Until relatively recently, standard British usage meant that describing someone as ‘a progressive’ was more or less the equivalent to branding them a communist fellow traveller. Not any more; we are all progressives now, it seems.
Isn’t anybody willing to stand up for honest-to-goodness barking mad reactionaries these days? It’s not as if they are an endangered species, after all. Surely such a sizeable constituency surely deserves a spokesperson more articulate than Melanie Phillips.
Yet the way things are going right now, most politicians would rather confess diabolism or an entry on the sex offenders’ register than admit to being on the wrong side of this divide.
This silliness reached its apogee in an article in the Independent last Friday, in which Tory leader David Cameron - pictured - attempted to rebrand the Conservatives as ‘the true progressives’:
If you care about poverty, if you care about inequality, if you care about the environment – forget about the Labour Party. It has forgotten about you. If you count yourself a progressive, a true progressive, only we can achieve real change.
Yeah, right. Such faux audacieux attempts to stake a claim to the traditional territory of one’s political rivals is getting so old hat, darlings. This kind of dumbed down 1994 vintage New Labourism in reverse is rapidly losing its power to shock. I’m bored already.
Nevertheless, I bet reading that ghost-written tripe ruined breakfast for many supporters of the rightwing Labour faction Progress, which brands itself as representing ‘Labour’s progressives’.
Meanwhile, the piece came on the very day that the Guardian published Ken Livingstone’s call for Labour to head a ‘progressive alliance’ including the Greens, and hinted that there was room for the Liberal Democrats on board at some point in the future.
Only after posting a critique this approach did I suddenly remember that Cameron offered those very same Lib Dems a ‘new progressive alliance to decentralise British politics’ just six months ago.
One presumes this has to be a ‘new progressive alliance’ to distinguish it from the old ‘progressive alliance’, a term coined by the Edwardians to describe the collaboration of the Campbell-Bannerman and Asquith Liberals and those MPs ‘elected in the labour interest’ after 1906.
Meanwhile, former SDPer David Marquand, writing in the New Statesman in February, has described Gordon Brown’s early tentative overtures towards the Lib Dems as an attempt to construct – what else? – ‘a progressive alliance’.
If you are thoroughly confused by this point, that’s because you are meant to be. The obfuscation is 100% intended. The habitual resort to the P-word by politicians of all stripes is a symptom of a climate in which everybody wears their bleeding green heart on their recycled sleeve and is deeply – deeply, you understand - committed to social justice, even if they are unable coherently to define the term. That’s the essence of progressive politics, innit.
Posted at 14:36, 13 May 2008
Comments (7)
I remember talking to a Labour right-winger and becoming quite confused as we both thought we represented the "progressive" faction of the Labour Party.
The überbig tent.
I wonder how many people in one election you could get to call themselves progressive. The news could be even more vapid than usual and just report a 100% vote for progressives (presuming the Monster Raving Loonies count).
Good article, dave, I have been waiting for someone to deconstruct the usage of progressive by all and sundry. Orwell(we need you now george) would have had a field day with all these attempts to subvert language. maybe even Lewis
Carroll,
When I use a word, it means what I want it to mean; neither more, nor less"--Humpty Dumpty to Alice.
We even have MacShane and others calling themselves left wing, and the Tories progressive, please, only if bringing in US style welfare and time limited benefits is progressive.
tbh, it is all quite sinister, and vaguely fascistic, though I suspect a fair few voters will buy it.
Hey does this mean that progressive rock will make a come back, Keith Emerson is making a new album.
More to the point Johann Hari did a good job of debunking Camerans' progressive credentials in the Independent yesterday.
Also remember the 2000 presidential campaign when George Bush declared that he was a compassionate conservative and would dedicate his presidency to helping poor children and immigrants.
"If you care about poverty, if you care about inequality, if you care about the environment – forget about the Labour Party. It has forgotten about you. If you count yourself a progressive, a true progressive, only we can achieve real change."
It sounds like an SWP advertising slogan.
They used to say something like "Against Blair? Against tuition fees? Against privatisation? Join the party!"
"the way things are going right now"
Sums it all up nicely, no?
``The habitual resort to the P-word by politicians of all stripes is a symptom of a climate in which everybody wears their bleeding green heart on their recycled sleeve and is deeply – deeply, you understand - committed to social justice, even if they are unable coherently to define the term. That’s the essence of progressive politics, innit.''
Two points: folks on this side of the pond have taken to the term ``progressive'' in order to avoid being called ``liberals'': a term which has acquired a bad odor among most of the working class folks whose support they would like to secure. (The bad odor has little to do with the weakly social-democratic policies favoured by such folks, but rather with the perception that liberals are actively hostile to ``traditional values'', ``anti-God'', and such. Among the white working class and the old lower white middle class, there is probably also a component deriving from plain old racism in the mix as well.)
The second point is that historically, i.e. in the progressive movement of the late 19th and early 20th century in the U.S., the term did mean something, and was not the sort of mushy nothing that Dave suggests. But that was a long time ago.