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There can be little doubt that Gordon Brown is on the ropes, if not on the canvass. Every day brings a fresh headline pointing up his weaknesses and failures. The opposition are triumphant. The media pack are in full cry, baying for his blood as they once bayed for the blood of Tony Blair.
So it would not be unreasonable to expect the Labour Party as a whole to come to his aid, if only to protect the gains of the last eleven years and to keep open the prospect of more to come.
Instead most activists and left-wing commentators seem to be intent on adding their punches to the pummelling Brown is receiving, much in the same way as those characters in that hilarious movie, Airline, queued up have a slap at a panicking fellow passenger. They are largely doing this in two ways.
One, is to use the opportunity to exert maximum pressure on the government to accept their own political nostrums, threatening to bring down the government if they don't get their way. Never mind that this exposes division in the ranks (which is anethema to the average British voter). Or that the government will be seen as weak if they do give way (again something that is a huge turn-off for most voters ).
The other (not unrelated to the first) is to throw in the towel, on the basis that a spell in opposition would do us the world of good. Never mind the impact on the lives of ordinary people or the fact that this could pave the way for another eighteen years of Tory rule.
Neal Lawson, whose latest piece for Compass exemplifies the first approach, damns the New Labour project for being two steps forward to the market and one token step in favour of society. As I commented on the related website, I see it more as two steps forward to social democracy, one step in favour of market considerations (or more precisely one step back to to take account of political and economic realities). In today's world this is the only way we can achieve our objectives.
The solution to our current predicament then is not to join forces with the opposition and the vulture- like media to exploit every government shortcoming for our own particular ends but to close ranks and fight back against this massive attack on what remains our best hope for a better tomorrow.
John Denham told a packed Progress meeting on Tuesday that he was optimistic about Labour’s prospects and branded talk about whether Gordon Brown should remain leader ‘damaging’ and ‘ridiculous’.
At a debate held to discuss how Labour can win back support in the south following May 1’s dismal election performance, the secretary of state for innovation, universities and skills insisted it was futile to debate which group of voters – core or new - Labour should target.
‘I am optimistic that we can win in the south as long as we talk with confidence about the society we want to create for southern voters,’ he said. ‘At heart we either believe we belong - and therefore win - or we don’t believe we belong - and therefore lose.’
Denham said Labour must not forget that it had governed well in the south, citing policies such as the minimum wage and investment in public services that had resulted in higher living standards. ‘I am absolutely certain there is not a single constituency in south-east England where there is not a clear majority of people who have been better off in the last 10 years than they would have been under the Tories.’
Charles Clarke – whose cover story in this month’s Progress magazine has been widely trailed in the media – agreed that Labour’s poor showing in the elections did not mean the electorate failed to recognize the party’s achievements since 1997. ‘May 1st was a slap in the face from an electorate that wants us to succeed but feels we stumbled,’ said the former home secretary.
He added that the government could only regain the electorate’s confidence by conducting politics differently and avoiding the politics of triangulation, setting out clearly what it is trying to achieve and focusing on long-term issues. Clarke’s specific proposals included a radical change in attitude to sustainable transport and energy, increasing confidence in the criminal justice system and addressing short-term errors – saying that problems should be addressed ‘in the same spirit’ as the chancellor’s recent statement dealing with the 10p tax controversy.
Joan Ryan MP, vice-chair of Labour’s campaigns team, argued that effective political campaigning would be fundamental to any recovery as it would enable the party to keep in step with the issues voters cared about.
‘If your main issue is not what voters think is the main issue, you don’t get their trust and you can’t give political leadership,’ she said, adding that it had been proved many times the party did best when it had established relationships with voters on the ground, in places like Slough, Oxford, Hastings and Enfield & Haringey.
Talk of vision was important, said Ryan, but had to be accompanied by a relationship with the electorate. ‘We need a thorough going change of attitude to campaigning. The electorate will abandon us if it’s all ideas and they don’t see delivery.’
YouGov’s Peter Kellner, who also contributed to the latest edition of Progress, said the underlying issue that mattered to voters in the south was the economy, stupid, with pessimism at its highest rate in 40 years. This was a curious state of affairs, Kellner explained, since the economy was not in the dire state it was in the early 90s or early 80s. And while people were feeling the pinch from rising costs in essential goods such as milk, bread and petrol, the major cause of pessimism was that voters had become frightened about the economy, ‘blaming the government for not taking action to forestall horrors they fear lie ahead’.
