Politicians, like novelists, are obsessed by posterity. Practitioners of the here and now — tomorrow’s headline, the latest poll, the next electoral hurdle — they nurse secret and often vainglorious hopes that their greatest plaudits will come in the future. Before New Labour swept to power in 1997, senior Blairites used to joke about the need to get ‘their betrayals in early’. Now, 11 years later, as the government disintegrates painfully and publicly, Cabinet ministers are rushing to get their side of the story across, to make excuses, and to pass the buck.
Few political interviews have been parsed so closely or caused such an instant storm — financial and political — as Alistair Darling’s cri de coeur in Saturday’s Guardian. It has been argued by the Chancellor’s champions that he was only speaking the truth (if so, why didn’t he speak the truth on Budget Day?) and that his remarks were those of a commendably frank politician relaxing on holiday and unaware that what he said would whip up such a frenzy. Yet it is scarcely credible that Mr Darling, a veteran survivor who has been a senior minister throughout the New Labour era, would not have paused for thought before choosing his words.
Indeed, his language seemed hyperbolic by calculation. It is simply wrong to say that the economic times ‘are arguably the worst they’ve been in 60 years’, as anyone who can remember the last Labour government knows full well. ‘This coming 12 months,’ the Chancellor added, ‘will be the most difficult 12 months the Labour party has had in a generation, quite frankly.’ Worse than the 1987 and 1992 elections, then? In case anyone had missed the point, Mr Darling explained that ‘people are p***ed off with us’. With friends like these, the Prime Minister must have thought, who needs David Cameron?
Mr Darling’s twisting of the skean dhu has been compared to Geoffrey Howe’s rhetorical assassination of Margaret Thatcher in 1990, but the closer parallels are with the resignation of Nigel Lawson in 1989. It is no secret that Mr Darling has had grave reservations about many of the tactical manoeuvres forced upon him by Mr Brown, notably the abolition of the 10p tax rate and then the cack-handed announcement of a £2.7 billion compensation package — a ruse which failed to avert disaster for Labour in the Crewe and Nantwich by-election.
On Tuesday, the Chancellor declared a stamp duty holiday until 3 September 2009 on properties costing less than £175,000. Such interventions in the housing market rarely achieve much beyond making a dent in the public finances: an additional cost the taxpayer can ill afford at present. The announcement was, in any case, gravely undermined by the OECD’s prediction that Britain’s would be the only leading economy in recession by the end of the year.
But Mr Darling’s personal gripe concerns the way in which the stamp duty measure, or a version of it, was floated unilaterally by Number 10 over the summer. Nigel Lawson faced similar problems when Margaret Thatcher’s economic adviser, Sir Alan Walters, was taking policy positions at odds with his own. The question posed by Lawson was the right one: who was truly in charge of economic policy? In his own case, Mr Darling knows the answer all too well: as a former Chancellor, and a uniquely controlling one, Mr Brown still calls the shots. But that has conspired to make his own Chancellor’s position close to untenable. Mr Darling, like the public, is deeply p***ed off.
No less striking this week was the leaked memo by Jacqui Smith, the Home Secretary, warning of terrible ramifications for law and order if the economic downturn gets worse: violent crime, burglaries, racism and membership of extremist groups might all increase, she suggested in the draft document, because of ‘a real or perceived sense of disadvantage held by individuals’. Ms Smith did not quite say that crime would reach its worst levels in 60 years, but the whiff of fatalism that clung to Mr Darling’s remarks was no less clear in her prognosis.
It has always been dubious to claim that there is a crudely causal link between deprivation and criminality: the long period of sustained growth that kept Labour in funds was also a period of shockingly violent crime, antisocial behaviour, binge drinking and the rise of Islamic extremism in this country. Numerous studies around the world have shown that Muslim terrorists are at least as likely to come from relatively prosperous homes as deprived backgrounds: it is ideological conviction, not indigence, that motivates them.
What is most striking, however, is the defeatism of the Home Secretary’s position. Tony Blair’s best known slogan — allegedly coined by Mr Brown — was ‘tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime’. What Ms Smith’s memo demonstrates is that, even by its own criteria, New Labour is conceding defeat. The starting point of the Blair government was that something could be done about the alleged ‘causes of crime’. The premise adopted by Mr Brown’s ministers is that the ‘causes of crime’ are now so overwhelming that we had better be braced for the worst. They shrug their shoulders in despair and says that there is nothing much they can do — beyond sticking on plasters such as those applied this week by Mr Darling — to staunch the flow of blood from the body politic.
The Prime Minister has never recovered from his initial position on the downturn: that this was a problem of foreign manufacture, imported from overseas like a virus, nothing to do with him, guv. In such a context, it is not surprising that his ministers are also trying to clear their names in expectation of eventual electoral disaster, the loss of power for a generation, and a pitiless historical audit of where it all went wrong. From now until the general election — whenever that is — it is everyone for themselves: sauve qui peut.
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