A party talking to itself: this is what Labour risks becoming after Blair
Will the Labour party go bonkers after Blair? I only ask because the early signs are worrying — or reassuring — depending what view you take of these things. To judge by the attitudes and prejudices manifesting themselves in the transition from Mr Blair to Mr Brown, the party is gagging to put itself on the wrong side of the electorate.
The Blairite attachment to the reformist centre-ground is absolute and has all the binding force of a sacred text. Of course, its potential has not been realised in many areas and there have been what the PM primly calls ‘unhelpful distractions’, like a war gone wrong and the Met at the door. But fiercely guarding that territory is what Mr Blair and his allies have done best through three elections. Because we have grown used to it, not to say bored with it, we take it for granted. Big mistake.
The internal ecology of the party is changing fast, even before Gordon Brown gets to run the show. It is not (yet) a lurch to the Left, but it is a loosening of the moorings as the PM prepares to depart: a sense that it is no longer fashionable to be too enthusiastic about the government’s remaining reforms and that a return to the old comfort zones is fine and even desirable.
Labourworld woke me up on Saturday morning when Fiona Millar, the former No. 10 aide, argued on the Today programme that the problem with education under Mr Blair was that too much back-door selection had crept in. Here is the classic example of a Labourworld truth — an interpretation of the facts widely agreed with in her own party, but absolutely mystifying to almost everyone else. Pretty much all instinctive Tories — except David Cameron and David Willetts in the new edition — think that there is not enough selection and are fretful at killing off a revival of grammar schools. Mr and Mrs Floating Voter are more likely to complain at the lack of good schools or selection by house price. But the feisty Ms Millar’s theory is very popular in Labour: she would be education secretary if the party had an open vote on it.
What is more interesting and threatening for New Labour is the way that many other fundamental tenets of the Blair years are seen as up for negotiation or dilution. Consider what Charles Clarke aptly referred to as the ‘ridiculousness’ of the deputy leadership contest. Most of the candidates are, to varying degrees, running from the Left because they have concluded that is where the votes are: Peter Hain, Hilary Benn and Alan Johnson are under no illusions that this is what the party wants to hear.
Only Hazel Blears has pointed out the unpopular Blairite/Blearite truth that a party that loses touch with voters who have ambition and aspiration, especially in the South, is flirting with defeat. This seems to have escaped everyone else in the race and is deemed to make her chances small because — as one of her competitors put it — ‘Gordon doesn’t like that stuff’.
Mr Brown is more of a conundrum than his enemies realise, being an adept strategist who has, since the 1992 disaster, put himself on the side of whatever was necessary for a Labour victory. But he has one major problem: namely the expectation that a Brown-led government will be more recognisably and traditionally Labour in its outlook than a Blair one, an impression he has allowed to flourish over many years (‘At our best when we are Labour’, etc.). So Mr Hain has suggested that City bonuses should be taxed and added that private equity firms should not be allowed to asset-strip companies, which is a bit like asking Dracula to leave the blood bank for another line of business: it is just not going to happen. The mark of a Labour Truth is that it does not matter if it is going to happen or not, as long as you say it and it appeals to the ancestral distrusts. At some deeper level, many in the party have convinced themselves that this is what the Chancellor really wants to hear, even if he has to affect to be a centrist figure.
The Education Secretary Alan Johnson effectively bounced Mr Blair into enforcing the ban on Catholic adoption agencies on the grounds that equality must trump all other arguments or benefits. ‘Magic’ Johnson is engaging, forthright and largely responsible for ensuring that the Tuition Fees Bill was passed. To date, he has squared his principles and union roots with thoroughly Blairite reforms to become one of the most persuasive faces of the government.
His present priorities are different: a stirring speech in praise of single parents included a denunciation of any recognition of marriage in the tax system as ‘pernicious’. Many people may be persuaded that it is unfair to reward married families above oth ers — but not many outside Labourworld would think it ‘pernicious’. He does his job in defending city academies but (I note from his Tribune interview) on the grounds that they ‘help the poorest’. The point about allowing different kinds of school, and the reason the policy was so hard-fought and contentious, is that they are intended to drive up standards and remove the deadening uniformity of the state system — and not just that they will be built in areas of deprivation. That is the difference between really believing in them and just accepting them. It will also determine whether such ideas remain influential or wither on the vine.
We haven’t touched on America yet. Mr Hain felt free suddenly to brand the entire ‘neocon’ foreign-policy vision ‘a failure’. Clearly, he is only distantly related to the brave minister of the same name with whom I debated on the same side in favour of intervention in Afghanistan and Iraq — under a neocon US leader. Now you would have to be dim, in denial, or Donald Rumsfeld to say that Iraq since the invasion has been a success. The terrible and avoidable failures, why they happened and what our responsibilities now are: these are subjects about which there should be honest argument. What is not honest is to suggest that whats-his-name in Downing Street dragged you into an alliance with the Great Satan and you agreed in a fit of absentmindedness. A prominent young ministerial supporter of the Chancellor tipped for greatness told me, when I asked what New Labour would be about after Blair: ‘The centre-left believes in the power of the state to do things — that’s what differentiates us from the Tories.’ I felt a strange jolt of Life Before Tony. Does the government still think that what it can best offer against David Cameron resides in being keener on using the state than the Conservatives? Very few people, outside the Labour tribe, would make that a defining priority.
If the Chancellor isn’t already worried about the cumulative impression all this is creating of a party talking to itself, he should be. One senior backbench ally told me in all seriousness that ‘Gordon will need voices to the left of him to balance his ticket because he’s now seen as the rightwing candidate’. Yes, Labourworld really is back. Lucky Mr Cameron.
Anne McElvoy is executive editor of the Evening Standard.
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