Brown is not the problem
In September 2006, as Tony Blair was forced to bring forward his departure date by backbench rebellion, The Spectator predicted a Labour civil war. It was not clear when this conflict would erupt, only that its coming was inexorable. This week, battle commenced.
In the wake of disastrous local election results and the loss of London to Boris Johnson, Gordon Brown faces revolt on many fronts. In Scotland, Labour’s leader, Wendy Alexander, has called for a referendum on the future of the United Kingdom. In Westminster, Charles Clarke, the former Home Secretary, has demanded that the PM drop his plans to extend the pre-charge detention period for terror suspects to 42 days, and that Mr Brown ‘finish with dog whistle language, such as British jobs for British workers, which flatters some of the most chauvinistic and backward-looking parts of society’.
The Labour Left, with all the logic of lemmings, urges the PM to embrace pure socialism. Rumours of ultimatums, ‘probationary periods’ and ‘stalking horses’ abound. Above all, the abolition of the 10p tax rate has become symbolic of the government’s rapid disaggregation.
The natural impulse of Labour supporters is to blame their battered leader: according to a Populus poll in the Times on Wednesday, 55 per cent of Labour voters believe that the party would be more likely to win the next general election if Mr Brown resigned ‘to make way for a younger, fresher, more charismatic alternative’. Less than a year ago, the PM could do no wrong in the eyes of his party. Now they attribute all their woes to him. In barely 11 months, Gordon has gone from hero to zero.
The PM’s shortcomings are so familiar that they scarcely need to be rehearsed — although Jon Cruddas, the MP for Barking and Dagenham, was right this week to contrast Mr Brown’s tone-deaf managerial language with the ‘much more sophisticated, emotionally literate Conservatism’ that David Cameron is developing. But the Labour movement’s collective decision to blame the PM and the PM alone for all its afflictions is intellectually lazy as well as morally contemptible. For all his failings, Mr Brown ran rings around all his rivals for 13 long years. He also established a global reputation — deserved or otherwise — as a world-class chancellor. The errors he made in the Treasury are coming back to haunt him now. But as a politician his achievements — stamina, cunning, strategy — have been remarkable. If Mr Brown is so dreadful, why did his party roll over and allow him to succeed Mr Blair as Labour leader and Prime Minister uncontested last June? All those who are now mentioned as alternative leaders had their chance in 2007. None took it.
It is not enough to say that the Brownite machine terrorised MPs, union leaders and activists into submission (although it certainly did its best). In truth, and shamefully, it suited Labour all round for Mr Brown to become the party’s first leader since George Lansbury in 1932 to be crowned rather than elected in a contest. The transition from Tony to Gordon — from one big beast to another — postponed the difficult internal reckoning about trajectory, priority and policy that the party so obviously required after 13 years under Mr Blair’s leadership.
On any number of fronts, Labour needed a debate about its future. Should it pursue the Blairite ‘choice’ agenda in public service reform or settle for Mr Brown’s less radical mix of central control and ‘personalisation’? How far was the post-Blair government willing to go in overhauling the welfare system, and acknowledging that immigration would not be so high if indigenous Britons were willing to take the jobs presently filled by migrant labour? Was Mr Brown right to put such faith in tax credits? Was the party prepared to embrace radical security measures, including extensions of pre-charge detention for terror suspects, or did it wish to put liberty first? On the global stage, should the Labour government persist with Mr Blair’s policy of liberal interventionism? All of these issues, and others, should have been debated in full last year by Labour while it had the chance. In the event, the only issue that was seriously discussed was the precise date of Mr Blair’s departure. When he had gone, the argument rapidly shifted to whether or not there should be an early election. Mr Brown was most culpable in this respect, but he was not alone in this carnival of dithering. As Labour immersed itself in navel-gazing and speculation, Mr Cameron recovered from a disastrous summer, and set the Tory party on the path that led to this month’s spectacular electoral gains.
Under Tony Blair, the Labour party knew more or less what it was for: its purpose was to keep winning elections, often holding its nose to let the modernisers have their way, but essentially confident that the compromise was worth it to keep the Tories out after 18 years of Labour opposition. The economy continued to grow, and the public services enjoyed an unprecedented spending bonanza. Mr Blair bagged three general election victories, and saw off four Tory leaders.
This sense of purpose has drained from Labour. Its language has become hollow and robotic: when ministers talk endlessly about ‘renewal’, ‘long-term decisions’, the ‘progressive consensus’, ‘listening and learning’, ‘the new politics’, ‘aspiration’, ‘empowerment’, they merely render these words and phrases meaningless. The government looks and acts like an enfeebled and effete elite grown listless on the perks of office.
Those who imagine that the Brown government will be saved by a few soundbites or a shopping list of ‘eye-catching initiatives’ are sorely mistaken. What has been revealed in the local elections and Labour’s growing indiscipline is not the failure of an individual party leader, but the obsolescence of a governing party. Labour had the chance to thrash out its future last year and lost its nerve. Mr Brown’s plight is not the cause of his party’s demise, but the most obvious and wretched symptom.
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