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The past is prologue
The Labour leadership contest continues. So far, despite the best efforts of a few, there has been far more attention paid to the past than to the future.
There has been much too much effort, by some candidates, to find a route to reshape their record – as senior advisers, MPs or ministers – and too little effort in developing some definition on the issues which will determine Labour’s and Britain’s future.
It ill-becomes those who seek to lead the Labour Party for them to spend so much time trying to distance themselves from our collective record.
With the possible exception of the BBC’s Diane Abbott, none of the candidates can reasonably pretend to have been absent from Labour’s leadership for any significant period or any significant decision over the last 13 years.
But that does not mean any or all of them have to pretend that they agreed with every last dot and comma of what was done. I spent eight years as a special adviser to the Labour government. I am extremely proud of that government but I did not agree with everything.
I disagreed with Gordon Brown on his decision to raise the pension by just 75 pence. I disagreed with Tony Blair’s enthusiasm for joining the Euro. I was always sceptical about the PFI programme because turning capital investment into revenue expenditure is only ever a short-term solution to a long-term problem. I always viewed the internal opposition to foundation hospitals, modernising student financial support and school academies as about political positioning rather than political philosophy.
The point is though, that now none of this matters. Having an analysis of other people’s decisions isn’t the same as making them yourself. The past is only ever prologue in politics.
This Labour leadership election is not some sort of entry exam for Oxbridge. It is not about getting the history questions right. It is about getting the future questions right.
Where people stood on one issue or another – whether they thought Hans Blix should have been given more time or given the sack – does not matter a jot.
If you want to be Prime Minister it is not the calls you did not have to make that matter now but the calls you might have to make next time.
Tomorrow David Miliband is making a speech in Bristol which must be about the future or it will fail. His website says it will reflect on Labour’s record in government and set out his thoughts on the next stage of the party’s agenda to use the power of education to transform children’s lives. We lost the education debate at the last election to the Conservatives because we failed to have a vision for the future. We cannot ever allow that to happen again.
It is time this election started to come alive. Time it began to fizz with new policy ideas and an understanding of the future challenges a Labour government will face and the vision we have for public services in the new economic reality.
Because if it doesn’t there might not be a Labour government for a very, very long time.
Counter cultural
I went to David Miliband’s event today. It was a very different sort of Labour meeting. I have never been to anything quite like it. Let me explain.
I was expecting a sort of rally. I thought I would be turning up at a traditional leadership election event: speeches from the candidate’s endorsers and supporters; bit of rah-rah and then a key note address from the candidate.
This meeting was nothing like a traditional rally. Nothing of the sort. When I arrived people were sitting around tables talking and listening to each other. They were engaging with each other. They were participants, not passive recipients of other pepple’s speeches. And they were discussing how Labour could be better at community campaigning.
David spoke at the end – after two or three feedback sessions. He’d been involved in the roundtable discussions all the way through. The participants were mostly there because they
supported David but included folk from tenants groups and other community organisations, non-party members and new party members too.
Each table made a commitment to hold one-on-one or house meetings to support David’s leadership campaign.
When David spoke he talked about why he loves the Labour Party: not an emotional tribute to the past but an argument about now and the future. About meeting hard working activists in even the most Tory communities. And using the triumph in Birmingham Edgbaston to show the potential of better community organisation.
At the end, someone from David’s campaign, came up to me and said that the meeting was probably a bit “counter cultural” for me. He was right. I am still not sure whether I was comfortable or not in the meeting but I am certain that the meeting had an electricity and enthusiasm that surpised me. Once or twice I got a glimpse of a very different sort of Labour Party: more grounded in its localities; more open to people who have something to contribute beyond just a party card and with a network spread deep and wide within local community organisations.
I didn’t come away feeling that I’d been to a leadership campaign rally; I did come away feeling there is something different here. Something counter cultural.
A Dream Ticket?
The old left culture or the new?
The Guardian and Sky News are reporting that David Miliband is making a speech today about renewing the Labour Party, including ideas about electing the party Chair and encouraging trade union levy-payers to become full members.
