|
 his general election campaign has a strange feel to
it. It's taken for granted by just about everyone that Labour
will win another handsome victory. Indeed, for the past month,
the broadsheet newspapers have been so sure of the result
that they've been concentrating their political coverage on
speculation about who leads the Tories after their inevitable
defeat.
At the same time, however, there seems to be no great enthusiasm
for New Labour wherever you look. Even Tony Blair's most loyal
supporters in the press can summon up only the faintest of
praise. Out in the real world, all the anecdotal evidence
suggests that Labour Party members and supporters are less
motivated than at any time since 1979. The Labour camp is
extremely nervous about the likely level of abstention among
its core working-class voters.
Loyal Blairites - of whom there are remarkably few - complain
that this just isn't fair. For the first time, they say, a
Labour government is set to win a full second term. For the
first time, a Labour government hasn't been brought to its
knees by a major economic crisis. For the first time, a Labour
government has done pretty much what it came to power promising
to do.
All of which is true. So why is there so little admiration
for the government either in the Labour Party or among the
population at large? One reason is undoubtedly that people
judge it less on its record vis a vis its policy promises
than on its overall standards of behaviour and its handling
of unforeseen events. Even before the cash-for-passports scandal
and the foot and mouth epidemic, it was difficult to be greatly
impressed on either score - witness the Bernie Ecclestone,
Derek Draper and Geoffrey Robinson affairs; the repeated reports
of feuding in the cabinet, the London mayor fiasco, the David
Shayler scandal, the Dome, the fuel crisis et cetera. New
Labour in government might not be as sleazy, incompetent and
prone to panic as the Tories, but it doesn't have too much
to boast about.
But this is not the crux of the matter. More important by
far is the widespread sense of disappointment that Labour
in power has not made more of a difference in policy terms.
Despite Labour's best efforts to dampen expectations in the
run-up to 1997, epitomised by the minimal promises in the
party's manifesto, Blair came to power on the crest of a wave
of popular hope.
Although Labour, in its desperation to pre-empt accusations
of betrayal, had made it as clear as it could that it would
not put right every wrong in its first term, even its most
sceptical supporters felt that it would be able to do much
more than it said it would. When it became obvious that, in
fact, there was no chance of Labour deviating from its chosen
'safety first' strategy, disillusion set in big time.
This has been particularly apparent among political activists
of different kinds, both inside the Labour Party and outside
it, and among the left-leaning intelligentsia. For most of
these people, even those on the traditional Labour right,
the great hope of 1997 was that Labour in government would
prove more recognisably social democratic than it had appeared
in opposition. That hope still exists - just - but it is now
much deflated.
The government's embrace of privatisation and deregulation
has been unconditional, and its expansion of workers' rights
minimal. Its measures to redistribute by stealth have failed
to stop the continuing growth of income and wealth inequalities.
Most important, Gordon Brown's decision to stick to Tory spending
plans for two years means that public services are as bad
today as they were four years ago. Things might get better
in the second term as the spending spree begun by Brown in
1999-2000 starts to take effect, but with an economic downturn
in the offing it would be foolish to count chickens.
For constitutional reformers, the 1997 Labour victory held
out the prospect of a root-and-branch transformation of the
British political system. Electoral reform for the Commons,
a democratically accountable House of Lords and devolution
to the English regions would rapidly follow the introduction
of devolution to Scotland and Wales and first-stage Lords
reform. Within a couple of years, however, it was evident
that the government had no intention of doing more than the
bare minimum promised in the manifesto - and it now seems
that the constitutional reform programme is as good as dead
for the second term.
The story is much the same in other spheres. Pro-Europeans
have seen their hopes of early British entry into the single
European currency cruelly dashed. Freedom-of-information campaigners'
optimism at the government's initial efforts disappeared by
the time its final legislation was passed. Environmentalists,
the anti-hunting lobby and opponents of the arms trade feel
just as let down.
Of course, Blair and the rest of the Labour leadership couldn't
care less what activists and intellectuals think, believing
them to be unrepresentative of the public as a whole and out
of touch with the views of the all-important swing voters
of middle England. And to some extent they are right: Labour
members' concerns about single parents' benefits and Charter
88's complaints about the lack of momentum behind Lords reform
are not, unfortunately, widely shared.
But the disillusion of activists and intellectuals does find
an echo in the wider population insofar as the focus of popular
disenchantment with the government is its failure to do more
to improve Britain's schools, hospitals, transport system
and public housing. This hardly counts as an upsurge of radical
socialist sentiment: just getting our public services up to
the level taken for granted in continental Europe would be
quite enough for most people. It is a mark of how far Labour
has shifted politically in the past 10 years that even this
modest goal now seems strangely utopian. But unless the government
starts to deliver tangible improvements to public services
in the next couple of years, it's a safe bet that there will
be no third term.
|
This
month
Archive
of past articles