Industry | 2009.07.31
Punch-drunk and fatalistic, they stumble into summer | Martin Kettle
Brown drags Labour down badly, as Norwich North is likely to show. It says it all that MPs know this and still do nothing
Norwich North is not one of those southern English urban seats that Labour normally only wins in good years, like Exeter or Bedford. By such standards the site of yesterday\'s byelection is actually a fairly safe seat, returning a Labour MP for fully 45 of its 59-year history. Labour won here in bad years such as 1959, 1970 and even 1979. Only in 1983 was Labour\'s grip prised open before the seat was regained in 1997. Four years ago, even amid the retreating Labour tide of the 2005 general election, Labour\'s majority remained well over 5,000.
Yet it would be a major astonishment, not least to the Labour party itself, if David Cameron\'s Conservatives do not capture Norwich North once more when the byelection is counted today. Reports that Labour is braced for defeat in Ian Gibson\'s old seat are entirely accurate. So braced, in fact, that officials have begun floating the absurd idea that anything less that a 10,000 Tory majority – something the Tories did not even manage in 1987 – would be a setback for Cameron. Some setback.
It is hard to recall a recent byelection in a supposedly safe Labour seat about which the party has seemed more fatalistic. Right from the start, the high command and many on the ground have been resigned to losing. The almost complete absence of the never say die spirit that usually marks the party even in hopeless contests – and, to repeat, Norwich North should be anything but hopeless – has been hard to miss.
Yet Labour\'s fatalism in Norwich North is representative of the party\'s wider current mood. Like a punch-drunk fighter, Labour retains enough ringcraft to go through the motions of a byelection, but the electoral punishment that it has absorbed over the last 18 months, culminating in its 22% score in the local elections and the abject 16% in the Europeans at the start of last month, has robbed it of almost every spark of hope. Under Gordon Brown, Labour has become a party that no longer expects to win.
It cannot be said too often that this is not normal party political behaviour. Modern British history offers no comparable example of a party waiting with such apparent indifference for its execution by the voters. Even when previous Labour governments have faced general election defeat – in 1951, 1970 and 1979, for example – they have gone into those contests not just with a fighting spirit but with a sometimes reckless belief in the possibility of victory. None of that is true of Labour now.
Even the most obvious comparison from Tory history, the lead-up to the defeat of 1997, fails to equate to the uniquely demoralised mood of Labour today. John Major\'s account of that period, though inevitably self-serving, paints a picture of defiant public optimism amid private expectation of defeat that rings true to those of us who witnessed it. Major may not have believed that the Tories could win in 1997, but he undoubtedly battled to minimise the Tory losses. Even in a game, you play on until the final whistle blows, is how Major characteristically expressed it. Twelve years on, Major would be entitled to look at a win in Norwich North and feel some vestigial vindication.
There are remarkably few echoes of this in Labour today. Yet it is not as though Labour has no story to tell. Watching Brown\'s end-of-term press conference this week was a familiarly disjunctive experience. Much of what the prime minister said – about the action to bail out the banks, about the support for business and industry, and about the slower than expected rise in unemployment – adds up to a genuinely effective set of government interventions to offset the worst effects of the recession, as well as a presentable embodiment of a centre-left response to the international downturn.
But how many people, in Norwich North or anywhere else, are really listening to Brown any more? In the larger scheme of things these actions, for which Alistair Darling and Peter Mandelson also deserve credit, are of greater strategic significance for most British voters than many of the subjects that dominated the media agenda at the press conference – army helicopters, swine flu, the PM\'s holidays, and even the government\'s spending plans. Not only does Brown fail to make this song sing, he is also weighed down by his previous humiliations and by the perception, not wholly unjustified, that he instinctively struggles to give straight answers to questions as apparently simple as what he wants to do on holiday.
As so often with Brown, this week\'s press conference performance combined elements that are in some ways heroic with other elements that are simply destructive. In more graceful or audacious hands than his, perhaps, the essential decency and nobility of so much of what Brown wants to do might override the effects of the political and presentational failings. But in Brown\'s hands, especially after two years in which his weaknesses have been so apparent – even to those who shut their eyes to them in earlier times – the destructiveness now outweighs the heroism.
This week has provided a classic illustration of the tragic consequences of this destructiveness. It was very striking that Alan Milburn , whose departure from politics is a major loss, made the case for putting social mobility at the heart of the party\'s message far more effectively than Brown, for all his vaunted commitment to the issue. Where might Labour be today if Brown and his inner circle, as Damian McBride came close to admitting this week, had not been so determined for so long to kill off Milburn\'s career and had instead allowed him to pursue such important policies? Not facing the loss of Norwich North, for one.
The summer consensus is that Brown\'s leadership is safe until the general election. On balance, and against many of my instincts, I am part of that consensus. It seems unlikely that the party will decide to challenge a leader whom it chose only two years ago and whom it has twice declined to unseat when it might have done so.
Nevertheless, the fact is that Brown drags Labour down badly, as the result in Norwich may underline. Labour would do better at the general election with another leader than it would with its present one. It says everything you need to know about the Labour party in the summer of 2009 that it understands this and yet chooses not to act. It is hard not to conclude that a historically important party is now just waiting for the end, boys, waiting for the end.
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http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/[...]norwich-north-byelection-brown