David’s idea of electing the party Chair would mean Jon Cruddas might get into the leadership team afterall. How’s that for a Dream Ticket? Or with David, Harriet (who is doing surprizingly well at PMQs) and Jon, perhaps it is a Dream Team?
Think I will go along to the speech and see what it’s like.
Labour needs to be led to the middle ground
This month marks the anniversaries of two general election defeats for Labour: 27 years since 1983 and 23 years since 1987. They are important dates from Labour’s past because they give us a warning for Labour’s future.
I haven’t written on this blog for over a year because, as someone who loves the Labour Party and has been a member for more than quarter of a century, I decided to take a vow of silence in the year running up to the General Election. Having written on 4th May 2009 that Labour was in ‘deep trouble’ and had to change course, I decided that it was better to be silent than critical in a general election year. Now that the predictable but no less disastrous defeat has occurred, it is essential that we properly debate Labour’s future, our leadership and our direction. So, normal service has been resumed.
Labour’s 1983 experience is instructive today because Gordon Brown came so close to repeating the record rout achieved by Michael Foot in the popular vote. We were just 1.5% ahead of the worst defeat in Labour’s history. Those who argue now that this time we did better than expected should recognise that we had the second worst defeat since 1918. Hearing them now reminds me of listening to Tony Benn describe the 1983 defeat as good news because it represented “8 million votes for socialism”.
It isn’t much of a consolation to the very many ordinary families who will suffer as a result of our defeat that it wasn’t even worse. Neither should we forget that there were those, including some of whom now aspire to leadership of our party, who encouraged people to vote for the Liberals “tactically” on the eve of the last election and contributed to the historic scale of our defeat.
And 1987 is important because it shows us something crucial about the response we need to make to defeat: we have to realise we did not lose in 2010 because of poor presentation alone. Labour won the 1987 campaign but we lost the general election vote. Neil Kinnock had a fantastic campaign; Peter Mandelson worked miracles but the voters saw through it. In 1987 we hadn’t changed the substance, just the style.
Even if Gordon had been the best communicator and the greatest debater in 2010, Labour would still have lost. We didn’t lose in the four weeks of the campaign but in the three years where we abandoned the middle ground, all but repudiated our record and resorted to a self-defeating ‘core vote strategy’. The lesson from 1987 is that we can not win by simply being better communicators or by installing someone as leader who makes us feel good about ourselves. To win we have to be on the middle ground; to gain the middle ground again, we have to be prepared to change.
Labour can only win by becoming a national party again, regaining support in the Midlands and the South of England, challenging ourselves to address and adopt difficult but necessary policy positions outside our comfort zone, with appeal beyond our core vote.
We can not win if we simply become a party that complains about cuts or campaigns on single issues. We can not win if we just keep telling ourselves that we are morally right and the public got it wrong. We have to shake ourselves out of the mistaken belief that this coalition will simply collapse and the public will then return to us because we are the ‘progressives’.
We can not win if we continue to appear to be enthusiastic for equality but antagonistic to aspiration; angry about unemployment but unenthusiastic about enterprise; if we act like cheerleaders for public spending but remain silent on value for public money; or if we appear to understand everything about the need for constitutional change but have no idea why anyone would want a conservatory.
Equality and aspiration; social justice and entrepreneurialism; the public service ethos and public service reform; a living wage and middle income Britain. We do not have to choose between any of these. In fact, we have to choose to embrace all of them and more. We have to be led with a radical edge and led to the middle ground.
We can not win next time if we do not change and we need to change our policy and programme just as much as our leader. To win we need a leader who really does challenge the party to change. Not in a series of deliberate confrontations for their own sake but with a determination to make the changes we need to keep in touch with and lead public opinion. We need someone with the leadership skills and popular appeal capable of reassembling the winning coalition which delivered victories in 1997, 2001 and 2005.
During this leadership election candidates will be trying to tell the party what they think it wants to hear. But we really need a leader who tells the party what it needs to hear. We need someone who isn’t too scared of the party or too cautious about their chances that they’d rather campaign on soft soap than hard reality. The choice isn’t a matter of left or right, we need someone who leads from the front.
