JUST WHEN you would expect grass-green or, possibly, an autumnal russet, Labour opted for a visceral colour scheme of sheer bloodiness. Delegates cross the bright-red carpets of the G-MEX exhibition centre in Manchester to be enfolded in the scarlet and purple of the conference hall. We could be in the womb, at an autopsy or part of a convocation of cardinals.
The drama was changed last week, and the gore to be spilt was no longer Tony Blair’s, but Gordon Brown’s. Of course, this wasn’t the original plan, which called for the Prime Minister’s immediate extinction. But like that other miracle man, Rasputin, Mr Blair survived the poisoned chocolates, and even in his weakened condition the plotters couldn’t quite amass enough momentum to roll the wounded leader to the icy river’s edge.
Why Rasputin? Because even those who most want to see him go understand that Mr Blair has had an ability to do that often impossible thing — win over middle-ground voters. He could somehow cure the Tsarevich’s haemophilia, where other physicks failed, and I suspect we’ll see Mr Blair work that magic again later today. It is this ability that makes him so loathsome to those permanent adolescents on the Left who find anything but rebellion and opposition psychically painful.
This is understandable in the case of the man on the CND stall here, who is handing out “No to Trident” carrier-bags and wearing a bright-red Che Guevara shirt (my daughter wears one; he’s in his fifties, and she’s 13). But listen to Colin McCabe, the cultural critic. In last weekend’s Observer he began a 1,200-word jeremiad by at least being happy that “the hatred I feel for someone who has betrayed all that the party has stood for is widely shared”.
I include Professor McCabe here because I think Times readers may be surprised by the extent of the dislike that certain influential sections of the left-wing intelligentsia feel for Mr Blair. They might also reflect that it is the McCabes who have, for the past few years, been tutoring the latest generations of bright but ignorant young BBC researchers.
Post-Watson and his attempted coup, mainstream Labour brushed the face of total defeat, and decided that it didn’t like the feeling. For the past week Labour grandees have been desperate — as well they might be — to apologise to the electorate for looking like a self-absorbed rabble.
My first response to the Watson spectacle was amazement and the second was to feel that it had put Mr Brown’s political sensibilities in question. Since then, however, the Chancellor has done everything he possibly can to retrieve the situation. “Not in my name,” he told the plotters; “Tony is my mate,” he told the voters. His BBC interview at the weekend was more or less flawless — sober, considered and, yes, principled. He was given the opportunity to slide Cameron-style away from Britain’s current foreign policy, and rejected it.
Despite the attempt by the latest conventional wisdom to create a new narrative of the “Failing Brown”, I think the Chancellor will fairly easily win a contest against the leftwinger John McDonnell and no one else. This will concentrate attention on the deputy leadership contest, which will be seen as a sublimated debate about the soul of the Labour Party, while in reality being no such thing. This doesn’t matter. What matters is what the Brown-led Labour Party will do in the run-up to the next election, and what it will offer to the electorate on polling day.
One could be pessimistic. There was an item in this paper a fortnight ago about the cave above the sea where the last of the Neanderthals lived before more adaptable Cro-Magnons crowded then out. And on the same day Mr Blair addressed the TUC and was booed and hissed. The essential critique of the Prime Minister as mounted by some of the most powerful trade union leaders was what you might now call new old Labour. No “privatising” public services, more tax money everywhere, enough reforms already.
In other quarters new old Labour’s position is expressed more obliquely — we must safeguard the gains of the past few years, while opening up a clear gulf between us and the questing Cameronians. Whatever we do we mustn’t look like the Tories. This reaction, of course, is exactly what David Cameron wants. One hoped-for consequence of Mr Cameron’s own detail-free hover-visit to the centre ground, would be to try to get Labour to pitch its tent elsewhere — somewhere more politically arid and more electorally marginal.
But a far greater objection to new old Labour’s conservatism is that once again, as in the 1980s, life has outrun it. Mr Blair (and, I think, Mr Brown) can see how globalisation and technological advance, climate change and the threat from terrorism are creating a condition of global interdependence. Now no island is an island.
Big new decisions, for instance, have to be made about the running of public services. New new Labour has to settle its battle against public sector fetishists in the party, whose conversion of all debates into one about “privatisation” is becoming damaging.
Sometimes this just takes the form of eulogising the “public sector” ethos, without having the honesty to admit that there are several public sector ethoses, and some of them are rubbish. Here let me take a cudgel and break it across the vast cranium of Ross McKibbin, Fellow of St John’s College, Oxford, and main political commentator for the hyper-clever London Review of Books. In his latest article Dr McKibbin condemns “new Labour’s relentless urge to privatise, to provide ‘choice’, even in areas where most of us don’t want to make choices (like the secondary school system)”.
One, note the elision. Two, the McKibbinite “us” who contribute to and edit the LRB, almost universally have been educated at schools — independent, fee-paying and religious — that “our” parents had chosen for “us”. And furthermore I discovered that “we” were now doing the same for “our” own children.
But then, this is what passes for analysis on the intelligent Left, as the Fellow of St John’s asserts that Mr Blair has wanted to “overthrow the welfare state” but hasn’t been able to do it because of the good sense of the British people. This, however, has so frustrated the “Americanising members of the Government” that it has “thrown them ever more enthusiastically into the arms of American foreign policy”. Yes, Mr Blair invaded Iraq because of the frustrations of introducing foundation hospitals.
Remember Professor McCabe hates Mr Blair for betraying everything Labour has stood for. But Labour has stood for social health and, since 1997, has taken on 200,000 extra employees in the NHS. (200,000! Where does that figure sit in the McCabe account? Do he and his friends ever mention it to each other, mid-rant, like the Judaean People’s Front in Life of Brian?) Annual spending on the NHS has risen from £34 billion when Rasputin took power, to £92 billion next year.
And it cannot go on. From 2008 the annual increase in spending will fall considerably. And this in a sector in which services are better, but in which they are not better enough, and nor are they likely to improve unchanged. It’s the same in education. And there is hardly an approach that Labour has not tried since 1997: central targets, inspection regimes, limited devolution, quasi-independent agencies.
Now the talk is of real devolution. That can only mean people at regional and local levels making their own decisions about how to implement a general set of objectives. But what, under these circumstances, will drive “best practice”? What will ensure that managers, clinicians, educators and governing bodies who are receiving money will perform optimally?
Isn’t it the case that waiting lists have fallen in the NHS partly because the new private centres have given patients themselves an element of choice? Was it this that the Chancellor was hinting at when he talked about building services around the aspirations of those using them?
Spreading this is, in old new Labour terms, radical stuff. My instinct is that it will take a new generation of Labour politicians to understand the necessity of such change and to help Prime Minister Brown to make it happen. But the people are there — let’s call them the Miliband Tendency — who are politically tough, experienced, often educated both here and in the US, are committed to social justice and are internationalists. What matters over the next few months is not the polls — they’ll change — but how Mr Brown deploys the Purnells, Alexanders and Milibands in advance of Labour’s next term in office.
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