There is more at stake this week for Labour than how we fund universities or who leads us at the next election. The struggle now is for the future of socialism.
It is unsurprising that this struggle should emerge now. It is almost a decade since Tony Blair was elected leader of the Labour party; nine years since we recast Clause IV; nearly seven since we formed a government. Tony Blair’s slogans of the mid-nineties – ‘new Britain’, ‘the Young Country’, even ‘New Labour’ – seem outmoded for contemporary political challenges. The man once derided as ‘Bambi’ now claims to be ‘battered without but stronger within’. The celebrations are long-forgotten; the champagne is flat. The hard slog of governing has taken its toll.
The New Labour project was about presenting the party as safe, reassuring, capable of winning new voters in their millions, and able to run the country. This project has been spectacularly successful: two landslides, seven years of economic growth and investment, and a raft of radical reforms. But like all political projects, New Labour runs the risk of running out of steam. After ten years in office, first in the wartime coalition and then in the 1945 government, Clement Attlee and his ministers were intellectually and physically exhausted. After a decade of Thatcherism, Conservative MPs executed their most successful leader and have never recovered from the shock. Reforming political projects seem to have a shelf life of about ten years. Successful ones work out how to renew in office; unsuccessful ones lose the will to live.
So what of Labour’s current troubles? Well, the last thing the debate about tuition fees is about is student finance and university funding. The Bill is merely a cipher for a deeper struggle raging in the psyche of the Parliamentary Labour party.
There are three types of rebel. First, the smallest group, those MPs who genuinely disagree with the method of raising revenue suggested by the Bill, who have thought about the issues and looked at alternatives. Their concerns have largely been met by the education secretary’s concessions.
Second, those who believe socialism is about taxing wealthy people and redistributing the money to public institutions, from which the poor benefit. By confusing the tactic of raising revenue from income tax with a cherished socialist principle, this group is doomed to forever seek solutions to modern problems with outdated answers. They want to cure the patient with leeches. This group, the hard-core of the old Labour left, is opposed to the Labour government and all its works. They are serial rebels, and few will be won over.
The third, and most insidious of the groups of Labour MPs, is a direct product of Labour’s longevity. These are the former secretaries of state, ministers and whips who Blair has sacked or have resigned over the years, and who believe that a new leader might revive their personal careers. For them, Blair’s defeat on tuition fees, combined with the Hutton Report, might trigger a Labour leadership election. Their calculation is that the government will survive, but that the Prime Minister will go, and their treachery will be rewarded by the new regime. This scheme is not merely disloyal. It plays Russian roulette not with the Labour Leader, but with the government itself.
My prediction is that the tuition fees rebellion will be faced down, and that Hutton’s report will fail to precipitate a Prime Ministerial resignation. The Tories will enjoy our discomfort – although if Michael Howard fails to deliver a knock-out punch, his own MPs’ disappointment will be palpable.
But the government’s survival in this dark hour doesn’t solve the deeper psychosis at the bottom of its troubles. What’s needed is the same kind of open and honest dialogue about what Labour is for that we had in 1994/5 with the Clause IV debate. Labour’s Big Conversation is about policy, and aims to appeal to the public. We need a process of political and philosophical renewal in the party itself.
‘New’ Labour is old news. So what should replace it? A form of socialism which returns to the old ways: tax and spend, state-owned public services, the pressure group politics of the past? Or a modern socialism which builds on New Labour’s achievements, learns from its errors, and sustains and energises a new generation of activists, MPs and ministers? This latter course is not served by egotistical MPs who miss their government cars. Let them stand aside, and let a new socialism guide a new generation. It is not just this Labour government in the dock this month - it is Labour governments. If we can’t prove that we can govern over a sustained period of decades, marked by progress and reform, without descent into internal warfare, then people will rightly ask: what is the point of the Labour party?