Do you need to be a critical realist to win elections now?

The following paragraph from Corbyn's recent conference speech may reveal something of the philosophical foundations of the division that has blighted Labour for the last decade.

'Conference, it is often said that elections can only be won from the centre ground. And in a way that’s not wrong – so long as it’s clear that the political centre of gravity isn’t fixed or unmovable, nor is it where the establishment pundits like to think it is. It shifts as people’s expectations and experiences change and political space is opened up. Today’s centre ground is certainly not where it was twenty or thirty years ago.'

In saying this, Corbyn is showing an appreciation that the structure of society changes over time. This seems like an obvious statement but the failure of New Labour to appreciate such change over time can be tracked back to a more complex source in the work of Antony Giddens, the architect of New Labour's Third Way, and his theory of structuration.

I've recently taken an interest in Anthony Giddens and his theory. Specifically, I am interested in its similarity to much of Roy Bhaskar's theory of social change within the critical realism paradigm that his life's work describes.

Bhaskar and Gidden's models were so similar that Bhaskar tells us in both of his posthumously published books , The Order of Natural Necessity (p34) and Enlightened Common Sense (p53), that he and Giddens agreed on the similarity of their theories over lunch in 'a very nice restaurant in Greek Street'. However, Bhaskar's colleague, Margaret Archer, subsequently pointed out that there was a profound difference between their work. Giddens' theory failed to account for change over time and as Bhaskar subsequently points out, 'This may fit a college in Cambridge but it does not fit most of social life'.

As Giddens, along with his theory of structuration, was the architect of the Third Way that Blair implemented, the failure to theorise change over time may account for some of the division that has been seen in the Labour movement since Blair's tenure as leader of the Labour Party. Failure to account for change over time has resulted in a failure to see that political parties that attempt to grab votes with populist promises before elections may alter the structure of society over time. The electorate may move further from the ideals of the party over time. Conservative attempts to grab votes from UKIP resulted in them doing UKIP's work and leading the way out of Europe, Blairism resulted in their traditional voting base resenting the increasingly rich South East of the country and voting for the nationalist rhetoric of UKIP, a situation repeated across the Atlantic to produce Trump's USA.

In appreciating work that has come before him, Bhaskar tells us that, 

'Critical realism is indeed a new philosophy but...it is not a new practice; genuine science, whether great, revolutionary or normal, has always been critical realist.' (p41)

Blair and Giddens appear not to have been critical realists, perhaps Corbyn is. Trump might be one too!