I’m feeling flattered that I got not one, but two visitors who were searching for “real amazingly cool & funny stuff” on google. Well, who am I to argue with the algorithms of the world’s mightiest search engine?
On the topic of being amazingly cool and funny (ahem) there’s been a flurry of speculation recently about James Purnell. First the Spectator celebrated him as the best of the next generation of Labour ministers.
Then John Rentoul, the ultra connected Blairite journalist (and from me, that’s a compliment, not an insult) concluded a “we’re doomed, doomed”, piece by ostentatiously complimenting Purnell,
Finally the equally well connected and insightful Danny Finkelstein slapped all this down by observing that Purnell might be all that and a bag of chips, but he’s just too right wing to ever be Labour leader, so nerr to you all.
I imagine that having his leadership ambitions raked over by Rentoul, Nelson and Finkelstein is the last thing James Purnell wants. The Secretary of State for Work and Pensions is conspicuously loyal to both Gordon Brown and Tony Blair and has focussed his energies for the last year on winning the political battle against the tories, not fighting internal briefing wars, while working to ensure Labour has a positive, coherent message on both pensions and welfare reform.
I’m sure he’d rather these acheivements were being noted instead of the question of whether he might be a candidate for leader in some hypothetical future election. It’s nice to be mentioned, horrible to be speculated about.
I too am a Labour loyalist, and I believe we can, and will, win the next General election. Yes, the polls are tough, and yes, the opposition has finally got its act together, but history is strewn with leaders who thought the crown already on their head. The Tories have significant strategic weaknesses, Gordon Brown is, despite what journalists currently think, taking good strategic decisions and I believe he’ll make a “Give ‘em hell, Harry” roaring comeback.
Of course, Gordon has said he’ll only serve one term, and that being the case, it is reasonable to think about the future beyond that. Speculating about personalities is pointless, but I know what single factor will decide to whom I pledge my little all.
It’s whether they have the ability to show us that embracing new, controversial solutions to old problems is not a betrayal of the values of the Labour party, but the best way of making them relevant and effective.
That’s not simply a question of being left or right, but of having the willingness to fight for what they believe in when faced by an party electorate that might not agree.
After over a decade in power it would be fatal for our party to retreat to cosy platitudes of tax and spend, or to say we must keep public service structures in aspic for a generation. To do so would be a failure to respond to the fact that we are now a nation of high employment but low union membership, of home ownership and two car families but tight budgets, and a nation of short term prosperity alongside long term insecurity.
It would be just as fatal to keep “New Labour” in aspic. The challenges we shall face will be very different from those of the mid nineties. For a start, the NHS is no longer underfunded, and we have thousands more teachers, nurses and doctors, as we’ve spent the last decade loudly telling people. As a result, their prioirties and concerns are different now.
So our leadership has to persuade the party anew that millions of voters want social mobility, want high quality public services, want protection at work and help for their children, but they also want to see that these things are provided with the same discipline and scepticism that is expected in their personal budgets and we have to respond to that.
That’s not an easy message for a Labour party proud of it’s progressive acheivements, but I think it’s the right message. More than that, it’s a needed message.
So I’ll back the politician who’ll have the greatest skill at telling the party what it might least like to hear. Why am I so certain this is right? Because when I think back over my limited political career, the biggest mistakes I made were when I backed away from fights about what was really progressive.
It was true when I first started getting active in the Labour party and didn’t understand why the Labour leadership were so determined to attack people who I knew and thought were wrong on politics but nice people who had done all they could for the party and just happened to sell the odd paper. I was wrong. We had to have that fight to save the party.
It was true in student politics when the likes of Jim Murphy and Lorna Fitzsimons fought a battle to re-align the NUS with reality, and I thought the fight wasn’t worth much effort. They won without the likes of me, and kept the NUS relevant for a decade.
It was true when I was briefly a councillor in Newcastle, and could see we (and especially the “left” in the Labour group) were talking only to ourselves and not to voters, but decided that it would be a mistake to do anything about it. We lost power in Newcastle a few years later.
