Labour has to reinvent itself to fight the next general election, says Phil Collins. The leadership contenders must look to the party’s radical roots
So, they were looking in the wrong place all along. For years now the Labour party has been seeking a steely assassin to deal with its unelectable leader. Finally, where James Purnell failed tragically and Geoff Hoon failed farcically, Nick Clegg has succeeded. Gordon Brown has gone and the Labour party is even more leaderless than when he was actually there.
Now that Britain has finally settled on a government, the campaigns will start. Or rather, resume. Discreet campaigning has been going on for some time. For Ed Balls, that means visiting constituency dinners and spending Saturdays writing the front half of the Sunday papers. For David Miliband, it means preparing himself psychologically, after two false starts. Then, for those who cannot decide between Ed and Miliband, there is the both of the above candidate: Ed Miliband. Early campaigning for Ed means making calls ostensibly about something else in which the question of leadership never quite comes up but both parties put the receiver down sure that something important has happened. They are just not sure what. Jon Cruddas will be implored to run by sections of the left and the contest would be all the better for having him in it. Don’t rule out Andy Burnham or Liam Byrne testing the water either. It could be a crowded field.
There could also be quite a fight. Neither the charisma of Tony Blair nor the coronation of Gordon Brown ever united the Labour party philosophically. It just held it, first in awe and then in shock. Now that the old guard has passed on — the desperate and laughable attempt to conjure a rainbow coalition was their last act — the dispute can begin. So, the question in the Labour party is not, will we have a row? It is, which row shall we have? There are lots of possible rows that the Labour party might have and it is very important that it chooses the right one.
Some of the old blood feuds will pass quickly into folk memory. Roy Hattersley has already endorsed Ed Miliband on the grounds that Ed Balls is little Brown and David Miliband is little Blair. That is unfair to all three of them. Ed Miliband is more than that and neither Ed Balls nor David Miliband will run campaigns based on the generation just gone. The Blair/Brown rivalry had no redeeming virtues; the sooner the party abandons that dirty talk the better.
The same is true of Old and New Labour. The distinction was always a caricature. Old just meant Labour governments from years ago that spent all the money and ended up in fiscal crisis. Ooops. The title of New Labour is also one that nobody wants. For too long the epithet ‘new’ was used to beat up those who were, by contrast, antediluvian, ridiculous and unelectable. They were all of those things, of course, but there’s no great profit in reminding them. All the candidates will declare the war between Old and New to be finished.
The framing of the argument matters crucially. I once asked a group of Labour MPs if they thought universities should be funded by taxing the pay of graduates in proportion to income, or whether students ought to take out a loan which they then repay later. They all chose the former and wouldn’t change their minds when I pointed out that the two options were the same. Tuition fees, a terrible betrayal; a capped graduate tax, part of the historic mission.
There are two possible rows about the type of leader Labour needs and two about the ideas it ought to pursue. The argument about the leader could be Culprit versus Victim or it could be Government versus Opposition. The argument about ideas could be Vintage versus Future or it could be People Power versus State Power.
The contest between Culprit and Victim is an argument about the cause of defeat. In one sanctioned version of recent history, Labour’s successes were all first term and were all trademarked HM Treasury. Then came wars and reforms and it all went awry. This is the way in which conservatives in the Labour party can pose as radicals. They are New Labour in general but never in particular. The greatest strategic ability of Team Brown has been to cast themselves as Victim. They are being victimised even as they read this sentence.
Insufficient pride in the record takes the party to Ed Balls. It provides a mandate for doing nothing very much. It can be done on the same plan that Gordon Brown was working to when he entered Downing Street, which is to say no plan at all. This might even provide a platform for a tough opposition but you can’t win an election from there.
The David Miliband camp could counter that this is actually more of a Government versus Opposition election. Labour are not far behind the Tories and it is possible that a party electing a potential Prime Minister will behave differently from one that is contemplating a long spell in opposition. In this frame, polls that outline public perceptions will be vital. Expect Frank Luntz and a Newsnight focus group to have a big say in who wins.
But this is still without content. It doesn’t describe the sort of Labour party that might win an election, even if its leader scrubs up nicely. Without a guiding idea, this is just one more heave. The obvious way of supplying content to the contest is to stick on the labels ‘Left’ and ‘Right’. There is no avoiding this entirely but Ed Balls is too astute to be trapped as the ‘Left’ candidate, especially if he finds Jon Cruddas in the same space. Terms will be devised to draw in those Labour people who think New Labour was an aberration from its history, which it was. If one side says it is the keeper of the flame, the custodian of equality, replete with endorsements from Hardie, Attlee and Bevan, the other side will project itself as the glorious Future. The team with the answers to the new challenges, all that sort of guff.
There is a halfway intriguing contest hidden in there, even if it may not look like it. But it’s likely to produce a candidate with a mandate to look back in comfort. The best way to ensure a serious argument, out of which a serious leader emerges with a viable prospectus, is to cut the party up another way. The choice for the Labour party is between Alan Milburn’s anger that the council chose the colour of his door and Ed Balls’s centrally issued guidelines for rhubarb crumble.
There is a radical tradition in the Labour party which, in Bevan’s famous formulation, seeks power in order to give it away. The advocates of People Power think it both outrageous and characteristic of government that it might tell you that you can have any colour door as long as it’s blue. The State Power faction believe, as a first resort, that government is the answer. Their faith in the central state ends in the attempt to micro-manage the nation.
G.D.H. Cole once said that the Labour party was a battle between the federalisers and the centralisers. There are right-wing federalisers (Marquand) and right-wing centralisers (Hattersley). There are left-wing federalisers (later Benn) and left-wing centralisers (Campaign Group). There are people who are both at once (Crosland) and people who travel from one to the other (Blair).
This argument would turn out a leader with a mandate to extend popular power. It would avoid an arcane fight about minor doctrinal points that will be incomprehensible to the rest of the nation. It might forge a new and arresting coalition within the party. And it might mean they are ready in the event that the new government struggles with the appalling legacy that the Labour party has been cunning enough to leave behind.
Phil Collins is a former speechwriter for Tony Blair.
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