Shades of Brown

Image result for action 4 equality scotland + ed miliband and gordon brown

Philip Collins wrote a perceptive article for The Times the other day on the current state of the Labour Party in which he argues that behind Ed Miliband there stands an equally unimpressive group of likely successors who are on the side of the 'planner, the controller - the producer, not the parent'.

Which is true if you ask me, because there's little real radicalism in the Labour Party these days and I say that not just in relation to equal pay where Labour has failed to tackle the big Labour councils or the vested interests of the trade unions

In practice, many of the activists in what is sometimes referred to as the Labour movement are deeply conservative people who are often on the side of the the 'status quo', the established ways of doing things, the old order if you like.

So while you think that the announcement that Greater Manchester is to lead a revolution in healthcare, by gaining control of the NHS budget for that part of the UK, would be welcomed enthusiastically by Labour (being official party policy), the fact that the Coalition Government has taken this step prevents the Labour Party from behaving in a grown-up fashion.

To my mind a Labour government under Ed Miliband would be just as dull, ineffectual  and uninspiring as the Labour government led by Gordon Brown which promised the sun and the stars, but crashed to earth in a quite spectacular fashion.   

Ed is just the tip of the iceberg for Labour

By Philip Collins - The Times


The party’s problems go much deeper than its leader. A refusal to embrace new ideas has infected a whole generation

Disguised by the frenetic activity of an election campaign, the Labour party is tempted by existential crisis. Scotland has changed the calculus. The fear of victory is gradually being replaced by the more probable fear of defeat. Fewer and fewer Labour MPs now believe Ed Miliband will make it over the line. In such in a mood, politicians begin to prepare for all eventualities.

Among commentators, the next move in the Labour party is always discussed as a question of “who”. There are rumours circulating again that Andy Burnham has tied up a deal with Yvette Cooper. Chuka Umunna could be anybody’s candidate and therefore risks being nobody’s candidate. There are even those who think that Alan Johnson’s loyalty to the party might persuade him to be caretaker manager so a Dan Jarvis or a Liz Kendall can grow under his wing.

The Labour implosion in Scotland, though, means that, for those MPs expecting defeat, the urgent question is not “who” but “what”. These are circumstances in which Labour ought to win. A weak and haughty Tory leader stands at the head of a divided party under the banner of a still-toxic brand. To the right, Ukip threatens to deprive the Tories of victory. Coalition has brought Labour the gift of Liberal Democrat votes, and the electoral system retains its bias in their favour. A meagre 35 per cent of the popular vote will bring victory. If Labour cannot win when its general has all this luck, there must be something seriously wrong with it.

The question of what and not who also applies looking backward. There will be an easy verdict available, should Labour lose, that the defeat can be explained entirely by the leader’s shortcomings. In 1992 Labour personalised defeat and the idea took hold that Neil Kinnock was not a viable prime minister. Lord Kinnock is, to my mind, a Labour hero without whom the Blair victories would have been impossible and while it is true that his lack of gravitas was a factor in Labour’s defeat, the loss was greater than that. Labour lost in 1992 because it had not finished its journey back to electability and the voters rumbled it.

This is the main reason to hope that the TV debates survive David Cameron’s cynical and frightened attempt to scupper them. Live debate would show beyond doubt that Ed Miliband is not rubbish. I would expect Mr Miliband to perform well and for it to make no difference at all. The public already knows that, on his day, Mr Miliband does good theatre but his leadership ratings, alas, already take account of that.

The crucial lesson about defeats is that they are never merely personal. A message is always thrown out along with a messenger. Robert Conquest, the great historian of the Soviet Union, once devised three laws of politics, the third of which runs that “the simplest way to explain the behaviour of any bureaucratic organisation is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies”. There have been two examples over the past fortnight that showed the cabal of enemies working their clever espionage and Labour not having the instinct to be in the right place.

The first was the announcement that Greater Manchester would be the first English region to be given control of its health spending. The full £6 billion spent on health and social care would, from April 2016, be managed locally. What was the Labour response to this radical and welcome development? It wasn’t quite sure. It didn’t quite know.

On the one hand, Andy Burnham’s central policy pitch is that he seeks to integrate health and social care, which are divided organisationally even though separation makes no sense in anyone’s experience. The news that Manchester city council — a Labour council — was brokering an agreement between ten local authorities, 23 clinical commissioning groups and 14 NHS bodies to ensure exactly such integration had to be welcome news. Didn’t it?

Well, not quite. Vintage Labour has a deeply centralising instinct and Mr Burnham’s other regular slogan, which he uses to oppose the mythical privatisation he espies everywhere, is that he wants to keep the N in NHS. “This has to be a solution that works everywhere,” he said. One size fits all. So even though this gave control to locally elected Labour politicians, even though it promised the integration that is Labour’s professed aim, the party spokesman was still unable to say he supported it. That was more than professional pique that it had been negotiated by the Tories. It was deep intellectual confusion.

It happened again this week on free schools. The prime minister declared he wanted 500 new schools by the end of a second term of Tory government. The British evidence is scanty so far but studies of charter schools in the US show that supplying more school places has the effect of forcing up standards in neighbouring schools. That is because, when money is attached to the pupil, the schools in effect compete for business. To anyone dedicated to the provision of as many good school places as possible this is an empirical question. If it works, fine. If it doesn’t, do something else.

The Labour impulse, articulated by Tristram Hunt to whom I give the credit of not really believing it, was that free schools created places where they were not needed. And who will be the judge of whether those places were needed? Why, the Labour party of course, in the guise of a local authority. Whether or not those places were deemed, by the resident bureaucrat, to be “needed”, they were certainly wanted or else the consortium of local teachers and parents wouldn’t have gone to the considerable trouble of setting one up. Yet the received Labour response was the voice of the planner, the controller — the producer not the parent.

The Labour party is in this cul-de-sac intellectually, and if it loses this will be why. If it wins it will either have to back out of the cul-de-sac or perish within it. But if the expected defeat materialises, Labour will confront a choice. The Brown team have controlled the Labour party since Tony Blair left. A future of Various Shades of Brown is a dismal prospect.

If that is the choice it makes then the pertinent question will be: what future? There is no English equivalent yet of the SNP in Scotland but, in the febrile moment, that oblivion stalks Labour’s fears.

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