STRONG LOYALIST support for the Prime Minister at yesterday’s meeting of the Parliamentary Labour Party cannot disguise the need to confront the reasons why Labour, in an historic third-term victory, nevertheless lost well over half its majority and dropped four million votes compared with 1997.
People made clear that they did not like the quasi-presidential style that has been adopted, where consultation and accountability have drained away. Essentially there are two kinds of democratic system. One is a regime which gives executive powers to an elected president, as in the United States, but where those powers are constrained by a range of congressional checks and balances. The other — our system — envisages a prime minister using his majority in Parliament to push through his programme, but having to manoeuvre between the factions both within Cabinet and in a wider, vigorous parliamentary process. The constraints, however, have broken down.
We now have a Prime Minister closeted with a small group of unelected aides monopolising many key decisions and riding roughshod over Parliament, with a mixture of patronage and threats. Indeed, the underlying thread linking the various flashpoints of the last Parliament — on foundation hospitals, tuition fees, GM crops, anti-terrorism legislation and, most notably, the Iraq war — is this exercise of autocratic power, without listening to the Cabinet, the party or the electorate. Tackling this is the single biggest task for the new Parliament.
But it isn’t only the Iraq imbroglio and the haemorrhaging of trust in Tony Blair that were so manifest in the election. This was by some margin the most lacklustre and negative election in recent times, and that is because there is no idealism or burning sense of ideological direction to inspire and drive forward events. With a majority of more than 160 during the past eight years, new Labour had the best opportunity for perhaps two centuries to imprint its vision on society. The plummeting in electoral turnout by 15 per cent in less than a decade exposes just how far this opportunity to build up momentum has been lost. Too many people now see new Labour as too closely associated with conservative politics, leaving large swaths of the electorate virtually unrepresented.
The problem therefore goes a lot deeper than simply seeking to arrange for a seamless transition to Gordon Brown, who recently has been making some encouraging comments about the need to entrench a social democratic consensus. The real issue is much more about policy and ideology than about personalities. We need an important change in direction, starting now if the core Labour vote is to be attracted back in time for the next election which otherwise the party could well lose. None of this is to suggest at all a return to the battles of the 1970-80s, but simply to make the obvious point that there are other and better ways for a modernised Labour Party to move forward than with the new Labour formula.
The problem for all parties of the Left is how to reconcile social justice with an unfettered capitalist economy. New Labour simply used spin to claim that they are compatible. Evidence suggests that they are not. Inequality has sharply increased, even while child poverty has seen some reduction. Means-testing has now proliferated so extensively in social policy that the poverty trap has become a serious problem and more and more pensioners now find they are penalised, having saved for their retirement. The halving of Stock Exchange values has decimated pension levels for millions relying on private pensions.
A serious rebalancing of pension provision towards the public sector is now needed if pensioners are to be protected against the disaster of recent years and guaranteed their proper share of rising national prosperity. In the short term there are many ways of restoring fairness in our society — for example, we could fund the guarantee credit level of pension (£107 per week) as-of-right for all pensioners, thus restoring the incentive to save for retirement, if just the richest 1 per cent paid a slightly higher tax on their earnings. This is the kind of minimum social justice that cries out to be implemented in today’s Britain polarised between the very poor and the very rich.
Nor is the privatising, deregulating, contracting-out agenda — the centrepiece of Mr Blair’s programme for this new Parliament — compatible with the goal of social justice or even with the aim of economic efficiency. PFI schemes, which now dangerously pre-empt future public expenditure commitments in servicing contracts, have too often proved poor value for money. The contracting-out of school meals and hospital cleaning has worsened standards. Foundation hospitals and specialist academies cream the best services for some people, but at the expense of draining off health and educational resources from most others. It is still not understood by the privatisers that boosting the morale of public service providers and enhancing their vocational dedication is a far better channel to raise standards than imposing market disciplines.
Another key change of direction needed concerns the handling of power. We display undue subservience to the US when the bottom line of our foreign policy should be protecting British interests and UN legitimacy. We respond to the threat of terrorism by withdrawing rights to a fair trial from suspects, thus undermining the free society we purport to defend. We continue to tilt the balance of industrial power firmly towards big business, eroding the protection of workers in the weakest position, in the first year of employment, in the smallest firms and in part-time work. Yet the proper exercise of power is to stand up to the strong where their demands are unacceptable, and to support the weak when they cannot protect themselves.
As Mr Brown has himself observed, the Labour Party was founded on moral principle and social justice. These are changes of policy direction he should now urgently consider.
Michael Meacher is MP for Oldham West & Royton
