Читать книгу Left for Dead? - Lewis Goodall - Страница 15

Clement Attlee’s 1945–51 government remains the party’s most important administration, one of the three most significant governments of the twentieth century. Its achievements are ones of which the party can be justly proud. Its ability to stir hearts in members of the party is unparalleled, despite the fact that no one even elected to that Parliament remains alive, much less anyone who held ministerial office. In the summer of 2015, I made a film about the seventieth anniversary of that government’s coming to power. As part of that I interviewed Margaret Beckett. She described an occasion when, in 1994, not long after John Smith’s death, she attended the fiftieth anniversary of D-Day in Normandy, as leader of the opposition:

‘We had a ceremony at the cemetery at Bayeux. The Queen was there, President Clinton, the Prime Minister and so on and so on. After the ceremony, the people broke and there was an opportunity for people to mix informally. And I was mobbed … by veterans and their families. I remember looking around and there were lots of people around the Prime Minister of course but I was mobbed. And it’s not just me who thinks that I was, because the Defence Secretary [Malcolm Rifkind] was there and said to everyone a few days later, did Margaret tell you, that she was mobbed by the D-Day veterans? And I thought … that was for Attlee’s government.’ As she told the story, she became quite overcome with tears.

It’s hard to compete with that, and every government before and since hasn’t. It is the only Labour government of the half-dozen or so there have been that has emerged with its reputation intact. Perhaps because of this and because of the strength of its achievement, it has acted as a sort of eternal litmus test against which each and every government since is judged within the Labour movement. It has become Labour lore.**

But just as subsequent Labour governments and prime ministers struggle to compete with its emotional pull, so they struggled to compete with Attlee’s greatest gift: the moment in which he lived, a moment primed for socialism. The total-war strategy articulated by Churchill entailed doing all the things that the Conservatives under Chamberlain and Baldwin had told the country were not possible: nationalising swathes of industry, huge government intervention in every sphere of existence, taking profound stakes in not only the economy but the day-to-day affairs of life. It controlled what you ate, what you did, whether or not your children lived with you, how much you paid for consumer goods, where you worked, whether or not you fought in the war, whether you lived or died. Public expenditure as a proportion of overall national spending and income skyrocketed.†† As a result, the ideological superstructure of the country changed. It was a unique moment and one that couldn’t last.

The new consensus Attlee and his ministers bequeathed held for the next thirty years or so, with both Labour and Conservative governments managing Attlee’s inheritance. But by the late 1970s Labour (and Conservative) governments had found it increasingly difficult to manage that settlement, which was by then decaying. As Britain struggled economically and the rest of the world fell into economic malaise, the traditional Keynesian methods of reflating the economy through public spending were in trouble across the globe. Jim Callaghan, who endured a pretty unsuccessful stint as chancellor and was now prime minister, sounded its death knell. He told the Labour Party conference in 1976: ‘We used to think that you could spend your way out of a recession and increase employment by cutting taxes and boosting government spending. I tell you in all candour that that option no longer exists, and in so far as it ever did exist, it only worked on each occasion since the war by injecting a bigger dose of inflation into the economy, followed by a higher level of unemployment as the next step.’

The cosy Keynesian postwar balloon was slowly leaking air. As it did so, the social ideas that underpinned it were also dissolving. As we’ve seen, the party’s grip on the working class was never entirely firm but by the 1970s it appeared almost loose. One of the central problems was the idea of greater public spending and, in a portent of things to come, a dissatisfaction with newer streams of more liberal leftist thought focusing on minorities and individual rights. As Denis Healey was to relay to his cabinet colleagues in 1975:

At the Labour clubs, you’ll find there’s an awful lot of support for this policy of cutting public expenditure. They will tell you all about Paddy Murphy up the street who’s got eighteen children, has not worked for years, lives on unemployment benefit, has a colour television and goes to Majorca for his holidays.4

In other words, as the years of postwar plenty gave way to a harsher economic climate, so the social solidarity that had paved the road to 1945 diminished. At the same time, globalisation, membership of the European Economic Community and increasing integration of global markets continued to lessen the power of social democratic governments to enact the policies that they might like: the idea that socialism or social democracy in one country was possible seemed less and less likely. Globalisation, the end of dollar convertibility and the development of a truly international capital market had disrupted the cosy world of 1940s Britain, where socialist or social democratic governments could pursue their dreams of a new Jerusalem without much regard to the rest of the world. The experience of the 1968 devaluation crisis under Wilson and the 1977 IMF crisis under Callaghan was searing to the Labour movement, but also illustrated how powerful international capital flows and financiers had become and how weak national governments now paled when set against them. Blair showed himself alive to these forces early in his leadership. In a university lecture in 1995 he said:

