This time the brothers won't save Labour

12 September 2009

Phil Collins reviews the week in politics

Which latter fact makes the argument about public spending crucial. Search parties have been sent from Downing Street to discover the lost tribe which agrees with the Prime Minister’s line on investment versus cuts. In Liverpool they will be found.

Notwithstanding Alistair Darling’s clear victory in refining the formula, some version of investment versus cuts will define the politics of the general election. If there were a general election on the Planet Zork in the year Infinity And One, the Brown strategy would be to set investment against cuts. This is the conjugation of the verb to Gordon: I invest, you cut, he thinks this whole argument is ludicrous. The Prime Minister’s motivation is not empirical; it is existential. He thinks Tories cut services as a matter of ideological conviction. ‘Tory cuts’ is, for him, close to tautology, a dictionary definition.

The impasse of this argument means the Labour government is just waiting to expire. Most of the older Cabinet ministers have retired, hurt. Most of the younger ones have their heads down, enthusiastically expatiating on the next big thing in their department. That they are colluding in an avoidable political disaster no longer seems to concern them. They talk about Gordon and Peter as if they were describing their Mum and Dad and they’d been allowed to stay up late to watch the football.

In the historical two-step of the Labour party and the trade unions, it has usually been the case that only one has been bonkers at any given time. To anyone schooled in politics by the corporatist catastrophe of 1978, the unions in the role of saviour seems wildly unlikely. But time and again in the history of the Labour party, the trade union bloc vote has been the weapon of the leadership against the membership. Whenever the Labour party flirted with oblivion, in the 1930s and in the 1980s, it was the earthy good sense of the trade unions that brought it back from the brink.

In fact, for at least the first half of its first century, it was the Labour party’s bourgeois intellectuals who were its in-house menace. The now forgotten books of Douglas Jay, Evan Durbin and Hugh Dalton committed the party to the methods of planning and central control from which the party has been in retreat almost ever since. The trade unions, by contrast, wasted no time gazing at the shining city on the hill. They wanted a better deal for their people, in this world, now.

The historic role for the trade unions is calling again. For all their virtues, you have to wonder whether Messrs Prentis, Crow and Simpson are up to it.

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Gil

September 11th, 2009 5:24pm Report this comment

Ooooh how exciting! The guy from Genesis writing for my favourite mag!

Alan Yates

September 11th, 2009 6:48pm Report this comment

Damn good first article Phil. One minor suggestion: perhaps Gordon and Peter should be, more appropriately, Dad and Mum, not Mum and Dad.
I still regret not attending your concert at Kingsmead in Durban.