So the political lesson is don’t run away from a fight. If it’s worth having, it’s worth losing.
Whenever the next leadership election of the Labour party takes place, and I hope it’s a long, long way away, the enormous victory Gordon Brown and Tony Blair won in re-orientating the Labour party to the radical centre will be challenged for the first time in a decade and half.
Those of us who grew up in the cosy, easy afterglow of their hard work will have to make our choices about whether to retreat to the comforts of old pieties, or try and persuade people using unpalatable new truths.
So I’ll be on the side of who-ever is boldest. Sure, they might not win, but it’ll be worth fighting for. I just hope the battle will be a long, long time coming.
15 Comments
July 18, 2008 at 1:41 pm
“It would be just as fatal to keep “New Labour” in aspic. The challenges we shall face will be very different from those of the mid nineties. For a start, the NHS is no longer underfunded, and we have thousands more teachers, nurses and doctors, as we’ve spent the last decade loudly telling people. As a result, their prioirties and concerns are different now.
So our leadership has to persuade the party anew that millions of voters want social mobility, want high quality public services, want protection at work and help for their children, but they also want to see that these things are provided with the same discipline and scepticism that is expected in their personal budgets and we have to respond to that.
That’s not an easy message for a Labour party proud of it’s progressive acheivements, but I think it’s the right message. More than that, it’s a needed message.”
But I see myself as being on the left, and would say exactly the same thing…
July 18, 2008 at 2:06 pm
Which is why I want leaders we can both agree with!
More seriously, what I mean is that while I’m on the right of the party I’m not on the right of the party because in some weird way I hate the Labour party, I’m on the right of the labour party because I believe that the best way to achieve the our objectives is through generally social-market solutions, through being sensitive to the concerns of swing voters, and being both discplined on spending and tough-minded on social policy.
Actually, welfare reform policy is one area where this marriage of Labour values and radical policy solutions could be really interesting..
July 18, 2008 at 3:29 pm
Wouldn’t it be nice if, whoever is the leader, everyone in the party could stay loyal to them at least in public or, if they can’t manage that great effort, leave the party until someone more agreeable to them pops up?
July 18, 2008 at 3:30 pm
[...] That’s a quote from Hopi Sen. [...]
July 18, 2008 at 3:44 pm
Brian – couldn’t agree more. I’m a Loyalist, a believer in Gordon Brown and, to my own surprise, find myself on the right of the party. All that said, if there was an earthquake tmw and Jeremy Corbyn was left as our only MP, I’d do all I could to be loyal to him. It would be an effort though!
July 18, 2008 at 4:58 pm
“welfare reform policy is one area where this marriage of Labour values and radical policy solutions could be really interesting.”
It could indeed, but instead Purnell appears to have decided to go along with the recommendations from the Freud Review, which is loved by journalists like Fraser Nelson and by the Tory Party but almost totally detached from the actual experience of people who are out of work. It also means accepting the right-wing narrative that welfare policy has been a failure for the last ten years, when it manifestly hasn’t.
A radical policy with Labour values, for example, might be to make childcare tax deductible for parents who are working. This would guarantee that employment rates amongst lone parents (already far higher than under the Tories) would increase substantially, and it would also be popular with hard-pressed middle earning families. It would also be a fantastic dividing line with the Tories (using the case study of their Party Chairman).
But there’s no money for that but there is to make billions of pounds available for private companies to bid for, and make a fortune out of, to take over the services which used to be delivered by Jobcentre Plus and small voluntary organisations.
Bit of a rant, but I think your test for the next leader is a bit one-sided. Totally agree that it is about telling the party what they don’t want to hear when that conflicts with the experience of most people. But it is just as much about telling the establishment and the Westminster Village what they don’t want to hear when that conflicts with the experience of most people. Purnell seems happy to do the one, but not the other.
July 18, 2008 at 9:38 pm
Your sudden and convenient discovery that you are on the right of the Party does not accord with anything you have written since I have been reading your stuff.