Governments can no longer adopt stimulative policies that boost demand without risk of being punished by markets and higher interest rates. We must recognise that the UK is situated in the middle of the global market for capital, a market which is less subject to regulation today than for many decades. An expansionary fiscal or monetary policy that is at odds with other economies in Europe will not be sustained for very long … to that extent the room for manoeuvre of any government in Britain is already extremely circumscribed.5

Blair and Brown were obsessed with this idea; from their earliest days in office it’s clear now that they were genuinely quite scared of the market reaction against their government. Harriet Harman, in her memoir, recounts a story that is revealing of her bosses’ mindset. As the new Labour government’s social security secretary, she had been tasked with finding several billion pounds’ worth of cuts, so the government could stick to its election pledge of matching Conservative spending plans (something the man who drew them up, Ken Clarke as chancellor, later said he wouldn’t even have done had the Tories been re-elected). This entailed cutting child benefit for new claimants by £6 a week, a move deeply unpopular within the wider Labour Party. She recalls that she went to see Brown to spell out the problems and find a remedy:

But he said it was a manifesto commitment and that it would have to be carried out. If we didn’t, it would send a signal that we weren’t going to be financially prudent in the way we’d promised, it would cause instability in the money markets, there would be a loss of confidence, the government would fall, and I would be responsible for bringing down the first Labour government for eighteen years … Our government still felt fragile to me, I couldn’t do anything to threaten it.6

In retrospect, this seems quite incredible. The Labour administration was only a year old, elected with a stonking majority, the economy was booming, the markets were sanguine, the world economy was enjoying stability and growth, but a Labour chancellor and cabinet minister were worried that a £6 a week cut in benefits for lone parents might be the issue on which the government’s fortunes turned and which risked sending money markets into a spin. Perhaps Brown was over-egging the pudding to get his way, but what is striking reading the accounts of the time is just how commonplace fears like this were.

So in every direction by the 1990s, whether it was economic, social or ideological, the world seemed to have given way beneath social democracy’s feet. The postwar social democratic settlement seemed to be increasingly unobtainable because the pillars on which it had been constructed were vanishing. Callaghan could see what was happening better than anyone. When polls indicated he might be doing a bit better in the run-up to the 1979 election than he might have hoped, his aide, Bernard Donoghue, ventured to suggest he might win after all. ‘Bernard,’ the old warhorse replied, ‘I’m afraid to say I think there’s been a sea change and it is for Mrs Thatcher.’

It is sometimes spoken of as if Blair and Brown ‘abandoned’ socialism all on their own. That’s putting the cart before the horse. By the time New Labour came along the process of abandoning the trappings of the old Attlee settlement (which many people then took, and today continue to take, as the quintessential socialism) was already well underway. Because New Labour was not only an attempt to broaden the party’s sociological appeal: it was also an attempt to respond to a world where traditional methods of social democracy and socialism had been deemed bankrupt, in a metaphorical and a real sense; and many of the people who declared them so were – guess what – the social democratic politicians of the day.

And while the old leftist ways withered the right wasn’t sitting idly by, it was seizing the moment. The next decade and a half after the 1979 election transformed the political and social landscape in Britain, a more economically liberal, individualistic and enterprising culture was born and much of the time Labour was nowhere to be seen. Thatcher clocked up three general election victories and her successor, John Major, secured an unprecedented fourth in 1992.

In the meantime, a betrayal myth developed across some parts of the Labour Party that not only had Blair and Brown sold out but that Wilson and Callaghan had done so before them, that they had given in to international capital, and that if they had taken a properly left-wing approach to managing the economy, things might have been different and Thatcherism might have been resisted. We will never know for certain, but there are two important indicators that might suggest such revisionism is without much basis. The first is that the idea of betrayal might be more credible if similar phenomena were not taking place all across the West. Britain might have led the way, but the entire world was heading in a more ‘neoliberal’ direction. Whether it was Reaganomics in the United States or Rogernomics in New Zealand,‡‡ the picture was much the same everywhere. Even governments that were ostensibly left wing, like François Mitterrand’s in France, implemented more economically liberal policies once in office. The same phenomena that were running the left ragged in Britain were much the same elsewhere; the malaise and stagflation of the 1970s gripped the world; the corresponding decline in social democracy took hold partly as a result of changing technology and work patterns, and partly simply as a result of the final dissipation of some of the solidarity that had so characterised the immediate postwar world. There had, in other words, been an ideological changing of the guard around the world in favour of markets and their creative potential. Just as in the 1940s, the sweep of leftist governments across Europe led the historian A. J. P. Taylor to lament that belief in private enterprise seemed as hopeless as Jacobitism after 1688, so in the 1980s and 1990s did an untrammelled statism appear equally futile.