This is a leadership election. It is about leadership. A leader is someone who can take tough decisions which the public respect; someone who the party follows not the other way around. If Labour votes for a leader simply because they like what they hear about themselves then we will be setting ourselves up for a repeat defeat.
This defeat can be another 1987 – where we lose again next time – or another 1992 – where we change and then win. The choice is ours.
The long lament
Thirty years ago Mrs Thatcher came to power. She changed politics utterly: moving the centre ground over three general elections firmly to the right; radicalising the right and the left as she did so, almost making the term ‘moderate’ seem like a criticism rather than a compliment; introduced the concepts of monetarism, privatisation and even Britain as ‘a property owning democracy’ into the bloodstream of public policy; all but broke the Labour Party and the labour movement; and of course, put Labour out of office for almost two decades until Tony Blair and New Labour created the opportunity to win again.
Few if any believed she would be so radical, so right-wing, so revolutionary in 1979.
Labour failed in the late 1970s to deal with its own demons. It mishandled a global economic crisis. It gave in too readily to trade union demands and allowed the Left to control the party. It seemed to be part of the problem with how power was exercised in Britain rather than the means by which ordinary families could do well and get on. It looked like it was being battered by events – including militant trade unionism – rather than in control. Frankly, Labour looked under seige.
And yet, in Jim Callaghan we had a Prime Minister and leader who was more popular than the party. More popular than Mrs Thatcher.
So, whilst there are parallels with where we are today there are important differences too.
We may have a leader less popular than the Opposition’s but we are not mishandling the economy; we may be conceding too much to the Left and the unions in the party but Britain is not in the grip of an industrial relations crisis. We may be being battered by events but to coin a phrase Jim Callaghan didn’t actually say, when it comes to comparing Britain today with 1978-79, ‘crisis, what crisis?’
That isn’t to say Labour isn’t in deep trouble. And has to change.
Of course, it is regrettable that Charles Clarke and Hazel Blears have to sound off in the media. Some of the language – like the ‘YouTube if you want to’ comment – was unacceptable because it was so obvious the media would have a field day with it.
It was equally unacceptable for John Prescott to call for Clarke to leave the Party for feeling ashamed over the McBride affair when I don’t know a single Labour member who didn’t feel ashamed and embarrassed by it.
But Charles, David Blunket, Hazel and others are merely expressing a sense of frustration – even exasperation – that so many Labour people have today.
It isn’t a Blairite thing or even a New Labour thing. It is a Labour thing: after a dozen years are we throwing away our own triumph in shifting the centre ground of British politics to the centre-left from the centre-right where Mrs Thatcher left it?
We were promised that when Tony Blair resigned we would experience “renewal in office” but it never happened. Instead, we have nose-dived in the polls, appear to have stagnated on reform, emailed away our “moral compass” and generally look like we’ve lost our touch.
If Charles Clarke and others weren’t speaking out in these circumstances we could legitimately ask why not?
This is not a Gordon Brown problem. Clearly he has had some communications and connection issues. But the problem is more fundamental than that: it is how we govern that is the problem not who leads the government.
To restore our reputation the government has to return to being New Labour.
We have to end and repudiate the language of Leftism that is creeping into the Labour lexicon. Allowing ourselves to fall into the Budget elephant trap of being badged “the end of New Labour” was a tiny example. Better to have cut income tax to stimulate the economy than to have broken our promise and introduced a 50p rate on top earners. Better to change the Budget plans now than break that pledge.
Criticizing primary school academies as being dangerous because they threatened to bring “free markets” to schools is crazy – especially as academies are a sound policy which New Labour introduced.
Giving local councils more say over academies or creating a new national control mechanism over them plays to activists not to parents.
We should be being more radical on schools and hospitals not slipping back or going silent.
Where are the policies and programmes designed to bring more power to parents, patients and carers through choice and competition between providers?
What is the long term vision for creating more new home owners not just more council houses?
Why have we stopped articulating our approach on crime, anti-social behaviour and bad neighbours when it connects across social classes and between communities?
How will more and more regulation on businesses – even in the name of ‘equality’ – help to create new jobs for those who will lose theirs in this recession?
Where are the plans to bring about a genuine greening of the economy as part of the recovery?
