PARANOIA AND PURITANISM
To compare a democratically elected politician seeking a fresh mandate through the ballot box to a brutal dictator is generally a cheap trick. Yet over the last days the resemblance between Labour's top brass and the sight of Romania's Nicolae Ceausescu addressing his people for the last time in 1989 has been unmistakable. There was Jack Straw's Ceausescu moment at the Police Federation conference, Blair's outside a Midlands hospital: both left blinking in bewilderment at the very idea that some of their subjects might no longer love them. And then, regaining their composure, they hatch the idea that of course their people love them: if there is protest on the streets it must all be some dastardly plot by counter-revolutionaries at the state broadcasting service.
Why the paranoia? Here is a government with higher poll ratings than any that has sought re-election in this country before. It should be beaming with confidence. If Gordon Brown wants to squeeze the rich with National Insurance contributions to pay for better public services, he should come out and say so: make a virtue out of it. If the Prime Minister has decided to give up our currency in favour of the euro, he should come out and say that too: sell it to the electorate rather than attempt always to steer the media on to some alternative agenda.
Labour is heading for a hefty election victory, but one which will be by default. The irony is that Tony Blair will win thanks not to the adulation of the public but to those very same 'forces of conservatism' which he sought to despise in his conference speech two years ago. His ploy is to play upon the inertia of voters, their fear of the unknown. He has made the calculation that it doesn't matter how miserable the state of the nation's hospitals: he has only to keep on mentioning 'Tories', 'spending cuts' and 'NHS' in the same breath and a large swath of Britain will vote for him out of fear of some supposed agenda on the part of Her Majesty's opposition to make the voters' grannies pay for their own hip replacements.
The Labour strategy makes it difficult, if not impossible, for its opponents to defeat it with a radical agenda. When the Tories announced, shortly before the last election, a plan to let the state pension evolve into a retirement fund that would invest money on behalf of future pensioners rather than simply paying them a dole from current tax revenues, Labour turned on the plan with full gunnery: the Tories want to abolish the state pension, Labour warned grimly, sending elderly pensioners, who would not be affected by the measure in the least, into fright.
Four years later we can see what Labour was really saying: better to grub along on your 75-pence-a-week state-pension increase than risk contemplating a measure which would enrich future pensioners and save the working population from a National Insurance timebomb. The public services may be shabby, taxes raised to little discernible benefit. but Labour knows it can get away with its lack of ambition just so long as the public can continue to be fed this image of the Tories as the nasty party. 'Okay, we may be causing misery,' Mr Blair seems to be saying to pensioners, hospital patients, motorists, train-travellers, farmers and all, 'but, you know what, those Tories would cause just as much misery, and the difference is that they would enjoy doing it.'
Four years on, it is hard to imagine that the Labour government seeking re-election is the same one which told us early on in its term that it would 'think the unthinkable' on welfare; which sought to fashion a dynamic, younger Britain through the success of the Millennium Dome; which promised to eradicate sleaze by imposing instant dismissal on errant ministers (as opposed to ordering them to take to their beds until the election is over); whose deputy prime minister told us that he would have failed if far fewer people were not by now travelling by road.
There have been some achievements, but largely confined to the areas of pugilism and puritanism. Had Mr Prescott launched himself into the subject of traffic congestion with the same abandon as he did into the crowd at Rhyl, all would have been well. On the puritanism front, Englishmen can now sleep safely in their beds knowing that it is illegal to engage in Olympic pistol-shooting (though gun crime is still rising), that cigarette advertisements will soon be driven from the vests of sportsmen, and that a government Bill has been prepared to save foxes from the chase — though for the truly bloodthirsty there has arisen the excitement of finding a position firing captive bolts at millions of healthy sheep.
The fact that in the midst of the mass slaughter the Prime Minister personally intervened, without even telling his agriculture minister, to save the life of one calf whose media career was interfering with New Labour's news management seems to sum up the entire Blair project: all for the cameras and rather little for the voters.
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