Please Labour, ditch the name calling and get organised.

What is in a name?

The first election I have a decent memory of is 1997. I remember Tony Blair, beaming and youthful, walking up Downing Street. I remember everyone seeming very happy about this broad grinned new broom. Although I wasn’t really that switched on to the policy agenda of the 1997-2001 Labour government – I was too busy trying to get picked on the school football team despite possessing two left feet – looking back I can recognise a radical, genuinely progressive movement. I can see why, despite the awful mess of the post-2001 New Labour years, there are plenty of people within the party who would quite like to turn back the clocks.

The heart of New Labour (Source: The Guardian)

I remember, in greater detail, the 2007 ascension of Gordon Brown, the financial collapse during my late school and early student days and then the last five years of stop start movement to the left, awkward photo opportunities and two steps forward, one step back. Yet for all the post-election pain, there is also still a strong appeal both in the old school, social conscience Labour of Brown in continuing the leftward tack embarked on by Ed Miliband. Labour is, and always has been, a broad church.

The narrative of an impending Blairite v. Brownite, Right v. Left battle in the Labour Party over the next few months seems, less than two weeks after Ed Miliband was driving down from Doncaster to hand in his notice, to be well established. Depending on where one stands, Labour either shot itself in the foot by abandoning the success of the Blair years, or began a long overdue transformations under Miliband that must be seen through if the Tories are to be defeated in 2020. To anyone outside of Labour it must seem like a dull, semantic slogging match. But the outcome will shape the next five years of British politics.

For a long time, the Tories had a similar problem. It might be assumed that the memory of Margaret Thatcher would only haunt the left. However, after her deposition in 1991, the Conservatives spent years in her shadow. Not only the shadow of her success, the benchmark for all future leaders of her party, but also of her divisive ideology. As the Tories suffered successive defeats in Westminster and in the polling stations of Britain, there was constant talk of revitalising Thatcherism and connecting again with the ideas that had brought the Conservative Party their greatest successes of modern history.

But, crucially, by May 2010 the Tories had finally stopped talking about Maggie. David Cameron’s election campaign that year was fraught, messy and ultimately indecisive, but he had succeeded in turning his party about face. The Conservatives, by the large, had their cheeks turned towards the future and not the past when the nation went to the polls.

So, while Tony Blair has often been compared to Britain’s only female Prime Minister for his neoliberal, often presidential approach to government, there is a more nuanced similarity between the two former PMs. Both left traumatic, but often not obvious, legacies on their respective parties. While the controversies of their time in power may draw the most attention from the public, in purely political terms it is the retrospective pull of their success that is most damaging. In the wilderness years of opposition, any party will find itself looking to the past for answers. But the danger is that serious reflection becomes idolatry and a rose tinted view of past successes is allowed to form, holding back reform and new ideas.

Interviewed last week, one of the senior architects of the Conservatives election victory gave perhaps the most deconstructed sound bite yet on the surprise result. ‘Elections are won by parties that look forwards’ he said and, having just won an election he should know. Any party that’s policies and approach seem stuck in the past will never be trusted with the reins of government by the electorate. Labour, more than any other party, should know that.

This is why it is vital that, in the weeks of necessary debate that are to come, Labour drops the Blair and Brown rhetoric. The party has spent five years stagnating in the name of unity and stability and in doing so allowed itself to be defined by the mistakes and controversies of the past. If it spends the next months, and then the next five years, being defined by the figures of its history then a Tory majority in 2020 is all but certain.

After Chavez

If you want a succinct summary as to why Hugo Chavez matters, even after his death earlier this week then look no further than the words of Channel 4’s iconic newsman Jon Snow,

When I started working in South America the US was still killing leaders it didn’t like. Chavez is part of the order that put an end to that.

As the nearest thing current British journalism has to an Edward Murrow figure one can hardly go wrong in trusting Snow’s hundred and forty character wisdom. Chavez was a leader who brought stability and development to his country over a fourteen year rule that, while by no means perfect, was very much revolutionary.

When Chavez was elected in 1998 one would have been forgiven for thinking that history was about to repeat itself. The bloody days of the 1970s and 80s when the CIA was South America’s devil, toppling socialist governments in Nicaragua and Chile and siding with the likes of Somoza and Pinochet cannot have been far from the minds of many commentators. The US had, on the back of the millions pumped into counter-revolutionary movements by the Regan White House, won in South America. Very few could have predicted that Chavez’s victory would, in the worlds of Gregory Wilpert, lead to ‘a wave of successes for left-leaning presidential candidates in Latin America’.

Chavez’s funeral (image taken from The Guardian)

Venezuela under Chavez was able to stand up to America largely because of a change in the political landscape. The Cold War had been over for nearly a decade, the CIA was no longer a cloaked figure waiting to strike against leftist movements and American foreign policy now looked, in general, to the Balkans and the Middle-East. Chavez had the time and space to act without an American funded Contra movement breathing down his government’s collective necks. There was also a legitimacy in the eyes of the West to the Chavez government, which had won over 50% of the vote in elections that were almost certainly balanced against a socialist candidate. There had been no violent coup or long Sandinista struggle but an ‘orderly transition of power’.

Of course, as the case of Francois Hollande in France has shown, it takes more than the election of a single socialist leader to change the political landscape of a continent. It was what Chavez did to Venezuela during his rule that allowed for the ‘wave of successes’ for the left. Between 1999 and 2009 unemployment fell from 14.5% to 7.6%. From ’99 to 2011 GDP per capita rose from $4,105 to $10,810, infant mortality fell from 20 per 1,000 live births to 13, the proportion of the population in extreme poverty decreased from 23.4% to 8.5% and oil exports increased by over 200%. All of this was done by a government that was staunchly opposed to the intervention of foreign powers, be they governmental or corporate, in the affairs of Venezuela (and indeed South America as a whole). Most famously Chavez effectively nationalised the oil industry and ensured that the majority of the profits made from hydrocarbon exploration in Venezuela stayed in Venezuela.

The changes brought above over the last fourteen years aren’t just measured in percentages. The continued and increased funding of the El Sistema  program which aims to bring music to the most impoverished young Venezuelans is just one cultural program that must also be considered as part of Chavez’s legacy. Critics may scoff at the idea of youth orchestras being as important as the increasing of GDP or reduction of inflation but anyone privileged enough to have watched the Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra, Venezuela and perhaps the world’s best ensemble of young musicians, can pour scorn on such a suggestion. El Sistema is as ambitious a cultural program as the attempts by the FSLN to spread poetry in 1980s Nicaragua and as tool to create both great art and help young people avoid crime puts many British projects of similar goals to shame.

But what now for Venezuela? Already some commentators suggest the crows may be gathering, with talk of US oil companies interested in forcing their way into the Venezuelan market and the view that without the gargantuan personality of Chavez at its head Venezuela might crumble. There is also the prospect of change for the better. One cannot ignore Chavez’s failures, he often acted more like a dictator than an elected President and there is no denying that for all the progress Venezuela made with his hands clenched firmly upon the Presidency the country is no socialist nirvana. A new leader with a new approach may, despite the uncertain circumstances, be the catalyst for more positive social change.

However one thing the Chavez should have taught us is that to try and predict what will happen next in South American politics is a risky game at the best of times. To forecast what Venezuela will look like in a year or even six months from now is next to impossible. What is certain however is that the country will never again be the same as in late 1998 when Venezuelans went to the polls to elected Hugo Chavez as their president.