Fighting for social democracy against the Lib-Labs?

I’ve been interested, therefore, to read many of the contributions to an online symposium the British magazine Soundings is holding on the future(s) of the left.

I’m particularly struck by this contribution from Jeremy Gilbert:

“So what can we do about it now? Well, not much, obviously. But what we can do, we vaguely social(ist?) (Radical?) democratic intellectuals, is at least to stop talking - to ourselves, each other, and others - as if it was still the case the policies like full funded, fully-socialised, health-care, decently-funded universities and civilized provision for the aged were still reasonable, moderate objectives, implementable by decent clever people of good intent from Whitehall and Westminster. Let’s at least admit that if we want those things now, we will have to fight for them in a way that many did not think we had to 30 years ago.”

There are many antipodean parallels here with the Blairite acceptance of much of the Thatcher settlement. Much ground has been conceded on private health insurance, marketised universities and the privatisation rather than socialisation of risk. Many aspects of social policy have been turned over to profit-making enterprises - such as the Job Network. Labor shows no inclination to reverse these trends. Perhaps it will “civilise” them.

So I think, in Australia too, it’s becoming an increasingly radical thing to be a social democrat, and I suspect that under a Rudd government, if that comes to pass, we might have to start thinking seriously about how we must begin to fight for aims which would have been seen as centrist orthodoxy 30 or 40 years ago.