Labour must ditch Blair now

LONDON: A tumultuous Labour conference approaches. Despite the blind faith of a diminishing band of ultra-Blairites, an obvious truth has emerged: there will be no renewal of the Labour party and no prospect of winning the next election until there is a new leader and some kind of change of direction. Until then, things will just get worse.

The problem is both personal and political. Labour’s drift stems from the announcement by the prime minister two years ago that he wouldn’t fight for a fourth term. No organisation, least of all a governing party, can survive if it knows its leader is off but is kept in the dark about when. It is a recipe for instability and eventual chaos.

It’s worth remembering why Tony Blair, against all the advice from those around him, made this unprecedented decision. In the short term he faced worrying press headlines about a new multimillion-pound house and another health scare. Longer term, Iraq meant trust in him had gone. He could only get through the next election if people knew it was his last. Things got so bad it was necessary to run on a dual ticket: vote Blair, get Brown. Labour won in 2005 despite Blair, not because of him.

But there was a much deeper political malaise. New Labour no longer had a philosophy of governance. Since the failure of the third way there had been no attempt at a coherent replacement. But behind the scenes Blairism was developing a private philosophy of ‘enlightened neoliberalism’. The shorthand version of this is: governments can do nothing to tame the global economy, so voters can only expect help to cope alone.

We are left with only individualised solutions to problems created by the global economy. But we cannot buy our way out of these problems and have become insecure and anxious under the daily pressure of relentless individual survival. The price of a free market is the creation of a social recession of poverty and overwork.

This personal and political failure left Blair with only one way to manage the party — the threat that he will take us down with him. In a glorified game of chicken, the diminishing bunker of Blairites tries to stare down the rest of the party. Who will blink first? Can the Blairites withstand the mounting pressure to name a date? For the party it’s a question of pain now or pain later.

The conference is Blair’s last chance to do the right thing and announce a timetable for his departure. He can then step down having put the interests of the party first. If he refuses then his fingers will have to be prised from the door of No 10. Such a refusal won’t so much mark a love of high office as a commitment to enlightened neoliberalism and the now wild belief that only he can defeat the Tories.

It is even being suggested that Blair wants Gordon Brown committed to a 10-year New Labour programme before he hands over. It is hard to see how any politician who wants to be prime minister could make such a binding commitment. So the stage is set for hints that, unless Brown dons a Blairite straitjacket, maybe David Cameron would be a more natural heir to Blair than his chancellor. Like all politicians, Blair responds to pressure. After the disastrous local elections in May he blinked first and conceded that his successor would need ‘ample time’ to prepare for the next election — but the definition of ‘ample’ was left to him. If there is no pressure before the conference, this is what will happen: Blair will get to the podium and, in a brilliant speech, tell us that global terror changes everything; we are in a fight between good and evil. By implication, he will make it clear that only he understands the threat. The Tories will be derided as hopelessly weak. Only Blairism can win a fourth term, he will suggest. Labour activists in the hall, well drilled in their postmodern role as the backdrop to the speech, will stay on message. The lights will flash, the music swirl and everyone will stand and applaud.

Only this year we cannot afford to let it happen. Another year of drift and it will be too late. Party membership has fallen to less than 180,000 and will crash further because of Lebanon. Funding is drying up. We are falling further behind in the polls. There will be meltdown in Scotland and Wales in eight months if Blair stays. Without a timetable everything gets worse, not better. Blair has lost the benefit of the nation’s doubt. Without the country’s trust there is simply no chance of eradicating child poverty, or dealing with the environment or our foreign-policy disasters.

A timetable would give the party a chance to change not just its leader but its direction. On trust we would be able to wipe the slate clean. The anti-Tory wave that swept New Labour to power in 1997 is still rolling. It is the wave Cameron is trying to ride when he talks up public services, the environment and now redistribution.

We are fast losing the ability to imagine a different way of living. This is fatal to the future of society. Without the hope of a different world, progressive politics simply dies. Progress is driven by the search for the good society. Where would the idea of a national health service have come from if not someone’s dream? Blairism offers no such hope because it refuses to buck the market and instead seeks to fashion society in the image of the economy. We live in a good society already — it’s just not ours. We live in the good society of neoliberal beliefs and practices because they had the courage and the capacity to build it.

In many people’s minds British politics is ruled by the pendulum theory — eventually you lose. Some on the left are saying our time is already up. This is madness — not least for the people who benefit from the minimum wage and the reduction in youth unemployment, who cannot afford to suffer a Tory government elected because centre-left voters can’t abide Blair. We should be entrenching our values through a progressive consensus that builds new institutions and establishes a political agenda that defines our values as the new common sense. After nine years in office, two landslide victories and a third comfortable majority, we are still pandering to rightwing pressure from Murdoch and the Mail. In the world-view of the Blairites this is still a conservative country that we have to accommodate to.

David Cameron will not win the next election. Labour will lose it. It’s always governments that lose elections. Labour will lose if it fails to be brave, fails to ditch the past and refuses to modernise. It will lose the next election because it decides not to be new enough or labour enough. It will be time for a change at the next election unless we change now. —Dawn/The Guardian News Service