Industry | 2009.11.26
The deathbed conversion has yet to deliver the goods | Seumas Milne
Labour is finally inching in the direction it should have taken years ago, but even now Brown can\'t stop triangulating
Queen\'s speeches always have a slightly comical, Ruritanian feel to them. But yesterday\'s spectacle of the crowned and bejewelled sovereign, with an annual public income of £8m, solemnly proclaiming her government would legislate to "narrow the gap between rich and poor" certainly broke new satirical ground. Previous Labour administrations that did a great deal more to attack inequality would have balked at making the monarch parrot such indignities.
But these are desperate times for the Brown government, which duly dispensed with deference and produced a string of measures designed to embarrass the Tories and flesh out a more populist appeal: from free personal care for 300,000 pensioners with the greatest needs and a guarantee of enforceable standards in schools to a crackdown on bankers\' bonuses and legally underpinned targets on everything from child poverty to the fiscal deficit.
Of course, all this has been trailed before. But add in his championing of a Tobin tax on speculation and earlier moves towards more progressive taxation and economic intervention, and the government\'s deathbed conversion to a more recognisably social democratic agenda seems to have been confirmed. The howls of protest from David Cameron and Nick Clegg that ministers have defiled the sacred forum of parliament with grubby politics are preposterous.
Much more difficult for Labour is why these measures weren\'t taken years ago. As one embattled Labour MP puts it, any promise after 12 years is inevitably met on the doorstep with the response: why didn\'t you do it in the first place? Nor is the problem just that the Lords will ensure that the majority of these bills never make it into law.
Most, including the bankers\' clampdown, don\'t begin to go far enough to meet public demand, let alone make a difference in people\'s lives. Whatever goodies are cooked up for Labour\'s manifesto, the government is failing to use its own banks now to revive the economy or build the new homes that would reduce competition for housing in key Labour electoral battlegrounds.
In some areas ministers are actually going backwards. Yesterday it was announced that agency workers would indeed get the same rights as permanent staff after 12 weeks – a central demand of those battling the casualisation that has fuelled tensions over migrant labour. But not only will the measure be delayed for two years. The fine print has been drafted to water down protection to the point where one trade union leader involved in the negotiations told me yesterday: "It\'s been made worthless, this is not what we signed up to." Once again ministers have bowed to market orthodoxy and business pressure, some evidently with an eye on their own lucrative corporate options after the election.
The assumption must be of a Tory victory next year. But that clearly doesn\'t reflect any underlying shift to the right in public opinion. Voters want change, and they\'re hostile to Brown. But there\'s not the slightest evidence they want the small state and revamped charity welfare backed by Cameron. Polls continue to show strong majorities for greater redistribution, equality and public intervention, as well as a halt to privatisation and withdrawal from Afghanistan.
None of which is on offer from the Conservatives. But it does help to explain Cameron\'s empty rhetoric about poverty and inequality, underpinned by a tax-and-cuts programme that looks certain to deepen them. You can see what that\'s likely to mean in microcosm in Tory councils such as Coventry, where the price of meals on wheels for the elderly has increased by 60% in the past two years – or in Liberal Democrat-Conservative Leeds, where refuse collectors have been on strike against savage pay cuts for nine weeks .
Government attempts to draw dividing lines with the Tories, however, from corporate outsourcing to welfare reform, routinely invite the riposte that New Labour was there first. Brown\'s circle regard him as the victim of a triple crisis: economic, political-constitutional and military. But he and the government have to share responsibility for all three.
Following Labour\'s byelection success in Glasgow last week, there are signs that the Conservative poll lead may be narrowing, as the prospect of a Cameron government sinks in. But fears of a Labour meltdown and the smell of the prime minister\'s blood has revived talk of a last-ditch coup after Christmas. That could only now come from a decisive move in cabinet that included Peter Mandelson – loth to be seen to wield the knife against Brown a second time – and probably relying on a party rule that allows the cabinet to appoint a new leader without a contest.
Whether that would damage Labour or give it the 5% boost some imagine, speculation has been fuelled by discussion of the option in the centre-left pressure group Compass, which refused to back the abortive Blairite strike against Brown in June.
A Downing Street insider close to the prime minister concedes it "could happen" in January. But short of a Brown collapse, such drastic surgery still looks unlikely – not least because the most likely beneficiaries are the Blairite David Miliband or the slightly less Blairite Alan Johnson. The latter would be more appealing to some: his age means he could be seen as a caretaker, his working-class background could be a foil to Cameron\'s, and he supports a referendum on electoral reform. But he has also failed to shine as home secretary, and the dangers of any forced leadership change so late in the day are potentially greater than those of doing nothing.
It would be ironic, though, if after a Tory victory a Labour leadership contest ended up as a fight between the Blairite Miliband and the Brownite Ed Balls, as seems possible now Harriet Harman has apparently counted herself out. There is no reason to believe a Cameron government would necessarily run to more than one term, the pattern since 1979. These are more volatile times, both politically and economically.
Miliband in particular has made little effort to move on from New Labour since the crash, even though the economic basis for a triangulating politics of increased welfare spending and ballooning wealth at the top no longer exists. What seems certain is that any attempt to entrench New Labour, let alone Blairite, politics after the election would lead to a party backlash – if not a risk of disintegration.
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/[...]/queens-speech-labour-election
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