What is our appeal to the instincts and incomes of middle class voters who were essential to our victories in 1997, 2001 and 2005?
Why have we stopped owning the future? Why do we look like we have stopped all legislation with any edge? Even the Royal Mail Bill now looks threatened.
The answer is radical policy not just improved presentation. It is to be controversial if necessary not conservative by nature.
In 1979 we looked like we have been driven from office as much by exhaustion as election. We have to recapture a sense of excited in office not exhausted by it.
Jim Callaghan said during the 1979 election that he had felt that the tide had changed. He was right. It is not too late to turn the tide back in our favour. It needs us to be as bold and radical today as we were when we made the Bank of England independent.
Thatcher’s anniversary must be New Labour’s warning from history. Otherwise, the lament – to use Hazel Blear’s word of the week – will be long and hard and deep. It will be a lament for the lost opportunities of radical social reform by future Labour governments. Perhaps even for the Labour Party itself.
The Blair doctrine
On Thursday morning UK time, Tony Blair delivered a speech in Chicago on his “doctrine of international community”. It is worth a read because it sets out precisely the basis for a genuine “ethical foreign policy” for the centre-Left: a policy based on the international community being prepared to intervene, including militarily, to defeat and remove regimes which attack and oppress their civilian population.
Too many on the traditional Left believe that it is better to excuse and explain away oppressive regimes that stand in opposition to the USA rather than to argue for intervention in the interests of their people. Their anti-Americanism outweighs their internationalism.
Too many on the traditional Right believe intervention should only be considered if it is in their own direct national interest or to safeguard a special interest with which they allign themselves.
So, for example, many on the British Conservative Right were lukewarm or hostile to intervention in Kosovo but are pretty John Bullish about intervention in Zimbabwe. 
Too many liberals believe that intervention can only be supported if international institutions like the UN sanction it. This fails to recognise that the Security Council veto means that countries which do not accept, as a matter of stated policy, the notion of international action to overcome oppressive regimes because it represents “interference” in internal politics of a nation state will wield that veto come what may.
Worse, many on the liberal Left argue that it is wrong even to countenance action to deliver democracy and freedom for the population of Muslim fundamentalist countries in the mistaken belief that democracy and Islam are somehow incompatible.
So, the traditional Left, the liberal establishment and the traditional Right, all coalesce around opposition to action to safeguard the human rights and freedoms of oppressed peoples.
The Blair Doctrine – which the former prime minister reprised in his speech a decade after he first set it out in Chicago – is distinctly different. It calls for action against oppressive regimes based on the values of international solidarity with the oppressed rather than isolationism. It recognises that where action is not taken in the apparent short term narrow ‘national interest’ often, as with Afghanistan, the medium to long term consequences can be at best unpredictable and at worst, disasterous. And it argues for siding with the majority of Muslims against the extremists and fundamentalists and helping them defeat those who would pervert Islam to justify terrrorism.
Today, we rarely hear the case for military action to safeguard freedom. Tony Blair makes that case. It is worth a read.
Credit where it is due
I have been accused of sometimes being too hard on Gordon Brown. It is certainly the case that I think he has issues communicating on an emotional level with the public or in a language they can understand. But, credit where credit is due: Gordon Brown did a very good job leading the G20 and secured an outcome which will help to knock some of the roughest edges off of the global recession. By their collective action the G20 agreement should help to avoid the isolationism and protectionism which combined to turn the Wall Street Crash into the 1930s Depression.
If communication isn’t GB’s strongest card then attention to detail certainly is and anyone watching his performance in the post-match interviews will have witnessed a Prime Minister with the facts, figures and finances at his fingertips. It is hard to see David Cameron commanding such authority on the World Stage.
Gordon may not be a Clinton, Blair or an Obama when it comes to selling the deal but even his sternest critics can not take away from him his success today. Tom Bradby from ITN asked if he was confident that the G20 meeting in London would now mark the beginning of the end of the Global downturn. Gordon avoided that trap. We had all better hope that if it is not the beginning of the end London’s G20 is at least the end of the beginning. If that proves to be the case Gordon Brown can take some of the credit.
I am in Israel for two weeks….
….and will try to blog from here.
