Saving Labour
I surely cannot have been the only reader to stop short mid-sentence at Nicholas Watts’ statement (Guardian, 13 January) that Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and Peter Mandelson had “wrenched Labour out of the wilderness”. The trio may have a number of achievements to their credit but the claim that they saved the Labour Party is – at the very least – open to question. It is precisely this kind of apparently casual but seriously misleading assertion which – unless challenged – can quietly become part of the accepted wisdom. History should not so easily be re-written.
By the time Tony Blair became leader of the Labour Party in 1994, the Labour Party had substantially recovered from the nadir of its fortunes in 1983. That recovery owed a great deal to the leadership of Neil Kinnock. Under Kinnock, the Party had stopped the rot by 1987, had begun to divest itself of outdated policies, and had averted the real risk of falling behind the Liberals and Social Democrats. It had made further strides towards electability by 1992, and lost that election against many predictions only because – despite his substantial qualities – Kinnock could not seal victory by reaching out to that further range of middle-class opinion which had succumbed to the claims of the Tory media that he was nothing but a garrulous working-class boyo.
It is very much to Kinnock’s credit that he recognised this and relinquished the leadership accordingly. Although I had my reservations about John Smith (and would have hoped for a more positive approach to the prospect of government), few can doubt surely that Labour was, under new leadership, heading for a comfortable victory at the next general election.
The reasons for that optimism are, and were, not difficult to substantiate. General elections are almost always lost by the governing party. By 1994, the heyday of Thatcherism had long passed. Mrs Thatcher herself had been deposed by her own party some years earlier because the electorate was increasingly out of sympathy with her extreme views and policies. John Major had won an unlikely victory in 1992 but had failed to convince the electorate that he was made of the right stuff to lead the country.
My own view is that when voters woke on the morning after the 1992 election, they were dismayed to realise that they were faced with another five years of Tory government. From that moment onwards, the die was cast. They were determined to secure a change of government at the next opportunity.
It was certainly a signal achievement of the Blair/Brown/Mandelson “project”, (what later became “New Labour”), to persuade a Labour Party starved of electoral success that only a wholesale abandonment of its values and policies would guarantee victory. But this was a piece of sleight of hand. Not only was aping the Tories not needed; the electorate was actually very clear that it wanted change and a decisive move away from the Thatcherite agenda.
This contention is supported by what actually happened in the 1997 general election. No one would doubt that Tony Blair was an electorally attractive candidate and that his appeal could well have added a margin to the Labour victory. But the real story of the 1997 election was that, after 18 years of right-wing and (especially after the debacle of the Exchange Rate Mechanism) incompetent government, Tory voters were disheartened and stayed at home. It was that lack of commitment, and the recognition that change was inevitable, not the abandonment of Labour principles, that accounted for the “landslide”. If, under a first-past-the-post system, your opponents stay at home, you win big.
The real issue in assessing the role of the Blair/Brown/Mandelson trio in the Labour Party’s history is to ask, not what did they do to bring about election victory (which was largely assured by the time they arrived on the scene), but what did they do with power once the general election had delivered it to them. The answer to this question is much less flattering to them than Nicholas Watts’ claim about their “wrenching Labour out of the wilderness” would suggest.
Every day that goes by makes it clearer that the contribution of New Labour in government has been to provide an unexpected, unwarranted and unnecessary prolongation to the Thatcherite era. New Labour has assiduously followed George Bush in foreign policy and Alan Greenspan in economic policy. On the central question of politics – the relationship between government and the market – New Labour has settled decisively on the side of the “free” market, with the consequences we are now living with. We should be very careful about investing those responsible with encomiums of praise for allegedly saving what is valuable in left politics.
Bryan Gould
18 January 2009
Putrefaction
I joined the Labour Party in 1964. I had been moving left since leaving home, and two years at Oxford during the fag-end of the Macmillan government had convinced me that Britain needed a Labour government. I was outraged when a run on sterling following Labour’s narrow election victory seemed to me to show that the City was intent on reversing the decision delivered by the popular vote. I joined up as my own small personal declaration of defiance.
