The Labour left’s three chances

By Graham Hall

Thee past week or so has given the Labour Party a massive opportunity to move leftwards without having had to do a great deal. The decisions by Home Secretary Alan Johnson and Business Secretary Lord Mandelson to shelve the ID cards scheme and part privatisation of the Post Office respectively have given the Government an unlikely chance to re-stake their claims as being the real progressive choice at the next election. These two decisions (in effect u-turns) were quickly followed by the news that the mammoth yet loss-making East Coast mainline from London to Edinburgh is to be taken from the hands of National Express and brought back into public ownership, if only temporarily.

Such events will have the left of the party (and the Unions) rubbing their hands in glee, but such leftist decisions from the Government need to be taken advantage of immediately, before the momentum is lost.

The ID cards scheme has seen Labour painted as the illiberal party, and has allowed the Right to frame the debate over civil liberties, immigration and national security. The decision to put the scheme on the back-burner in the correct one, and should allow the Prime Minister an opportunity to stress that Labour are at heart a socially liberal party. Many liberally minded people have jumped ship and turned their support to the Liberal Democrats and even to the Conservatives believing that successive Home Secretaries have been far too concerned with pandering to the Daily Mail when in effect the real debates on national security and illegal immigration are far more nuanced than merely introducing an ID card for all and sundry. Alan Johnson has a big part to play in forging a new identity for the Home Office and the Government on civil liberties matters, yet as hard as he may try he seems unlikely to shift Brown from his position that the policy decision announced is merely a postponement. Brown should be emphasising that this decision is one taken from deep and thoughtful analysis and that the policy change stems from a desire to be more liberal. This won’t happen, and his lack of awareness on this issue is staggering

Likewise, turning its back on part-privatisation of the Postal Service should give the Government a reason to trigger a real debate on the Post Office’s future and should allow them to try and convince the Unions that this move is an ideological one aimed at shifting the party more towards the left. But it appears that they will do no such thing and simply blame their decision on the economy. There is real need for the service to be modernised, and it is true that in the age of email and e-billing the Postal Service isn’t seen as vital as it once was. But nevertheless, the Post Office plays a massive part in thousands of communities and is immensely popular with the public. The Prime Minister needs to set out his aims at modernising and even enhancing the service’s capabilities, and he needs to set those out whilst emphasising that his argument is the progressive one. But yet again, I fear he will avoid doing so because he feels that such talk will move Labour from the centre-ground and will overly antagonise his First Minister. A chance wasted in my opinion.

As far as the latest debacle over the East Coast mainline is concerned, this gives the Government a perfect opportunity to turn this huge part of the rail service into a profitable state-run machine. Just like the decisions on ID cards and the Post Office, this has again given the Prime Minister a chance to pacify the left of his party. If the service can be improved and done so by the state (and there is real potential for this to be done) then this will be a great achievement and should be maximised by Brown as a situation where the state can run certain things more effectively than the private sector. It also shouldn’t hurt that the main part of the line runs through what should be big Labour-supporting cities like Sheffield, Leeds, Newcastle and Edinburgh. What a boon it should be for the Labour Party to have their own state-run rail line travelling through their heartlands.

The issue for the Labour left is that if such an end-result occurs then why should the Government seek to re-privatise the line when state ownership will have been preferable to private ownership in terms of profits and reliability? Again, this Government’s lack of any real desire for public ownership is shown by Lord Adonis’s statement that this is merely a temporary measure and such statements appear to be another wasted opportunity from a Labour Government seemingly afraid to be seen to be of the Left. Nationalisation is seen by many in this administration as something of a failure – but in reality it needn’t be. As in the case of Northern Rock and the bail-outs given to the financial sector, Brown seems determined to assure us that these are all temporary measures. In every instance it shows a complete lack of awareness of how his own party and supporters feel on these issues.

The Government now has its hands on the biggest rail line in the UK, has shelved (for now) the massively unpopular ID card scheme and has decided to keep the Post Office in public hands. The latter two of these events should have come about from logical and ideological desires from the Prime Minister and his cabinet to appear to be going back to a more traditional Labour approach of governing, but very few of us, I believe, think that.

They are the results of a Government with no clear long term path, and with no resolve to push through with what they aim to achieve in their last year before an election.

Emphasising their real Labour values could yet save Brown and his Government insofar as it may just see the party reclaim trust and support in its natural heartlands, and scrapping the ID scheme could win it support from disenfranchised liberals. Yet Brown sees no need to promote these decisions as ones of a party of the Left listening to its supporters and members. Instead they are made to look like botched u-turns and the Government almost acts as if each decision has been a disaster when in reality a lot of their core supporters will support them.

The failure to capitalise on these accidental (and easily avoided) events in the Prime Minister’s doomed attempt to appear to be more ‘of the centre’ than David Cameron will see him crushed by a Tory party that is fresher and that has already laid claim to that territory whilst not being seen to be responsible for any of the economic setbacks that the public blame on the ruling administration.

It doesn’t yet seem that the Prime Minister realises this, and that is the most tragic fact for anybody on the Labour left.