Labour’s problem – a Southern European left in Northern Europe

Amongst all the talk about Labour’s problems, I was struck by this tweet:

It leads to an important point. Labour  needs to be more like the rest of the north European left, and less like the southern European left. If I think of the south European left I think of noisy, passionate street politics – an impression undoubtedly reinforced by coverage of Greece in the last few weeks.

The southern European left includes varied shades of opinion in broad alliance, from moderates through to genuine socialist and Marxist strands. The north European left in contrast are pragmatic reformers: the privatising and deficit-cutting Swedish social democrats of the 90s, or the Gerhard Schroders labour market reforms in Germany in the noughties. France of course, incorporates elements of both. It is the epitome of noisy street politics AND pragmatic left-wing government.

I do not attribute this difference to the supposedly passionate Latin character of southern Europe, but rather to the history of the late 20th century. Southern European societies have traditionally been poorer and more unequal, and the left needed to unite against the authoritarian right  – Franco in Spain and the colonels in Greece for example.

Germany of course has its own right-wing authoritarian history. But this strand of belief  was thoroughly discredited after 1945, in a way it was not in Italy, where of course fascism ruled for much longer. Furthermore the moderate left and the communists had always been enemies in Germany. Indeed, the communists deliberately betrayed social democrats to the Nazis after the Nazi-Soviet pact.

The reality is that for all the passion some in the Labour movement bring to politics, not always a positive passion one might add, they live in a north European country with an unexciting domestic history, needing practical, reformist politics.

So a piece of advice: some countries don’t need a revolution, get over it.