As Gordon Brown prepares for the 'speech of his life' at next week's Labour Party conference, a panopoly of commentators have been offering their assessment of the Blair years and giving advice for the party. This weblog doesn't often stray into party politics, but as there is some interest amongst readers, here goes...
Peter Hain, candidate for Deputy PM and Secretary of State for Northern Ireland and Wales, thinks Being bold and progressive will win back disillusioned voters (The Observer, 17 September). He wants Labour to recapture the green vote, "narrow the gap between those at the top and those at the bottom" (without saying how), and "deepen democracy" through democratic reform of the House of Lords, and electoral reform (introducing the alternative vote). Hain concludes:
For Labour, the task of renewing after 10 years in government is onerous - and rarely, if ever, achieved by governments of either party.What happens ne But with a renewed and revitalised party, we can do it. What matters now, at this point of transition from Labour's most successful-ever Prime Minister, is to rediscover our passion for our values and so enable the decent, caring, moral and progressive majority in British politics not to be seduced by Cameron's trendy soft focus or feel driven into the arms of the Liberals in protest, but to come home to Labour.
Will Hutton writes in the Observer that if Gordon Brown becomes Prime Minister, his first duty should be to restore New Labour's core values: Blair is dead but Blairism must not die with him
The heart of Blair's problem was that he could no longer win the arguments. For all the strengths of his core creed, it had become intellectually incoherent. Parts worked and continue to work. But it did not add up to a progressive position at home, while abroad, its attachment to pre-emptive unilateralism meant that it became an apologist for American and Israeli might, the least progressive position of all. Intellectual incoherence is political death and last week Blair died.
But not, I submit, Blairism or at least a reconstituted version. ...Blair's successor must rescue Blairism from its blind alleys but, simultaneously, own and reinvigorate its core propositions. At home, the Labour party must drive on with the consensus achieved in the mid 1990s while making more explicit its aims to increase public value, legitimacy for public action, opportunity and social justice.
The Fabian Society's Sunder Katwala ponders What happens next? in the October issue of Prospect Magazine. British politics has moved to the centre-ground, so there is little point Labour turning right-ward.
New Labour’s political success, in beginning to convert its opponents, means that the 1990s politics of triangulation now delivers diminishing returns. Attempts to define “New New Labour” on the “think of something the Labour party will hate” principle (such as Stephen Byers’ call to abolish inheritance tax) now makes little strategic sense, because the dynamic of the cross-party battle has been reversed.
For a decade, New Labour claimed the centre-ground by pushing rhetorically into Tory territory, and the Tories consistently fell into the trap seeking “clear blue water” out to the right. Three defeats later, they have worked it out. Just as Labour had to show it had a response to crime, Cameron seeks attention by addressing issues which Tories used not to talk about—the environment, social justice and global poverty.
Katwala argues that education (not health), along with the environment and democratic renewal, ought to be the focus for Labour's policy agenda.
Yet an incoherent education white paper and schools bill has made this the domestic issue over which the party is most divided. The dispute is over whether the current reform agenda will exacerbate inequalities or reduce them. What is needed is a reform agenda which addresses inequality explicitly: a policy approach to schools funding, inspection and targets which pays as much attention to narrowing the gaps in performance as to increasing average attainment—dealing with the long tail.
Peter Wilby thinks that Labour has squandered its opportunities: "Labour probably had an opportunity to pursue left-wing policies, but it has gone." This is Thatcherism's final triumph
..Thatcher changed Britain, but Blair didn't. Far from making the 21st century a radical century, as he insisted was his ambition, he may have laid the foundations for another conservative one. Private provision of public services, weak trade unions, huge contrasts of income and wealth—all these now seem permanent features of the landscape, their reversal as unlikely as the return of prices and incomes policies. When Labour came to power in 1997, it was not all over for the left. It is now.
Martin Kettle at the Guardian thinks This is a terrible plight for Gordon Brown - and Labour.
Labour has learned something else in the past four weeks. It is laid raw and bare in this week's poll. And it won't go away whether they want it to or not. That something is that Brown may not be the answer to the Labour party's woes after all.
In a devastating series of match-ups with Cameron, the public has weighed Labour's heir apparent in the balance and found him wanting, both as a political leader and as a man. When Labour delegates cheer the chancellor next week, as they will, there will also be a voice somewhere in their heads reminding them that the public sees Brown as arrogant, dishonest, selfish, treacherous and unpleasant.
It is a horrible plight for both Brown and Labour. But the great risk facing Labour has to be stated plainly. That risk is that every step Labour takes towards the Brown succession is now also a step towards electoral defeat at Cameron's hands.
Richard Reeves writes in the New Statesman that the most important person at Labour's Manchester conference will be nowhere in sight - David Cameron. Could he just be Labour's future?
Cameron is staking his claim on the fertile political ground of our sense of community. He senses that people know that labour-market mobility, giant supermarket chains, anonymous neighbourhoods and congealed roads are eroding well-being. And he correctly perceives that there are no simple state- or market-driven solutions.
This ground should not be ceded easily to the right, however. The ingredients of successful communities do not, in fact, fit a binary left-right model, and they have a complex relationship with state action. On the one hand, greater income equality seems to promote what Bowles and Gintis dub "prosociality". On the other, home ownership does. And, most troubling for all liberals, ethnic diversity seems to reduce community cohesion. But this messy terrain is the battleground for much of the politics of the future.
This is why the Cameronistas stress their commitment to localism, and why up-and-coming ministers do the same. On his blog, David Miliband, the Environment Secretary, points out that "all environmental issues end up being local". We'll have to wait for Ruth Kelly's local government white paper to see how far the top brass (for which, read "Brown") are convinced of the need to redistribute power. Labour has to create spaces for communities to organise themselves, in a necessarily messy process that the Brazilian activist and Harvard professor Roberto Unger describes as "democratic experimentalism". As Unger puts it, the goal should be to widen the opportunities, to try out ways of associating with other people in every realm of our moral and practical existence.
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