Posts Tagged → Labour Party
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.
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.
New Labour: not dead just sleep-walking
Tony Blair famously told the 1997 Labour Party conference that the Conservatives were “not dead. Just sleeping.” To make such a comment when the Conservatives had been so throroughly thrashed at the general election only four months previously was remarkable. Equally memorable though should be Blair’s next line in that speech: “Let their fate serve as a warning to us.”
Today, with Labour looking becalmed at around 30% in the polls, with the Parliamentary Labour Party looking ever more fearful of having to make bold and radical reforms necessary to improve the public services, with the economic crisis so crushing and with some Cabinet ministers – who should know better – preening themselves and posing in public like peacocks for a potential leadership position, it looks like Labour has failed to heed Blair’s warning. In this context, it is not surprising commentators are saying: ‘New Labour is dead’
I do not believe new Labour is dead but I do believe it is sleep walking to defeat. Incumbent governments win elections when they are capable of showing the electorate that they have more to offer than they have already delivered: that they can be both continuity and change; not just that they haven’t run out of ideas but that their ideas are right for the times.
The economy of course, is taking the lion’s share of the resources and the reporting at the moment. That is only right. Unfortunately, too much of the rhetoric continues to be anti-market and anti-city – both positions which will come back to haunt Labour in the future; partly, because Labour will need both the market economy and the City to recover and prosper if Britain is to grow our way out of recession and partly, because anti-free market sentiment will be used by those on the left to call for a re-allignment of Labour politics which is actually about trashing the government’s record and moving Labour leftwards.
I appreciate scope for action on the economy is limited but where are the ideas and radical reforms from elsewhere in government capable of making the case that Labour has more to offer in the future? Sadly, they currently appear absent.
Take the publication on Tuesday of the government’s ‘vision for the future shape of public services’. Much of what was in the paper was fine, harmless stuff. The fast-track teacher training is OK. But frankly, the idea that the way to make the radical leap required in public service provision is to ape TripAdvisor by having internet reviews would be laughable if it did not signal so surely that New Labour is sleep walking to defeat.
Or take the loss of David Freud, the welfare reformer, to the Conservatives. I do not believe Freud is a natural conservative. He believes in progressive reforms. He appears to have walked because, despite his excellent work, the government as a whole (probably not James Purnell himself) just does not look interested in pursuing them.
Or take the government’s overall legislative programme. Of course, the Marine and Coastal Access Bill is necessary but, with the exception of the Royal Mail Bill the government’s legislative programme seems to be rather empty. Watch the Parliament Channel any evening (as sadly I do) and there just doesn’t seem to be anything much going on.
Where are the policies to raise standards in schools, to drive choice and contestablility in healthcare, to reduce and remove our reliance on carbon power generation, to address anti-social behaviour and increase personal security, to show Labour are as radical after 12 years in office as they were after 18 years in Opposition?
I believe New Labour isn’t dead. Just sleepwalking to disaster. Labour has just months to put that right. To heed Tony’s warning.
I disown Bryan Gould
Those like me (and almost no-one else I know in the Labour Party) who voted for Bryan Gould to be both Leader and Deputy Leader of the Labour Party in the same election against John Smith will have been disappointed to read his piece in the Guardian today entitled, ”I disown this Government’.
I helped organise some meetings in Newcastle and on Tyneside for Gould. As a result of being a supporter of his in Nick Brown’s East Newcastle CLP I had to spend a period of two years when I couldnt even get elected to be one of the two constituency auditors – including being beaten by no-one at one AGM!
The reason I supported Gould was that at the time has was a moderniser. He wanted to change the way power in the Labour Party was exercised and by whom. He wanted Labour to have an appeal to the English middle class and to break out of the traditional ghettos of Labour support which had condemned the Labour Party to years of opposition. To me, Bryan Gould was new Labour before it was fashionable. I backed him but he betrayed us. Today’s article is just the latest stage of his own personal betrayal of Labour’s modernisers.
When Gould lost both elections at the same time (to John Smith and Margaret Beckett) rather than stay and fight for what he believed in he flounced out of British politics altogether to live on the other side of the World. Today, Gould (whose experience actually serving in a government is nil) seems to think that his views about British politics from his ivory tower 12,000 miles away actually still count for something significant. He lost all legitimacy to be taken seriously when he couldn’t stand the heat and got out of the kitchen.
I disagree with the content and tone of Gould’s article: the language of ‘betrayal’, which so peppers his writing, is reminiscent of the ritual denunciations of the Trotskyite Left (he should remember because they accused him of precisely that in the 1980s when he called for wider share ownership in Britain and was all but booed off at Party conference); his analysis that the Labour government has rejected “any decent and civilised values” is simply hysterical.
Others no doubt will want to challenge his economic argument. I just want to comment on his international one. He denounces the Iraq War as a contravention of civilised norms, based on a lie, which undermined the UN and destroyed Iraq. Wrong, wrong and wrong again.
Firstly, the Iraq War was waged to remove weapons of mass destruction and, as a positive byproduct, end the fascistic regime of Saddam Hussein, his psychopathic sons and their henchmen. Would it have been more ’civilised’ to let the regime continue to torture, kills and commit genocide against its own people?
Second, the war was fought because Saddam refused to comply with UN resolutions. Governments across the World believed that he possessed WMD. Yes, there were differences of opinion on the actions that should follow. Yes, there were errors of intelligence, perhaps even of presentation. But no, the governments that were part of the Coalition of the Willing did not lie. And none of the (too) many inquiries have shown that they intended to.
Third, the UN was not undermined by the Iraq War. There was an effort – led by Tony Blair – to achieve a second resolution but it was vetoed by President Chirac who made clear he would oppose military action whatever. No-one knows if that resolution had been passed if Saddam would have woken up and smelled the coffee and started to properly comply with the UN resolutions. What is clear though is that what undermines the UN is the failure of its Security Council members to properly enforce its resolutions – and the failure of the UN to be able to resolve anything at all, as with Kosovo.
Fourthly, Iraq was not destroyed. Iraq today is a democracy where record numbers of people participate in peaceful elections. There have been challenges, failures in the initial period after the liberation to ensure security for all but, Iraq today is rebuilding itself and showing that democracy can flourish in a majority muslim country in the Middle East.
Those of us who stayed and fought for the creation of New Labour, the successful election victories of 1997, 2001 and 2005, who contributed to the success of Labour in government, who continue to support this government in the difficult economic times since Tony Blair left office do not need Bryan Gould to disown us. He was never part of us when it happened. He never owned it in the first place.
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