A lack of hostility: the debate within Labour

By Tom Miller

For me, what New Labour turned out to be is a fundamental break with the past, so I guess I come from a fundamentally different place to Progress’s editorial here.

I think this for a number of reasons, but the first I want to talk about is Progress’s response to claims of market fundamentalism.

I believe that New Labour is a market fundamentalist conception. While I’m quite happy to admit that the rhetoric it uses is state-neutral, I think it is beyond dispute for most people, not least party activists, that the content is usually different to the sell. Progress describes the mentality as “Labour’s lack of hostility to the use of the private sector in providing and funding public services”. Well, that’s true, and that wouldn’t be so much of a problem (though rather than being neutral about any solution, I’d prefer to have outright scepticism to any solution, public or private, but there you go).

But here’s a question for you.

Can you think of anything apart from Railtrack, and without the threat of total economic meltdown, where the government have looked at a failing, privately run public service, and said ‘this isn’t good enough, let’s go for a non-profit’? Can you think of a circumstance where this has happened and the solution has not been a private one (Network Rail remains private, and the government is planning to sell off banks, reverse gear style, rather than breaking them up and keeping them national, or mutualising them)?

Every time there is some area where the government identifies a public service with some sort of problem, if it is public, they privatise it, and if it is private, they simply mess around with it a bit.

Over the last decade, we have seen an approach which claimed to be neutral, but in every instance, the solution has been private, not public. Most of these have been services which have been nationalised since the great social democratic gains of the late 1940s, or earlier.

Where a not-for-profit, democratically controlled service has existed and a problem identified (or indeed manufactured), the government has tried to replace it with a private sector one. The net effect of this is that Britain is at a velocity which points from the public, towards a future that is much more heavily private. Save for in health, our economy is already one of the most private in the world, as we spend a relatively low proportion of our GDP on public services.

Even in health, we spend less on our (superior) public system than other economies spend on their (private) systems. But when our public sector shows elements of failure, this is never seen as the root of the problem; instead the route of the problem is public ownership. In this sense, New Labour is fundamentally a departure from Croslandite neutrality on the public/private question. Croslandism really was neutral. He meant what he said. The other reason Crosland is different is that Crosland came into his own following the gains cemented by a populist left wing government fifteen years before. Thanks to the liberal welfare state, a Keynesian employment policy and a combination of free education and healthcare, the class gap was narrowing fast. Crosland’s role was therefore a consolidation on what had gone before.

New Labour is the exact opposite. It came into power when inequality was rising vastly, on the back of an explicit promise not to take the full range of action necessary to reverse it (thus securing a couple of brief cessations in the upward trajectory of our gini coefficient). In fact, under this government for one of the first times in a while, the rich are getting richer while the poor get poorer. The are facts. Our gini coefficient is higher than at any point in the last 30 years, including under Thatcher ; the higher it is, the more unequal the distribution of wealth… and especially in the consumer society, in a number of ways, wealth is a good rough guide to power. Labour should face up to them.

Crosland, the consolidator of Social Democracy, would probably have been a lot fairer to the public and social sector, at least, according to his own precepts. In place of a bent for nationalisation, Crosland’s project was general increases in equality.

Rather than fitting this tradition, New Labour’s actual trajectory has been a relentless steering from the public, Labour’s most radical historical contributions, towards the private; whether it says so is less than relevant in comparison to the facts of what has taken place. When the public, social sphere is viewed as ‘old’ and in need of ‘reform’ (read gradual chipping away), and the private is viewed as ‘choice’ (even though its big drawback is that it is less democratically accountable to the citizens who use it) and ‘new’ (why?), the playing field in making decisions between the public and private cannot realistically be seen as a level one. And all of this directional push towards the private comes against the backdrop, as I mentioned before, of an already relatively small public sector, in world terms. Even in those areas in which we have seen the biggest expansions in public spending, such as the 137 new hospital units we have brought about, we have relied on (now highly shaky) private finance. I speak primarily as a mutualiser, and am no fetishist for the unresponsive big state, but I still don’t think the state gets a fair deal, or that enough effort is put into making it respond better to stakeholder needs, rather than just selling chunks of it off.

