Labour fires the starting pistol in the race to find its new leader today, as the National Executive Committee (NEC) meets in London. The mood among the mourning and exhausted MPs does not suggest this will herald a joyous new dawn. Far from it. At present, the field looks thin. Do any of them have the heft to win public trust?
Someone needs the political imagination to first reinvent the party and then lead it through five long years. Whether anyone is capable of the new thinking required is impossible to tell. How inauspiciously this has begun, as sulphurous Peter Mandelson risks contaminating those too quick out of the traps to claim his “Blairite” mantle. Chuka Umunna and Liz Kendall dashing for the Sunday TV sofas with indecent haste looked as if they had been rehearsing a bit too eagerly for a Labour fail, with Tristram Hunt another too quick to slam what went before as failing to appeal to the “John Lewis community”. How will the party members and supporters who fought from door to door feel about that? Wiser to hang back for a decent interval.
For talents other than the obvious frontrunners to emerge would require a prolonged period of soul-searching, but Harriet Harman will not stay as interim leader that long. Nor, alas, will there be a primary ensuring the winner collects the widest possible public support.
Instead, the NEC will decide if the victor is declared at the end of July or at the September party conference: Pressure is growing for a short, sharp July result. The race begins when the NEC opens nominations: As candidates need signatures from 35 MPs they will stampede to collect the most — and MPs will hasten to pledge allegiance to a likely winner. Looking at the interminable five years ahead, the NEC should consider (and minute the discussion) that a leader chosen now need not take them into the 2020 election: Just as the Tories rightly replaced Iain Duncan Smith after three years as leader of the opposition, the NEC should stand ready for the party to look again later if need be.
Mandelson thundered against union influence on Sunday, reprising the old voting system where unions sent out dubious ballot papers with Ed Miliband’s leaflet enclosed. But one of Miliband’s best legacies was a reform passed at a special conference he called last year, which with difficulty abolished the three colleges — members, MPs and unions — that let him win by a whisker on the union vote. Now it’s one member (or registered supporter), one vote, with the ballot handled entirely by the Electoral Reform Society. One curiosity about the noisy Blairite demarche is how they rewrite history to Blair’s disadvantage.
Early Blair, pre-Iraq, pre-privatising itches and pre-jetset multimillionairedom, was as radical as the Miliband programme. These days, it is unfashionable to praise Blair for anything, but as David Walker and I charted in our book The Verdict , his leadership brought the minimum wage, tax credits leaving a million fewer poor children, NHS funding raised to the European Union average, massive school rebuilding, standards and teacher quality up, free museums and galleries, civil partnership, universal free nursery schooling, 3,500 SureStarts, one million fewer poor pensioners thanks to pension credit, a child trust fund, education maintenance allowance, the Freedom of Information Act — and the soon to be abolished Human Rights Act.
Do not forget how radical many of these policies were after 18 Tory years. To be sure, Blair did not touch the rich and he was cavalier with civil liberties. But Miliband’s manifesto had a similar blend of radicalism and caution — raising the living standards of the low-paid but with a fiscal conservatism that included a stiff deficit target, a welfare cap and a lock on raising value added tax, income tax or National Insurance. Blair’s magic at his peak was a personal political genius far greater than any “Blairism”, with a skill to tax more, redistribute quite a bit to the poor and yet take the majority with him. Everyone wants his “big tent” that captured three majorities, but they need the same ability to win widespread trust — not some re-run of Blairite privatising “reform” that will be irrelevant to the desperate state of 2020 public services.
Do not let the story of 2015 be rewritten with the wrong lessons learned. Miliband’s manifesto was no echo of the 1983 suicide note. Before the mansion tax becomes a totemic “disaster”, the two Labour constituencies with most mansions — Westminster North and Hampstead and Kilburn — gained larger majorities, despite extraordinary Tory spending focusing on that one issue. Raising top tax and mansion tax were highly popular. What went wrong? Deep distrust of Labour’s economic competence and distrust of its leader — which may be the same thing.
In the coming months, candidates need to show their mettle by confronting David Cameron’s oncoming torrent of extreme legislation. The argument for staying in the EU needs to start now, Labour standing out as the pro-Europeans in a storm of Europhobia. The Human Rights Act needs passionate defence: who better than new MP Keir Starmer, former director of public prosecutions and human rights lawyer, to help stop the UK joining Belarus outside the European court of human rights.
The argument for staying in the EU needs to start now, Labour standing out as the pro-Europeans in a storm of Europhobia Duncan Smith’s return to the Department of Work and Pensions — where universal credit, the work programme and disability benefit PIP are in meltdown — needs forensic exposure. The public will be shocked at what a £12 billion (Dh68.62 billion) benefit cut really means. Cameron plans a 40 per cent threshold for striking — yet he was elected by 24 per cent of the electorate.
The National Health Service (NHS) only squeaked through the election with emergency Treasury bungs: Two thirds of trusts are in deep debt, quality inspections worsening. Departmental and local council cuts will be severe.
Cameron’s election bribes add up to £30 billion: where is the unfunded 8 billion for the NHS, inheritance tax or raising income tax thresholds? Where is the money for flat rail fares, more free childcare and the selling off of housing association property? All this must be found, despite a new law forbidding any raise in value added tax, income tax or National Insurance. Cameron thought Lib Dems would save him from rash promises — but now he’ll have to do all this. Labour has plentiful soft targets.
Candidates should not waste energy on a never-ending parade of identical hustings round the country: Livestream just a few. Give black marks to those who spend precious time trailing round constituencies when they should be confronting Tory policies heading through parliament. Judge them by how well they take the fight to the real enemy, not on revisiting Labour battles of yesteryear irrelevant to 2020.
— Guardian News & Media Ltd
