Labour: the week that was ...
You will be pleased to hear, I hope, that I have safely returned from The Other Side.
I refer, of course, to the Land Beyond the Ring of Steel, the Land of the Labour Party Conference. It is a Strange and Peculiar Land where Politics is All.
Outside, the Sun shone and the Sea glistened. But inside, the Select Few were filled with Foreboding: their Mood was Dark and the Clouds were Gathering. (Enough capital letters, thank you. Ed.)
It's been a strange few days. For one brief moment - after a gloriously over-the-top, end-of-pier performance by Peter Mandelson - it looked as if the conference delegates might have been ready to start smiling again. But Gordon Brown's speech on Tuesday didn't seem to deliver the goods - and then The Sun (the newspaper, not the bright yellow thing in the sky) went and ruined everything by announcing in that under-stated way it has: Labour's Lost It.
By May of next year, the expected date of the election, Labour will have been in power for 13 years. By British political standards, that's a very long time. With only one exception - the Conservatives between 1979 and 1997 - you'd have to go back to the days of Lord Liverpool and the Duke of Wellington (1812-1830) to find a single party remaining in power for longer. (The Tories also lasted for 13 years between 1951 and 1964.)
So it wouldn't exactly be surprising if voters decide next year that Labour's time is up. I wouldn't expect the party to accept that publicly, but maybe it helps to explain the slight dream-like air of unreality in the Brighton Conference Centre.
I went round asking delegates how they would describe their mood. Nearly all of them insisted bravely that they were ready for a fight and in good heart. They said they have a "good story to tell" - the story of accomplishments that Gordon Brown rattled off at break-neck speed at the start of his speech on Tuesday.
The winter fuel allowance, national minimum wage, Sure Start, civil partnerships, shorter NHS waiting times, less crime, better school exam results ... how can voters not be grateful for all that?
But they know the answer, of course. First, voters never say Thank You - not even to Winston Churchill at the end of the Second World War (which Mr Brown is reported to spend a lot of time brooding about). And second, after a bruising recession, with rising unemployment, and a Prime Minister who has claimed for more than a decade that he was uniquely able to steer an economy and abolish "boom and bust", well, gratitude is in short supply.
Two more thoughts: Labour is still in thrall to the US Democratic Party (at least when it wins elections). The original New Labour project owed a huge debt to Bill Clinton's New Democrats - and when I saw Sarah Brown do her Michelle Obama thing ("he's messy and noisy" - Sarah B; "he doesn't put his dirty socks in the laundry or put the butter away after breakfast" - Michelle O), it was clear that nothing has changed.
And finally, still in transatlantic compare and contrast mode, it seems you do need to be an actor these days to be a successful political leader: Reagan and Clinton were, and Obama is; Thatcher and Blair were, Brown ... well, he isn't.
It wasn't a disastrous conference for Labour, and I suspect most delegates did feel a bit better at the end of it than at the beginning. But was it the beginning of a long fight-back to electoral victory?
What do you think?
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Robin
How the Labour Party let Brown become leader practically unchallenged in the first place beats me. It was obvious that he'll never inspire the public to re-elect the Government. I remember when he became PM and his first speech used the word 'change' so many times that it was obvious that change was never going to be on the agenda. Mind you, Mandy did advocate partially privatising Royal Mail - that's a change I suppose, not ever a vote grabber though.
This is more of long fight-back to avoid being beaten by the Lib-Dems into third place. Its going to be a struggle.
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Robin,
I think it is almost universally true that all politicians are not brought down by what they do but by what they say that they do (c.f. 'an end to boom and bust'!)
One of the other problems with the British system of democracy is the permanent government (i.e. the Civil Service) that stays on whichever party comes to power. Mrs Thatcher recognised this and applied the 'is he one of us test' - one of the major errors of the Labour Government in 1997 was not to do so to the same extent. [At least in the USA system there is a reasonably full clear out of the executive and administrative staff on change of President.]
Because the civil servants remained from the days of Tory rule the advice given was essentially Tory advice and this caused the incoming Labour government to be essentially Tory - indeed Tony Blair made a virtue of carrying on with Tory policies as did Gordon Brown. In a sense we have had Tory rule since Margaret Thatcher came to power - so Mrs Thatcher's ('Libertarian')Government has been controlling things for 25 years - and now we will probably have the Tories again!
Labour needs to find a (re)newed philosophy and renew its moral and ethical positions. David Cameron is from the 'One Nation' strand of the Tory party (I believe) and has made himself seem like a change from the past 25 years of rule - he may not be a change of course, but that is yet to be seen.
Labour needs to be a party of the Left again, but also needs to take a warning from the German SPD - the left of the middle is a difficult place to be! When the SDP broke from labour and joined the Liberals Labour lost what was then thought to be the right of the party to a centre Liberal party, but now the Liberals are probably best considered to the left of Labour. The left of centre squeeze in the UK is really quite similar to that suffered by the SPD in Germany and I don't think there is much that they can do about it! (The left of centre squeeze is probably a function of the impact of (Libertarian) Tory economic policy and the resulting Credit Bubble and Crunch in both countries.)
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