JEREMY Corbyn’s launch of Labour’s 2017 General Election campaign was, by popular agreement, distinctly underwhelming – though largely because it wasn’t a presentational disaster. The press has a playground attitude to political weakness, and have firmly fixed Mr Corbyn’s image as a no-hope, loony lefty who can’t walk and chew gum at the same time. Consequently, when he delivers a half-decent speech competently it isn’t news.
But it was also because the speech was curiously devoid of content. There was a lot of rhetoric about “rip-off bosses and greedy bankers” and talk of more homes, teachers and nurses. But there wasn’t a great deal of headline policy. What has marked Mr Corbyn’s leadership so far has been not so much a lurch to the left as a lurch to the centre. The most distinctive policies unveiled so far have been four extra bank holidays and the abolition of charges in NHS car parks. Not exactly the Communist manifesto.
His supposedly far left Shadow Chancellor, John McDonnell, may have said that he thinks there is a lot to learn from reading Karl Marx’s Das Kapital, but he is the one who has restored Labour to the ranks of fiscal orthodoxy. Labour has rolled over and accepted Brexit, balanced budgets, and the two-child cap, the freeze on benefits and other aspects of Tory welfare reform.
Of course, Labour’s manifesto hasn’t been published yet and will no doubt feature the £10 minimum wage, increased taxation on earnings over £80,000 and the renationalisation of rail. There’s a hint Labour might scrap university tuition fees in England. But there isn’t anything in the pipeline that looks like an election winner. Indeed, Theresa May is hoping to upstage Labour and portray the Tories as the “party of the many not the few” by adopting key Labour pledges from 2015 – like the cap on energy prices that the Conservatives condemned then as “dangerous” and “economically illiterate”.
The former Labour policy adviser, Lord Glassman, has been taking tea with Number Ten staffers offering advice on how to improve Mrs May’s appeal to working-class voters. We can expect the Tory manifesto next week to be strong on skills training, industrial democracy, the gender pay gap, infrastructure investment and security in the rented sector. Largely rhetoric, of course, but the Conservatives are keen to hang on to all those ex-Labour Ukip voters who are now voting Conservative thanks to Brexit.
To charges that Labour is being too cautious, Mr Corbyn’s defenders will not doubt reply: well,you can’t have it both ways. You can’t reassure voters that Mr Corbyn isn’t a reincarnation of Leon Trotsky by packing Labour’s manifesto full of left-wing policies. The most important thing is to get Labour elected. And surely no one is going to say that he is less radical than the neo-Thatcherite, war-mongering former Labour leader who-shall-not-be-named, but answers to “Tony”.
Actually, you could make an argument that Red Jezza is less radical than Tony Blair was back in May 1997, when Labour swept to power with a majority of 169. It was Mr Blair who introduced the original National Minimum Wage, which had been fiercely opposed by business and the press. Labour also promised to finance the New Deal job-creation plan, by a £5 billion windfall tax on the utility companies – a rare example of a Western government seizing company profits that had been legitimately acquired.
Mr Blair promised to sign Britain up to the EU Social Chapter, which was regarded as proto-communism by the Conservatives. And Labour went on to introduce working families’ tax credits, double spending on education per child and it injected record levels of investment into the National Health Service. It also introduced 2000 Sure Start centres to address underachievement by children in poverty-stricken and dysfunctional households.
Mr Blair’s 1997 manifesto promised and delivered devolution of power, including of course the Scottish Parliament – the most radical constitutional change in more than a century. Labour also brought in the Human Rights Act and Freedom of Information (which Mr Blair says he now regrets). Labour ended the right of hereditary peers to vote in Parliament, though Lords reform stopped short of abolition. The 1997 Government signed up to climate limits, abolished fox-hunting (which Mrs May now wants to restore) along with fur farming and cosmetic testing on animals.
Everyone forgets that Mr Blair also went into the 1997 General Election campaign committed to Labour’s then policy of a publicly-owned rail service – though renationalisation was killed off by the Chancellor, Gordon Brown. Mr Brown did however introduce many ingenious “stealth taxes” like the abolition of dividend tax relief on company pensions which raised many billions for the NHS. He also committed Britain to vastly increasing foreign aid and promoting 100% debt relief in developing countries. So the 1997 Labour Government really was a radical one – it’s what came after that gave it a bad name.
No one voted Labour expecting to go to war in Iraq in defiance of any clear UN resolution, bring in the Private Finance Initiative or commercial provision in health. It is important to remember this, because Labour’s forthcoming defeat will no doubt be blamed on Mr Corbyn and his leftism. But the truth is that he isn’t particularly radical and left-wing policies are rather popular right now, which is why the Tories are trying to steal some of them.
Mr Blair’s “people’s revolution” in 1997 was was a period of perhaps naïve optimism. He was carried to office on a wave of disgust with the “sleaze” of the Tory years, not unlike the anti-elite attitudes of today. There was a widespread revulsion against Thatcherism and the “no such thing as society” neo-liberalism. There was a real appetite for change abroad in Britain 20 years ago, and Labour was willing to give it to them.
1997 was an inspirational moment time to be covering politics, because there was a genuine sense of radical change in the air – not the rancid populism that has been bred by Brexit. Iraq and a curious obsession with money-making damaged Mr Blair’s image irreparably. But Labour’s tragedy is that its greatest prime minister began as a genuine radical, leading a government that really did change the lives of ordinary people for the better.
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