Gordon Brown is quite right to warn that Labour cannot win without a credible economic policy. Where he is wrong is to imply that the remnants of New Labour (and the candidates who lean towards the centre) has one. The reason Jeremy Corbyn has become a phenomenon is because voters have for years been unable to distinguish between New Labour and the Tories when it comes to economic policy, because both follow what might be described as a Thatcherite agenda. There is a difference of emphasis here and there, but there is no real difference. The house price driven economy based on debt at every level and consumption of imported goods, with manufacturing and exports accounting for historically low GDP, is as much a creation of New Labour as it is of the Tories.
New Labour introduced tuition fees. The Tory led Coalition put them up. New Labour introduced Academies; the Coalition increased their numbers and the new Cameron government wants even more of them. Thatcher and Major privatised everything and created a network of regulatory quangos; New Labour left almost all of it in place. New Labour introduced Tax Credits to subsidise low wages, when it should have expanded the economy to pay wages which the state did not need to subsidise. The Tories have kept them going whilst increasing the minimum wage in the hope of reducing them. Labour allowed house prices to spiral out of control and did little to build social housing. The Tories have been no better. New Labour backs austerity, but with a lighter touch.
Gordon Brown echoes the cry that unless there is barely a cigarette paper between Labour and Conservative economics, Labour will not win power. This is nonsense. If voters want to continue in the Thatcherite tradition they will vote Tory. Labour is not about power at any price. It is about principle and people. New Labour set power as its goal and abandoned the working class in the process. It was re-elected on ever reducing votes because the Tories were off in the woods and unelectable. But the Tories are back now smartly dressed in new clothes very like those worn by New Labour. Without regaining the 4 million plus working class votes it has lost, Labour cannot win, ever. And those will not return until Labour returns to them.
Labour will get not them back without a credible economic policy, but credibility in this context means a radical departure from both Thatcherism and New Labour’s version of it. History will see Blair and Brown’s New Labour as a failure, which abandoned its mission in order to gain and retain power, which it then wasted with a lot of tinkering at the margin, while leaving the imbalances of social and economic injustice unrestrained. It followed an interventionist foreign policy which was founded on illegality and lies, and when free market excesses overheated and blew up, it was asleep at the wheel. Its finest hours were saving the banking system from collapse at less than 200 hundred minutes notice, the Good Friday Agreement and devolution for Scotland and Wales.
The real story is in the voting figures, which fell away from New Labour in every election it fought. It succeeded not because of what it offered but because the Tories had lost their way. Now the Tories have found their place again, which is that they are the natural party of power who can be relied upon to govern quite well. The Labour movement was founded to be a game changer and power for it lies in changing the game.
We now have a society in which lawyers, estate agents, loan sharks, gangmasters, unscrupulous private landlords, the sharp elbowed aspirational and celebrities prosper and are happy. But there is a huge mass of disenchanted voters who have to work all hours to keep the fundamentals of a civilised nation running, who feel abandoned and let down. Labour’s mission, its purpose and its priority is to rally to their cause. If you have a vote in the contest vote for a candidate who understands that. There appears to be only one who has a radical agenda to make a difference to a society which has now synchronized the creation of billionaires and foodbanks. That is why the grandees of New Labour are in a panic. They know deep down in their hearts that they share in the responsibility for the most unequal society since the nineteen thirties and that for them the game is over.