Where Crosland’s real public/private ambiguity (which we can’t, in my view, realistically say New Labour continues in the tradition of) replaced previous dogma on nationalisation as a consolidatory move, new Labour has sought not to consolidate Social Democracy (for all that came before was Thatcherism), but for the most part to accommodate the old order. How such a reliance on the paradigms of the past can rightly be described as ‘new’ has always been slightly confusing, bearing in mind that most of this happened before I was even conceived.

Where the Croslandite tradition (as later progressed by Kinnock and Hattersley) sought instead to concentrate on equality, while things would have been worse under the tories, we have failed to do what it takes to solve the problem. Indeed, under us it has slowly got worse. Therefore, I don’t see New Labour, encased in the chains of the decade in which I was born, as new, nor do I see it as living up to the traditional conceptions, right or left, of what it means to be Labour. Its stab at being both has been halfhearted; better than what went before, but still inadequate in meeting Labour’s historical challenges, or representing Labour’s historical values (even when they are taken to include public sector/private sector neutrality). New Labour can’t even achieve its own watered down objectives, because in many ways, the whole point of it is to rob itself of the tools necessary to do so (such as progressive taxation).

Jon Cruddas makes reference to the final point I wish to make about whether New Labour really fits into the Labour tradition.

The original ‘third way’ document (an explicit denial in itself of the Social Democratic ‘2nd way’) includes no reference to the labour movement from which the party takes its origination and its name. That’s about as important as traditions of thought and values get, but it doesn’t get a mention.

New Labour is fundamentally split over what it thinks about Trade Unions. Many New Labour people actually admit to hating the movement which represent organised workers. Even US Democrats are friendlier. The other half includes people like Alan Johnson and Tom Watson (someone for whom I have a lot of respect), both of whom fit into a broadly labourist strand of New Labour; but I wonder whether either of them back the current policy of their previous employers at the CWU and Amicus/Unite? These people approve of unions being involved, which is great, but I think there’s a lot of qualification going on. So even on the key question of organised labour, there is, at very best, a lot of ambiguity.

Is New Labour, then, really so new? And is it really very… well, Labour? Is having a membership card all that this description requires? More importantly, is it really pubic/private neutral? I think there’s definitely a momentum towards the private, which implies a bias. What do party members think?

Can Labour achieve equality? It has not so far. Is it even committed to it?

Perhaps, for consistency’s sake, it should re-revise clause IV, and, contra-fabians, get rid of the bit about ‘power, wealth and opportunity’? At least then the policy outcomes as demonstrated above would meet the party rulebook, as revised by Blair.

According to the sell, New Labour believed that left and right were finished concepts. Very postmodern! But then, according to the sell, it seized the centre to pull it leftwards. And has it done this? Does it really want to, or would it rather stay rooted to a centre that never moves? Will it continue to bof itself into being defined by the anti-union, pro-private, anti-fair-taxes British public of the 1980s, so long ago, or will it seek to begin once again to modernise itself, be radical, and persuade better?

Perhaps the initial response to the credit crunch is the begining. Must it take an emergency? And do we want to go back to the old way of doing things, or build a more regulated, preventative structure for society?

All of these questions, in previous incarnations, are one that the Labour Party could easily answer.

But now, all is unsure. In terms of a ‘progressive century’, these formerly very moderate positions are now where the real debates within our movement will be held.

There are plenty of fine Labour achievements I can list. I have a fantastic little booklet of them. Many things in the country have changed unrecognisably for the better. A minimum wage (a change I put second only to the invention of the NHS, but, nevertheless, one which is ten years old). Schools and hospitals. Policing levels. Treasury-safe policy on gay rights, religious tolerance and racial equality.

But I still give us a B minus. For the future, there are questions to be answered.