So, where’s the opposition?

By James Valentine

Saturday was the first time I’d attended a leadership hustings (unfortunately I couldn’t get to last night’s LabourList event) and I thought the Compass event was pretty good. The candidates, as well as arguing, were clearly listening and bouncing ideas off each other. One of these individuals is destined to be Leader of the Opposition but none of them has quite taken on this mantle yet. You might say it’s rather early for this, but the Tories won’t stop and wait for them.

Gove’s Academies Bill is clearly one measure which all the candidates oppose. This bill would entirely distort Labour’s original intention of focussing special resources on the poorest and underprivileged. By offering Academy status to the best performing schools there’s a danger of simply strengthening the educational divide between haves and have-nots. Most of the primary schools that now have the right to form academies simply don’t have the administrative backing to run their own finances, so expect waste and chaos too.

There are other vital points for opposition which questioners didn’t raise. Take for example Andrew Lansley’s extraordinary idea of financially penalising hospitals which have to readmit discharged patients on an emergency basis. The Tories have been banging on about dismantling Labour’s NHS targets because of their supposedly perverse consequences and undermining the professionals – and yet they plan to bring in a new type of target which could have not merely perverse but gruesome consequences, especially for the elderly, and where doctors have clearly not been consulted.

Our response on the economy is key. The government continues to lie about public debt; that it needs to be reduced immediately regardless of the risks to the economy, that we’re comparable to Greece, and that our credit rating is vulnerable. The problem with a lie is that if it’s repeated enough then it is treated as established fact. It’s not as if the coalition hasn’t been challenged by many in the media and the academic community. A case in point is the FT’s Martin Wolf who wrote to last week to Osborne with a devastating demolition of the government’s case, mocking its “pre-Keynesian approach” to the UK’s fiscal challenges.

Alistair Darling, at least, is resolute and continues to remind us about the threat to the UK economy and the ghastly prospect of a return to recession across Europe. He will do so in spite of Ed Balls’ apparent efforts to undermine him. The Shadow Schools Secretary’s willingness to robustly take on Gove and others is commendable, but his curious attempt to construct an argument that VAT lost us the election only serves painfully to remind us of the real reason we lost – in part, his and others’ boring “dividing lines”, and their constant spinning and briefing against colleagues.

There will always be an argument that opposition is a time to return to first principles, which includes examining where we went wrong. That’s entirely correct, but it’s not responsible to give up and watch the country become devastated. Candidates should stop obsessing about Iraq and other failings and start promulgating policies – this was the strong steer from NEC Chair Ann Black during Saturday’s meeting. Debates have entertainment value (and I’ll be watching the Newsnight debate tonight) but we badly need a political spin-off too.