Labour is in a hole because it no longer has a vision or an ideology to cling to – and its government is stuffed full of yesterday’s men and women
Let us take it in descending order of certainty. Despite Labour’s record low vote in the European Parliament elections and despite the parliamentary party plainly having as little confidence in Gordon Brown as the voters do, he is still prime minister as I write this, will almost certainly be in office as you read it and will most likely lead Labour into the next general election. Why?
You could call it Margaret Thatcher’s revenge, and it has taken two forms. First, her electoral success – and that of her successor John Major in 1992 – convinced Labour it could win only by accepting the fundamentals of her political and economic creed. Once that creed was undermined, if not broken, by last year’s financial collapse, Labour found it had no ideology or vision to cling to. Gordon Brown, the last hope of ‘real Labour’, is found wanting, not least because we now know his ten-year chancellorship left Britain a more unequal society than it was in 1997.
But if Brown has no answers, nor does anyone else. The resignation statements of the past two weeks contain a mixture of personal pique and sentimental homage to what used to be called ‘this great movement of ours’, but nothing resembling a policy or a principle. When Michael Heseltine stormed out of Thatcher’s Cabinet in 1986, nobody understood the issue at stake – something to do with helicopters – but everybody knew what he stood for. Not so in the cases of Hazel Blears, James Purnell, Caroline Flint et al. Thatcher robbed Labour of its soul.
Second, the majority of the new Cabinet fall into two age groups, which I shall call the Young Turks and the Old Lags. There are 11 Old Lags, aged 55 and over, of which the oldest is Jack Straw at 62. Then there are eight Young Turks, aged 43 and under, of which the youngest are Ed Miliband and Andy Burnham, both 39.
Only four ministers fall outside - or, rather, between – these two groups, and only one (Ben Bradshaw) is a conventional Labour politician. Of the others, Baroness Royall (leader of the House of Lords), aged 53, was a backroom operator until she took ermine; Lord Adonis, 46, is a former academic and journalist who was a Social Democrat Party member; and Shaun Woodward, 50, is a renegade Tory. In other words, Labour has a missing decade in its senior ranks: the people born between 1955 and 1965, who went to university in the late 1970s or early 1980s.
During those years we saw a Labour government staggering through sterling crises and mass discontent before going into opposition; electing a 66-year-old as its leader; losing several leading lights to the SDP; issuing a manifesto that was described as ‘the longest suicide note in history’; and offering only feeble resistance to a rampant Thatcher.
That generation of students – and political commitment and activism almost always begin at university – didn’t find the Labour Party too enticing.
That is Thatcher’s second revenge: she robbed Labour of a generation, and it is the one it now needs. It is from MPs in their late 40s and early 50s that Labour might expect to find another leader as well as energetic but experienced figures who could occupy the big offices of state, such as the Treasury and Home Office.
As it happens, Jacqui Smith, the departed home secretary, is aged 46. Her promotion to a position where she was clearly out of her depth – yet mentioned, for a brief period, as a possible future leader – shows Labour’s desperation to fill its generation gap. Now, though the party wants to replace Brown, it has an unappetising choice between one group that seems callow, if talented, and another that seems tired and defeated, if experienced.
Bereft of mature talent, and bereft of binding beliefs, Labour looks doomed to electoral disaster under Brown’s leadership or anyone else’s. It might win – or at least deprive David Cameron of a majority – if Britain rises from recession next year while the rest of Europe continues to struggle or if the NHS contains a swine flu pandemic while millions die worldwide. And swine might fly. Or a redeemer, aged 49 or thereabouts, might be found in obscurity on the Labour back benches.
Peter Wilby is a former editor of the New Statesman