I suppose I had expected when I joined the Labour Party to become part of a great movement of principle and social justice, dedicated to improving the lot of the common citizen – an heir to a great tradition of resistance to privilege, greed and injustice. It wasn’t quite like that – the primary focus was on a weekly bingo session which raised just enough money to keep our pathetically small branch alive – but there was no shortage of good people, and plenty of debate about how a Labour government could reform and improve society.
When I was eventually elected to Parliament, I discovered that there were many different kinds of people who had become Labour MPs. There were the usual placemen and time-servers, there were those who craved the supposed fame and glamour or who enjoyed the massaging of their egos, there were the machine politicians who relished playing the game for its own sake. But there were also, in good numbers, men and women who were genuinely motivated by a desire to do good (how odd that “do-gooder” is almost now a term of abuse) and who saw their time in Parliament as a chance to improve the lives of those who had sent them there.
And while MPs, like everyone else, had their share of character flaws, and some were attracted by the mantra that all was fair in love and politics, most dealt with their colleagues – from whatever side of the House – with the same courtesy, respect and fairness that they would expect to be shown in their private lives.
That is why I am distressed at the latest headlines. What have they got to do with Labour values and the true purpose of Labour politics? What relevance do Russian billionaires and Mediterranean yachts have to the lives of Labour voters who look to the Labour Party to advance and protect their interests? Are we really to accept that the road to social justice lies through the – literally – “filthy rich”?
What is that sweet fetid odour of putrefaction that assails our nostrils? What is the satisfaction to be gained from the “high life” if what it brings is a grubby game of tit-for tat and tittle-tattle? Are the knife in the back and the poisoned whisper the proper instruments for the achievement of Labour’s noble purpose?
If Gordon Brown wants to save his government, and more importantly his party, he should eschew the use of these reputed “skills” and “arts”. There are no straits so dire for government or party as to warrant a descent to these depths.
Was Gordon Brown’s Reputation Justified?
Like so many others, I looked forward to Gordon Brown’s accession to Number Ten. Here, I thought, was the chance of breaking with the spin and superficiality of the Blair years. With Gordon, we would surely hear the authentic voice of Labour and welcome the end, even if it was not publicly acknowledged, of the New Labour project.
Why have those expectations been so comprehensively dashed? How did we get it so wrong? Why is Gordon’s leadership proving such an unmitigated disaster?
There is not one, but several answers to these questions. Those who saw in Gordon a mere technocrat, a bloodless (not to say desiccated!) calculating machine, may have had a point after all. Here, it seems, is a man who may live and breathe politics, but who is incapable of articulating what he feels about it. The more he talks of his “vision” the more arid it seems.
We can now see that his many critics may have been right in condemning him for being more comfortable with figures than with people. Those long years of apprenticeship in The Treasury may have been, perhaps, an amazing stroke of luck – providing him with the closeted comfort of doing his sums while never having to confront the real blood and guts world of real politics.
And how lucky he was in another sense. He inherited an economy that had been released from the bondage of the Exchange Rate Mechanism and which accordingly proceeded to out-perform our European competitors, saddled as they were with euro-driven centro-monetarism, by a comfortable margin. This was the era of the easy-credit property bubble. The tenant of Number 11 Downing Street needed to do no more than look and sound tough, and then sit back and garner the plaudits of those who reaped the profits – plaudits which hugely inflated an unearned reputation.
It may be that that reputation has always been much more substantial than was ever deserved. I have recently consulted my own memoir of the period when Gordon Brown as Shadow Chancellor insisted, even more fiercely than the Tory government, that the United Kingdom should remain within the ERM, come what may. I noted at the time that “it has always been a puzzle to me that people who make mistakes of such magnitude and reveal such a total inability to understand the issues of which they are supposed to be masters nevertheless sail serenely on, unscathed by any suggestion that they might not be up to the job.”
Gordon’s reputation as a successful Chancellor and a Prime Minister in waiting may, perhaps, always have been based on a soufflé of good fortune and complacent media who were content to go along with the myth rather than probe for the reality. And the Labour Party itself failed to meet its responsibilities as well.
