The lessons of power.
| Author | McIvor, Martin |
| Position | Editorial |
Why has Labour's leadership contest proved so unsatisfying? The case for the extended timetable that is reaching its final stage as this issue of Renewal goes to press was that it would allow a thorough, maybe cathartic, but most importantly self-educative reflection on the causes of May's election defeat. Like the Tories in 2005, the Labour Party would be forced to stop and think hard about its predicament and its purpose, instead of digging itself deeper into the hole that its existing policies and positioning had left it in.
Sure enough, candidates have all, in one way or another, hurried to proclaim an end to 'the New Labour era'. More significantly, the defining dogmas and taboos of the past fifteen years have been earnestly thrown to the bonfire. Old heresies are the new orthodoxy. It seems now to be accepted on all sides that New Labour was too technocratic and managerial, and insufficiently visionary or ideological; New Labour was too impressed by wealth and corporate power, and too embarrassed by its party activists and union affiliates; New Labour placed too much trust in markets, and too little faith in democracy; New Labour was too complacent about inequality and the rise of the new super-rich, who should be made to pay more tax; New Labour should have done more to rein in the financial services sector and regenerate our manufacturing industries; New Labour should not have invaded Iraq. For the most part the tendency has been refreshingly progressive, social democratic, even radical (1). (The major exception to this was the dubious dogwhistling about immigration indulged by a number of the candidates in the early stages of the race. But since this was effectively challenged by Diane Abbott, they have all been sheepishly assuring us they only meant that New Labour should have built more council houses, and defied the CBI and EU over labour market regulation).
Those of us who have been raising such points for years should be pleased. And certainly much of this is encouraging, in many ways exciting. And yet it is hard to shake the feeling that there is something too easy about all of this. The worry concerns not the sincerity of the recantations, but the risk that party is being denied the difficult and challenging discussion it needs to have about the realities of power and the barriers to progressive reform. The question begged by the pitches of the four candidates who have been close to the heart of Britain's governance for the...
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