The day after the Day of Destiny

Following the defeat of the independence proposal in the Scottish referendum, the haggling starts over the constitutional settlement that will result. So here's an extract from my book A Classless Society: Britain in the 1990s about the last time the government chickened out on this issue:

All the really difficult issues associated with devolution were similarly shelved. Tam Dalyell’s 1978 query – dubbed by Enoch Powell the West Lothian Question – still remained: Why should Scottish MPs sitting in Westminster be able to pass laws that affected people in England but not their own constituents? ‘It was a perfectly sensible question,’ concluded Blair, ‘and an interesting example of a problem in politics to which there is no logical answer.’

There was a logical answer, of course: an English parliament, or even a committee of the House of Commons, comprising all those elected as MPs for constituencies in England, which would be responsible for decisions related specifically and solely to English matters. This would have created two tiers of MP, with a steep reduction in influence for the lower tier; MPs for Scottish constituencies would have even less responsibility than they already did, since so much domestic policy was devolved to the Scottish Parliament.

The official government response to the proposal was to reject it because ‘at a practical level, there is no room in the precincts large enough to accommodate all 582 members sitting for English seats’. Teresa Gorman voiced an alternative interpretation: ‘It doesn’t take a genius to work out why the English are denied a referendum and its own parliament; England is where most Conservative voters are to be found.’

Likewise there was no attempt to address the matter of the disproportionately high number of Scottish and Welsh MPs who sat in the House. Nor was there any amendment to the Barnett Formula, the stop-gap system introduced in the 1970s which provided Scotland and Wales with high levels of government spending, and which had remained untouched ever since. David Blunkett did argue for a change in early 2001, but Gordon Brown told him: ‘I can’t do anything about the Barnett Formula before the election.’ Blunkett’s response was at least honest: ‘No, I don’t expect you can. I want to win seats in Scotland and Wales as well.’

Pointless Politicians

An edition of the TV game show Pointless this week had a round based on 100 people naming as many politicians as they could remember who had served in the Labour cabinets of either Tony Blair or Gordon Brown. That is, any cabinet member between 1997 and 2010.

The game, of course, is for contestants to find someone who wasn't named by anyone, so I came up with Ivor Richard, thinking he was suitably obscure. But I needed have aimed so low. It's not a scientifically selected sample, but even so the results suggest just how completely uninterested in politics the public are.

Top of the list was John Prescott, named by just 15 out of the 100 people. Then came:

Ed Miliband - 13 out of 100
Ed Balls - 13 out of 100
David Miliband - 12 out of 100
Jack Straw - 7 out of 100
Alistair Darling - 7 out of 100
Peter Mandelson - 4 out of 100
David Blunkett - 4 out of 100
Clare Short - 2 out of 100
Mo Mowlam - 1 out of 100
Margaret Beckett - 1 out of 100

We never found out whether my nominee, Ivor Richard, made it into the pointless category, because there were simply too many names to go through. But amongst those who rated not a single mention were: Andrew Adonis, Andy Burnham, Jack Cunningham, Charlie Falconer, Patricia Hewitt, Derry Irvine, Donald Dewar, Frank Dobson, Geoff Hoon, Margaret Jay, Alan Milburn and James Purnell.

I believe this is what's known as a reality check. Alternatively, all those politicians, so convinced that they're very important people indeed, might think of it as being - in Rupert Murdoch's phrase - the most humble day of their lives. Thirteen years in power, and hardly anyone cares or remembers who any of you were.

I'm reminded of an exchange in Pamela Hansford Johnson's great novel An Error of Judgement, way back in 1962.

'Could it really be that I am the only person in the world bored stiff, bored pallid, by politics?' a character asks, and is immediately put straight by another: 'No, we all are, those of us who aren't politicians. That's why we're the prey of the silly men, the posturing men. They don't get bored, not ever. We are the victims of their professional excitement.'

Quote for the Week 9

'You cannot build the New Jerusalem on a mountain of debt.'
- Gordon Brown to the Labour Party conference, 1997

The Man Who Wasn't There

As I was going up the stairs
I saw a man who wasn’t there;
He wasn’t there again today...

