I used a recent LabourList post to take issue with four of David Miliband’s seven points in his recent New Statesman article.
I’m grateful to Neal Lawson of Compass for reminding me this week why I have a lot more in common with David Miliband than with his critics.
His starting point is not about David’s vision of the future, which is where I had concerns, but about David’s balanced take on Labour’s period in government. David said Labour should be ‘loud and clear where we made mistakes, but we should also insist that the list of gains far outstripped the mistakes. After all, even David Cameron said on coming to office that Britain was better in 2010 than 1997’.
This is both a rational, objectively provable historical judgement, and the only sane stance Labour can take politically. We have to acknowledge where we made mistakes. If we had been perfect we would have won in 2010, clearly the electorate didn’t agree. But we cannot expect voters to return us to power if we trash our own record rather than reminding people of how much better life was on almost every conceivable measure under New Labour, both compared to the Thatcher-Major years and the Cameron-Clegg ones. Why would anyone vote for us again if even we don’t think we were any good?
People often say that living under the worst Labour government is better than living under the best Tory one. Personal experience makes me believe that to be true. But 1997-2010 wasn’t a weak or bad Labour government, it was the best government we have had since the 1945 one.
It was a period of stunning progress on improving public services, reforming the state, tackling poverty, and until the global economic crash of the strongest sustained economic performance for generations.
Neal, the Eeyore of the Labour soft left, can only see under gloom. He seems to have hated living under Blair and Brown with the sort of passionate venom most of us feel for the current government.
He describes the dreadful state of Britain today ‘Unemployment is soaring and youth unemployment sickeningly high, the poor are being targeted and humiliated with housing benefit and a hundred other cuts, public services are being decimated’ as though this is somehow Labour’s fault rather than a direct result of the Tories and Lib Dems switching off the fragile economic recovery Alistair Darling had delivered by 2010 and going over to a policy of severe austerity. He claims ‘all of which would have largely continued under Labour’ when our economic strategy was explicitly one of generating growth to help reduce the deficit and rejection of the Coalition’s strategy as cutting too far and too fast.
He claims that ‘Democracy is weaker and inequality greater after the biggest majorities Labour has ever had”. The first claim is simply nonsense: we delivered a London mayor and assembly, Scottish and Welsh devolution, removed most of the hereditary peers, brought in proportional representation for European elections and the devolved assemblies, introduced Freedom of Information laws, allowed cities to choose to have elected mayors etc etc The second part is true in so far as it goes – the gap between rich and poor grew because in the boom years everyone got richer but the rich did very well – and that we didn’t succeed in the tricky task of narrowing that gap was the biggest disappointment for me of our time in power. But it was not for want of trying. And Neal ignores Labour’s huge achievements in tackling poverty (particularly child and pensioner poverty), regenerating deprived communities, presiding over sustained low unemployment, and bringing in a minimum wage which Labour had aspired to since Keir Hardie’s time but never previously delivered.
Finally and absurdly Neal claims that ‘The party itself is on the floor. Resistance comes from new forces; Avaaz, 38 Degrees and UK Uncut.’ I doubt Neal was one of the 1000s of people leafleting London tube and rail stations in the bitter cold on 3 January about the fare increases. I doubt he goes to branch or constituency meetings. I doubt he is one of the people currently delivering higher rates of canvassing in a mid-term year than we had in the last general election. I doubt he is engaging in integrating our 60,000 new members into the party, a challenge for those of us in CLPs like my one that has gone from 500 to over 900 members in two years. If he is he is choosing to ignore reality. If he was he would know the party is a very long way from ‘on the floor’ and is in fact going through something of a renaissance, but with the political mood at CLP level one of gritty realism rather than the ultra leftism of the equivalent period after we last lost power.
I am sure ‘Avaaz, 38 Degrees and UK Uncut’ do what they do very well – actually I confess I haven’t got a Scooby what Avaaz is but that’s probably because I’m getting old – but they are not going to win the next general election or run councils. Only Labour can do that.
Neal says Labour ‘destroyed its own electoral base’. That’s odd as we seem to be achieving a steady 40 per cent in the polls only two years after defeat, when political scientists will tell you our base vote is in the low 20 per cents. I invite him to come canvassing on estates in my ward in Hackney, one of the most deprived in the country, where he will find our electoral base extremely enthusiastic to vote Labour and enjoying the use of services from a vastly improved Labour local authority, a police neighbourhood team created by a Labour mayor of London, a fantastic Foundation Hospital, a wonderful new city academy that is transforming their children’s life chances, two other schools rebuilt through Building Schools for the Future, and Decent Homes-funded new kitchens and bathrooms.
This is the reality of what New Labour did for my constituents. It physically transformed their community, homes, public services and lives for the better. There is still a huge amount to do to lift my constituents out of poverty and deprivation. They face dreadful economic threats from the coalition’s pernicious policies. The sooner we get back into power and start where we left off the better. But we will do that by being honest and proud about our time in power, not by indulging in miserabalism, self-hatred and drawing mendacious and disgusting equivalences between our fine government and the current dreadful mob in the way Neal seems addicted to.