When the time came to elect a successor to Tony Blair, the Party had its one chance to satisfy itself that the Brown reputation was justified. A leadership election would have provided a contest of ideas, of vision, of sheer political nous, which might have been enough to ring alarm bells.
It was with that goal in mind that I was prompted to stand against John Smith, another widely anointed successor to the leadership, in 1992. Unhappily, no one could be found in today’s Labour Party to undertake such a daunting but necessary task.
So, is Gordon – and his personal qualities or lack of them – solely to blame for the debacle? Certainly not. The tragedy for Gordon is that a career that was blessed for so long by extraordinary good fortune has now seen his luck turn big-time. His undoubted strengths might continue to have won the day but for two strokes of bad luck over which he has had little control.
The first is the bursting of the credit bubble and the consequent and threatening damage to the whole international banking sector and world economy. It could be argued that, as Chancellor for most of the relevant period, he cannot escape blame for what has happened, but – even so – there are many reputations other than his that must, in the light of what we now know, be reviewed even more savagely.
The second is that he is not, in reality, a first-term Prime Minister. The Blair-Brown duo is so well-established in the public mind that Gordon has not had the luxury of a fresh start and fresh hopes for his government. The failures of the Blair government, and the disenchantment not only with Labour politics but with a politics as a whole, are Gordon’s failures as well. His long-time friend and rival has had the last laugh. The keys to Number Ten came enclosed in a poison chalice.
Bryan Gould
28 July 2008
This article appeared in the online Guardian on 28 July
New Labour – Not Labour
New Labour’s current travails have prompted a number of people to recall a piece I wrote for the New Statesman in 1999 – it was a review of Paul Routledge’s biography of Peter Mandelson – and to ask if they can see it again. So, here it is.
“When Peter Mandelson’s resignation from the cabinet was reported in New Zealand – a resignation apparently caused by Paul Routledge’s investigations – he was described to a public which had never heard of him before as “the architect of New Labour”. “Yes,” said my New Zealand friends, who had noticed the capital N, “but what is New Labour?”
As many have remarked, the capital N is significant (though the New Statesman style sheet sticks resolutely with the lower-case version). It signifies that “New Labour” is, and was intended to be, much more than might have been expected as a rational response to four consecutive election defeats and to the huge social and other changes which have taken place in Britain over two decades. Those changes, whose pressing necessity by the end of the 1980s was surely evident to all but the most purblind, would have taken place in any case.
The modernisation of Labour, the reappraisal of Labour policy, the rethinking of the relevance of Labour principle to modern circumstances, the recognition of people’s aspirations as well as their needs, the positioning of Labour as a political force which empowers rather than limits, the reaching out to a new majority – all of this was already being undertaken by many Labour thinkers and activists who did not see the need for that capital N.
The truth is that “New” Labour is more than a renewal or modernisation or updating of Labour. It is a project born of the conviction that Labour was dead – in the sense that it would never again be electable. Something new – in the sense of a complete break – was required. It was the completeness of the break that mattered. New Labour defined itself by not being Labour. Issues on which the break could be highlighted were actively sought. New Labour is not Labour renewed. It is Labour rejected, Labour renounced. New Labour is a negative. New Labour is, and is meant to be, Not Labour.
We do not need to look far for the genesis of this belief. There is a constituency out there which is instinctively Not Labour. They knew immediately what the three-letter word beginning with a capital N really meant.
They are the people who had always wanted a party that would salve their consciences, would give them a sense of moral and intellectual superiority, would provide them with the illusion that they were – under the skin – blood brothers of the dispossessed, without threatening the comfortable privilege which they enjoyed and expected. They are the intelligent, well-meaning, agreeable dinner party companions who reveal that, despite their socialist convictions, it turned out that the local school was simply not academic enough or little Johnny was just too sensitive and so, after an appropriate struggle with their consciences, they had to send him to a fee-paying school.