While the usual suspects on the Eurosceptic right (Simon Heffer, Norman Tebbit et al) continued to demonstrate that they haven't quite got the hang of this coalition business, and as the government took its collective sledgehammer to some backbench nuts, there was a missing voice in the coverage of this week's debate about a possible EU referendum.

It happened again on the BBC's Question Time this evening. The panel comprised a Tory cabinet minister, a Tory peer, a Lib Dem and the leader of the UKIP. Oh, and there was a Labour MP as well. But she had nothing to say.

Where exactly is the Labour Party these days? I know that it had problems after the election, when Gordon Brown disappeared in a puff of sulk and the media decided that the coalition was a much more interesting story, but that was last year. It really should be making a bit more of the running by now.

Admittedly Labour is ahead in the opinion polls. But not by much. And the gap was wider during the summer (six to eight percentage points) than it has been over the last month or so (three to five points). Or to put it another way, the party was doing better when all the politicians were on holiday and there was an absence of debate.

Which does seem to be the problem. It feels as though Labour has a lead in the polls simply because they exist and aren't in the government. And as long as no one listens to a word they say, they'll stumble along as a protest option. But while the government is obviously unpopular - how could it not be? - that's not going to be enough.

Around this stage of the first government of Margaret Thatcher, when she was also pursuing unpopular economic policies, the Labour Party was touching 50 per cent in the polls, not the 40 to 42 per cent that it's stuck on now. Even in the early days of Michael Foot's leadership, the party had a massive lead in the polls.

The truth is that polls at this point aren't of any significance. What's important is trying to seize some kind of control of the agenda. And Ed Miliband's Labour Party is doing nothing of the kind.

Crying Wolf

A fortnight into the Great Phone-Hacking Scandal of 2011, and I can't help feeling that Ed Miliband is still missing his moment.

Obviously he's managed to raise his profile and improve his reputation. He's done enough to ensure that there won't be any whispering about leadership challenges during the autumn conference season. But there's still no distance between him and the bad bits of the New Labour legacy. Indeed the clumsy contributions of his mentor, Gordon Brown, last week only served to remind us all of the continuities with the past.

We've had a whole fortnight of righteous indignation, and I'm not convinced that Miliband has read the public mood properly.

As far as I can tell, there was genuine revulsion in the first couple of days, when the stories of hacking into the phones of murder victims and dead soldiers first emerged. But the closure of the News of the World changed things. Now it feels like the public are simply enjoying a great soap opera - the tone is mostly one of gleeful fascination with the decline of Rupert Murdoch and his associates. I'm not sure that there's the political anger in the country that Miliband seems to assume. It may yet come, but there will need to be further revelations to relight that fire.

And there will be more revelations. There's a long way to go. Things will calm down after Murdoch's appearance before the select committee this afternoon and the Commons debate tomorrow, but this is a story that's going to run and run. My suspicion is that Miliband would have done better to have kept some of his powder dry for the battles to come - he's in danger of looking like the boy who cried 'wolf'.

This was a good time for a little humility, to prepare the ground for relaunching the Labour Party as an alternative government. Just to concentrate on attacking David Cameron isn't sufficient. Let's hope that the parliamentary closed season will give time for a more considered approach.

Failed Gods

‘Depressions can be seen as what happens when inequality gets out of hand in a market system. At one end of the scale there is a growth in poverty, which in turn leads to high debt as people struggle to maintain their living standards. They either borrow or consume less. At the other end inequality encourages bouts of wild speculation as the rich find themselves with piles of spare cash. Speculation leads to bubbles, and bubbles lead to crashes...’

That was Larry Elliott and Dan Atkinson in their classic (if slightly neglected) book, The Age of Insecurity, back in 1998.

At the time, of course, they were wildly out-of-step with the times – off-message, as it was then known. Certainly no one in the triumphalist Blairite camp wanted to hear their warning that New Labour was ultimately headed for disaster, and that it was a mistake to abandon time-honoured social democratic values of egalitarianism in favour of the fantasy of the free market.

