Brown promises (Big) business as usual

Piers Mostyn

Prior to his resignation, Blair admitted that public hostility made him a liability to his party.

He could hardly deny it. Opinion polls rated the party at it’s lowest since the early Thatcher years. This was matched by a rating of 27 per cent in the recent local elections. Despite stage management to make it look like a time of his choosing, he walked rather than being pushed.

In his self-serving goodbye speech to a small bar room of paid supporters (the Trimdon Labour club staff and their relatives) he blamed the public for having expectations that were “too high” and refused to apologise for the Iraqi carnage.

Nonetheless the admission of his unpopularity played a role, after years of back-biting and intrigue, in the Blair and Brown camps deciding to finally bury the hatchet – cognisant that more lives would be saved if the sinking ship’s crew worked together.

Was the Blair/Brown split real? Both were locked into the same ideological framework – neo-liberalism with a nice face, hanging on the coat-tails of a belligerent US imperialism and a strong-state response to the inevitable social tensions generated by inequality and alienation. That they both warmly welcomed a Sarkozy victory in France was no surprise.

Two recent moments were very revealing. In mid-April, Brown’s campaign team stated its intention to crush any attempt to stand against him. This went further than a traditional determination to win. It was an open bid to prevent any contest.

The party is now widely loathed. Brown has been at its heart from the word go, directly associated with all that people hate most – particularly the war. He’s got to make a fresh start and create the impression he is putting it all behind him . But he can’t because he is so deeply implicated.

Any opening up of the issues – which an election campaign inevitably involves – would expose this. He will aim to settle in as Prime Minister for a couple of years and then fight the Tories as “the incumbent” on that two year track record, airily waving the rest away as “the past”.

The second revealing “moment” was the epiphany in the Blair camp five days before the election. After months of puffing themselves up about the need for a contest, head bangers like Home Secretary minister John Reid suddenly decided that unity was the key.

At face value, it was obvious that they simply didn’t have the support and a drubbing at the polls was looming. After a decade of loyalty to the project, as few as 25 per cent of Labour MPs could stomach another Blair – most of those probably because they were on the government payroll.

What is difficult to believe is that they seriously didn’t realise this until April 29, when it was long obvious that no challenger to Brown had a chance.

The Blairites have a deep-rooted belief that Brown is incapable of delivering for “The Project”. Blair was seen as a supreme asset because of his ability to reach out into middle class middle England– particularly the marginal constituencies key to winning.

Far from being a “conviction politician” as the spinners would have it, he achieved this by being a cipher, with no political hinterland before joining Labour in his early 20s, combined with his betrothal to the right wing media, in particular Rupert Murdoch.

The party has been in a state of collapse and its weakness is greatest precisely in middle England. In the local elections it fielded candidates in only 60 per cent of the seats overall. But in the South East the figure was 52 per cent and in the South West it was just 44 per cent.

The decisive haemorrhaging of support in Scotland and Wales adding to pre-existing incursions by the other parties in urban areas (with some exceptions) has produced a pincer movement threatening Labour’s electoral base from both sides of the class coalition underpinning it’s success.

While Blair was around he was an effective substitute for the party, making up for the decline in membership and local structures. Financial pressures of course required a turn to millionaire backers whose sole interest was furthering their own status and interests – hence the cash for peerage scandal.

The Blairites have no confidence in Brown’s ability to follow this act. Unable to connect to the middle class heartlands with such ease, with a “socialist” past and greater proximity to union bosses, he is seen as more vulnerable to pressure to rebuild the party’s working class base.

So they sought to lash him to the mast as he steered the boat post-Blair – ensuring it maintained the same direction. And they succeeded.

Brown has dropped talk of “renewal”. His final budget was a blatant bid to do fiscally what Blair did telegenically – through a straight redistribution from poor to middle income earners.

The final step, on April 29, was a TV admission that a bad local election result would reflect as much on him as Blair.

The very same day the Blairites called their dogs off – fronted by Culture Secretary Tessa Jowell calling for an “end to division”. This was followed by the surreal image of Charles Clarke lavishing praise on Brown as one of the best chancellors in 200 years only months after accusing him of lacking courage and vision, being uncollegiate, being a control freak and having profound “psychological” issues to address.

Some Blairites are quietly mourning the death of their vision. They wanted a Blair clone (Milliband) to stand against “Blair’s heir” (Cameron). For The Guardian’s Martin Kettle, the failure to do this marks the end of the whole New Labour Project.

This sounds a bit extreme given Brown’s wholehearted adherence to that project’s values from the start. What it really reflects – as did all the squabbles and division – was a deep-seated realisation that the game is over, whoever is in charge. Looking to the future, they fear further organisational and political decline.

Blair slowed the downward trend in Labour’s popularity since 2001, through an astute manipulation of the undemocratic electoral system and the absence of an alternative. But the audience rumbled this magician’s tricks and wanted no more of it. The majority of the party, even loyal MPs, were too realistic to believe that a young apprentice could pull the same tricks without being seen through.

Brown’s inheritance is accordingly not very rosy. The party has a membership rushing for the doors and a leadership claiming to reinvent itself but unable to do so. One result is a largely irrelevant deputy leadership election campaign.

Top of the disaster list, obviously, is Iraq with April’s death toll of British soldiers the worst in the four years since the invasion. And the debacle of Iran’s kidnapping of British sailors was a humiliating blow to Britain’s supposed prestige as a world power “punching above its weight”.

The economy is teetering on the edge – with interest rates and inflation hitting their highest for a decade. Inequality is higher than before and poverty is on the up again. And while a 2 per cent public sector wage freeze prompted strike action by civil servants and threatens confrontation by other public sector workers – the richest 1,000 saw their income rise by 20 per cent last year.

Then there is the endless prison crisis, a decade in the making and a pure product of the government’s neo-liberal authoritarianism. And corruption scandals gather pace with the abandoning of a bribery investigation into BAe and the police recommending prosecutions of two of Blair’s closest aides and a leading party fund-raiser.

Despite talk of Brown “reconnecting with the party and the voters” his pitch is likely to be “steady as she goes” and “better the devil you know”. Jettisoning past claims to core values, his premiership will be low on propaganda – a technocratic government that fine tunes.

One exception seems to be greater use of the word “equality”. But this was already a New Labour’s promise. And it wasn’t delivered. The notion that Brown has only just woken up to raging inequality as the one man most responsible for it is a joke.

We are being promised “reviews” on Iraq and housing. The former amusingly to be co-sponsored by the same Channel Four that brought Big Brother into our lives. Far from leading from the front with bold policy initiatives, Brown will find his comfort zone in the new transatlantic dispensation, with a Sarkozy-US Democrat realignment searching for a new post-Iraq pax Americana

The housing crisis, precipitated by a virtual halt to the building of “social housing” combined with house price inflation that is the highest in the developed world has been fuelled by a decade of Brown’s economic stewardship. Only the most radical U-turn could tackle this in the short to medium term.

Brown grabs the reins without as much as a parliamentary vote, let alone a general election (George Bush eat your heart out). It will be a weak government, lacking enthusiastic backing from either the Blairite vanguardists or an increasingly disillusioned labour movement. The question is: can the left take advantage of the opening this offers, in building an alternative?