing administrative support from the Union's bureaucracy).

It is the plight of social democracy and the social democratic parties that should be under discussion.

Social democracy covers a multitude of political stances, and a multitude of political sins. Its protagonists and supporters are drawn from a tradition of moderation that argues for the provision of a welfare state, some redistribution of wealth, and the settlement of disputes by negotiation; social democrats see themselves as the moderate, commonsense fairness, decent people. The proof of this is in their commitment to a decent living standard and education, to freedom from gross want and access to steady employment for members of society.

Unfortunately some of those goals are concomitant with much uglier political ideologies - communism and socialism that carry as a political imperative, ideals of the installation of a permanent authoritarian state; and they are concomitant, too, with much more liberal thinking - market regulated capitalism, unfettered individual freedoms, and the small state meeting minimal social peace, plus conservation of the State, goals.

Social democratic parties have been damaged dreadfully by both becoming masking movements for socialist and communist movements fiercely rejected by every society where the chance to get rid of them has been created and seized; while, at the same time, democratic societies have observed that centre right parties offer many of the social policies and ameliorations of unbridled capitalist practice, originally associated with social democracy but long harnessed under one nation conservatism, without the risk of the wolves in sheep's clothing that entered and are still sidling into social democratic parties.

The British Labour party has been the cause of some of the greatest damage to the social democratic movement in advanced capitalist democracies. New Labour has been one of the greatest recruiting sergeants for centre right one nation conservatism. Elected to both increase and to speed up delivery of social wellbeing post the deindustrialisation crisis in the United Kingdom, it used its social democratic mandate to instal a familiar 'democratic centralism' within the Party, and to deny the constitutional usages that informally but historically provided the checks and balances on Executive use of power in our country. As the New Labour government steadily and increasingly identified itself with the permanent State, surveillance of our unfortunate population was installed at Korean levels to proscribe individual and long-entrenched liberties of self assertion, protest, inconformity and self-determination. Ironic comparisons with the realised socialism of the German Democratic Republic, Poland, the former Czechoslovakia and the Baltic states turned to horrified understanding. New Labour is not social democratic but sociofascist. Its aims are post democratic permanent administrative governance.

The bombastic, punch above our weight, vulgarity of New Labour's authoritarian sociofascism has been prevented in other countries by constitutional embedded rules and practices both within social democratic parties and in national constitutions. But the propaganda effect of our disgrace of a government, this travesty of social democracy seeking to infect the European Union with its horrifyingly recognisable reincarnation of so many countries' recent and more recent political history, has led to a massive draining of support for any social democratic party, and its supporting movement, across the Continent.

If social democracy is to survive and prosper again in Europe the European social democratic movement and its leadership needs to cut off New Labour at the knees.