These people had always had a problem with Labour. They did not like Labour’s sharp edges. They voted Labour in a good year, but also flirted with the Liberals, might even have supported a liberal Tory, and enthusiastically supported the Social Democrats for a time. They are found disproportionately among the liberal professions, the universities and the media. They are people who love to, and are often paid to, think, talk and write about politics.
Peter Mandelson, as Routledge’s book shows, understands this world very well. It is his world. It is in numerical terms a small world, but it is disproportionately important in shaping the political agenda. It is also a world which, despite its smallness, has the self-confidence (not to say arrogance) to believe that it is all there is, or at least all that matters. (It is one of the paradoxes of a complex society like Britain that it is possible to have an existence which is almost completely insulated against the lives and experiences of large numbers of other and different people.)
And so Not Labour was born – a party shorn of all those aspects that might frighten the bien-pensants. It was, from the outset, an exercise in exaggeration, in overkill. Yet what determined the 1997 election result was that Thatcherism was a busted flush, John Major had been permitted by the electorate’s casual decision in 1992 to demonstrate conclusively that he was not up to it, and the voters were determined to secure a change. The question of renewed Labour or new Labour was simply not a major factor.
But a Labour Party that had been brought, understandably, over years in the wilderness to the belief that any sacrifice was worthwhile for the sake of election victory had given up any will to contest what they were told by the experts. If embracing Not Labour was the price of victory, then so be it. The possibility that the sacrifice may not have been necessary was not allowed to intrude into the euphoria when victory finally came.
Yet sacrifice it clearly was. Much that is important and valuable to British politics and British democracy has been jettisoned. The prospects of acting on a non-establishment view as to how British society might be reformed have been fatally undermined. Democratic choice has been limited. Not Labour is self-consciously a centrist party whose purpose is to marginalise and starve of sustenance parties to the right – and the left. The only competitors allowed will be those who provide, for marketing purposes, merely an alternative brand of centrist politics.
That is how it will seem, and rightly, to many Labour activists. For many of them (and I think particularly of members of the cabinet), the last decade has been a painful period, over which they have yielded up more and more of what it was that mattered to them as individuals and as a collective. This has involved more than the process of compromise and pragmatism which is central to all democratic politics. It is even more than the less savoury treacheries, large and small, that individuals make in secret for the sake of personal ambition. What was required of all those Labour activists was a sustained, deliberate and collective abandonment of what had brought most of them into politics in the first place.
Battle-scarred as they are (and the scars are in private as well as public places), most remain nevertheless grounded in Labour politics. For them, Not Labour is a device, a means to an end. Increasingly, they look from one to another, mutely asking for a sign that the sacrifice will soon be at an end and that the real business of government can begin.
It is beginning to dawn on them, however, that Not Labour is the end and not the means. When they look for reassurance that normal business is to be resumed, they discover a leadership whose instincts, particularly under pressure, are to reinforce the Not Labour message. Their leader’s response to some small local difficulties on returning from abroad is his announcement of new policies which will be “strict and authoritarian” – the authentic voice of Not Labour.
This is not an accident. When Peter Mandelson was famously or notoriously swapping horses in the race for the Labour leadership, it was not just presentational skills he was looking for. Gordon Brown was not instinctively a Not Labour man. Tony Blair was and is. In Blair, Mandelson found his political soulmate – someone who effortlessly and instinctively treads the same path that Mandelson, perhaps more consciously, had mapped out. It is not necessary to dislike Mandelson personally to try to lay this bare. Indeed, the Routledge book is on occasion seriously vitiated by the cheap shots – born no doubt of deep loathing – that he takes at his subject.
On the contrary, Peter Mandelson can be a delightful and charming companion. His charm is an important part of his armoury. It is not an exaggeration to say that he seduces those with whom he wishes to work closely – not in a physical sense, but for the purpose of establishing a sort of emotional thraldom. The bonds between Blair and Mandelson – emotional and political – will not be broken easily.
Nothing in politics is permanent, and Not Labour will fade away sooner or later. But it looks set for a good run. I think I can claim to have seen it coming. It is not for me.
