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Labour Conference: Taking freedom back from the right

The left should reclaim ideas of liberty that have inspired social progress down the centuries until today, says LISA NANDY

Last year I met young people involved in the Arab spring. The word freedom was never far from their lips or their thoughts. It was less the hope that freedom would come that kept them going, more the certain knowledge of what life was like without it. 

They reminded me that freedom remains a rallying cry around the world — but closer to home, after the Scottish referendum, no-one can deny it matters here. 

Why then doesn’t the left talk about it more?

Instead, the right has captured the concept of liberty. But theirs is a bleak, limited version of liberty that says as long as nobody stops me from acting, I am free. It allows us to ignore the multitude of things that restrict our freedom — inequality in social relations, gnawing, degrading, abject poverty and domestic violence. 

What also of social prejudice, intolerance, or simply lack of knowledge? As Goethe said: “None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.”

We live in an era in which the power of capital that Karl Marx warned of — where corporations with global reach would become accountable to no-one — has come to pass and a managerial elite wields vast economic, social and political power. 

Rob Walton, James Cash, Pamela Craig. Ever heard of these people? Probably not. But they control the 25th-biggest economy in the world. With Walmart, whose board they sit on, now roughly equivalent in value to the Norwegian economy, in what sense can we claim to have self-determination?

But if instead, we accept the right’s version of freedom, then we can lay the blame squarely with individuals — the poor once again to blame for their own predicament. 

When you extend this into economics it becomes self-fulfilling. We can ignore that markets don’t see people, they see only consumers, that when markets are all-powerful, the poor are simply invisible. 

And then, to deal with the anti-social consequences of poverty, inequality and despair, the state extends its reach over law and order, and we are all less free once more.

This is the freedom of perfect selfishness. My freedom to fly when I want, drive any car I choose, invest in whichever project brings the greatest return, however unethical it may be. Together these things amount to social injustice, the consequences of which have immediate, shattering impact for some of us, but will come to us all in the long run.

So on the left we have a duty to dig back into older concepts of liberty. The Romans believed in freedom from the arbitrary will of anyone else. And it’s in this context we can see just what a poor version of freedom the “choice” agenda offers, because so often it’s meaningless. 

I can choose between a low-paid, insecure, dead-end job or a life on benefits, or between two schools, if and only if, I can afford the daily bus fare for my child to get to the one that’s furthest away. 

But also because so often it’s not meaningful. It assumes that services are determined by individuals, not by a multitude of other factors over which we’re offered no choice at all. And this agenda so often replaces what should be a collective endeavour with individual choice. 

The values of the market have pervaded education, social services, and now, slice by slice, the NHS, politics and society.

It began in the 1970s when the agenda to advance individual liberties, for women, ethnic minorities and LGBT groups was hijacked. 

We were told that to have individual freedoms at societal level you also have to have market freedoms at an economic level. But it was a hoax. While one advances freedoms, the other actively destroys them. 

And it crowded out what, until then, had been a major focus of public debate — collective rights to economic and social emancipation.

Over my lifetime we’ve seen an increasing focus on individuals, from Harvey Milk to Malala Yousafzai — these are amazing, inspiring individuals but somehow along the way we’ve forgotten that nothing worth doing was ever done alone. 

Movements change things. In the words of Hemingway’s literary hero Harry Morgan, “one man alone ain’t got no bloody chance.”

We’ve allowed ourselves to be fooled into thinking that individual rights are in conflict with collective rights. But individual rights are collective rights. Take Richard and Beryl Driscoll, told in 2006 at 89 years old that “the rules” prevented them from ending their lives as they had lived them, together, because by Gloucestershire County Council would only pay to put Richard in a care home and not Beryl, even though she was blind. 

The separation was ended after seven months because of the Human Rights Act. This is us, collectively, protecting ourselves against the tyranny of Kafkaesque bureaucracy, against arbitrary interference with our liberty.

Now more than ever we need a collective response. When I see young people taking to the streets in defence of the Education Maintenance Allowance, not for themselves but for those who come after them, it’s on days like those that I have hope. Because those are days when we remind ourselves that those three ideals of the French Revolution are not in conflict, they’re inseparable. To defend freedom it takes solidarity.

Unlike the right, we understand why the state matters so much in this battle. But when you look back at our history whether it’s the Levellers or Suffragettes, trade unionists or the radicals at Toynbee Hall, our struggle was never just to get a seat at the table. It was to challenge and change. The state is the means and egalité, fraternité and liberté are the ends.

 

With the internet opening up new avenues of dissent, the state’s response to challenge is to protect itself, to shut down debate, dissent and protest — whether it’s the Lobbying Act in Britain, the closure of the internet across Egypt or the crushing of LGBT rights protesters in Russia. 

We must fight back. Because if you look at what happened to young people in Rotherham you come to understand that the state on its own is never enough. It’s only as strong as we are.

The best bulwark against arbitrary, illegitimate state power is a thriving, inclusive civil society. Charities, campaign groups, trade unions, religious groups, the media, all of them hold government to account in today’s Britain. 

We should judge our government on its attitude to them. But with legal aid slashed, judicial review restricted, charities and trade unions under attack, it begs the question, where will that challenge come from?

Civil society is only strong when people can participate. Without the state in pursuit of greater equality, participation will never be achieved. But we also must open up the state to build a more complete democracy, devolve powers in the workplace and in society, and battle against that creeping sense of insecurity in society where too often, too many people feel they have little control over their own lives and communities.

Because to achieve those aims of freedom, solidarity and equality we need giants, in every family, workplace and community. 

As John Stuart Mill said, “a state that dwarfs its men will find that with small men no great thing was ever achieved.” 

Labour was founded out of collective struggle where everyone played their part. We are starting to remember it again.

 

n Lisa Nandy is Labour MP for Wigan and shadow Cabinet Office minister.

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