Labour’s fate at the next general election would be decided over the next nine to 12 months, said Kellner, pointing out that after Black Wednesday in 1992 the Tories hit the ‘point of no return’ – unable to recover its reputation even though the economy faired pretty well between 1993-1997.
Labour had not reached the point of no return yet, said Kellner, but if the economy didn’t soon show signs of recovery, it could reach that point later this year.
Kellner urged the party to stop using statistics – ‘any claim based on numbers is apt to be disbelieved’ – and outline its concrete achievements such as Sure Start, the minimum wage and civil partnerships. ‘It’s not a bad record and Gordon was behind a lot of it as chancellor. Let’s get away from this self-indulgent crap about Gordon [and the leadership]. We need to persuade people that the taxes they’ve paid are used effectively.’
At the After May 1st event earlier this week, John Denham made an interesting point about personalities. In 1992, many people said that they wouldn't vote for Labour because "they didn't like Neil Kinnock". This, in Denham's view, was merely an excuse, and that there were more profound underlying reasons why people did not yet want to vote Labour.
It reminded me of a post on the Daily Dish last week, where Andrew Sullivan wrote: "Projecting his own clownish-left sensibility onto the first serious black contender for the presidency ... Wright has given white voters permission - and an alibi - not to vote for Obama on racial grounds."
Could it be that the recent economic stumble has given the voters "permission" not to vote for Labour? By framing the problems in this manner, the questions Labour must answer become: Why would the electorate be looking for an excuse to desert? And, what must we do to revoke that "permission".
Is this a helpful analysis? Since it assumes that the electorate is innately unsympathetic to Labour, it's certainly depressing.
Some of my fellow Labour bloggers, party activists and members have short memories. Less than 12 months ago the Tories were disintegrating over academic selection and Labour was 14% ahead in the polls. The next election is not due for another 24 months, the economy is probably over the worst and Gordon Brown - though he admits that he has made mistakes - is not stupid.
The loss of Ken Livingstone as Mayor of London ranks as the worst blow to Labour since the 1992 general election defeat. The question is whether Labour can heed the lessons and rebuild as the party did after 1992.
That will require leadership and vision, strategy and, above all, motivation. Motivation of party members and motivation of the public.
There is still plenty of time to the next general election. But the need for action is urgent, particularly to motivate people.
We need to explain why politics is important, why Labour politics is different, and how Labour has transformed Britain and can continue to change Britain for the better.
People want a party that is clear about its values and acts on those values. People want fairness.
I believe the British public has a great sense of fairness. Labour should start talking about creating ‘the Fair Society’.
The Fair Society will embrace fair pay, fair taxation, fair access to services and so on. People understand what is fair when it comes to pay and to tax, and they know that both should be fairer. Fair access to services would tackle how we get care and childcare, housing, health and education.
But there are many other things that could be embraced by the ‘fair’ banner. A fair world would include fair trade, fair chances would mean a fair start in life, and fair power needs fair votes.
We need to make sure we relate fairness to people’s everyday lives in simple, everyday language.
Fair tax, fair pay and fair services would be a good platform for the next manifesto. It would motivate the public. And crucially it would inspire party members to battle for the fourth term of a Labour government that continues to build the Fair Society.
Stephen Burke is Campaigns Officer, Hammersmith Labour Party
According to commentators of the weekend, last week's election results in London sounded the death knell for environmental policies for the Labour party: Ken Livingstone stood on a green platform, with some of the most radical environmental policies being proposed anywhere in the world and the voters said 'no', instead voting for a man who supported George Bush's position on Kyoto.
But looking a bit more closely at the results, the numbers actually tell a very different story. If anything, they lay the environmental challenge firmly at David Cameron's doorstep. Because although Ken Livingstone came second, more people voted for him this year than in 2004. Far from putting off Labour voters then, if the environment was a significant factor in determining voting intentions, last week's results suggest that Ken's bright-green policies appear to have motivated supporters to turn out. On a national level, similarly bold environmental policies could play a significant role in attracting people back to Labour, helping demonstrate the fresh thinking and strong leadership that we can offer and providing a positive reason to vote Labour.
