I HAVE a confession to make. Last week Stephen Pollard informed
Times readers that he shared with a couple of unnamed friends, an unhealthy interest in political minutiae. He had, he said, recently reached the depths. He sent an excited e-mail to his mates to report spotting, out of the window of a London bus, Adrian Slade, the former president of the Liberal Party.
Reader, I confess. I am one of those friends.
Stephen’s alleged (conveniently there were no witnesses) spotting of Slade was a pathetic attempt to top my news that I had received a telephone call from Dom Mintoff, the former Prime Minister of Malta, and that our other friend had been in e-mail correspondence with the great-niece of the long dead left-wing Labour MP Konni Zilliacus.
It is my membership of Stephen’s little club that means that, on one of the great issues that divides Gordon Brown from Tony Blair, I am emotionally definitely on Mr Brown’s side.
For Mr Brown, described so often as a dark, brooding figure, is actually an incurable romantic. He is captivated by the history of his party, driven on by the ambition to join its great figures in the pantheon. He lights up when the topic of conversation concerns political figures of the past. His speeches are laced with references to the Labour movement and its traditions. As a young man he wrote an entire book on the minor Labour figure James Maxton and it reads like a hymn to the brave young Clydeside MPs who came down to London in the 1920s to fight for social justice. (In fact, so engrossed is he that I suspect Mr Brown would be astonished to see Maxton described as a “minor” figure, while the rest of you are astonished to see him described at all.)
It is hard to imagine Mr Blair reading such a book, let alone writing it. The only political figure likely to be the subject of a book penned by Mr Blair is himself. And his speeches are light on Labour history.
Yet while, as a matter of taste, I prefer Mr Brown’s approach, sharing his affection for dusty tomes, I recognise that there is much more to this difference between the two friends and rivals than aesthetics. Attitudes towards Labour’s history explain why Mr Brown will be a very different leader of his party than Mr Blair. And while emotionally the political hobbyist in me is with Brown, intellectually I am with Blair.
This weekend I have been rereading Anthony Crosland’s The Future of Socialism. This famous text, written by a man who would later serve in the highest government offices, has reached its 50th birthday. For me, Crosland and his fellow Labour reformers have always been a more attractive group than Brown’s Clydesiders. This attraction is partly due to Crosland’s charisma (brilliantly captured in a memoir by his wife, Susan), partly due to his tragic early death and partly because, wrong though he often was, his wrongness ratio (Is that proper English? It should be) was rather better than that of Maxton and Co.
The book’s half-century will be marked by seminars and earnest discussion that rereading suggests it thoroughly deserves. The Future of Socialism makes many assumptions that are entirely obsolete — Crosland believed, for instance that heavy state involvement in directing the economy was permanent and workable — but the book also provides the clearest and earliest expression of the central idea underpinning Blair and Brown’s new Labour. For it is in this volume that a Labour thinker first argues that the party’s biggest problem is the confusion of means with ends.
The need to separate Labour’s objectives from particular policies (such as nationalisation) is the most basic proposition of the party’s modernisers. Without such a separation the party becomes a slave to traditional policies that either never worked or have lost their relevance. The result is electoral failure and failure in office. Interestingly, in a later book, Crosland characterised those who confused means and ends as “the conservative enemy”, using “ conservative” in exactly the way Tony Blair did in his famous attack on “the forces of conservatism”.
Yet alongside Crosland’s impressive statement of modernising principle there is something else that strikes the reader. Here was one of the most important political works of a generation and half of it is spent explaining why some fairly obviously stupid ideas (Guild Socialism for instance, which involves establishing workers’ control of industry through small-scale guilds) are, when examined, indeed as stupid as you thought they were when you first heard about them.
As if this wasn’t enough of a waste of intellectual energy, the rest of the book attempts to rescue what is left of socialism once most of its ideas have been dismissed, and fashion this remnant into a doctrine. Crosland contends that the meaning of socialism is simply greater equality and seeks modern methods of achieving it. This effort contains all the weaknesses (a confusion between fairness and equality, for instance, and a lame attempt to reconcile equality with incentives) that you would expect.
It is quite obvious that Crosland would not have got himself into these difficulties if his starting point had been his own ideas, rather than the traditions of the Labour Party.
Which brings me back to Brown and Blair. It is often suggested that Gordon Brown is old Labour. This is quite wrong; in fact completely ridiculous. He is 100 per cent new Labour: as new Labour as Mr Blair. But their visions of new Labour are subtly different. Mr Brown, like Crosland before him, is committed to his party’s traditions, wants them to help him to shape new ideas, while Mr Blair is not remotely interested in those traditions. Mr Brown wants to go on modernising the Labour Party. Mr Blair wanted to abolish it.
So the next time you hear Gordon Brown wax nostalgic, or Tony Blair casually talk about “political cross-dressing” it may appear mere mood music, but is in fact quite fundamental.
And like Crosland before him, Mr Brown will find that socialist tradition propels him to a dead-end.