For ten years the Cassandra warnings have continued to pour forth. And, like Cassandra, it turns out that Elliott and Atkinson were right all along. Their devastating summary of the Blair years, Fantasy Island, came out in Spring 2007 and rained all over Gordon Brown’s parade just as the band was striking up.

Their most recent book, The Gods That Failed, dissects the roots of the current crisis. Its sales figures suggest that maybe people are listening: ‘Markets are not Magic. Debt is not Freedom.’

Whether the Labour Party has the courage to return to its egalitarian traditions is another matter.

Gambling on Gordon

The first bet I ever placed was in 1984, and paid off very nicely when Pebbles romped home to victory in the 1000 Guineas at odds of 16-1. The following year I backed Dennis Taylor at the start of the World Snooker tournament to win the title at 25-1, though a last-minute loss of confidence saw me take the each-way option, to my subsequent regret as he came back from seemingly inevitable humiliation to beat Steve Davis on the final ball of the final frame.

Somewhat predictably, I peaked too early, and my sporadic gambling career has been marked by a series of lost stakes ever since. The sequence of ill-considered punts culminated some eighteen months ago, as Tony Blair was preparing to vacate Downing Street, with what I’ve promised myself was definitely my last bet: twenty quid said that Peter Hain would be the next leader of the Labour Party.

As you’ll have noticed, I was entirely wrong. Hain didn’t get the leadership. He didn’t even get the deputy-leadership. In fact, shortly after coming fifth in a field of six for that job, he was obliged even to step down from the cabinet altogether, after some controversy over campaign contributions.

Despite the loss of the money, though, I still reckon my reasoning was sound. I argued that Gordon Brown was so clearly the wrong man for the job that Labour MPs would see the error of their ways and would decide against an act of collective political suicide.

Obviously the party cards were stacked in his favour, but equally obviously he could never put together the kind of cross-class coalition needed to defeat a Tory Party that was so successfully reinventing itself under David Cameron. Why, then, would Labour MPs vote in a leader almost guaranteed to lose them their jobs at the next election?

As we celebrate the completion of Brown’s first year in office, none of this seems to have been invalidated by events.

Admittedly my endorsement of Hain was less prescient – but it’s hard to see how he could have made a worse fist of being prime minister than Brown has done. My logic said that he was old enough not to stand in the way of younger pretenders for too long, and could have made a decent compromise candidate, taking Labour to probable defeat, but leaving Cameron with a minority government or – at worst – a very small majority.

In any event, the Labour Party evidently wasn’t thinking what I was thinking, and now it’s stuck with a leader who appears destined to emulate Jim Callaghan’s unenviable record of being prime minister without ever winning a general election.

The similarities between Brown and Callaghan are striking. Both followed a prime minister who had proved adept at winning elections (three triumphs for Blair, four for Harold Wilson), but who had lost the support of the party, was considered a bit too shallow and gimmicky, and seemed exhausted by office. In both cases, the new incumbent was a former chancellor who was regarded as a good Labour man, a safe pair of hands with a strong emotional and structural attachment to what used to be known as This Great Movement of Ours.

And yet, once in office, they disappointed their followers, pursuing right-wing economic policies almost indistinguishable from those of the Conservative Party, and finding themselves locked in damaging pay disputes with public sector workers whose support should have been automatic.

Both have been castigated for failing to call an election: Callaghan in autumn 1978, and Brown in autumn 2007. In both cases they would probably have won, Brown by virtue of novelty at least. Callaghan went on to lose to Margaret Thatcher the following year; Brown has the comfort of another two years before time runs out.

Both faced rising enthusiasm for nationalist parties in Scotland and Wales. And both were vulnerable to English suspicion for representing constituencies outside England.

The differences between the two men, however, are proving ever more significant as the months pass.