Time to walk and chew gum at the same time
Sitting in my hotel room in Washington DC on Wednesday evening I managed to catch a speech President Obama was making to a town hall meeting in Orange County, California. It was, as usual, an inspirational speech from an inspirational president. Within it, President Obama set out some important contrasts with how the British government is handling the current political and economic crisis.
First of all, the President began by stressing that when it comes to economic problems and mistakes made in how to handle them he stressed that ‘the buck stops here’. The specific issue he was referring to was about bonuses paid to AIG executives. Of course, the Obama administration isn’t really to blame for the bonus payments – any more than Gordon Brown is responsible for big bonuses paid to bad bankers – but President Obama didn’t try to shift responsibility he took it. He knows that that’s what leaders do. The town hall meeting lapped it up. This is what Gordon Brown should have done to defuse the apology issue: to take responsibility for the situation rather than try to shuffle off the blame to others. By doing so, Obama looks in control, rather than the victim of events.
Secondly, the President made a vitally important point about priorities. He said that whilst he was facing criticism for dealing with more than one problem at a time, he believes that it is vital to address the economic crisis and to reform healthcare, improve schools, reduce reliance on carbon fuel and win the war in Afghanistan. He said that he wouldn’t choose between dealing with the economic crisis and reforming public services because people didn’t get to choose between dealing with their personal economic circumstances and the quality of the schools their children use and the healthcare they rely upon. It was, he said, time to chew gum and walk at the same time.
This is absolutely the right analysis and one which the Labour government would do well to emulate. As I have said here before, the government’s standing with the electorate is suffering from its failure to set out a radical and challenging reform programme for health, schools, energy and the wider public services. The Labour government too often looks like it has forgotten how to be radical reformers; that the ability to walk and chew gum at the same time is beyond them. 
If Labour is to have any chance of winning the next election it is vital that Gordon Brown and the Labour government learns some lessons from how President Obama is communicating on the economic crisis: taking personal responsibility even when it isn’t his fault; and making radical public service reforms even whilst dealing with the economic crisis. Labour has to show it can walk and chew gum at the same time.
IMF predicts UK recession will last longest of G7
The importance of a successful outcome to the G20 meeting to Britain is highlighted today with the International Monetary Fund predicting that the recession in the UK will be longer and deeper than amongst our competitors. The IMF predicts that Britain will be the only member of the G7 to experience a continuing economic contraction in 2010. These predictions come on top of bleak assessments on jobs. As unemployment passes two million today most commentators expect it to reach three million in 2010.
There was a time when Ministers’ claimed Britain was in the best place of any nation to weather and then recover from the global downturn. That sounded a little boastful at the time. Today it seems like an unfortunate joke. There are two million people sitting at home today who won’t see the funny side.
Inevitably, today’s gloomy predictions and terrible statistics will lead to more cat-calls for Gordon Brown to apologise. I’m not so sure it matters whether he does or he doesn’t use those words. The public know that this is a global downturn. They know too that whilst individual governments in one country or another might have done this thing or that differently, a bit sooner or a bit later, that in reality this hurricane was going to hit and to hurt.
The real point now for Labour is not to try to brief, boast or bluster our way through. No more leading the world or saving the planet. No more last in, first out idle rhetoric. Britain, for a range of reasons, not least our reliance on the City of London and financial services sector, and our over reliance on easily obtained debt to fuel consumer confidence, is going to experience a downturn beyond the memory and experience of most of our politicians and most of our people. When Alastair Darling told us that in an interview over Christmas he was made by his political masters to recant as surely and as fully as anyone faced with the inquisitors of the Spanish Inquisition. But Alastair was right and the briefers were wrong. The only way to convince the public that Labour knows how to deal with this crisis is to lower the rhetoric and level with them. It is not apologies we need now but humility.
So, when the G20 ‘global deal’ happens it should not be greeted with fanfares and fireworks because even if it amounts to anything much it won’t impact directly the million more Britons expected to lose their jobs this year. Everyone hopes and prays that a deal can be reached but let us not talk up expectations about its impact in a way which only adds to the disillusionment with politics so many of our friends and neighbours face as they stare out from their homes at an uncertain future.
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