Labour's landscape

Writing before Labour's Crewe debacle, Martin Bright notes that the party is "a landscape largely barren of ideas". Writing after the result, Daniel speculates plausibly that Harriet Harman might be a strong contender for the Labour leadership. But I repeat myself.

Martin maintains that "New Labour was always as much an intellectual concept as it was an electoral strategy". I agree in the sense that the change under Tony Blair was ideological as well as presentational, and this was crucial to Labour's becoming a party of government. But I'm profoundly sceptical of the notion of a Third Way, whose origins Martin expounds.

Its significance for Labour was as a vehicle for the belated acceptance of certain essentials of good government: inflation targeting as the goal of monetary policy; the limits of discretionary fiscal policy; the need for trade union power to be subject to the rule of law; the acceptance of our obligations as a member state of Nato and the European Union. But there never was a distinctively left-wing way of doing these things, an esoteric wisdom unknown to the Tories and deriving from Labour's traditions. To the extent that the Third Way encouraged Labour to take these tasks seriously, it helped in the party's evolution. But the Third Way also implied that Labour's aims were always compatible - that in pursuing, say, both economic efficiency and equity, there was no need for trade-offs. That was damaging.

On my reading of his administration, Tony Blair changed his position and tacitly discarded the Third Way. Gordon Brown is ostentatiously not of a Blairite disposition; that was his claim for leadership. I do not consider that Labour will recover under its current leadership, or that any useful purpose will be served by the intellectual quest that Martin calls for. My scepticism about Labour's prospects and disrespect for the PM would hold regardless. But it's worth repeating what a discreditable campaign the party ran in Crewe.

Tony Blair made occasional hair-raisingly partisan assertions. (His "forces of conservatism" speech at the 1999 Labour conference was a shocker. It included the line: "The forces of conservatism allied to racism are why one of the heroes of the 20th Century, Martin Luther King, is dead.") But these tended to be for party consumption, on the part of a leader who was clearly and fortunately not attuned to Labour's more atavistic traditions. The Crewe "Tory toffs" campaign, for which the PM must be held responsible, was stupidly mean-spirited. So, incidentally, was the candidate, who seems to me to have had an unreasonably generous press. When you lose an election on a 17% swing, it's unwise to tell the voters how perverse is their decision - or as Tamsin Dunwoody put it, "I think my mother is turning in her grave."

Comments

[Jim S.]

Two points:

Is fighting against unemployment and gross inequality as important as fighting against inflation?

And, is the power of big business to be subjected to the rule of law as much as union power?

[simon]

Oliver, I apologise for derailing this thoughtful and insightful post with a comment about David Lindsay. But I would be doing your readers a disservice if I did not draw their attention to David's observations on the by-election result.

As you may recall, David had confidently predicted that the Tory poll lead would be 'exposed as a lie by their failure to win the Crewe and Nantwich by-election', so his fans were waiting anxiously to see how he would respond to the news of a Conservative victory. He hasn't disappointed us. He tells us that he spent the day attending a 'traditional Latin Mass' followed by 'a superb dinner .. at which I was seated next to a delightful peeress'. This, he explains, is 'real politics' - unlike a mere by-election, which is of no importance whatever.

[Bartholomew]

This caught my eye:

The issue of race also reared its head, with Labour highlighting that Timpson and the Tories were against ID cards for foreign nationals.

The Tory MP Eric Pickles, who masterminded Timpson's campaign, was furious that the issue had been raised in a town where, for the most part, locals rub along easily with workers from eastern Europe.

Talk about the world turned upside-down,

[Ross]

"As you may recall, David had confidently predicted that the Tory poll lead would be 'exposed as a lie by their failure to win the Crewe and Nantwich by-election', "

His electoral predictions also include this gem from late last yeat:

"Meanwhile, Boris is dead in the water. A Tory was never going to win an all-London, one person one vote ballot anyway.
......
But even if he did stand and win, then he'd only have the job for about six weeks, after which there'd be no such job to have. The position of Mayor of London was invented specifically for Livingstone, in order to get him out of the Commons and thus prevent him from standing against Brown when the time came. "

http://davidaslindsay.blogspot.com/2007/08/doreen-lawrence-boris-johnson-and-ken.html

In fairness though, that was a more plausible prediction than Harriet Harman becoming Labour's next leader.

[Michael]

The position of Mayor of London was invented specifically for Livingstone, in order to get him out of the Commons and thus prevent him from standing against Brown when the time came.

I do hate to use the words "gibbering mentalism" to describe the political analysis of Britain's next Prime Minister, but that's so wrong on so many levels that I don't know where to begin.

But perhaps Lindsay could enlighten us as to why Labour went to such reputation-embarrassing lengths to prevent Livingstone from running for Mayor in 2000?

And if this was part of a cunningly Machiavellian strategy all along, how much did they pay Frank Dobson to act as the stooge and wreck his career?