Trimmer
July 19, 2008 at 4:14 am
…its amazing how much you have come to agree with what I have been telling you reading that again and I like the personal history lesson.
The problem is that if you drop high tax big government solutions from the menu its awfully hard to see what the point of the Labour Party is ,
and all the reform required will be done better and quicker under the Conservatives.
I see Freud mentioned , another Conservative idea copied.
July 19, 2008 at 5:14 pm
An interesting read. Not because of the “real amazingly cool & funny stuff” – but because you seem proud to be/have been a Blairite.
I too am such. I think leadership is VERY important, and you and we had it in spades not long ago. None of the new lot inspires me, an undecided voter. And anyway, after Labour’s short-sighted and peculiarly ungrateful treatment of the previous PM, I find it hard to see myself voting for the party. Well, not unless and until …
July 19, 2008 at 6:53 pm
Facing the sea…
A delicate and
soft wind is
blowing near an
empty space,
while the curtain
covers a silky
notepaper describing
a picture and the
love for the youth;
I call you my
darkness, I wait
for a dream……
Francesco Sinibaldi
July 19, 2008 at 8:36 pm
How can Hopi be a Blairite in any meaningful way when he has been singing the praises of Gordon Brown whose first act was to try and frustrate Blairite projects like the Academies and the introduction of private elements into NHS provision.
How how how ?
July 19, 2008 at 9:27 pm
Ah well, newmania, it seems that Hopi may be typical of many in Labour who aren’t/weren’t quite sure what they wanted. Nor were they were quite sure what they had in The Previous PM.
They just had this feeling that whatever it was, Mr Brown probably had the right version of it.
And Mr Brown liked them to think that too, especially since he too wasn’t quite sure what he wanted … ad nauseum ad nauseum.
Perhaps it’s clearer to me because I’m not inside the Labour party (nor in any party, btw).
Blair just happens to have been right about most policy areas, domestic and foreign. The press didn’t like it or him because of umpteen reasons, usually because he’d had the ideas before them.
They cooked a concoction of mistrust and fed it to the voters, twisting “facts”. Mud stuck to Blair.
In the end Brown has adopted and will adopt most of Blair’s policies. Why? Cos they were right.
Labour people who used to support Blair and now support Brown are not exactly being inconsistent. They are Blood Brothers, and their views are very similar on most issues.
It’s just that the more honest of the pair has been thrown out for ‘dishonesty’. While the other one is showing his true colours – and confusing the believers. And they HAVE to believe him, now don’t they?
Funny old world.
July 20, 2008 at 8:18 pm
And they HAVE to believe him, now don’t they?
Interesting point
July 21, 2008 at 10:40 am
Don- Thanks for the comment- I’ll try and bear that in mind when i look at the WR rpoposals. One thing I would ask is how would you deal with the huge potential cost of tax deductible child care to the arleady wealthy? Let’s call it the “Duke of Westminster’s nanny” question.
On the Blairite question. I’d pretty unhesitatingly callmyself a Blairite, and I’d pretty unhesitatingly call myself a Brownite too. That must sound rather vicar of bray ish, but it reflects two things – first that Tony Blair and Gordon Brown were together the driving force behind the transformation of the Labour party.
It’s too easy, given the prism of the last two-three years, to forget the essential closeness of outlook between Blair and Brown. it’s about the one thing I agree with John McDonnell on.
The second factor is loyalty, which I think I’ve posted on before. I think party loyalty is a quality terribly mis understood by most reporters and analysts (with the honourable exception of Phil Cowley).
July 21, 2008 at 1:39 pm
Hi Hopi,
On the “Duke of Westminster’s nanny” question, I guess firstly you would cap the amount that could be claimed.
But more generally, couldn’t we do like with the compensation for the 10p tax, where we did clever things with so that higher earners didn’t end up better off from raising the tax thresholds? Free childcare would also be a pretty substantial subsidy to a lot of employers, so they could chip in a bit more and still end up doing well out of it.
There are probably other cleverer answers than that, though.