Quality | 2010.01.22
Brown may have survived. But the coup was a success | Seumas Milne
After last week\'s comic opera putsch, Blairites are back in charge – and calling time on a timid social democratic turn
The battle for Labour\'s future is now on – in government, or far more likely out if it. That is the real message of last week\'s comic opera coup attempt against Gordon Brown , and its febrile aftermath. The putsch that wasn\'t has naturally been written off as yet another failure, for the obvious reason that the prime minister remains stubbornly in post.
But that assumes ousting Brown was the main purpose of the plot. For most of those involved, as one senior minister argues, the unlikely prospect of changing the leader at such a late stage before an election was only a "small part of it". More serious was "positioning for the future" and changing the political direction of the government now. From that point of view, all the signs are that the coup has been a ringing success.
Brown and his closest allies have been brought to heel, Blairite and Treasury orthodoxy has been re-established, and the government\'s recent crab-like shift towards a more recognisably social democratic stance has come to a juddering halt. That was encapsulated at Monday\'s meeting of Labour MPs when Lord Mandelson, whose powers now extend well beyond those of a mere deputy premier, smilingly accepted Brown\'s pledge that he was merely "one of a team" who would not now be interfering in other people\'s jobs – such as running the party\'s election campaign.
Of course the conspirators were hopelessly inept. "If I\'d have been organising it," a Downing Street insider comments, "Gordon would be out by now." Who in their right mind would have picked Geoff Hoon, defence secretary during the invasion of Iraq, and Patricia Hewitt, a former privatising health secretary now working for the private health sector, as the patsies for the operation – or allowed the reputation of the Blairite standbearer, David Miliband, to be sealed as a serial ditherer? Naturally, news of renewed infighting also immediately knocked back Labour\'s tentative polling recovery.
But by exploiting the coup attempt to demand a change of direction, and making the prime minister\'s closest ally, Ed Balls, their fall guy, the cabinet\'s anti-Brown majority has unmistakably called time on the Keynesian-inspired and progressive tax measures that have won public support but caused such alarm in the City, Treasury and media.
That was made clearest by Alistair Darling in the Times on Saturday. Not only did the chancellor pledge that his cuts would be the toughest for 20 years – tougher, indeed, than the Tories\' – but he went out of his way to highlight his "well to do" background, insisting that opposition to "punitive taxation" was a "cornerstone of all our policies". Elsewhere, he promised that higher than expected growth would be used to cut the deficit faster, rather than shield public services.
The target was clear enough. Those, notably Balls and the prime minister himself, who had argued in favour of setting Labour investment against Tory cuts, or pressed for more progressive taxation to pay for the crisis, had been put back in their box. After weeks in which their case has been absurdly caricatured as a "class war" or "core vote" strategy, all the signs are that reheated Blairism is back, with Brown dutifully mouthing its catch-all slogan of "aspiration".
In reality, the core vote charge is a classic straw man attack. Labour has always depended on an electoral coalition of lower- and middle-income voters, though New Labour\'s neglect of its working class base and its refusal until last year to lay a finger on the swollen incomes of the wealthy has been a central factor in its haemorrhage of votes over a decade. The tentative moves to correct that failure have clearly proved too much: any hint of indulgence of traditional Labour voters can evidently not be tolerated.
Both Brown and Balls were of course architects of New Labour and its fatal embrace of neoliberal economics, privatisation and "light-touch" regulation in the 1990s. But in their qualified resistance to the lemming-like rush for spending cuts, they are on the side of the angels. True, there has to be a credible plan for debt reduction once growth resumes, and there are risks that borrowing costs will rise as Bank of England life support is withdrawn.
But both economically and politically, it makes far more sense to keep the emphasis on public spending and investment, without which the crisis would have already turned into an Irish-style slump. Private investment has collapsed and, as Mandelson himself argues, "growth is the best antidote to debt". Instead, in the wake of last week\'s internal coup, Labour has ditched the chance to go into the election as the anti-cuts party, is fighting on Tory territory, and appears determined to run a Dutch auction with the other main parties on who can slash the deficit fastest. It\'s the ghost of Labour governments past.
Now they\'re back in charge of the government, the Blairites are setting out their stall to take control of the party after its expected defeat. David Miliband told Tuesday\'s cabinet meeting that Labour\'s early manifesto plans were not nearly radical enough, that a "game-changing" offer to the electorate was needed, including proportional representation and sweeping political reform. That was echoed in this week\'s Guardian article by James Purnell , who resigned in the last failed coup and is now looking for allies on the centre-left.
But for all the talk of a new radicalism, neither man appears prepared to turn his back on New Labour\'s calamitous embrace of corporate power and its besetting failure to confront private wealth and inequality. Indeed, Purnell goes out of his way to emphasise his support in cabinet for talking about cuts and makes a case for a market in schools providers and a less powerful state that strikingly overlaps with the approach of David Cameron\'s Conservatives.
Despite everything that has happened in the past couple of years, the majority of the cabinet remain wedded to a model of free market capitalism and corporate privilege that simply isn\'t delivering the goods to their voters, core or otherwise, while bailed-out executives in state-owned banks still stuff their pockets with impunity. Their dominance has been strengthened still further in the past week. Unless that grip is broken, the crisis of representation in British politics can only deepen.
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