An eternal struggle

Tessa Jowell seems a very sympathetic soul; if I was worrying about how to pay my mortgage and whether I was going to lose my job at Longbridge, it would be nice to have a chat with Tessa. She's the kind of person, I suspect, who wouldn't be embarrassed if I got tearful and would probably have a tissue to hand. She would, I'm sure, care. It would also be comforting to hear that the prime minister was very angry with BMW, and gratifying to watch on TV a harassed Stephen Byers shuttling back and forth to Germany. But what it all adds up to is a devastating indictment of the impotence of politicians and the ineffectual state.

While it might make me feel a bit better having government ministers emoting, what I really want - and there is no mystery in this - is for them to save my job. We can get all the emotional stuff from family, colleagues, therapist or vicar. What we expect of government is the power to do something - that's what they're paid for. But no one is talking about the government investing in a public-private partnership to keep Longbridge open. No, instead we get the rhetoric of "care"- a word which has been castrated into passive emotionalism - and an on-site job centre offering advice on the benefit system and long-term regeneration aid which won't help thousands of families survive the next five years.

This should have been top of the agenda at the cabinet meeting last Friday at Chequers as they pondered how, over the next month, to get the voters out at the local elections. Just as the predictions of a meltdown in Labour's heartlands have politicians and commentators mulling over questions of motivation, apathy and political disillusionment, thousands prepared to come on to the streets of Birmingham at the weekend for the biggest industrial demonstration since the miners' strike. Here are two sides of the same conundrum: New Labour hunts for that elusive big idea to motivate its voters at the same time as thousands of highly motivated, passionately angry voters protest against a global capitalism which is both brutal and arbitrary.

Of one thing we can be sure, while New Labour makes lots of emotional noise about Saturday's demonstration, it will effectively turn its back on it. Because Gordon Brown and Tony Blair are wholehearted facilitators of the very system of global capitalism which will devastate the West Midlands. The promise New Labour offers is paltry: "We can't buck the market but we will make things better where we can, when we can." What Rover demonstrates is how little that amounts to - how inconsequential politicians have become in the global economy. This brutal fact was quite easy for the Thatcherite right to accommodate because it fitted with their belief in a small state. But for Labour politicians, it presents a massive identity crisis: what is the role of the leftwing state? For more than a hundred years, the left saw the powerful, interventionist state as the means to deliver its political objectives. Now, a New Labour government feels - and looks - as helpless as we do.

This is a defining moment because if even Tony Blair is wringing his hands in anguished powerlessness, what's he for? (Margaret Thatcher shrewdly understood the importance of the fiction of power and dressed up her powerlessness with an ideology of "rolling back the frontiers of the state".) If New Labour's politicians are aware of their powerlessness and the primacy of the market, what is there for the electorate to buy into? Take education: the whole drive of government policy is to provide a system which will supply the market with the skilled, educated workforce it needs. Human beings are moulded to fit the market rather than vice versa; childhood is a training for employment. A frightening poverty of vision underpins this; whatever human creativity and potential cannot be used by the market is of little value.

Many voters have a closer, more personal experience of the market than politicians; they have dealt with redundancy, retraining, unemployment, portfolio/flexible/contract working. As a result, they've learnt a pragmatic contractual approach to life: work out what you get out before you put anything in. As Richard Sennett asks in The Corrosion of Character, how can one develop loyalty, if one has had little experience of it as an employee? What is often castigated as selfish individualism - and blamed for the late 20th century decline of institutional life (the family, membership of political parties, trade unions, churches) - is in fact a perfectly understandable survival mechanism.

W hat the eggheads in Number 10 and Millbank need to worry about is a bifurcation of politics and personal experience. In the former, the market is king, economic growth is buoyant, the Holy Grail of modernisation is efficiency and the marker of progress is material wealth. But in millions of private worlds, people know that this serves a very narrow interpretation of human wellbeing. They know the kind of modernisation which Blair, Milburn, Blunkett et al bang on about brings teachers, midwives, doctors and social workers huge amounts of stress which damages their children (one in five of whom now develop stress-related illnesses according to research last week) and relationships with their partners. When the political system offers so little for your happiness, it is no surprise that you can't be bothered to turn out to vote, or you vote for Ken for the hell of it.

The logical response is to retreat into your private world for salvation and hope. You build your own paradise from Homebase in the back garden; and your own palace in the front room inspired by Changing Rooms. What defines your life are your relationships - friends, children, partners - and experience - the Greek holiday, working out, a massage, a good meal, salsa evening classes or AA. Politicians may moan because this won't deliver a good turnout at the polls, but the French sociologist, Michel Maffesoli, at the Sorbonne's Centre for the Study of Everyday Life, takes an inspiringly optimistic view, seeing in it a reassertion of our humanity. He characterises this increasingly dramatic split between the public and the private in terms of classical mythology: Prometheus is the bringer of order, rationality and productivity which has driven the industrial development of Europe. A mass mutiny against this - searching for a life experience of spontaneity, playfulness and intensity - is symbolised by Dionysus, the god of play, orgies, ecstasy, and of pleasures in the here and now. Maffesoli has a point. Most of us are caught in the battle between Prometheus and Dionysus: still obedient footsoldiers for corporate capitalism. But what makes our lives meaningful lies largely outside the workplace, where we forage for a less mechanistic humanity.