The Expense of New Labour
As the scandal of MPs’ expenses unfolds, it threatens not only to expose individual sleaze but to create a crisis of confidence that will engulf the whole of the political class and Parliament as well.
While it’s not surprising that Labour, as the party in power, is in the firing line, the Tories, and others, all have their skeletons in the cupboard too. But for Labour loyalists, it is not enough to say that others are equally culpable; we feel that we have the right to expect better from Labour.
It is probably not too harsh to say that we don’t necessarily expect too much by way of principle from the Tories. They have always been a party of the self-interested. That self-interest is sometimes – in their better moments – tempered by a touch of noblesse oblige; but, in these days of the “self-made man”, there hasn’t been too much noblesse in evidence.
Politics is, we know, a difficult business which demands compromise and the adjustment of principle to suit reality; but Labour politics has always seemed to enjoy – even in an era of aggressive individualism – the redeeming influence of a genuine concern for others and for the well-being of the whole community. So, how did we come to this? How did Labour embrace a culture of self-aggrandisement, pursued even against the interests of the disadvantaged in that society that we like to insist, pace Margaret Thatcher, does exist?
It might be argued that we can’t indict the whole Labour Party because of the defalcations of a few. Well, that is indeed the question. Has New Labour’s “intense relaxation” about the “filthy rich” now been extended to ourselves? And does that indulgence cover the “filth” as well as the riches? Is this what New Labour now stands for in British politics?
Is there, in other words, a recognisable connection between the politics of New Labour and the fall from grace of individual Labour standard-bearers? The first evidence of this was the emphasis placed by the New Labour project on doing whatever was necessary in order to win power, even if that meant the abandonment of principle. Opinions may differ on whether the junking of much that had been considered to be core Labour values was really required for electoral victory – and no one can doubt that the way in which those values should be applied to the issues of the twenty-first century was overdue for re-appraisal.
But what was surprising about New Labour was the enthusiasm shown, not just for change and renewal, but for the positive adoption of a quite different agenda – one that had hitherto been seen, with its acceptance that the market should not be challenged and that growing inequality was the necessary condition for economic development, as the property of the right. The Labour Party found itself cut adrift from its traditional emphasis on the central role of government as defender of the weak, as a counter-force to an unfettered market and as a guarantor that everyone shared in growing prosperity.
As it floated free from its traditional moorings, little wonder that a new generation of Labour leaders became confused about what they were in politics for. If policy dictated that unashamed greed was indeed the irreplaceable mainspring of economic advance, how could it be wrong to act on those same precepts in one’s own life?
The whole thrust of the Blair government was, after all, that politics didn’t really matter, and indeed were best eschewed altogether. The Blair pitch was always that, if voters elected the right people (“pretty straight sort of guys”), they could safely forget about politics which would become nothing more than an annoying distraction – the domain of a few fanatics. The Labour Party was assured that it did not need political analysis or a programme for real reform.
But without that analysis and programme, what was power for? The question matters little to the right; power for them is the means by which the pace and direction of change can be controlled and, at times, completely frustrated. But for the left, power is surely a means to an end, to a different and better society – one which shares its benefits with everyone.
But that, too, was denied by New Labour. For them, the purpose of power was not to use it but to enjoy it and extend it. Power was a state of being, not a path to change. The over-riding priority of New Labour was always, from the first day of taking power, to retain it by winning the next election. Power as the instrument of change would be limited to those measures that did not alienate powerful interests and thereby jeopardise the perpetuation of power.
That is why controlling the agenda through spin, why manipulating events through a mastery of the minutiae, of the often grubby day-to-day detail of politics, became the leit-motifs of New Labour government. They rarely bothered to lift their eyes to wider horizons or to re-connect with their core values. Tomorrow’s headlines were always their prime concern.
Little wonder, then, that New Labour leaders lost their way. Short-term advantage, politically and personally, was all that mattered. The Labour Party is paying a heavy price for that distorted view of what left politics should be about.