The left had to respond to these changes and more which were to come: the Soviet Union was collapsing, the Berlin Wall was coming down, and the ideological and geopolitical underpinning of much of twentieth-century leftist thinking was coming down with it. This was the era of the supposed ‘end of history’, as the academic Francis Fukuyama (sort of) said. Liberal market-based democracies had triumphed – it would have been bizarre if no reckoning had come and doubly bizarre if the response had been to double down with policies of nationalisation, higher taxation and stricter economic controls. Indeed, what is striking is that the left responded in a similar way across the West. Wherever you look, whether it’s Clinton’s Democrats or Schroeder’s SDP, there was a conspicuous move to the centre and an acceptance of market methods. New Labour might have embraced it with more brio than the others, but the pattern was the same. The left fundamentally changed because the world around it had done so too, including the attitudes and beliefs of the voters. Thus, even if the dreaded Blair and Brown hadn’t led Labour, even if New Labour had never been created, there is no doubt as to what the direction of the party in the late 1990s would have been because we have a control: the rest of the world. New Labour and Blairism were just a British version of an attempt across the West to respond to the profound crisis of social democracy that had taken place in the late 1970s and beyond.

Blair’s personal take on Labour’s lack of success in the 1980s and 1990s period was a simple one. He told a 1996 BBC documentary analysing the party’s 18 years in the wilderness: ‘The problem of the Labour Party of the seventies and eighties is not complex it’s simple. Society changed and the party didn’t. So you had a whole new generation of people with different aspirations and ambitions in a different kind of world. And we were still singing the same old song that we were singing in the forties and fifties.’7

Brown agreed. He told the same documentary: ‘I don’t think anybody believed that you would have a Conservative government that would be able to maintain itself over four elections and be in power for now 16 years. I think what Mrs Thatcher understood in 1979 was the need for change. I think what Labour failed to understand then was that change had to come about and that Labour should have been sponsoring that change and I think we’ve had to come to terms with that over a period of 16 years.’8

But what would that change look like when all the old tools of tax and spend had been taken out of the toolkit? Well, the truth is, as we shall see, that New Labour did dust off some of the tools in the end – but in the early days, before Brown’s tax hikes of the early 2000s, things were different. Harriet Harman, then shadow chief secretary to the Treasury and Brown’s deputy, described the approach:

Gordon developed the mantra that, to have growth, we needed to build the supply side of the economy. He was determined that our economic policy, which had been our electoral Achilles’ heel over so many years, would shift from taxing and spending the proceeds of growth to focus instead on increasing the rate of economic growth. He wanted to move beyond the idea that our economic policy was only about taxing the rich and spending more on benefits. Government policy should not just be about dividing up the cake but increasing the size of the cake as well. This was the background to his ‘endogenous growth’ speech in 1994, in which he said that economic growth could come not just through increasing demand but through increasing the capacity of the economy by investment in people, through education and training; in industry, through research and development. And in infrastructure, like roads and public transport … This was a huge change. For so long, the only thing people knew about Labour’s approach to the economy was that we would raise taxes and use the money to improve benefits and public services. The public perception was that they would have to pay more taxes and that, subsequently, their money would be thrown down the drain … Now our weekly Treasury team meetings would always begin with Gordon intoning that Labour was not just about taxing and spending but about investment. To get our message across, we had to invoke the supply-side investment strategy as the frame for every point we made.9

This idea, of unleashing people’s latent talent and investing in training and education in order that they might release latent potential was not exactly red-in-tooth-and-claw stuff – it wasn’t bailing out my dad’s job in Rover as the Labour governments of the 1940s and 1960s might have done, but it was still recognisably a Labour innovation. Its transformative impact, on the public realm and on people’s lives, is often underestimated and damned by some on the left and right today who, frankly, would never have come within a thousand feet of feeling its effects. But it was the underlying philosophy that directed government money into my Aim Higher programme and Gifted and Talented. It was the approach that allowed my mum, a woman who had had me at 17 years of age and had had to quit her education early, to retrain as a midwife and start a new life as her kids were growing. It was the philosophy that led to the reinvigoration of the public realm and civic infrastructure that I could see all around me growing up. I’m not convinced that would have happened had New Labour not come to power and the best thinking Conservatives, including David Cameron and his team, learned its lessons. It was a quiet radicalism to befit a benign age.

The irony is, as the government grew in confidence, it quietly became much more bullish about redistribution and the tax and spend policies from which it resiled in its early days. But you wouldn’t have known it; that hushed radicalism led to its own decline.