The End of New Labour?
The local election results, and the subsequent opinion polls, suggest that the game is up – not just for Gordon Brown, but for the Labour government. It seems unlikely now that recovery is possible. If anything like the local election result is repeated in a general election, Labour could be out of power for a decade or more.
This may, in other words, be one of those watershed moments in British politics when an apparently well-entrenched political hegemony is suddenly seen to be vulnerable and is about to be replaced by another. In my own political lifetime, I can recall several such moments, when the commentators’ solemn pronouncements that the status quo was unlikely to change were suddenly falsified by an overwhelming swing in political fortunes.
It may not be premature, therefore, to begin thinking about an obituary for Blair/Brown and their New Labour government; for, make no mistake, Labour has not only won as New Labour and governed as New Labour – it will have lost as New Labour too.
It is of course true that no government goes on forever. The cumulative disappointments that inevitably attend the exercise of power mean that any government’s survival for three terms is a signal achievement. In judging New Labour, we should not, therefore, be too harsh about the fact that they may now face defeat.
The obituary writer might however linger longer over New Labour’s legacy. The body politic is, after all, like a tree trunk. A dendro-chronologist is able to derive a huge amount of information from a cross-section of the trunk; each ring is a detailed record of climatic conditions, natural disasters, liability to disease, and so on.
Similarly, the political scientist or historian can see in the development of a given society the imprint and permanent record of each particular political era. British society today still lives with the legacies of the great Labour post-war government, the trauma of Suez and the “never had it so good” prosperity of the Macmillan era, the confusions and struggles – at home and in Europe – of Heath, Wilson and Callaghan, and the harsh – some would say bracing – certainties of Thatcher.
What, then, when the dust has cleared and a sober assessment is possible, will the tree rings show about New Labour? What mark will they have left on British society? If, as New Labour enthusiasts proclaim, the new doctrine was a break with the past and a new beginning, surely what remains will be of considerable significance? And – given the unparalleled opportunities offered by huge parliamentary majorities, a virtually defunct opposition, a charismatic and gifted proselytiser as leader – the government’s programme of reform will have left a particularly lasting legacy?
Sadly, where the tree ring marks the point where the New Labour era ended and another has begun, it is likely that its outline will be blurred and in places non-existent. The “break with the past” will hardly be visible. There will be a broad continuity between what went before and what came after; the New Labour interlude will stand out hardly at all.
There will be clearer marks at places – the Northern Ireland peace process to set alongside and offset the Iraq war for example – but the broad themes will show little change. The tolerance – even encouragement – of inequality, the blind faith in market provision, the exaggerated respect paid to the rich and powerful, the abandonment of the weak and powerless, the impatience with public service and the public sector and organised labour, the reliance on spin rather substance, the belief that the purpose of government is to keep power rather than use it, all represent themes that have changed little in what may well be seen by future commentators as merely an interregnum between Thatcher and Cameron.
It is a sad reflection of this ethos that one suspects that there may be many in New Labour whose main response to Gordon Brown’s travails will be one of schadenfreude. Some will say that if only Tony Blair had remained at the helm, everything would have been different. But, like Mrs Thatcher before him, Tony’s supporters will conveniently forget that he was forced out because he had lost the confidence of his party and the country.
Gordon has had to reap what Tony had sown. I was one of those who hoped and believed that Gordon could save the Labour government, that an injection of more recognisable Labour values might restore some faith in a doomed enterprise. But Gordon has been simply overwhelmed by the torrent of disappointments and resentments of erstwhile Labour supporters. His personal qualities or lack of them have become the lightning rod for all those who wanted change but did not get it.
There is a certain rough justice in this. The New Labour project proved itself to be adept at winning elections – at least for a time. Where it has failed, as readers of the tree rings will one day confirm, is in using government’s power to bring about the change that was needed and that they promised. Instead, they wasted their opportunity and delivered more of the same. All of those who framed the New Labour project are implicated in that failure.
Bryan Gould
This article was published in The Guardian (online) on 12 May 2008
12 May 2008