I pity Neal, I really do. It must be a miserable existence keeping up such a level of hatred of your own party and everything it has achieved.
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Luke Akehurst is a constituency representative on Labour’s NEC, a councillor in Hackney, writes regularly for Progress here, and blogs here
New Labour did tremendous things for the UK, ones which the current leadership seem to forget. First, Tony Blair worked to bring peace to N.Ireland. He went the extra mile and then more. Bringing peace when most had failed seems to be ignored. Second, New Labour widened Labour’s political landscape and enabled normal people to vote for our Party. The current leadership seem to be drawing us back into a rainbow alliance and not a broad mainstream alliance. Of course, the current leadership has not coherent battle of ideas to take to the country. New Labour had its failures to embrace the logic of a decentralised power but it is clear if Labour wants to ever return to power (a good place to help hard working middle class families) finding an agenda that resonates beyond the corridors of Unite would be a good place to start
Luke, whilst I support the general thrust of your article, I am now going to reel something off that I more frequently deploy against the left, when they oppose education reform. But I’m afraid that irrespective of what you think the cure is, it does put a real dent in New Labour’s record, let us forget, elected on a pledge of ‘education, education, education’….
“When Labour came into power, we were in the top 6 of the OECD’s PISA measurements for English, Science and Maths. Now we are out of nearly out of the top 25 in all three (I think we sneak 24th in Science). We also have the worst social mobility rates in the G20.”
This is the hidden shame of our record, more so than inequality – which actually we ameliorated far better than a lot of comparative countries in a period where global economic structure was pulling the world economy in an unequal direction. It is also, in my own opinion, far more damaging than our record on bank regulation – again something that global politicians of all stripes failed on, not that that is a necessarily credible excuse.
We need a totally new education agenda. And you’ll have to escape the Hackney context on this one – to say the least, it is not a paradigm for overall UK economic performance. It isn’t Hackney that is responsible for the statistical slump!
Hold on before you accept the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) as being definitive as a measure of educational performance, and listen to what Radio 4’s ‘More or Less’ said about it: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b010fd86
I know Neal. The real Neal that is, not the straw Neal you have constructed here. He does not hate his party. What a futile excercise writing this article was.
I got halfway down the second paragraph and didn’t bother with the rest.
I can’t recall one single success. Even the minimum wage when thrown into public discussion is widely acknowledged as legitimising poverty wages.
Right from the word go Labour lost support, the moment it became know Labour party policies were available to any with money, peerages and passports too it turned out
Then we had the Millennium Dome fiasco, £500 million of taxpayers money, subsidised more with £500 million in Lottery money and for what?
A big tent is all, that then got sold off for £1. Whoopee.
Oh what a wonderful marketing success that was.
Two Illegal wars, educational failures, laws designed to harmonise races, ending in achieving the exact opposite. Harriet Harman’s laws were and still are so bias, the laws themselves did nothing but incite racial hatred.
Who’s next for tea with Margaret Thatcher?
I often wonder if many of today’s Labour party members didn’t get lost on their way to Conservative central office and still haven’t figured out they’re in the wrong place..
excellent article, couldnt agree more!
money circulates ,makes a circle, goes round and round ,up and down OK mainly up but I’m trying to make a point ,the Dome has generated much income and therefore Tax,jobs too when are people like you going to realise, it is not something that gets eaten and goes way ,inflation does that ,yeah yeah offshore bank accounts too! The war in Iraq may have been illegal but we went to temper the affects of the American ‘kill em all’ mentality
to save the Kurds from genocide,we went in good faith.I did not get lost on my way to the Conservatives ,how dare you ,take that back you little creep. To support and work with Labour best chance of getting rid of the Tories. Your got out of the wrong side of bed rant thin and saddo .
mind you bleachy, doesn’t hurt to save a bit ,as Scotland is about to point out.
Nice to see Luke back to his best with his new labour bull, trying to play both camps mate
I think Luke is wrong about the Labour base point, and once again unnecessarily confrontational. Sometimes it is better to leave it to an appeal to the higher ground, if you have a higher one to go to. That’s what is convincing about some of the other stuff Luke is saying.
My biggest disappointment (Iraq aside) is ‘laying the ground’ for a lot of what is going on now. People will debate endlessly whether Blair and Lansley’s so-called ‘reforms’ are really all that joined up, fair enough. But I think it’s beyond dispute that we opened up the ground for them to go further, and that we normalised some Tory fetishes by abandoning any kind of resistance strategy to them.
We really have two things to do – win power and implement social democracy.
Part of this stuff on implementation is about holding the conversation, but instead we religiously followed the conversation that hostile forces set.
On the actual substance though (rather than the strategy), I certainly have some sympathy for Luke’s point.
It’s extremely ironic to see trot’s marching down the road, demanding that Gordon Brown’s EMA is saved – a policy which, like many others, they habitually referred to as insignificant.
It’s not enough for a swimming pool or a limousine, but every leftward move is significant, and those on the left who fail to recognise this with respect to the better part of New Labour (rather than some of the rightward shifts) end up looking biased, or unbalanced, or straight up foolish.