What’s Left for Labour?
Barring a miracle, and miracles seem likely to be in short supply, Labour will lose the next election. The question is not the survival of the Labour government, but the survival of Labour as a force in British politics.
Ensuring a positive answer to that question should be the sole preoccupation of Labour loyalists and activists between now and the election. A change of leadership is unlikely to make a real difference and should be considered only if it would.
The lost election, and the failures that preceded and caused it, are not solely the responsibility of Gordon Brown. Yes, he has failed to provide the requisite miracle, but the need for a miracle is the result of cumulative failures over nearly a decade and a half of lost opportunities and abandonment of principle.
It is ironic that we are told that the greatest threat of a leadership challenge now seems to come from the remaining standard-bearers of New Labour. The existential crisis for Labour is, after all, the end-state of the whole New Labour project. It is the end of New Labour, not a renewed New Labour, that is now needed; we can all have too much of a New thing.
But all is not lost. Political parties can and do recover from electoral wipe-outs. My own native New Zealand provides a good and encouraging example.
The New Zealand Labour government of 1984 confounded opponents and supporters alike by embarking on a ferocious revolution that saw New Zealand become the test-bed for a daring experiment in far-right, free-market economics. The electorate suspended judgment in 1987 and gave the Labour government a further chance; but by 1990, it was thumbs down, ushering in nine years of conservative government.
Many people felt that electoral defeat was not the most serious issue for Labour as it faced its future. The real problem was finding a way back to a role in New Zealand politics which would allow Labour to re-connect with supporters who had been confounded and felt betrayed by their party in government.
The abandonment by New Labour in Britain of what might have been expected of a Labour government was not nearly as dramatic or initially shocking as the policy reversal delivered by New Zealand Labour. But it was equally far-reaching and ultimately distressing to Labour’s natural supporters.
From the Iraq invasion to complicity in torture, from the obeisance to the rich to the faith in the infallibility of the unfettered market, from the infringement of civil liberties to the belief that spin mattered more than action, from the subordination of economic policy to the interests of bankers to the devaluing of the public sector, New Labour has dashed the hopes of Labour voters and distorted the political landscape. As in New Zealand in the 1980s, voters no longer know what to expect, or where to look if they are to secure the policy framework they want.
The good news is that, in New Zealand, the sense of betrayal and disorientation engendered by Labour’s performance in government was followed by a period in the wilderness but was not terminal. After nine years of opposition, Labour returned to office in 1999 and – even with the added challenge of a new proportional representation electoral system – then delivered a competent and well-regarded government which not only won two further elections but also restored sense and order to New Zealand’s political scene.
Even after an election loss last year, Labour remains the government in waiting. Voters know that, if they want a left of centre government, Labour will deliver. Even in opposition, Labour remains identified with left positions and attitudes and is widely seen as where voters will go when they tire of the new conservative government.
The leader of that nine-year Labour government was Helen Clark, recently identified by an opinion poll as the greatest living New Zealander. How did she manage to restore Labour’s fortunes and its rightful position as a contender for and deliverer of government?
The answer should surely be of some interest to those who might aspire to the leadership of Labour in Britain. What she did was to re-state Labour’s traditional values – compassion, social justice, an economy that serves the interests of everyone and not just a privileged minority, an inclusive approach to what it means to be a New Zealander in the twenty-first century.
Her government wasn’t perfect – what government is? But she not only restored a sense of what Labour stood for; she moved the agenda forward so that Labour values were seen as newly relevant to New Zealand’s current needs. Most of all, she carried the debate to her opponents and made the case for a left programme.
What British Labour now needs is a new generation of leaders who have a sense of the political legacy to which they are heirs and who have the courage and conviction to move that legacy forward. The British electorate will want to punish Labour for the failures delivered in the name of that short three-letter word with the capital N; but they will respond to a party that gives them a real choice and that knows what it stands for.
Bryan Gould
27 September 2009
This article was published in the online Guardian on 3 October.
Sin and the City
Twenty three years ago, the City was excitedly awaiting the Big Bang – the moment which would usher in a new era of self-regulation of the financial services industry. I had a grandstand view of the impending arrival. The legislation to prepare for the Big Bang was called the Financial Services Bill, and I spent several intense weeks leading for the Opposition as the Bill was taken through its Standing Committee stage.
