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That was the year that wasn’t. Our New Labour conditioning began to fray, the permanent smile began to crack and recidivist impulses to tax, spend and public service began to emerge. Tony’s regular, restless reshuffles have created a critical mass of malcontents, plotting revenge, on the back benches just as the Party begins to realise that our leaders didn’t have a new philosophy to replace social democracy. Just a series of half baked impulses to privatisation. Mostly now exhausted, impractical or insane. Godot’s arrival has been postponed. So we’re milling round waiting for someone else to turn up. Gordon? David? Peter? Perhaps Arnold Scwazznegger if he doesn’t make it in California.
October 2002 Fairly boring conference though at least its back in Blackpool where Real Labour belongs. As distinct from the poncey South Coast, natural home to New Labour. It begins with the usual big media build up with promises of revolt, tough on Tony, tough on the causes of Tony, all contrasted with predictions of new leadership in a new direction. Then nothing much happens, Tony gives us another brilliant but forgettable speech. Off we go to face the rigours of Virgin Trains, the M6 and constituency parties who’re getting fed up with walking backwards they know not where.
November 2002 If this isn’t the most boring Queen’s Speech ever it will do until the most boring comes along. No indication of the new line advance. Just rumours that we will be able to get the neighbours locked up if they’re naughty, or politically militant. We’ll be giving the private sector a new role in local government and the health service and possible allowing funeral homes to sponsor NHS Direct.
December-January Growing pressures to give the public sector, or at least the military section of it, a greater role in Iraq while Tony devotes his efforts to working on President Bush rather than Party by persuading him to work through the UN and get other nations besides Texas on his side. I find myself praising his efforts to a degree that people begin to look at me oddly.
March 2003 We wuz conned into war. But for our own good and, in the last analysis, rightly. Tony put up a brilliant performance, but being dragged behind the American chariot and with no control over the timetable he over-egged the pudding and kept shifting his argument from WMD to regime change to humanitarian Clwydism, as well as bringing in spurious arguments, such as WMD launch in 45 minutes (which was actually a misprint for 45 years). I abstained having been persuaded by Tommy McAvoy that if I voted against the government Tony would chuck it in, the government would collapse and Charles Kennedy would sweep to power. So I didn’t vote either way and personally saved Tony’s career.
May 2003 Disaster in council elections. Particularly in North East Lincolnshire where we were trounced from 22 seats to 7, and a Lib-Con coalition takes over. We deserved it because of the way we’ve treated councils, particularly local Labour councils who’ve not been given the money to do their job, been forced to flog their council houses for peanuts, and waste millions on endless consultancies, best value studies and reports by the big accountancy houses. New Labour has created a whole new industry battening on both central and local government. It works on the assumption that the public sector can’t do anything for itself and provides exactly zilch value for council tax payers. Better pay out millions to the consultancy industry than spend it on housing!
June 2003 Euro- or more accurately non Euro month. Gordon wisely kicks the Euro into the long grass where it belongs. But is bullied into keeping Mandy’s hopes alive by the possibility of a referendum next year. It can’t happen, but it gives Peter something to do. The Euro enthusiasts have gone Kamikaze. They want a referendum which they’ll lose, destroying Tony in the process. Great love hath no man than he lays down his party for the EU.
I’m positively enthused by Tony’s angry criticisms of France and Germany. Of course, in traditional EU fashion, he’ll now have to eat his words, pretend we’re all best friends, and all’s for the best in the best of possible EUs. Mitchell’s law of Euro double talk tells us that when you want to disassociate from anything European you must walk backwards away from it while loudly singing its praises. That will ensure loud hosannas of praise and pleasure for the EU and particularly the Giscard Constitution, which Tony has to pretend is an unimportant tidying up while the others claim it’s a base for a new federal system. Tony has to argue that it’ll be changed, even castrated, by British objections but Giscard says it all hangs together so we can’t pick and choose. Tony’s got to resist a referendum which the country clearly wants, because he’ll lose it. Ho hum. That will mean another year spent talking gobbledygook about an incomprehensible mess which no one particularly wants.
July 2003 We’re running into economic problems. Pundits complain that we’ll have to increase taxes and that living standards aren’t improving because of the tax burden. The real problem is that we’ve preferred stability to growth by ensuring that Bankers rule: they’ve kept the pound overvalued to defeat inflation at the cost of deep damage to manufacturing, exports, and the balance of payments. So we’ve ensured that it’s not profitable to produce in this country and everything, from call centres and clothes to videos and vacuum cleaners, is shifted overseas. The pound needs to fall like the dollar while the Euro rises. Yet our Banker rulers are keeping British interest rates at double, or more than double, everyone else’s. So the pound stays higher than it should be, investment falls, and producers have to slash ever more jobs in a vain struggle to keep ourselves competitive.
Growth slows, jobs are lost and the economy declines. Now it’s kept going only by higher public spending and a consumer boom financed by credit, both of which our banker moralists view as immoral. We’re becalmed waiting for an economic revival elsewhere to pull us out. Which it can’t if the pound stays as high as it is. Time to Go for Growth Gordon, and make it profitable or competitive to produce here. Nothing can be improved without growth because the only alternative is higher taxes.
August 2003 It’s not just the economy that’s becalmed. Everything else is too. Tony’s last press conference, even worse his speech to the Bildeberg for Beginners conference Mandy was allowed to organise to give him something to live for, were brain dead performances, not ringing clarion calls. Now, to compound the problem, everything is now postponed for the Hutton enquiry which will takes minutes but waste months, deciding whether Alistair Campbell should go. Of course not. I’m organising keep Campbell For the Nation Campaign. WE need someone putting out propaganda and deciding policy who is actually Labour, someone with Labour reflexes rather than a propensity to bash unions, party members, Labour councils and the party’s past and anything which stirs the left.
September 2003 MPs are reluctantly dragged back from freeloading round the world and ministers and whips are forced to look through the lockers to find something for us to do, besides holding yet more post mortems on Iraq. The shorter the war the bigger the row. This will run and run. Meanwhile the apparatchicks and chaps working with Tony on the big attraction for the coming conference, are preparing Re-launch III. From Re-launch to Re-launch his army he doth lead, till all his foes are vanquished, and Tone is Lord indeed. Which is where we came in.
October 2003 I have a fiendish plan. We devoted the first term to showing ourselves safe, clean, housetrained and devoted to making the world fit for Tony’s policies to survive in. That should have been a base for moving forward into a more radical second term but we forgot this second bit. So Tony stood on a very different platform to mine. He burbled about privatisation, incentives and G.M. while the party wanted public spending, redistribution and organic social democracy. As a result we’ve been treading water since June 2001 and had to distract the nation’s attention by playing Robin to Bush’s Batman. A little dose of war covers any domestic mess.
For a time. For a time. Now that interval is ending. So why not begin over, do as we should have done in 2001 and act like a Labour Party? I’m putting that idea to Tony. Unfortunately his next scheduled meeting with MPs with L-N surnames is late 2004. |