Bryan Gould
12 May 2009
This article was published in the online Guardian (Comment Is Free) on 13 May
Not In My Name
Those, like me (and almost everyone I know in the Labour Party), who have been critical over the years of New Labour and its record in government might have expected that the passage of time would bring with it a kinder judgment. And in my case, in particular, it might have been thought that – twelve thousand miles away – distance would lend enchantment.
How, then, to explain that the more we take the long view of the Blair and now the Brown government, the sharper seem the contours of its failures and betrayals? How is it that the features of its landscape that grow – as our perspective lengthens – in shocking, anger-making prominence are those shameful episodes at home and abroad which cumulatively are a complete denial of what a Labour government (or any British government) should have been about?
There have been of course many good and decent day-by-day achievements of this government. Across the whole range of political issues, I do not say that Britain did not do better under Labour than it would have done under most alternatives. But these achievements have been molehills, judged against the towering peaks scaled by New Labour in its rejection not only of Labour, but of any decent and civilised values.
The first – and for that reason perhaps most unexpected – contravention of civilised norms was the Iraq war. The damning judgment of that doomed enterprise has been repeatedly rehearsed, but to read the charge sheet again is still a shocking experience. A British Prime Minister, claiming the right to moral leadership and an almost religious duty to confront evil, sucked up to a soon-to-be discredited US President and helped to launch an invasion of a distant country – an invasion based upon a lie, and one that flew in the face of international law, undermined the United Nations, alienated the whole of the Muslim world, seemed to validate the claims of terrorists and those who recruited them, destroyed the country that was invaded and killed hundreds of thousands of its citizens, took many young soldiers to unnecessary deaths, and rightly reduced Britain’s standing in the world.
The New Labour government still refuses to acknowledge that any of this was wrong. It will not even countenance an independent inquiry into how such a fatal mistake was made.
It may seem improbable that the scale of the Iraq calamity could be matched in any other area of government. Yet, as the reasons for and scale of the global recession become clear, it is also increasingly apparent that another global (as well as British) disaster can be laid – substantially if only partly – at the door of the New Labour government.
It was, after all, that government which enthusiastically endorsed the virtues of the “free” market, which turned its back on the need for regulation, which celebrated the excesses of the City, which proclaimed that it was “intensely relaxed about people becoming filthy rich”. The government that should have protected the interests of ordinary people was dazzled by the super-rich; unsuspecting Labour supporters found themselves thrown on the tender mercies of a market-place that was cleared of any limits that might have restricted the rich and powerful. There have been no more enthusiastic cheer-leaders for the culture of greed and excess than New Labour ministers.
On the central issue of politics – the willingness of government to use its democratic legitimacy to intervene in the market in order to restrain its excesses – the New Labour government ensured that the dice lay where they fell and applauded as they did. It was Tony Blair who, standing shoulder to shoulder with Rupert Murdoch, proclaimed that the future lay with the “globalisers” and that those who wanted to reclaim some control over their lives were “Isolationists, nationalists and nativists”. It was Gordon Brown who removed the major economic decisions from democratic control and handed them over to unaccountable bankers.
That betrayal of those who looked to a Labour government to help them has seen a rapid widening of inequality and a sharp intensification of social disintegration. It is the jobs, homes and lives of ordinary people that have borne the brunt. The country is a weaker and poorer place as a result.
But even that failure pales by comparison with the latest revelations about the abandonment by New Labour of any pretence to civilised standards. We now know that this government connived with the Bush administration to hold people illegally, to kidnap them in secret, and to torture them while in custody – all in the name of a war against the forces of darkness. The perpetrators of these outrages seem to believe that they can be washed clean by simply declaring their superior morality.
Nothing more clearly distinguishes those beyond the pale than their willingness to use the secret, illegal and cowardly infliction of pain to terrify, cow and bend to their will helpless people being held without charge or trial or legal redress. It beggars belief that any British government could, in a supposed democracy, do so, and not even bother to respond to its critics. It is simply incredible that a Labour government claiming to represent the values of the Labour movement could believe in these circumstances that it has any right to remain in office.
For me, this is too much. I am sick to the stomach. I disown this so-called Labour government. I protest.
Bryan Gould
20 February 2009
This article was published in the online Guardian on 22 February.
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