Mrs Thatcher’s government, in line with its free-market philosophy, was very clear that the City could in essence be trusted to regulate itself. They resisted all attempts to give the regulators some teeth. The next few years of what some called self-regulation but which was in reality a free-for-all saw a huge expansion in financial services, in the size of the institutions providing them, in the sums of money involved, and in the rewards “earned” by those who worked in the City.
For those of us who argued at the time that the “free” market was not infallible, and (in line with Keynes, who had warned that financial markets were peculiarly prone to excess) that the City would require substantial regulation, subsequent events have come as no surprise. Even we, however, could not have foreseen the size of the money-go-round, spinning ever faster, that produced outrageous fortunes for a few and, eventually, crash and ruin for many.
Nor could we imagine that it would be a New Labour government that would become the most enthusiastic cheerleaders for the new lords of the universe. So dazzled were Ministers by the riches generated in the City that they did not think to enquire as to how many of those they claimed to represent actually benefited from the new wealth – wealth largely gouged out of the pockets of the rest of us.
The current revulsion at City excesses – the inflated bonuses, commissions, salaries and perks – is understandable; so, too, the anger at the growing evidence that nothing has changed and that those responsible for the mess will be paid mega-bucks for (allegedly) cleaning it up.
But the reaction to the greed and irresponsibility of the financial free-for-all, while natural, is a diversion from the real point. The reason for the government’s continuing genuflection to the City is that, after 23 years of unregulated City operations, and a growing reliance on financial services to keep the economy moving forward, the collapse of the City means that there is nothing much left.
The game is given away in the Chancellor’s statement this week on his plans for future regulation of financial services. His constant references to the importance of the City to our economy should be seen, not as an endorsement of the course followed over the last 23 years, but as a confession of failure. It is an admission of how far governmental indulgence of City excesses has distorted our economy and how big has been the price that the rest of us have had to pay for the rewards that City operators have milked from that same economy.
The real damage suffered as a consequence of the City’s domination of our economy is not to be measured, in other words, only in terms of the current crash and financial meltdown. The weight given to the City’s interests over a long period has seriously distorted our economic performance – and the more successful the City seemed, the more important its earnings to our national accounts, the more other parts of the economy were allowed to wither away.
The problem is not a new one; it was Winston Churchill who, as Chancellor of the Exchequer, remarked in 1925, “I would rather see Finance less proud and Industry more content.” An excessive attachment to the interests of those who hold and manipulate existing assets, at the expense of those who want to create new wealth, is – after all – a characteristic of mature economies which have substantial assets to protect – and we have been a mature economy for 150 years.
But the era of self-regulation and the demands of the global market meant that this policy bias became magnified many times over. Economic policy as a whole was tailored over this period to serve the City’s interests – so consistently, and over such a long time, that it was no longer recognised as abnormal. There was, we were assured “no alternative”; the global market meant that if the City were not given free rein, others would muscle in on their territory.
So, monetary policy was given centre stage. The policy itself was handed over to bankers, so that it was no longer subject to scrutiny and Ministers were no longer accountable for it, but so that it could be decided for a limited purpose that – arguably – primarily served the purposes of one part only of the wider economy.
Macro-economic policy was largely abandoned. Keynes was dismissed and forgotten. Interest rates were pressed into service to maintain the value of the currency and to underpin financial assets that might otherwise have been regarded as of dubious value. Little or no attention was paid to the competitiveness of the rest of the British economy, so that any thought of following an exchange rate policy that would stimulate exports, employment and investment simply never occurred to our policy-makers; manufacturing in particular was allowed to continue its relentless decline. Most of our economic eggs were placed in the financial services basket and only City operators had access to the golden eggs amongst them.
That is why the global crisis has hit the United Kingdom harder than anywhere else. The financial meltdown has meant that we have nothing much else to fall back on. And that is why the government has gone back – cap in hand – to the authors of the great misfortune, to ask them to dig us out of the hole. There is no better hole to find.
Millions will pay the price of the financial collapse with their jobs, homes and taxes. But many more – and over a much longer period – will suffer in ways that they do not even recognise as a result of the policy priority given to City fat cats whose primary focus remains their own privilege rather than the British economy. Whether through indifference or cowardice, our politicians seem intent on perpetuating a 23 year-old error.
