Читать книгу Left for Dead? - Lewis Goodall - Страница 16

Aside from its foreign policy,§§ there are several powerful critiques of the New Labour years. The first is an egalitarian critique. Although the New Labour government can objectively be considered among the most redistributionist and empowering of its predecessors, it was perhaps the first not to place equality as part of its central and organising political mission. This was genuinely new for Labour. The fundamental Labour critique, which underwrote its view of political economy, was that society would not only be better to live in if it were more equal but that it would be more just. It was a profound political insight and one that endured. As early as the late 1990s, senior figures worried the party was drifting away from it and, ergo, the basis of its political and philosophical power. Roy Hattersley, a man partly inspired to become a socialist because of his reading R. H. Tawney’s seminal work Equality as a schoolboy, said in 1995:

We had a big idea, a more equal therefore a better country. Sometimes we called it fairness. Sometimes we called it social justice. But our idea was a more equal and free society. Now that was the idea we should have propagated with determination and consistency and we should sell to the people, the idea we’ve failed to sell to the people. But it’s still the only idea that socialism could possibly stand for.10

It was not entirely clear that Blair and others did share that idea. Equality didn’t improve much in the New Labour years, although there’s plenty of evidence to suggest that it would have got worse than it did had New Labour’s policies not been in place. Regardless, it wasn’t something the leadership seemed very concerned about. Tony Blair famously said that he wasn’t ‘especially interested in controlling what David Beckham earns, quite frankly’. Peter Mandelson likewise observed that New Labour was ‘intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich … as long as they pay their taxes’. Under the Conservatives the Labour rallying cry had always been, just as my grandad used to say to me, that ‘the rich got richer and the poor got poorer’. Under Labour, the poor got richer but the rich got richer too (and faster). For a while it was satisfactory enough, but inspiring rallying call it was not.

The important thing, it was argued, was to create the right conditions that allowed individuals to thrive, that equality of opportunity, not outcome was what mattered. As I’ve said, this isn’t to be underestimated. My life was transformed. I was and am exactly the sort of person Blair’s socialism would benefit. But once I succeeded and had skyrocketed up, the gap in income between me and my old classmates back in Longbridge was something about which New Labour seemed to have little to say, especially in the post-industrial Midlands and north, the small towns and the left behind, what we would one day come to call ‘Brexitland’. That was a clear weakness in New Labour’s political strategy and one that gave its opponents on the left and the right the space to destroy its reputation in years to come – and more importantly, weakened the social and political fabric of the country.

Nonetheless, the last part of the Mandelson quote is still important and often forgotten: that getting filthy rich was acceptable ‘as long as they pay their taxes’. Because, as it turned out, Brown was slowly redistributing vast sums of money, especially after 2002, when he increased National Insurance to pay for greater NHS spending. The tax credit network redistributed money from rich to poor. Take a look at this chart, from the Institute for Fiscal Studies. It shows how much the population gained or lost as a percentage of their income.

The impact is clear. In terms of what the government was doing, there was one sort of person you really didn’t want to be. And it was rich. Quietly, without much fanfare, in a way that it barely dared to say aloud, the New Labour government was redistributing money hand over fist.

But the people who didn’t make a song or dance about it most were the Labour government itself. It was so desperate to appear respectable, not to hark back to Labour governments of long ago, that the most social democratic things they did were never presented as such. They were offered to the country and to their own voters, from conception to implementation, through the way they were explained and communicated, in terms of the market and of individual empowerment. Consequently, what they didn’t do is sew the threads together in a moral critique of capitalism, or of politics more generally. It revelled in its banality, in its dull managerialism. New Labour was often radical but it usually pretended that it wasn’t. Today’s leftists are the opposite. New Labour did social democracy on the quiet, in deed if not in spirit. Corbynism does it through a loudspeaker.

But the sense of mission matters much more than Blair thought it did – as Peter Shore, the former Labour cabinet minister, once said:

‘You’ve always got to have in mind with a Labour Party that if it isn’t a radical party, if it isn’t a party of change, if it isn’t a party that’s committed to making Britain a fairer more equal society then that idealism, that enthusiasm, that energy that goes with that, will be denied it. And if the Labour Party plays too safe for too long then it really will be denying its own heritage.’

