Happy Birthday, Staggers! As a conservative, I can only admire your skill at splitting the political left and bankrupting your proprietors over the past century, and I hope you continue to do so for many years to come. It’s a new take on Gramsci’s long march through the institutions to have so many editors march through one institution—but the happy result has been to stimulate, enrich and broaden our political debate. Thank you.
You will, however, need a new purpose. The New Statesman was founded in 1913 to be in the vanguard of a modern scientific Fabian socialism, in which society would be improved by intellectuals for the benefit of the working man and woman through the benign instrument of the state. But as we now know, much of this was high-minded twaddle.
The first death blow came in 1925, when Leon Trotsky pointed out in Where Is Britain Going? that Fabianism was not an attempt to empower the ordinary working people of this country, but an attempt to suppress them. Fabianism’s last best hope came in 1997, but the Blair-Brown era squandered the chance of a lifetime to show its value, even if they had been Fabians themselves. Now the credit crunch has finished it off.
So Fabianism is dead. It has been killed not by politics, but by economics. Instead, the ever-increasing cost of services relative to manufacturing requires new ideas, new thought, indeed nothing less than a radical reconceptualisation of the role and value of the state—the largest “service provider” of all. That will create a new politics of the left, alongside an attempt to recapture the insights of Burke in a Labour idiom. Time, then, for the Staggers to begin afresh.
[A rather sanitised version of this article appeared in the New Statesman's Centenary Issue]