Bryan Gould
6 July 2009
This article was published in the online Guardian on 9 July
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
A Brown Study
The following article by Bryan Gould appeared in the Sunday Telegraph on 21 September
The first two months must have been very heaven. The long-awaited prize had been grasped. Opposition from both within and without had faded away. A long period at Number Ten seemed assured.
The voters seemed to like the new leader. They liked his plain-speaking and the absence of spin. They liked his re-statement of basic values and his robust defence of the national interest. Most of all, they liked the fact that he was not Tony Blair.
So, one month later, how have we arrived at the 7% Conservative lead in today’s poll? Is Gordon Brown on track to join the ranks of those Prime Ministers who were never granted an electoral mandate because they fell at the first electoral hurdle?
The first and partial answer is that it may be premature to ask these questions. The “Brown bounce” was always going to be short-lived. There was always going to be an audible thud as the polls came back to earth. What matters now is what will happen over the next eighteen months, and the current volatility of the polls (something to which David Cameron is himself no stranger) tells us little that we need to know.
None of this means that Gordon has not compounded his problems by making avoidable errors. He has lacked a sure touch in presenting policy and in Parliament. He has appeared to contradict his declared distaste of spin. And he made a serious mistake in handling the issue of an early election – a mistake that suggests that there is behind the appearance of iron resolve a much less certain political calculator.
A more confident leader might well have gone for the kill in the period leading up to the conference season. He could have argued with some justice that he was unwilling to serve for long without a full mandate for a Brown premiership, and that the voters deserved the chance to say whether they wanted him or not. He could have launched an election campaign from the top of the “Brown bounce”. And he could have denied David Cameron the chance to make a life-saving conference speech.
But to concentrate on these immediate mistakes does not explain the speed and scale of the decline in Gordon Brown’s standing. There are other, deeper factors at work – contextual elements that, unlike those with a short life, such as a conference speech or a mistake in presentation, are likely to influence events for some time to come.
First, there were always going to be elements of the poison chalice about Tony Blair’s legacy to Gordon Brown. We should not forget (and nor should the Blairites) that Tony left office, not because he wanted to, but because his party saw him increasingly as an electoral liability. Glad of a change, intrigued by a new face (or at least a familiar face in a new context), the voters were always going to recall before too long that Gordon had been a centrally important figure in the Blair government. Its failings were his as well.
Gordon knew this, too, but foreknowledge made the problem no easier to resolve. He could go just so far in drawing a line under the Blair legacy, and trying to distance himself from its more unpopular aspects. If he went too far, he would provoke several unwelcome responses.
The first would be the predictable question – if you were at odds with this or that policy, why did you not say so at the time? More damagingly, a break with the Blair record in government would prompt a damaging counter-attack from the still powerful guardians of the New Labour project.
And so it has turned out, and in a much shorter time than even Gordon’s enemies must have planned or hoped for. No sooner had Blairite spokespeople like Peter Mandelson declared that their long-nurtured hostility to a Brown premiership had ended than hostilities were resumed – and with a vengeance.
The all-too familiar off-the-record briefing is suddenly in full swing. Unnamed “insiders” warn darkly that they always knew that Gordon’s personal and political deficiencies meant that he would falter sooner rather than later. For the first time in years, we are now made privy to leaks from around the Cabinet table, designed to show that Gordon’s colleagues are unhappy. Blairite ex-Ministers proclaim their readiness, in effect, to campaign against the new leader. As we know, the voters hate to see division and infighting – and they look like getting it in spades.
Why has this happened? It is partly a matter of personal pay-back. The price is being paid for those brooding years at the Treasury, when the hint of an anti-Blair conspiracy was often in the air. But it may also be that there are issues of real political substance in play. The Blair government drew its strength only reluctantly from its democratic mandate, still less from the Labour party. Its main pillars of support were always Washington and the Murdoch press.
Any change of policy that Gordon Brown may wish to make would cause him real problems if it provoked an adverse reaction from these powerful allies. So, even a phased withdrawal from Iraq may be seen as unacceptable. Even the most careful hint of a slight move to the left, or at least towards traditional Labour values, might ring some alarm bells. The Blairite counter-attack may not be made in the interests of its front-men alone.