Unfortunately, at the same time, the opportunity to vote against these same policies appears to have been extremely motivating for Tory voters. We will need to select our environmental policies carefully in order to avoid motivating those who want to assert their rights to pollute, but these results present a much bigger problem for David Cameron. The green agenda has been fundamental in the rehabilitation of the Tory party, but to date we haven't seen any concrete policies. Talking about the environment in abstract terms and evoking images of lovely cycles-to-work appears, for many, to have lifted the guilt of putting your cross in the box marked 'conservative'.
But as a general election grows closer, the Tories are going to have to come up with some policies to legitimize this warm green glow. What policies to tackle climate change will Cameron be able to put forward to when his biggest victory to date has been delivered by voters actively wanting to get rid of the most sustainable mayor in the world? Cameron's slogan 'Vote Blue go Green' might be very clever while they have no policies, but it appears that Tory voters are not so keen when the rhetoric becomes reality.
At last year’s Labour Party Conference in Bournemouth, Gordon Brown laid out his pitch to the nation. Like any good salesman, he picked his audience carefully, and the buyer of brand Labour for a fourth Labour term was Dudley woman. It’s widely assumed that Brown’s PPS, Ian Austin, wrote large segments of the speech, and so as Dudley’s MP, this Midlands suburb featured large.
Brown made it clear he wanted to reassure the aspirational middle classes with a heady punch of patriotism, family values and Stakhanovist emphasis on hard-work. It struck a clearly different tone to Blair’s speeches, far more conciliatory, and much less ideological. It was down to earth and rooted in understandably British values, not Blair’s more internationalist agenda. But Dudley woman is angry, fears for the future and thinks the government has lost its way: can Cameron capture the agenda, or could Brown’s speech provide a blueprint for a new governance that could capture the mood of the nation?
Britain is gloomy. Not since the early nineties have the storm clouds gathered so quickly. The pound in your pocket is worth little against the Euro, inflation is biting, and house prices have begun to fall. Brown needs to return to his core theme, that if you work hard, the government will be ‘on your side’. Anger at the City is growing, there’s a palpable sense amongst the middle classes that they’re not getting their fair share of the cake: that the workless are taking too much at the bottom, and the feckless are getting too much at the top. Brown’s narrative about working hard and playing by the rules makes sense to people in the middle: the 10p tax cut didn’t.
Brown needs to return to this story – by slashing tax for everyone at the bottom with a large increase in the tax-free threshold for earnings, and a new top rate of tax of 45p in the pound for earners above £150,000. It must be done simply – every penny raised at the top, must go down to the bottom. None must be diverted to tax credits, even if this means the money is less well targeted – the economic down turn affects everyone.
Further to this, Labour needs to think the unthinkable about unemployment benefit. It isn’t progressive to allow people to linger on the dole with declining mental health, and a declining sense of worth for years on end. The dole should be restricted to a maximum of 18 months before it is cut off. Extra funding should be provided to charities who work with the unemployed: not to provide financial assistance, but to provide training for work. Although few people take benefits willingly, a tiny minority abuse the system: racists point to work shirkers and ask why we need immigration when healthy young men stand idle. Both proposals should be announced simultaneously – the work ethic must be at the heart of what Labour stands for, for it contrasts with the Tory record of mass unemployment.
Brown also needs to rediscover his radical side. No Labour government has ever won a fourth term, and sadly at the moment it looks unlikely that Brown will either. So, rather than spend two years outlining plans for a fourth term, Brown should unveil radical reform that can pushed through Parliament in a year. Serious House of Lords reform would split the Tories and re-establish in swing voters minds why they voted out the reactionaries in the first place.
The house building programme unveiled by the government must be made more radical still: with the housing market in meltdown it is unlikely private contractors will be in any position to build new homes. The government should announce an intention to sell off a million Council houses, and also an intention to provide capital to housing associations to replace every one of those Council houses with low-rent properties (rent-fixed for a decade). Giving Council tenants a stake in their estates is good for communities, and proved popular under Thatcher.
The Tories have no response to the failures of the housing market, except to provide subsidies to middle-class mortgages which would do nothing to increase our housing stock. Let’s place the emphasis on building and securing mortgages, and enter the next election with cranes on the landscape of British cities providing work - “Homes for heroes” won Labour votes in the 40s, market failure in our decade could provide a platform for a 4th term Labour government.
