Jon Cruddas: Stop these rogue elements rampaging on the Labour right
There's a dreary nostalgia for the market-obsessed Blairism of 2001
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Independent Minds
right-wing factions can be dangerous things. Just ask the Pope: recently, Benedict XVI overturned the excommunication of four bishops, which many people saw as a deliberate political move, aimed at appeasing traditional elements of the church. But there’s a problem: one of the four bishops, Richard Williamson, is a notable Holocaust denier, so the Vatican has tried to distance the Holy Father from this part of the controversy by claiming he didn’t know about Williamson’s views. Another problem: where does this leave the doctrine of Papal Infallibility, first stated in 1870?
In the Labour Party, it’s the doctrine of “Market Infallibility” that’s triggered manoeuvrings on the right, and is now causing plenty of trouble. Since the weekend, the press has been awash with precise briefings against Harriet Harman for having the temerity to develop a policy agenda of her own, flagged up by her hard line on City bonuses – hardly seditious, in the current climate. Last week, anyone sympathising with strikers in the energy sector was dismissed as xenophobic, protectionist and anti-European. The attacks are aimed not just at anyone remotely of the left, but Gordon Brown and his allies; in the midst of renewed leadership gossip. For example, some of those who threw David Miliband in front of a train last year are generously offering to help Alan Johnson out of his siding.
It’s easy to miss the political context behind the tittle-tattle, but there is one. In another newspaper yesterday, Tony Blair’s former speechwriter Philip Collins crystallised the politics that runs with the poison in an article headlined “Labour’s positioning has left it left of sensible”. The thesis was simple enough: Brown has crashed in the polls because he has turned down the volume on Blairite public service “reform”; is lukewarm on “freeing schools from the control of local authorities”, and has failed to grasp that “Labour was never going to win on the economy”.
The solution: hit the rewind button by reactivating an agenda that the recession looks to have all but killed, and hope that people can focus on something other than jobs, repossessions and banking failure. No, I don’t get it either, but to his credit Phil doesn’t hide behind anonymous briefings.
Power is draining away from those who are briefing the press; there’s a painful sense of loss, mixed with a dreary nostalgia – not for the idealistic, gently social-democratic Blairism of 1997, but the market-obsessed version that kicked in around 2001.
The ashes of this approach are all around us. Rather than “reforming” the public sector, New Labour’s beloved Private Finance Initiatives are being squeezed out of existence by the credit crunch. The old wonkish talk about “personalising” services, squashing Local Education Authorities and using the alleged dynamism of private firms, won’t just founder against the current public mood, but actively contradict it. The global crisis is immovably in the political foreground, and Labour needs to come up with credible answers to the great issues of our time. As ever, “it’s the economy, stupid”.
This is not an argument exclusive to the left. Listen to the Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, whose election campaign was advised by Alan Milburn. He talks about the end of “free-market fundamentalism, extreme capitalism and excessive greed”, and the death of “the economic orthodoxy of our time”. Charles Clarke – no radical leftie – recently said: “The grand story is very clear: 30 years of Thatcher/Reagan, tempered by Clinton/Blair, are over.”
Plenty of Labour people know what that means: a new, thoroughly modernised agenda. We need to talk about not just fair pay, but fair taxes, and urgently address insecurity at work. Our reaction to the financial crisis should be proactive; we should make the case for remutualising some banks. Instead of the craven decision on the third Heathrow runway, we should be advocating a jobs-creating Green New Deal. These are the priorities the moment demands; the politics of the past won’t do.
The Labour Right has a noble history – as a source of reliability, honesty and dependability for the leadership. It has usually understood changing times. But a rogue element has developed since the departure of Tony Blair. Their personal attacks, anonymous briefings and confused diagnoses are symptomatic of an inability – or simple refusal – to grasp the end of an era. With echoes of current events in the Vatican, the Doctrine of Market Infallibility is collapsing: as Blair used to say, “we should leave the past to those who live in it”.
Jon Cruddas is the Labour MP for Dagenham
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Comments
GET A LIFE YOU IDIOT, YOUR FINISHED IN 2010 and so is the un/United Kingdom. We Scots have had a gutfull of the biggest industry in England, Bulldust.
What the public wants is reliably-delivered Government - not your witless obsession with image, spin and press-leaks.
You've got the Home Secretary stealing cash - "Lord" Mandelson the unelected Nazi giving "business advice" when he's never run a business in his entire criminal career - and the whole bundle of you SPINELESS YANKEE YES-MEN voting for yet more spending on two illegal wars for the benefit of Uncle Sam. The country IS spiralling, and all your a*sehole Mandelson can do is get into f-word fights with people who know a LOT more about it than he does?