As it is, there is no quick victory – just the long haul. But the long haul – like the electoral arithmetic – may work to Gordon Brown’s advantage. He has time to get the balance right between acknowledging and distancing himself from the Blair legacy. He has time to confound his internal enemies by using the power of patronage and reminding his party of the electorate’s intolerance of disunity. He has time for the voters to understand and value his sterling qualities, and to turn his quintessential Britishness and love of his country to political advantage.
Above all, he has time to stop paying so much attention to “advisers” and to trust his own judgment. Today’s poll means that the campaign for the next election is only just beginning.
Bryan Gould
15 October 2007
Bryan Gould on Gordon Brown
The following article was published in the NZ Listener of 14 July.
In the ten years after Gordon Brown and Tony Blair entered the House of Commons together in 1983, Gordon was always regarded as the senior member of the duo – slightly the older, better grounded in the Labour movement, apparently with more substance than his more charming but perhaps more superficial colleague.
Little wonder, then, that Gordon was first bemused and then angry that the Labour Party “fixers” (and principally Peter Mandelson) decided at the last moment – and just in time for the leadership election following John Smith’s untimely death and my own decision to return to New Zealand – to back Tony as the preferred leadership candidate. Gordon was persuaded to wait for his turn – something he was promised in return for not challenging Tony’s candidature.
The result was a ten-year wait – profitably spent, it is true, in a successful term as Chancellor of the Exchequer – but a period of increasing frustration on Gordon’s part and an increasing reluctance from Tony to keep his part of the bargain. It was only when the post-Iraq opinion polls turned sour that Tony bowed to the inevitable and that Gordon had his chance.
What will he make of it? The omens look good. The main thing going for him is that he is not Tony. Despite Blair’s extravagant gifts, as communicator and persuader, the British public has grown tired and cynical at the glibness and the endless spin. They seem ready to embrace someone with perhaps less surface but more substance. They want, at least for the moment, someone who says what he thinks and means what he says.
Brown also has the good fortune to face in David Cameron a Tory leader who has made the Tories electable again but who looks better suited to fighting the last war – against Blair – rather than a new battle against the more solid virtues of the new Prime Minister. There is already a “Brown bounce” in the opinion polls as the British public suddenly see the dour Scot in a new light.
This is not to say that Gordon will find that election success falls into his lap. More than anyone else, he is ineluctably and correctly linked in the public mind with the Blair government and its record. He is as much identified with the government’s failures as is Tony. He will have a difficult task in convincing people that he can free himself of the Blair legacy; nor will there be any shortage of defenders of that legacy if he succeeds.
And the truth is that what is known of him is not without foundation. He does find it difficult to smile and to chat to people. He does demonstrate some of the characteristics of a control freak. He is at times excessively cautious and calculating. And his record is not free from blemish, including most memorably his determined support for British membership of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism long after its disastrous consequences were becoming apparent.
I remain, however, optimistic about a Brown premiership. Here is someone who is a much more authentically Labour figure than his predecessor, someone whom the voters will easily recognise and therefore trust. Here is someone who has a better grasp of the fact that we would not bother with the messy business of politics if it were not for the need to reconcile competing interests and allocate scarce resources, with the consequent inevitability that some people must be disappointed – something Blair instinctively shied away from. Here is a Prime Minister who will want to use power, as opposed to simply holding on to it, and to use it for purposes that will commend themselves to voters who want a recognisably Labour government.
If he is to make that fresh start, however, he must do some difficult things. He must draw a line under the Iraq disaster; the appointment as Foreign Secretary of the Iraq war sceptic, David Miliband, is a good start but the most effective step would be to establish an independent inquiry into the origins of the war, and set a timetable for the withdrawal of British troops. He must reaffirm the value of public service and the public sector, and not turn always to the private sector for solutions. He must stop hobnobbing with the rich and powerful, something for which his predecessor had a fatal weakness. Above all, if he is to make that essential connection with the British public and to do so without Tony Blair’s exceptional presentational skills, he must re-establish trust in the political process. He can do that best by being his own man.
Bryan Gould
29 June 2007