Labour must avoid the self-destruct button – and turn its fire on the Tories

By David Beeson

One of my favourites quotes from that classic film Dr Strangelove is ‘I think the auto-destruct mechanism got hit and blew itself up.’ Wouldn’t it be great if we could find a way to destroy the Labour Party’s self-destruct button?

After all, if I admire David Cameron for anything, it has to be for the extraordinary capacity he has demonstrated for shooting himself in the foot. Does he want to recognise the status of marriage in the tax system? He definitely does, he definitely doesn’t, he definitely does again. Is he going to build another 5000 prison places? Absolutely. Or perhaps not. Is he going to cut the deficit? You bet he is. Is he going to cut taxes for the wealthiest? Without a shadow of a doubt. Does he have the intellectual horsepower to see the contradiction? Not that he’s admitting to. He comes across as dithering, lost, unprincipled.

Before Christmas that was all becoming increasingly clear. And it was reflected in the slipping Conservative poll lead. Wonderful, I thought. We’ve still got a fighting chance.

Now whatever else one might say about Geoff Hoon and Patricia Hewitt, I really don’t think they’re dumb. So there’s no way they can have failed to understand that the only benefit that could possibly have arisen from raising the question of the party leadership this close to a general election would be felt by the other side.

What on Earth were they thinking of?

We have a job in front of us. It’s to try to protect this country from the damage a Cameron government would do. The last lot were awful: remember Thatcher with her Section 28, with the Poll Tax, with Railway privatisation – or even with something as stupidly trivial as having Gerry Adams spouting away on TV, but with an actor reading his words. You could see him speaking; you could see his body language; you could even hear his words; you just couldn’t hear his voice. That’s the level of infantile nonsense that a rigidly ideological Tory government took us to.

The only comfort the present lot give us is that Cameron isn’t showing anything like the competence of the Thatcher team. You can hope that some of his blows will turn out to be as weak as his contradictory, blundering policy statements now. But it’s cold comfort: it’s like saying that faced with an angry adolescent with an axe in a crowded room, you’d prefer him to be blindfolded. The random damage he could do might be worse than if he could see what he was hitting.

So, Geoff and Patricia, if you feel the need to undermine a Party leader, at least make it the leader of the other Party.

For the next few months, at least, we need everyone who actually cares about a fair society out there battling to get the current government re-elected. Defects it may have, but they’re nothing compared to the pain the Tories would cause, when they start running public services back down to Thatcherite levels and boosting unemployment by killing off any kind of economic recovery.

We need public statements supporting that goal. And if you can’t make any, well, try a few months of healing silence. For all our sakes.