In London, on the doorsteps voters who turned out for Labour mentioned Ken’s 50% affordable housing pledge. The London Mayoral elections showed that much of Labour’s core vote held, in all but two GLA seats Labour’s vote rose – and in 6 it rose more than 5% (including traditionally Tory Merton and Wandsworth).
Project Labour hasn’t collapsed, this isn’t ’97 for the Tories yet: but in London there was a clear Labour agenda, this needs to be returned to nationally. Dudley woman worries because her children can’t afford to get on the property ladder, wants decent schools, and wants her hard work recognised. The two Etonians running the Tory party with their emphasis on the polar ice caps, hugging hoodies, and increasing the inheritance tax threshold to £1m give her absolutely nothing to vote for. The Tories’ current platform makes them an upper-middle class irrelevance. They’ve nothing in their basket of goodies for families who though aspirational, still want the state to provide their education, healthcare and pension.
Cozy nineties Blairite centrism is dead, anger at the filthy rich is rising fast. Brown needs to wake up to the new reality, set out a radical stall, and not flinch. He needs to find courage, and fast.
When he was shadow Health Secretary, Dr Liam Fox appeared to suggest that the Tories should become the anti-abortion party. In 2001 Fox was quoted in the Conservative Christian Fellowship prayerbook as saying that the UK's 'pro-abortion laws' should be scrapped.In 2005 Michael Howard almost made abortion a general election issue when, towards to start of the campaign, he told Cosmopolitan magazine 'I believe abortion should be available to everyone, but the law should be changed. In the past I voted for a restriction to 22 weeks, and I would be prepared to go down to 20.'
It is because of examples like this that I am just a little sceptical about the new campaign launched today by the Tory MP Nadine Dorries. A former nurse, Ms Dorries is leading a parliamentary campaign to reduce the upper limit for abortion from 24 weeks to 20 weeks when the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill is debated in the Commons later this month. The last time the law on abortion was amended was in 1990 – given the fact that both medicine and science have advanced significantly one cannot agree that a review of abortion legislation is long overdue.
At present, all legislation on abortion in Britain is considered as a matter of conscience and decided under a free vote. What worries me is that some MPs and campaigners may use the forthcoming debate as a means of polarising attitudes where the issue of abortion is seen only of terms of being a vote winner, or a vote loser. Today’s Daily Mail leads on the launch of Ms Dorries’ campaign and will no doubt be a strong advocate of the need for a change in the present law. Britain has a long and enviable record of allowing its elected representatives to make up their own minds in matters of conscience. The danger, as I see it, is that some of Ms Dorries’ colleagues may well be tempted to frame the debate about abortion in such a way that it heralds the first tentative steps to try and establish a political arm for the Christian right in Britain.
Ms Dorries has stated that the campaign is not a religious campaign (yet 6 out of the 10 organisations linked to it are backed by Christian evangelicals) nor, we are told, is it politically motivated. Let’s hope it stays that way.
Last April I posted about Luke Mackenzie, a Tory candidate who was standing in the British National Party (BNP) target ward of Basildon in Essex. Mr Mackenzie had been accused of peddling scare stories by suggesting that people who wanted to stop asylum-seekers being given council houses should vote Conservative. The Times reported that Mr Mackenzie's future as a Conservative candidate was 'hanging in the balance.'
Guess what? Luke is standing for the Tories in this year's election - this time for the neighbouring ward of Vange. Here are a few of Mr Mackenzie's thoughts and observations (taken directly from his website):
Luke on Crime: 'Ever heard of the saying cut off the head and the body will die. Try the hand instead.'
Luke on the NHS: 'The NHS has the money it needs, but it's mis-spent. Targets should be scrapped and the money saved from administration costs, that come with the targets should be spent on Doctors, Nurses, hygiene etc.'
Does anyone understand this? Does it make any sense?
Luke on housing: 'Local council housing for local people, not asylum seekers.'
The fact is that Luke is still a candidate for the Tories and he is still (if his website is anything to go by) peddling scare stories by suggesting that people who wanted to stop asylum-seekers being given council houses should vote Conservative.
Perhaps it is a case of vote Tory and get the BNP?
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