Quality | 2010.03.15
Why I'm backing the Lib Dems | John Kampfner
It started with Iraq. But in 2010 Nick Clegg\'s party has become the natural home for left-liberal Cookites like me
The causes of Labour\'s malaise are various: a cyclical shift that follows all periods of dominance; exhaustion of the main players; continued fury with Tony Blair over Iraq; and despair at Gordon Brown\'s strange mix of brutishness and weakness. But it is more than that. The New Labour project was born of the traumas of the 80s and 90s. It was based on the notion that centre-left governments can change society only at the margins and only by stealth. The party accepted the economic settlement wrought by Margaret Thatcher. Blair, and even more so Brown, restricted their aims to offering limited palliative care for the most disadvantaged: redistributive bolt-ons.
Unable or unwilling to deal with the causes of inequality, they confined themselves to tackling its effects. Having raised the white flag to the super-rich, ministers exerted their power elsewhere, seeking ever more ingenious ways of telling ordinary people how to lead their lives.
Labour had one of the great opportunities of modern times to transform society. It made some changes for the better – Sure Start , the minimum wage, civil partnerships and more. Yet the audit for 13 years is disappointing. Debits outweigh credits. The Blair and Brown eras will be remembered more for the toxicity of their politics. Whenever they faced pressure, they bowed to the powerful and tacked to the right.
In my pamphlet Lost labours, I assess the cause of the malaise. I suggest that the two drivers of economic growth were brittle – a consumer binge based on excessive borrowing, and a financial services sector drunk on hubris. In criminal justice and other areas of social policy, Blair assumed he would achieve little if he did not acquiesce to the tastes of the majority view as represented to him by pollsters and certain press magnates. Authoritarianism united arch-Blairites and many on the left. Both regarded the small group of civil libertarians in the party as deluded.
Blair and Brown believed that Britain was both a Conservative and a conservative country. They were pessimistic about their ability to change society. No matter how low was the stock of the Conservatives, Labour always felt haunted and saw a perpetual need to triangulate the two positions.
This default setting, this belief that intrinsic centre-left values were somehow a minority interest, was not just debilitating; it was not borne out by the numbers. At every election where Thatcher was leader, a minimum of 56% of the public voted for parties committed to higher taxation and spending – Labour, the Lib Dems and others.
The fear, aggression and ideological caution were indistinguishable. One reason why so many in New Labour acted thuggishly is because their passion was based not in the desire to engineer fundamental change, but in one all-consuming purpose: re-election. Since 1997, their every working day was based around the task of prolonging their term of office. It filled in the ideological hollow.
My pamphlet develops some of the themes outlined by Nick Clegg, the Lib Dem leader, in his document of last year entitled The Liberal Moment . He appealed to Labour\'s lost army of progressives to join him in common cause. The liberalism to which I have long been drawn is not the libertarianism of the centre-right, with its message of keeping the state off people\'s backs.
My model is one that sees egalitarianism as a virtue in itself and as a means of delivering individual freedom. I see the role of the state as intervening on a macroeconomic level, to build the foundations for delivering greater social justice, rather than meddling in people\'s lives on a more day-to-day level as an outlet for politicians\' lack of courage.
I have long described myself as of the centre-left, a left-liberal whose reference point was the politics of the late Robin Cook . His ideological bearings were sensible redistribution, an ethical foreign policy, constitutional change, investment in public services, and environmental protection. Some of his hopes have been fulfilled. Most of them have not.
What has happened to that politics? Where do its adherents go? Some sections of the Labour movement are engaging with these questions, seriously and openly. The majority, however, continue to demonstrate tribal instincts and the politics of the lowest common denominator.
Alongside a million other voters, I deserted Labour in protest at Iraq, in favour of the Liberal Democrats – the only party to oppose the war. My decision to back the Liberal Democrats in 2010 is based on a more fundamental appraisal of Labour\'s record, together with a positive assessment of the Lib Dems\' platform.
Their analysis of the failures of the deregulated market has been consistently, and painfully, accurate. Their tax reform plans, taking 4 million low-paid workers out of tax altogether, are the most redistributive of any party, alongside green taxes, a "mansion tax" on high-value properties and the closing of tax loopholes (on pensions and capital gains) exploited by the rich. The Lib Dem approach to criminal justice, human rights, foreign and social policy is close to mine.
I understand the dilemma faced by Labour\'s army of dismayed who still cling to the hope of reform from within. That will not happen with the tribalists at the helm. A party led by Jon Cruddas or perhaps Ed Miliband might reconnect with left-liberals and the broader electorate, but even then it should not underestimate the task ahead. It should have no illusions about how deeply trust has been corroded.
David Cameron is on the verge of power, even if in recent weeks he has shown a striking lack of sure-footedness. His political pitch is an unedifying pitch of the shallow and the alarming. For many Labour supporters, the single most important reason for their party to stay in power is to keep the Tories out. Yet people can only for so long be exhorted to hold their nose, to vote for a party they feel has let them down, simply because the alternative is worse. It is deeply damaging to politics to resort perpetually to the double negative.
There is a bigger task facing left-liberals. The election should be used as a means of promoting a more pluralist politics. Whichever party forms a government will do so knowing that it has a wafer-thin endorsement and a weak mandate in the midst of economic hardship and the widespread disparaging of parliament. Politics is more fragile and fluid.
This is the opportunity facing the Liberal Democrats. They could become the natural home for the left-liberals that Labour has lost. The more the other two parties rely on caution, the more the Lib Dems must eschew it. Rarely have the circumstances been more propitious for a party to demonstrate that, in its policies and in its behaviour, it is very different from the others on offer – and not afraid to say so.
John Kampfner launches Lost labours, published by the thinktank CentreForum, with Nick Clegg today
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/[...]/labour-lib-dems-left-cookites
