Blog 2023 Malcolm Blair-Robinson

Ed Miliband is invoking the spirit of 1945 in a nostalgic think back to the post war Attlee government. This is a foolish and meaningless comparison. Yet it need not be.

The reason for the Attlee triumph was an entirely new prospectus put before the British people; a welfare state, social justice, public ownership and, perhaps above all after the jobless despair of the 1930’s, full employment. Although Labour retained power for just six years the following Conservative government changed very little in the new order, but it did make things work better. This post war consensus on the fundamentals of how society should be ordered remained more or less untouched until the Thatcher revolution. Thatcher’s brand of de-regulated free market capitalism with its privatisations and emphasis on home ownership fuelled a grand renewal of national confidence and aspiration. It succeeded because the old socialist system had failed through its own excesses. Public acceptance of high unemployment as the price for prosperity as one worth paying, represented the most remarkable rethink in electoral strategy since the end of WWII.

Now we find ourselves faced with the greatest economic challenge since the industrial revolution. The challenge is awesome because none can agree on the remedy, though all can see that a boom fuelled by borrowing led not just to bust, but to a collapse of the economic model to which all had, since Thatcher, paid homage, including the Labour Party and especially New Labour. Excess borrowing has led to asset inflation, especially property, unsupported by a broadening of wealth creation. Indeed the creation of wealth now struggles from a shrunken base. The unproductive State is too big a burden for the private sector to bear, whilst the productive state, once referred to as the family silver by Harold Macmillan in a prescient speech delivered when in his nineties to the House of Lords and ridiculed by Thatcher acolytes, has all been privatised and sold off. It is now in the ownership, not of a multitude of ordinary folk called Sid, but a tiny group of massive corporations who exploit their monopoly of public utilities to the detriment of the economy as a whole.

This should be fertile ground for Labour, but it is not good enough to talk about new regulators and tinkering with tax credits or whatever. There has to be a new appraisal of the responsibility and role of the state vis a vis the private sector. Thatcher’s ideas worked at the time but have now gone wrong because they were abused, just as Attlee’s dream faded because its principles were eventually abused also.

The country now has to re-balance the critical elements of resource and supply which should be best managed by the state, freeing up the private sector to do all the things it does best in a modern efficient environment,  ie create wealth and jobs through bold enterprise and clever innovation. Full employment must return to the top of the political agenda with a radical re-shaping of the social model to end exclusion and benefit dependency. This should be fertile ground for the Labour Party from which it should reap a rich harvest. But first it has to come to terms with the fact that Blair was Thatcher’s heir and whilst his premiership gave her nostrums a human touch, his Chancellor’s eye was turned from Prudence to Mammon.

Labour must, once again, break with its recent  past and revisit its roots, in order to build a future, not just for itself but for the whole country. This blog urged the Liberal Democrats to be bold. The task of Labour now is to be a good deal bolder. Fiddling about with regulators and spending plans misses the point altogether.

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 30th, 2012 at 7:09 pm and is filed under Malcolm Blair Robinson. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.