Callaghan was, above all, distinguished by his enormous breadth of experience in office. He had been a minister in the government of Clement Atlee (at the department of transport, he’d introduced cats’ eyes and zebra crossings to the nation’s roads), and apart from being chancellor, had also served as home secretary and foreign secretary. Quite possibly he will prove to be the last ever prime minister to have also held the other major offices of state. And while he hadn’t been a conspicuous success at any of those previous jobs, he did at least know in some considerable detail how government and Whitehall worked.

Brown, on the other hand, spent fourteen years on the opposition benches before being catapulted into Number Eleven. He’s never run – or even participated in running – a spending department. For someone who, unlike Blair, hasn’t shied away from the word ‘socialism’, it wouldn’t have done any harm to have known what it was like to argue for more resources, rather than simply to hold the purse-strings.

Beyond the economy, the difference in style was evident in the Crewe & Nantwich by-election last month, where the Tories celebrated taking their first by-election seat from Labour since Ilford North thirty years ago.

That election, back in 1978, came just weeks after Thatcher’s famous World In Action broadcast in which she successfully appealed to the supporters of Enoch Powell, warning that ‘People are really rather afraid that this country might be rather swamped by people with a different culture’. In the election itself, Sir Keith Joseph built explicitly on this position, with a direct plea to the Jewish vote: ‘Therefore I say that the electors of Ilford North, including the Jews – who are just like everyone else, as the saying goes, only more so – have good reason for supporting Margaret Thatcher and the Conservative Party on immigration.’

The effect was all that could have been hoped for, and the defeat of Labour’s Tessa Jowell was greeted with dismay on the left: ‘The party is depressed at the apparent success of Thatcher’s exploitation of the race issue,’ noted Benn glumly in his diary

In Crewe & Nantwich it was the Labour Party that was accused of playing the race card, from their slogan for Tamsin Dunwoody (‘One of us’) downwards. Callaghan was not exactly in the progressive vanguard when it came to race and immigration (‘We don’t want any more blacks in Britain,’ he’d told Benn in 1970), but under his leadership, at least Labour didn’t descend to the dog-whistle. To do so, and then to lose, looks like the tactics of desperation.

Then there’s the question of temperament. Callaghan’s public persona was that of Sunny Jim, a cheerful calming presence in times of trouble. His image of unflappable reassurance may have cost him dear in the winter of discontent (prompting the famous ‘Crisis? What Crisis?’ misquote in the Sun), but mostly it stood him in good stead and saw him retain a high level of personal support: before, during and after the 1979 general election, he scored higher in opinion polls than did either his party or Thatcher.

Nowadays, Brown trails even Labour’s lowly standing in the polls. And despite all attempts to re-vamp his image and all the encouragement to smile more often, he still looks as though a slightly sulky gloom is his default position. One can’t help but be reminded of P.G. Wodehouse’s comment that ‘It is never difficult to distinguish between a Scotsman with a grievance and a ray of sunshine.’

Most important of all is the difference between the two men’s assumption of office. Callaghan came through in 1976 as the victor in a contest that saw a host of substantial and weighty challengers: Roy Jenkins, Anthony Crosland, Tony Benn, Denis Healey and Michael Foot, any one of whom could make a plausible case as a potential prime minister. They were the best and brightest candidates available, and they came from right across the spectrum of the Parliamentary Labour Party.

Had Brown faced a similar field a year ago, he would probably still have won, but he would have emerged with the kind of unquestionable authority that he now so patently lacks. It would have been hard for the press to indulge in the promotion of, say, David Milliband’s cause if he’d already been seen off by Brown.

And of course it would have given me at least an outside chance of seeing a return on my stake.

But then again, to return to one of my few successes at the bookmakers, in 1985 Dennis Taylor was eight frames to nil down before he staged that remarkable comeback to snatch victory from Steve Davis. A rotund, uncharismatic figure from the Celtic fringes proved capable of overcoming the golden young star who everyone thought was invincible. And he did it by sheer resilience and a refusal to accept defeat when it was staring him in the face.

Maybe, just maybe, Brown is not the new Callaghan at all; maybe he’s the new Dennis Taylor.

But I wouldn’t bet on it.