The spectre of Maggie
As you may know, a general election looms here in the UK; Tony Blair is expected to announce on Monday that it will be held on May the 5th. The so-called pre-campaign has been moving in to high gear in the last couple of weeks, and it's almost as boring as the last (2001) one - for a taster of which you can check out the special sub-site the FT have put up with all their stories and analysis from the last election.
The place of policy proposals in the campaign was indicated on Tuesday by Alun Milburn, Labour's campaign co-ordinator, when he "set out the broad themes of the party's forthcoming manifesto, arguing the government was committed to creating an “open, mobile, classless society” that made the UK more economically competitive," the FT reports.
The Labour manifesto will be a "prospectus for the progressive modernisation of Britain" apparently. If you're struggling to make head or tail of this, you're not alone - doubtless the intention. Let's take it one step at a time. First, an "open" society - "open" to those previously excluded from equal participation in society? The UK's prison population rate, which, according to a Home Office report, by 2003 had risen to 139 per 100,000 - the highest in the European Union - under "New" Labour - hardly supports this interpretation. "Open" to those from outside the country? The proposal hardly merits comment, given that the key element of the election campaign thus far has been a Labour-Tory contest over who will crackdown on asylum seekers harder.
A "mobile" society? One's mind turns first to transport - again, such a calamity under New Labour so far that comment seems not superfluous, but faintly ridiculous, as anyone who has tried travelling from London to Leeds on the ground (either by rail or by road) will understand. How about labour mobility? Can unemployed people in Newcastle easily move to Surrey, where they stand a better chance of getting a job? Not a chance. Mobility of labour from areas with too few job to those where labour is needed (i.e. from the North East to the South East) is heavily inhibited by a housing crisis - the unemployed northerners could not for a moment consider buying or even renting property around Greater London, and despite the rhetoric, nothing has been done to seriously address the problem. Social mobility? More complex to analyse and dependent on how you look at things (in a "classless" society, social mobility is impossible by definition). But in terms of access to education and skills, to take an obvious example of a means by which people might move from a low-income social position to a higher-income position, betrayed promises on university tuition fees and the debacle of the training and skills programmes proposed for the long-term unemployed under the "New Deal" (how many Labour voters have heard of Roosevelt?) illustrate the progress (or lack of it) on this front.
And "classless"? Well let's just put it this way: Milburn's speech yesterday was delivered to the Fabian society in London and not to a workers' meeting in Darlington.
What does all of this empty rhetoric mean? I've been interested by the fact that Thatcher has been invoked a couple of times in the last few days - in a Guardian opinion piece by Peter Hain warning readers that voting for the Lib Dems as a protest against the government's role in the invasion and occupation of Iraq risked a Tory victory, and also by Milburn yesterday. Hain told Guardian readers Labour had to win to ward off the lingering danger of the "extreme right" and that the Lib Dems had "crypto-Thatcherite policies" involving "abolishing the New Deal" and "promoting privatisation of health services." Milburn proclaimed that re-electing "New" Labour represented a "once-in-a-lifetime chance to “see off the last hurrah of Thatcherism.”"
That the Tories are now to be identified as the "extreme" right, and identified with Thatcher implies that elements of "New" Labour are beginning to recognise their own position as centre-right (not "centre-left" as was widely claimed a few years ago), thus requiring some means of differentiation between the remarkably similar sets of policy proposals produced by the two main parties. The differentiation must necessarily be almost entirely rhetorical, ignoring actual policy or matters which concern ordinary people, simply because the basis of both parties' policies is identical - hence the enormous difficulty experienced by most people in telling them apart, and the boredom induced by petty squabbling over minute details (how to go about imprisoning people without trial, rather than whether to do it at all; tactical errors in the invasion of Iraq rather than whether to invade at all etc etc. ad nauseam).
It also indicates a realisation on Labour's part that could be of greater significance than the shift to the right of the last decade or so: that after countless broken pledges and promises (no university tuition fees, proportional representation in parliament, no plans to increase taxes to name but three), "swing" voters are unlikely to trust them a third time. This means that Labour can not come up with any number of wild (or even sensible, reserved) promises and proposals that it has no intention of keeping in order to get voted in to office, as, like the boy who cried wolf, they find that the third time around, no one is listening any longer. Campaigning then, is reduced to empty, meaningless rhetoric and digging up long-lost relics. Is it any wonder people complain that politics is boring?
