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Things Can Only Get Worse

Added on 13/05/2008

Zaki Moosa considers what last week's local election results mean for Labour...

If “Things Can Only Get Better” was the theme tune of Labour’s victory in 1997, Alanis Morrisette’s “Ironic” should be the soundtrack of their local election disaster last Thursday. Isn’t it ironic, don’t you think, that the first high-profile victim of the electorate’s impatience with Gordon Brown was Ken Livingstone, who couldn’t be less like Brown? Not-quite-so-red-anymore Ken always split opinions, and the sense of momentum behind David Cameron and the renewed Tories was probably enough to lure the suburbs out to the polling stations. Labour will be hoping BoJo, as the excruciating abbreviation has it, will cock it all up and let them campaign for the next election on the theme of “Don’t let the Tories do to the UK what Boris has done to London”. Don't bet on it. A battalion of advisors will be on hand to prevent exactly this happening.

Even after 6 months in Germany’s richest city, returning to the prosperity and vibrancy of much of London was quite a surprise. Personally I don't believe that Johnson is a suitable candidate to lead a city now regarded as the capital of the world (although Labour can hardly hold up Johnson’s dubious writing when their own man once compared a Jewish reporter to a concentration camp guard). He has had to be smothered by PR men to prevent another stupid utterance about black people or Liverpool, and seemed to base his campaign on airy-fairy promises about the reintroduction of Routemaster buses – tradition for tradition’s sake, as constantly emphasised in his columns – and cutting crime and disorder, as if everyone else was for violence. (Prepare for a fight as tube workers refuse to enforce his alcohol ban.) Politics is not a celebrity contest, and the amusement factor is not really a sufficient reason to choose a leader; even Simon Heffer in the Telegraph denounced him recently as an “act”. However the fact is that he won and Livingstone didn’t. And so overall the state of play exactly eleven years after Tony Blair celebrated victory on May 2 1997 is that extrapolated to a general election, last week’s results in council after council give David Cameron a majority of 130 in the Commons. This was not just another midterm council vote giving bored voters a chance to stick two fingers up to Westminster. It was, as Munich’s great liberal paper the Süddeutsche Zeitung put it, a vote on “banal issues – rubbish collections in Nuneaton, cycle paths in Slough, traffic lights in Walsall” that morphed into an opportunity to whack Brown one. This election must surely mean that without drastic change his days as leader are numbered. The reams of Labour MPs in danger of losing their seats will rise up eventually, if bloodshed looks inevitable under his control.

Until the great catastrophe of the Iraq war, it wouldn’t have such been a massive leap to describe Tony Blair as the great European politician of his generation. It's always easy to work backwards from the final days of his premiership, when he was so extraordinarily out of touch with everyone else; the days in which his leadership resembled how he looked in that fascinating portrait of him revealed recently, empty, exhausted, haunted by numerous ghosts. But back on May 2 1997, Our Tone swept into Downing Street on the back of the Tories’ greatest loss since 1906 and the biggest majority for one party under universal suffrage. Just eleven years later it broke another record, by notching up its worst polling since records began; it kicked Blair out as leader and failed to renew itself afterwards. But compared to the Tories’ 18 years of boom and bust and mass unemployment, on the surface Labour hasn’t seemed so disastrous. The unwavering belief in the power of unfettered capitalism only now exists in Downing Street and its chums in the City. Its epitaph will be written by Matt Ridley, science writer and failed chairman of Northern Rock, who called government “a self-seeking flea on the backs of the more productive people of this world ... governments do not run countries, they parasitise them.” He believed this until his incompetence sent him running to the Bank of England for help in propping up his floundering bank. Yet many aspects of the Third Way aren’t particularly dead, just resurrected by the Tories with a fresher face and a real sense of renewal. So what changed to turn the Labour party into such an electoral liability?

Folklore has it that when William the Conqueror came ashore at Hastings in 1066, he jumped out of his boat and promptly fell flat on his face. After a decade or more of lingering in the wings waiting to be Prime Minister, as promised in the infamous Granita deal (which Cherie Blair now claims actually happened a couple of days before the meal, at her sister's house), Gordon Brown surfed into power on a wave of delight as Blair finally went, reached the beach of Number 10 and did exactly the same. A series of disasters destroyed his reputation as a great political strategist: the election that never was, the constant data losses that destroyed people’s trust in grand government IT schemes, the arrogant encroachment on civil liberties (although much of that was Blair’s work, there has been no sign of a withdrawal), the bigging-up and then ignoring of constitutional reform and finally the catastrophic removal of the 10p tax rate. The latter was a masterstroke in political ignorance, meant to keep the middle-classes happy at the expense of the poor with nowhere else to go. All it resulted in was a mass rebellion by those affected – Labour losing councils in the Welsh Valleys and to the Tories across the North is surely the strongest sign of its malaise. Then the legendary middle classes joined in, partly out of disgusted solidarity and partly due to their own financial insecurity as the rich get richer and inflation shoots upwards. Gordon Brown does have some record in trying to alleviate poverty both here and abroad, most notably through tax credits and the Sure Start scheme. But these were implemented quietly whilst billions were given loudly to Northern Rock. They’ve said it’s all over for New Labour before, but if Worcester Woman has now deserted and returned to the Tories, it really is now.

The lasting legacy of Tony Blair and New Labour is the death of ideology. For all that is written to the contrary, he leaves a relatively progressive country to the left of both major political parties; one not given to political extremism on either side, as shown by the continuing failure of the BNP in comparison to similar parties in Austria, France, Switzerland, Italy and elsewhere; one that for all its problems and whinging seems prosperous and comfortable compared to twenty years back. What will worry Labour is that nobody seems to be that bothered about their upcoming defeat anymore. The Guardian, on the Saturday after the results came in, seemed to be heralding Cameron into power, calmly reporting the Tory victories with no sense of disapproval. Rather than issuing meaningless control-freak initiatives by the thousand Labour has two years to learn its lessons, in particular working out why Ken Livingstone and his progressive politics lost to the Tories much less spectacularly than the rest of the party's councillors did. But what will probably happen now is that the opposing factions will start whirling around in opposite directions like dervishes, desperately trying to capture the attention of the party and hopefully then the electorate at large. Compass and the Fabian Society on the left and Progress on the right fill my inbox daily with suggestions and conferences about where to go next. They will eventually collide in a mass of irrelevancy and collapse into the heap of opposition, unable to get up for years. If it goes on trying to find excuse after excuse whilst staying so catastrophically out of touch, Labour is condemning itself to years back in the wilderness. And it will only have itself to blame.

Zaki Moosa

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