Well, allow me to take a leaf out of his book. YOU ARE F*CKING USELESS, CRUDDAS. The country can't wait to KICK YOU OUT ON YOUR USELESS A*RSE - you and the fat unelected w*nker you call "Leader". How many more billions are you going to waste fighting illegal yankee wars and torturing innocent civilians - while telling tax-payers you've not got a penny to help businesses that are keeling-over and dying thanks to your idiotic policies, you w*nker?? And don't tell me that it's a world recession because oddly enough France & Germany are coping a lot better than Britain... could it be because they don't have talentless morons like you running their countries???
RESIGN, YOU HOPELESS PILLOCK. YOU AND YOUR SHIP OF FOOLS ARE INCAPABLE OF RUNNING THIS COUNTRY. GET OUT!! WE HATE YOU!! WE DESPISE YOU!!! YOU ARE A TALENTLESS CRETIN!!!
Who can lead Labour after Brown and his gang are ejected from Westminster? No-one I can think of, they are all puny or discredited except Clarke and Mandelson. Do you Labour people want him for leader?
To Scoittishrepub (good for you, backing you all the way for your freedom) re "English bulldust"I can't help but remind you half the cabinet it seems are Scots plus a fair number of MPS at Westminster and they're mostly Labour and the PM is unelected by us and unelected by his party and is a Scot. A fair bit of Parliament therefore is also Scottish bulldust run by a Scots PM....! What will you do with Brown, Darling and co. when the Union between Scotland and England dissolves?!! This isn't a diatribe against Scotland as I'm part Scot myself, but you can't imagine we English are any more thrilled to be ruled by Scots making this much mess of our countres as you are by seeing English Labour MPs doin the sames. On with the end of the Union.
Correction Jon, the 'rogue element' entered the party when certain people realised the old Labour Party was ripe for a take-over, ready to become the party of a bunch of sinister neoliberals who saw the size of the trough, and the means to expand it.
What we have now is corporate-state Britain in which what were previously the public services, but are now a branch of the corporate trough.
The motto now, borrowed from Reagan's USA, is very simple: "Do less, but make it seem like more".
As the unemployed are finding out, Job Centres have bought into this notion, big-time.
Labour was never a Party fit for long spells in government - the two factions that sit uncomfortably alongside one another were guaranteed to start squabbling when the going got tough.
With the Tory Party, the splits are more to do with individual issues, Europe etc.
With Labour, it's more to do with ideology - a constant, permanent tension between Red Flag-waving socialists and Continental-style Social Democrats - and in a time when whole economic models come under strain, an ideological rift was inevitable. "Stay the course", say the Blairites. "Left! Left! Left!" scream the socialists, nearly desperate to demonstrate the exact same kind of zeal that Michael Heseltine used to mock at Tory Party Conferences.
Don't get it over with it yet though, Labour, please - I beg of you. Let it stew and simmer, ferment and develop. And let it explode about three months before Crash Gordon calls that election. That should finish you off, very nicely indeed.
Your lot of Corrupt, Sleazy Trough-Snouters are going to be annihilated at the General Election and deservedly so for Lying & Cheating over the 1997 Labour Manifesto commitments which you all simply ignored as soon as you got into power.
Well never again!
You lot are T O A S T !
No one is listening to Labour !
We KNOW what your party stands for.......S L E A Z E ....&.... C O R R U P T I O N.
Remember how you conned us all into supporting you in 1997 with your promise to 'clean up politics'.......what we got, was a nosedive into the sewers.
Frankly, we all wish New Labour were dead and buried but will have to wait a few more months, which I'm prepared to do as every day that Labour remain in power will only make their political demise that much more certain and permanent.
The only thing keeping us cheerful in these dark Labour days, is the prospect of watching all those Labour Trough Munching Sleazeballs being despatched, one by one..............all those 'Portillo' moments to look forward to on election night.
O can't wait! :o)
Every time there was a problem he somehow turned it to his benefit.
Since Tony Blair left office everything has gone wrong for the Labour Party. A Government Minister said recently we were in the worst depression for a hundred years.
Things like that would never have happened under Tony Blair's leadership.
As McEnroe would say.........."You cannot be serious, man"! LOL
Quote 'Tony Blair was known as teflon Tony because he had this marvellous gift of turning adversity to advantage.'
What?....Like the Illegal Iraq War?.........Yeah! That's a HUGE advantage for our country, and one even our kids will be bankrolling for years to come.
Not to mention ALL those D E A T H S.
Where do these Labour apparatchiks still come from?
With the bliar, blanket, brown stuff et al, a cult took over. It is called nulabor.
This nulabor government is corrupt. The nulabor corruption is absolute, lead from the top down, imposed through all tiers of social and government control, down to street level. Being rotten to the core and from the core, everything it touches it taints. Having neither the ability nor inclination to correct itself, outside intervention is indicated.
An as yet unnamed elite, lawless organisation is actually running the country by stealth, in effect a silent insurrection from within. The control must be total, absolute, and lead top-down from the centre. What and who cannot be controlled must be destroyed by nulabor. This unelected cult cadre bypasses Parliament, the Judiciary, and all the institutional safeguards that were designed to ensure our freedoms, especially free speech.