The place of policy proposals in the campaign was indicated on Tuesday by Alun Milburn, Labour's campaign co-ordinator, when he "set out the broad themes of the party's forthcoming manifesto, arguing the government was committed to creating an “open, mobile, classless society” that made the UK more economically competitive," the FT reports.
The Labour manifesto will be a "prospectus for the progressive modernisation of Britain" apparently. If you're struggling to make head or tail of this, you're not alone - doubtless the intention. Let's take it one step at a time. First, an "open" society - "open" to those previously excluded from equal participation in society? The UK's prison population rate, which, according to a Home Office report, by 2003 had risen to 139 per 100,000 - the highest in the European Union - under "New" Labour - hardly supports this interpretation. "Open" to those from outside the country? The proposal hardly merits comment, given that the key element of the election campaign thus far has been a Labour-Tory contest over who will crackdown on asylum seekers harder.
A "mobile" society? One's mind turns first to transport - again, such a calamity under New Labour so far that comment seems not superfluous, but faintly ridiculous, as anyone who has tried travelling from London to Leeds on the ground (either by rail or by road) will understand. How about labour mobility? Can unemployed people in Newcastle easily move to Surrey, where they stand a better chance of getting a job? Not a chance. Mobility of labour from areas with too few job to those where labour is needed (i.e. from the North East to the South East) is heavily inhibited by a housing crisis - the unemployed northerners could not for a moment consider buying or even renting property around Greater London, and despite the rhetoric, nothing has been done to seriously address the problem. Social mobility? More complex to analyse and dependent on how you look at things (in a "classless" society, social mobility is impossible by definition). But in terms of access to education and skills, to take an obvious example of a means by which people might move from a low-income social position to a higher-income position, betrayed promises on university tuition fees and the debacle of the training and skills programmes proposed for the long-term unemployed under the "New Deal" (how many Labour voters have heard of Roosevelt?) illustrate the progress (or lack of it) on this front.
And "classless"? Well let's just put it this way: Milburn's speech yesterday was delivered to the Fabian society in London and not to a workers' meeting in Darlington.
What does all of this empty rhetoric mean? I've been interested by the fact that Thatcher has been invoked a couple of times in the last few days - in a Guardian opinion piece by Peter Hain warning readers that voting for the Lib Dems as a protest against the government's role in the invasion and occupation of Iraq risked a Tory victory, and also by Milburn yesterday. Hain told Guardian readers Labour had to win to ward off the lingering danger of the "extreme right" and that the Lib Dems had "crypto-Thatcherite policies" involving "abolishing the New Deal" and "promoting privatisation of health services." Milburn proclaimed that re-electing "New" Labour represented a "once-in-a-lifetime chance to “see off the last hurrah of Thatcherism.”"
That the Tories are now to be identified as the "extreme" right, and identified with Thatcher implies that elements of "New" Labour are beginning to recognise their own position as centre-right (not "centre-left" as was widely claimed a few years ago), thus requiring some means of differentiation between the remarkably similar sets of policy proposals produced by the two main parties. The differentiation must necessarily be almost entirely rhetorical, ignoring actual policy or matters which concern ordinary people, simply because the basis of both parties' policies is identical - hence the enormous difficulty experienced by most people in telling them apart, and the boredom induced by petty squabbling over minute details (how to go about imprisoning people without trial, rather than whether to do it at all; tactical errors in the invasion of Iraq rather than whether to invade at all etc etc. ad nauseam).
It also indicates a realisation on Labour's part that could be of greater significance than the shift to the right of the last decade or so: that after countless broken pledges and promises (no university tuition fees, proportional representation in parliament, no plans to increase taxes to name but three), "swing" voters are unlikely to trust them a third time. This means that Labour can not come up with any number of wild (or even sensible, reserved) promises and proposals that it has no intention of keeping in order to get voted in to office, as, like the boy who cried wolf, they find that the third time around, no one is listening any longer. Campaigning then, is reduced to empty, meaningless rhetoric and digging up long-lost relics. Is it any wonder people complain that politics is boring?
posted by UK plc at 5:52 PM
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