Industry | 2009.10.05
Mandelson's mortar fire could save Labour's future | Polly Toynbee
Conference season 09: The election may be lost, but an inspired fightback could give its bright young candidates the chance to rebuild the party
Scurrying up and down the hilly Streatham streets, a contingent of mostly young Labour activists were out campaigning for their new candidate. By rights, he should win this south London seat, with its 7,000 majority inherited from a well-liked, longstanding MP. But with these appalling opinion polls, no one knows what\'s safe these days.
Whatever the weather, they are out every Saturday and Sunday in this Lambeth constituency where I have lived for over 35 years. Labour bucked every dismal trend by regaining Lambeth council at the last local elections. Streatham has a thriving local party, and Chuka Umunna is as good a candidate as they come – a politically astute black employment lawyer, born and bred in the constituency. What\'s more, he is where the heart of most Labour members beats, leaning leftward, against the Iraq war, for proportional representation and a high pay commission. If the Labour party has an optimistic face, it\'s his.
His future is Labour\'s: national victory would be a fine thing, but the difference between losing respectably with a thirtysomething percentage of the vote and crashing out below even Michael Foot\'s desperate 1983 result is the difference between winning and losing this solid seat. Despite Umunna\'s dynamism, the predicted anti-Labour tidal wave might sweep him away. The latest alarming poll this week has Labour level-pegging with the Lib Dems at 23%, 15 points behind the Conservatives.
Knocking on doors, it\'s hard to tell what\'s going on. People are friendly; many know Umunna\'s face already. One or two good old Labour people embrace him, but others are evasive on voting intentions. Yet all around us are good Labour legacies of money well spent: the new school sports hall, the new primary school on Brixton Hill, nine new children\'s centres, health clinics, squads of neighbourhood police, and a spectacular sixth-form college next door to my home. But it\'s a struggle to get angry people to acknowledge Labour brought all these good things.
Talk to the depleted number of delegates here in Brighton and they tell the same story. These people know down to the last nurse and teaching assistant in their ward how much has improved in Labour\'s decade. Frantic with fear at what a Conservative government would do to their children\'s centres or neighbourhood renewal programmes, speaker after speaker gives an eloquent reminder of what is at stake.
Yesterday came Peter Mandelson \'s kiss of life. Here in a vaudeville turn with intellectual depth was a fightback strategy that began at last to find traction, a light at the end of a long tunnel still to be travelled. For the first time he took his party off the back foot on debt, hammering out thundering threats that the Tories would choke off recovery before it has even begun. The economy is the battleground as never before. Who could trust David Cameron and George Osborne with the delicate recovery?
Beyond the grand guignol and slapstick, Mandelson\'s attack on Tory plans to demolish economic investment had a crocodile\'s bite: you could feel Cameron and Osborne wince and summon their speechwriters for an instant re-write. His pro-manufacturing, pro-R&D, pro-skills and low-carbon investment began to look like a "white heat of technology" winning theme. One or two slight apologies – "less financial engineering, more real engineering" – were not quite the banker-bashing the public yearns for, but it\'s a start. After all these painful years of Gordon Brown\'s insistence that the "knowledge economy" was all that could be hoped for in the "globalised" world, here was a boastful reminder that Britain is still the world\'s sixth biggest manufacturer. Industrial strategy was coming home. Here was Labour economic talk of growth, investment, high- speed trains and optimism.
Tomorrow Gordon Brown will struggle to match his business secretary for theatrics, self-indulgence or mortar fire lobbed straight down the barrels of enemy guns. No doubt his speech will be good enough: leaders\' speeches always are, as loyal halls rise to their feet to cheer long and hard. But those great set pieces are rarely game-changers, mostly forgotten even by aficionados a fortnight later: two memorable exceptions were Iain Duncan Smith\'s awful "beware the quiet man" croak that cost him his job; and Neil Kinnock\'s mighty assault on the militant madmen of Liverpool that began to change Labour fortunes.
Despite Mandelson\'s beacon speech, my guess is that Labour will still stand where it did in the final opinion poll reckonings of the party conference season. The turnaround will take a lot more than one speech. As one cabinet minister after another declared undying loyalty, another half-cocked putsch looks unlikely in October. An Ipsos Mori poll yesterday found Labour MPs twice as likely to expect a Conservative victory as a Labour one: the question this autumn is whether they are simply resigned to their fate and counting their pensions – or can they find the will to fight back?
Good signs: more of Labour\'s best do now call for boldness, casting caution to the wind with nothing to lose but their failure. More have called for radical electoral reform, for ruthlessness with bankers, and for taxation as part of the debt solution.
Here at last was the outline of a strategy. It helps that for the first time in a while Labour ministers sounded as if they actually believe they are right and Tory cuts are wrong. As the reality of what a Cameron/Osborne government would do creeps up on them, their claws sharpen. Can they find a way to apologise for past errors that lets them be heard on future plans? Perhaps. Can they ride the depth of anger with Labour? Perhaps. Can the urgency of the alarming economic choice overcome the disability of a deeply disliked leader? It\'s a severe handicap.
Back in my home constituency, voters may not note the finer points now, but a good case repeated over and over with conviction will get heard. Economists of every hue support the pragmatic Labour view against a shoddy Tory opportunism. Fatally flawed and almost universally derided, Cameronomics might yet fall apart under electoral fire; Mandelson showed today how it might be done. Now the fate of Labour\'s future and its Chuka Umunnas – the fate of Labour\'s best programmes and the fate of future public services – depends on the cabinet\'s serious determination to save every seat it can, whatever it takes.
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/global/2009/sep/28/peter-mandelson-labour-future
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