Quality | 2009.06.18
Either Brown acts decisively or immolation is certain | Seumas Milne
Now he has seen off the Blairite coup, the Labour leader\'s only chance is to meet voters\' anger with a radical policy response
Anyone hoping for a new Gordon Brown after his return from the political dead will have already been disappointed. With another failed Blairite coup behind him, a relieved-looking prime minister was yesterday back doing what he likes best: unveiling initiatives, announcing relaunches and offering stern-faced pledges of a new humility. In the wake of the expenses scandal and Labour\'s worst election results for a century, this was the fruit of the cabinet\'s agonising over democratic reform.
But in spite of a handful of welcome proposals for cleaning up parliament and a limited new right of voter recall for miscreant MPs, it will do little to meet the expectations of those who believe constitutional change is the answer to public contempt for the political elite. Plans to elect most or all members of the House of Lords, which Brown could have driven through when he came to office, now seem likely to be emasculated or buried by a Tory government. The call for yet another public debate about electoral reform, more than a decade after New Labour first promised one, simply looks like going through the motions.
There are many in the Labour camp who anyway regard constitutional reform as a metropolitan fixation and a diversion from what is actually enraging the party\'s traditional supporters, even if it has significant traction elsewhere. And Brown certainly seemed a good deal happier laying into David Cameron over his health spokesman\'s gaffe that the Conservatives are planning 10% cuts in all public spending outside health and education.
But for this government, the time is long past for debates and promises. It\'s only through action that Brown can rescue himself and his party from electoral immolation. And it\'s not as if he doesn\'t now have the opportunity. He has seen off a media-fuelled, factional attempt to drive him from office, which has left the Blairites looking weak, isolated and divided.
Some supporters of the failed rebellion insist the Blairite-Brownite split is meaningless nonsense, that they are two sides of a New Labour coin with barely the hint of ideological difference between them. That might have been true in New Labour\'s first decade. But the crisis of neoliberalism has begun to create new alignments – with a Blairite rump clinging to privatisation, corporate privilege and low taxes for the wealthy. Those divisions were on display at a cabinet meeting last week, with Blairite ministers calling for more "reform" and individualisation of public services, and an end to union funding of Labour – David Miliband even complained to Hilary Benn about the "conservatism" of his father, Tony – while their opponents countered with the need to mobilise the progressive power of the state.
Most of the post-Thatcherite ministers have now resigned. But of course Brown was rescued not only by Labour\'s loyalists, centre-left and left. He was also bailed out by Miliband and, crucially, New Labour\'s original architect, Peter Mandelson, now master of all he surveys. The armlock they now have over the prime minister, combined with Brown\'s replacement of plotters with Blairites such as Andrew Adonis and Tessa Jowell, has led some to argue that the cabinet\'s political makeup is essentially unchanged.
But that underestimates the significance of the Blairites\' loss of dynamic capacity to paralyse the government and inability even to come up with a programme for fear of losing of potential allies. As for Mandelson, whose personal and political journey has taken on an altogether epic quality, his own interests are now closely bound up with his former enemy\'s. One close ally of the prime minister even claims that "Peter is in a different place from five years ago" and – in a reference to the new first secretary\'s interventionist ministerial grandfather – "he\'s becoming more Morrisonian than Blairite" .
That may well be wishful thinking. But for Gordon Brown the excuses are certainly running out. Social democrats were hammered across Europe in last week\'s elections because they were unable to separate themselves from a neoliberal model that is seen to have failed, while centre-right governments have held their ground by stealing the traditional interventionist clothes of the left, and the far right has milked the crisis for fear and racist poison.
In Britain, Labour is being punished not only as an incumbent government in a crisis but, as the American Nobel-winning economist Paul Krugman put it at the weekend, for disastrously buying into "free market fundamentalism". And the British National party\'s progress is a product both of the government\'s failure to deliver for poorer working class communities, and its pandering to migrant scapegoating and Islamophobia. Yet despite Labour\'s catastrophic polling last week, there\'s clearly no great enthusiasm for the Tories: their 28% in the Euro elections was well down on their 36% score at the height of Tony Blair\'s ascendancy a decade ago, for example.
There\'s meanwhile no secret why 63% of the public think Labour used to care about their concerns and only 19% think it does today. Start with the evidence published by the Institute of Fiscal Studies last month that most people\'s living standards have stagnated, and those of the poorest fifth have fallen, since the last election – and now they are being hit by pay cuts and freezes, short-time working, closures and job losses. Betting on the hope of over-hyped green shoots turning into a full recovery by spring is the road to ruin.
But if Brown were to ditch Royal Mail privatisation; launch a crash council housebuilding programme; take a leaf out of the German, French and US governments\' book and intervene decisively to protect manufacturing jobs; scrap the exorbitant Trident renewal and ID card schemes; and take full control of the half-nationalised banks to force up lending – the message would be clear that the government was responding seriously to public anger and fatal working class abstention. What has he got to lose?
There\'s a tendency now to read off the recent past and assume that a change of government means the loser will automatically be out of power for several terms. In an era of renewed economic and political volatility, there\'s no reason why that should be so. But unless Brown seizes the last chance he has bought himself this week, it could easily become New Labour\'s legacy.
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http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/[...]n-brown-coup-labour-leadership
