Deborah Orr: The real tragedy after 11 years of Labour is that we have learnt so little

Saturday, 3 May 2008

Share
Close
- Digg
- del.icio.us
- Facebook
- Reddit
- Google
- Stumble Upon
- Fark
- Newsvine
Print
Email

I think it is safe to say, in the light of this week's elections, that the New Labour project is not looking healthy. Suddenly, there is much discussion about how the Government's social democratic principles can be revived, none of it amounting, so far, to very much.

Suddenly there is fear as well, among social democrats anyway, because while Labour may not have addressed the flaws in its thinking, the Conservatives most certainly have not either. This is the real tragedy – that in the past 11 years we learned so little, and that it took a decade for Labour's basic problems to become so apparent to its leadership.

Interviews with voters at the exit polls suggested that among the many and varied difficulties former supporters had with Labour, the recent debacle over the removal of the 10p tax band was a strong influence. Voters are right to alight on this matter. Labour was caught in the act of taxing the working poor, then planning on somehow returning the cash, in the form of tax credits – so cumbersome, so dependent on means-testing, so expensive, and so hard to manage.

More generally, the Government has employed that system to transfer wealth from richer to poorer, earning itself a reputation for "quiet redistribution" that those concerned with inequality have broadly accepted as the best thing to do, under the circumstances. But the trouble with "quiet redistribution", it is now horribly apparent, is that it has been carried out without discussion and argument about its moral worth to society. Labour may have hoped to show, not tell. But it has not done so.

Brown's reliance on tax credits as a means of wealth redistribution arose from his hope that he could design a mechanism that would rebalance the tendency to inequality that existed in the economy he inherited, without unduly disturbing it. His practical measures to alleviate poverty may have been more timid than his instincts, but they were positive, and we told ourselves that this was enough.

Now, 10 years on, the tax credit system has not made sufficient impact on the underclass for the point to have been made (far from it), while the over-class still threatens to leave town if its tax is not cut, unwilling to face its own responsibilities, unable to see that in a stable society, everyone must feel secure.

The horrible feeling is that in philosophical terms, we are no further forward than we were in 1997, at the time when all could see what havoc an economy that condemned so many to uselessness and insecurity was wreaking. Sometimes, it even seems that the debate has actually managed to regress from what then seemed like a pivotal moment.

One or two of the allegations now circulating about the "state of Britain" would be comic if they were not so perilously ignorant, inflammatory and wrong. In the past few days it has been reported that "even asylum-seekers" are leaving Britain, fed up with the health service, and the weather, rather, presumably, than the hardline denial of their most basic rights, until their claims have been processed, that they are now subjected to.

Only last week, we were treated to the amazing spectacle of a prison officer contending that Britain's prison's – stuffed to the gills, understaffed and underresourced to a hellish degree – were so cushy that even given ladders, prisoners were choosing not to escape from them. In reality, our prisons have become holding pens for the mentally ill, who probably have good reason to fear release from incarceration anyway.

The rhetoric is frightening, and the worry now is that the moment has passed for sensible analysis even to begin to cut through the tumult of misinformation. The debate is becoming so distorted that the Conservative Party itself understands that it must do its best to keep a distance from such senseless and negative hyperbole. Sometimes it appears that it is the Conservative Party that the New Labour project has educated with most success. I guess we'll soon find out just how much of an illusion that faint hope is.

Save the planet by seeing this film

"It's a small world," goes the joke, "but I wouldn't want to paint it." So all the more credit must go to Marjane Satrapi, the Paris-based Iranian illustrator who has drawn our small world, and called it Persepolis.

First published as a pair of graphic novels, now on general release as an animated feature film, this story of the 38-year-old's life is one of those rare works of art that connects the concerns of the individual to the galloping sweep of human history in such an effortlessly natural way that you simply feel that if the whole human population could sit down and watch it, then maybe we could all just fix things.

Satrapi's views play well in the West because she is anti-fundamentalist. Nevertheless, it's worth noting that, despite the Iranian authorities' animus against their wayward �migr� daughter, Persepolis has been screened, albeit under stricture, in Tehran. This achievement itself proved many of Satrapi's own cinematic points about real life in the country, and about the odd eagerness of Western outsiders to believe that fundamentalism in Iran is more intractable than it really is.

Satrapi is an unlikely cartoon super-hero. But she's come a little bit closer to saving the planet than any other. No politician should ever be allowed to even say the word "Iran" ever again until they have seen this film.

There's no humour in harassment

Grisly reports have emerged from the Bloomsbury Theatre in London of a comedy routine by Johnny Vegas that focused physical attention on a young women to a degree that many observers suggest amounted to sexual harassment. The incident sounds horrific, much worse than the most awful of similar "comedy" exchanges I've witnessed myself. Even the gross Gerry Sadowitz (at the same theatre) kept his abuse verbal, when he asked a girl in the audience: "Can I smell your feet?" and retorted to her negative reply, "Then it must be your c***."

Back then, I was too young and stupid to have thought of lodging a formal complaint about his behaviour. But it would have been the right thing to do.

Defenders of Vegas, writing on the Guardian's website, say that the joke was on him, not her. His behaviour was funny, they say, because the humour resided in the absurdity of an unattractive man getting off with an attractive girl. So there you are. If a man commits an assault against a woman in the name of irony, because he's "modest" enough to act out, using her body as a prop, the idea that she's "too good for him", then the circumstances are mitigated. Right. No wonder rape convictions are so low.

* That little detail in the story of the engagement of Peter Phillips and Autumn Kelly, whereby she is renouncing Roman Catholicism in preparation for her marriage, seems to be fairly significant. In this country we are supposed to take pride in our lack of religious discrimination, and, for that matter, in our theoretical lack of gender discrimination. So the House of Windsor really does have to be put in order. The Act of Settlement has to go, and so does male primogeniture. Where are all those European directives when you need them anyway?