Too often, New Labour, desperate to be accepted and to be seen to be in the middle ground, was insufficiently proselytising about just how radical its own achievements were. Looking back it’s clear it was, broadly speaking, a social democratic government. But it didn’t always look or feel that way at the time. As a result, it allowed its internal opponents to cast it as dull technocrats and themselves as the true inheritors of the party’s radical flame. At times, inexcusably, Blair and others acted as if they weren’t political at all. Indeed, he would say in 1999 that ‘I was never really in politics. I never grew up as a politician. I don’t feel myself a politician even now. I don’t think of myself as being a politician in that sense of someone whose whole driving force in life is politics.’ And in so doing he managed to lay the foundations of his own unmaking within the Labour Party.

James Graham’s 2017 play Labour of Love wrestles with recent Labour history and, in so many words, this precise tension. The plot revolves around a Midlands MP, David Lyons, and thirty years of tribulation and trial within the party. In one scene, the MP’s caseworker, Jean Whittaker, offers a killer assessment of the New Labour period: ‘All looks good on the outside but it only takes one little tremor to bring the whole thing down.’ Lyons jumps to the government’s defence, listing all of the new schools and hospitals that have popped up in the area and the new-look town centre, but Whittaker is unimpressed: ‘Yeah, spending, good, fine, but not the actual difficult work of digging deep down into the underlying factors woven into the rotten fabric of this unfair fucking country.’

In other words, New Labour did not in any way challenge the fundamental economic assumptions of the British economy. It believed – as most people did – that at base the British economy was working well and that it was a new sustainable settlement. The basic economic model did not need to be challenged or changed; the sole question was about what you did with the bounty of the untrammelled free market – and New Labour’s answer was, among other things, spend it on kids like me. The problem was, as Whittaker says in the play, that as soon as the good times ended, it was all too easy to turn the taps off. This happened again and again across the West where social democrats had governed. As the academic Shiri Berman told me:

‘These new centre-left politicians celebrated the market’s upsides but ignored its downsides. They differed from classical liberals and conservatives by supporting a social safety net to buffer markets’ worst effects, but they didn’t offer a fundamental critique of capitalism or any sense that market forces should be redirected to protect social needs. When the financial crisis hit in 2008, this attitude repelled those who viewed globalisation as the cause of their suffering and wanted not merely renewed growth, but also less inequality and instability.’

It was all too easy for such measures to be reversed by the Tories, as soon as the good times ended. By contrast, as a signifier of the power of their achievement, Labour did not attempt to reverse the changes to Britain’s political economy that the Tories augured in the 1980s. By way of illustration, Labour’s enduring reforms – which were substantial – were usually structural ones: the Scottish Parliament, the Welsh Assembly, the London mayoralty, the minimum wage, civil partnerships to name but a few. But New Labour was too dewy-eyed about the virtues of the market. As a result, the question Giles Radice posed on that heady day in 1997 is still apposite: ‘What will Tony’s success consist of: election victories or something more permanent? The jury is out.’ The answer, we now know, was somewhere in between. Some permanent structural changes, a reinvigoration of the public realm but not a new settlement in favour of social democracy.

In fairness, it is easy now to say with hindsight what they should have done. Moreover, it seemed before 2008 at least as if New Labour had created a new settlement. When they assumed the leadership of their party, David Cameron and George Osborne did not initially dare to question Labour’s spending. On the contrary, they called on the government to increase spending on public services. It would not even explicitly commit to tax cuts, the raison d’être of Toryism; only cautiously, gingerly, daring to say that they would ‘seek to share the proceeds of growth’ at some undefined point, probably far in the future.

This, as we now know, did not endure. The New Labour settlement was not as successful at changing the minds of its opponents as the Thatcherite one had been. But perhaps one of the reasons for that is Blair himself, who was dedicated not only to the market but to the idea that he wasn’t even political at all. This critique is perhaps the most damaging.