‘Things need to be different than what they currently are,’ Derek Simpson, the general secretary of the trade union Amicus, said on the Today programme last week. This is a proposition around which the whole country can unite. But there Mr Simpson’s status as national spokesman begins and ends. The former communist is one of the foremost union barons pressing Labour to change direction radically when Tony Blair leaves office. New Labour, Mr Simpson argues, was the problem: it is time to reassert the workers’ rights and to win back the electorate.
It should be obvious to anyone with the slightest knowledge of recent electoral history that his two objectives — socialist and electoral — are not only distinct but utterly incompatible. As the Prime Minister told the last TUC conference he will address, ‘Believe me, the issue at the next election is not whether we have put in sufficient amounts of money, or have been sufficiently supportive of public sector workers. The issue will be whether we have managed to deliver the outputs for the money the taxpayer feels that they have put in.’
As we argued in this space two weeks ago, New Labour is obsolete: its old-fashioned social democratic prescriptions do not answer the needs of the time. That said, Mr Blair’s rebuke to the brothers was correct. The electorate is not concerned with the so-called ‘privatisation of the public services’. It is, however, increasingly enraged by the pitiful value for money that taxpayers have been offered under this government, even as the tax burden has crept above Germany’s.
Every reliable indicator shows that NHS productivity has declined even as untold billions have been spent on the world’s most bureaucratic and centralised health service. New figures compiled by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development tell a similarly depressing story about our education system. Britain tops the OECD’s table of 30 countries for increased spending — and yet it is still a nation of educational dropouts, with far too many pupils leaving school without even the bare minimum of five or more GCSE grades at C or above.
The issues that animate today’s voters are obvious enough: violent crime, the government’s failure to control the nation’s borders, the embarrassing state of Britain’s public transport system, the ever-present threat of terrorist attack, the crippling rise in council tax and Labour’s wrecking of the pensions system. These are huge issues, requiring fearless, dynamic and sometimes painful solutions.
Labour has chosen a bad moment, therefore, to turn in on itself so spectacularly and to engage in the sort of intra-party politics most voters associate with rows over who should be the next golf club secretary or which member of the family should collect an elderly relative from the station. Having won three successive general elections, the governing party appears determined to squander its hard-won gains and revert to the habits of tribal feuding and disconnection from the wider world that made Labour unelectable for a generation. Our interview with Michael Foot today on page 20 is a reminder of an era in the party’s past from which it learnt many lessons but which some of its most senior figures now seem to have forgotten.
A party that chooses to please only itself or to focus excessively on its ‘core vote’ is doomed to failure. Mr Blair has made many errors, some of them grotesque. Whatever one thinks of his decision to lend support to the US invasion of Iraq, he signed his own political death warrant in doing so without ensuring that adequate plans had been drawn up for the reconstruction of that country. The loans-for-peerages scandal epitomises, at the very least, an arrogance and sneakiness that has long characterised the Blair court — and may reveal, in due course, something much darker about Labour’s fundraising methods. He failed conspicuously to deliver the transformation of the public services he promised in 1997, too often yielding to his Chancellor’s reform-blocking objections.
Yet it is absurd to suggest — as so many in the Labour movement do — that the correct response to the fall of Mr Blair is for the party to revert to type. The country does not need less public service reform, but more. It does not need more ‘workers’ rights’, but greater labour market flexibility so that it can compete in the globalised economy. It does not need fewer prisons, but many more. It does not need more ‘redistribution’, but a lower tax burden.
The party that said it would represent ‘the many, not the few’ is now behaving like the worst and most self-obsessed oligarchy. Indifferent to the interests of the ‘many’ — that is, the voters — the Labour ‘few’ tear chunks out of each other, battling over party positions which are not even formally vacant. Harriet Harman, Jack Straw, Peter Hain and Alan Johnson line up for the deputy leadership, their ‘allies’ briefing furiously against rival camps. Mr Johnson leaves open his options for a run at the top job. John Reid remains the most intriguing and impressive alternative to Gordon Brown, not least because he has behaved with a dignified reticence in the past fortnight.
David Cameron could not ask for a better backdrop for his autumn campaign and his first party conference as leader. He deserves credit for the role he himself has played in driving Labour towards its present identity crisis, both in the fresh appeal he has given his own party and in the lead he has given it in the opinion polls. There will be some Tories in the weeks ahead who argue that the fall of Mr Blair means that the job is done and that Mr Cameron can now afford to slow down his party reforms. The opposite is true. The pressure on the Tory leader to deliver has never been greater. He should persist with his strategy and accelerate its implementation. If he does so, there is no intrinsic reason why he should not become prime minister in 2009.
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