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Telling it like it is? With a ‘difficult’ election upon us, Matthew Brown reviews two contrasting tales of Britain under the Labour government It
all seemed so much simpler back then. A little more than 20 years ago I clung to
the back wall of a packed students’ union hall listening to Billy
Bragg telling it like it is about the evils of the Tory government and their
odious press. It
says ’ere, (sang the bard of Barking) D’you
ever wish you were better informed? It
says ’ere, we can only stop the rot, With
a large dose of law and order, And a touch of the short sharp shock …
Billy
Bragg - slightly greyer now... The
young Billy sang with what sounded then like refreshing political punch and
clarity about our ’orrible world. We all knew what we were about – for the
miners, against Thatcher and the Falklands War, dying for a Labour government
… We were already into the second Conservative government by then, with two
more terms and a thousand miles to go before the great dawn of 1997. How
times have changed. At the end of March, shortly before the election was
officially announced, I found myself leaning against the back wall of small,
dark venue in east London listening to Billy Bragg. He, like his audience, is
older, greyer, and a bit more confused these days. Here we are, two decades on,
at the end of a second consecutive Labour term, not celebrating but reeling from
another idiotic war, and wincing with each new dose of law and order, dished out
new Labour style. Is this what we were singing for? The
gig was a benefit for the re-election campaign of Oona King, Labour MP for
Bethnal Green and Bow. One of the poorest and most ethnically mixed wards in the
country, it ought to be one of Labour’s safest seats. But things are not so
straightforward these days. Bragg and, I suspect, the vast majority of his
audience, was against the war and no doubt opposed many of the government’s
other headline-grabbing initiatives – short, sharp shocks an’ all. In
parliament, King voted for the war and her seat is now under threat from a Tory
Muslim candidate picked to appeal to Tower Hamlets’ large Bangladeshi
population. The Lib Dems have a Muslim too, and Respect are fielding their
Stalin look-a-like leader George Galloway, who may well bite a hefty chunk out
of King’s majority. Indeed, the thinly disguised ranks of the SWP are out in
force, keen to feast on the scraps of Labour’s disillusioned left even if it
hands the seat to the Tories. In
some ways, the constituency is a perfect case study for assessing the
contrasting merits and short comings of So now who do we vote for? by
John Harris and Better or Worse? Has Labour delivered? by Polly Toynbee
and David Walker, both of which aim to provide ‘progressives’ with some
guidance on what’s been happening over the last four years and where to place
their crosses come 5 May. King’s
support for the war sets up precisely the kind of lefties’ dilemma that Harris
is trying to examine. If not Labour, then what is the alternative?, he asks. And
what will be the effect of voting for someone else? Yet, a close look at Tower
Hamlets over the last eight years reveals huge improvements in education and
health (more teachers, more doctors, as Blair would say), new housing
everywhere, reduced poverty, and a booming local economy, at least on ‘Bangla
Town’s’ brightly lit Brick Lane – just the kind of changes detailed by
Toynbee and Walker. On the other hand, people on its poorest estates are still
struggling, many of them slapped with tags, curfew orders, ASBOs and all the
other Mail-friendly anti-youth crime nonsense that squirms out of the Home
Office. So
what’s really been going on? Reading these two books it’s difficult to tell,
as they leave you with two largely contrasting pictures of the kind of society
our new Labour government has been creating over the last four years. In
reviewing Better or Worse? in the New Statesmen recently Harris wrote: ‘It is
easy to divine the authors’ take on the Blair government from the book’s
most telling passages … that inside the most hardened Blairites, there might
be a redeemably social-democratic heart – if only confusion and reticence did
not get in the way.’ Well, there might. You
don’t even need to find ‘the most telling passages’ to discern Harris’s
‘take’ on Blairism. Multi-coloured capital letters on the back of his book
spell it out in verb-less phrases that read eerily like one of Blair’s
speeches. ‘War in Iraq. Top up fees. Blair in bed with Bush,’ it says.
‘Private companies buying into schools and hospitals. We didn’t want the
world. We understood the need for caution and compromise. But really: what was
all this?’ What, indeed. There
are similarities. Both books are written by Labour-supporting authors (albeit in
Harris’s case a disaffected one) who are neither rabid Blairites nor
headbanging ultra-lefties. Both seek only to deal with the immediate
parliamentary term and the forthcoming election, casting barely a glance at any
wider social context or political complexity. Neither gives much thought to how
our approach to parties, elections or the business of parliamentary government
might form part of a longer term understanding of social change. And there’s
no discussion of what other kinds of political activity such change might
entail. Disillusioned Yet,
for all those surface similarities, the stance these books adopt could hardly be
more different. The disillusioned Harris is writing explicitly for others like
himself – Labour supporters or, like him, ex-members – who are so fed up
with Blairism they’re seriously looking for a new electoral home. We all know
the type, if we haven’t become one ourselves – people who’ve been tipped
over the edge into the ‘never again’ camp by war, PFI, anti-immigration or
any of the government’s other teeth-grindingly contentious policies. Harris
sets out to present the alternatives, travelling the country to find out what
the Liberal Democrats, Greens, Plaid Cymru, SNP and Respect have to offer. He
talks to Labour dissidents too. A former pop journalist, he deals in opinions
and personalities, serving up his own highly personal impressions of the people
he meets and what they tell him, measured against his own rather predictable
yardsticks, which he assumes are his readers’ too. Toynbee
and Walker do the opposite. Their book deals in facts – hundreds of them, laid
out to present a picture of the last four years in every conceivable area. They
write in the past tense, as if making a written record of an era that has
already gone. Such commentary as there is gets sidled into the unfolding,
statistic-heavy narrative of each hugely researched section – on health,
equality, education, the economy, war, crime, security, the environment,
governance, the constitution, and so on. It is, both in size and substance, a
heavier and more impressive tome than Harris’s slim volume. In many ways
it’s more enlightening, although Harris’s tale is certainly more
entertaining. Indeed,
he draws you in at the start with a strangely familiar tale – how he joined
the Labour Party in the mid-1980s full of Thatcher-hating zeal, fought the Trots
in the Young Socialists, delivered leaflets at college, got upset by election
defeats, and went off to start a career (in his case as a rock journalist,
Harris is the author of The Last Party reviewed
by Will Brown in Democratic Socialist, Autumn 2004 ). He returned to
canvassing in 1997 and cried with delight when Neil Hamilton was ousted from
Tatton, his old constituency. The ‘giddy’ Mr Harris even put a double-page
image of Blair in Select magazine, which he edited. ‘Now, the memory
fills me with a shivering embarrassment,’ he writes. He
voted Labour again in 2001, guiltily, before it all went wrong. The usual
suspects are to blame – Iraq, privatisation, tuition fees, Iraq, Iraq, Iraq.
‘Of course,’ he admits, ‘relative to the doom-laden days of Conservative
government, things are better … But having progressive – oh, go on then,
socialist – politics is not just a matter of wishing to see more new schools
and hospitals per se; it is also bound up with the question of what kind of
schools and hospitals you want.’ So
Harris sets off to find out what each of his alternatives has to offer, meeting,
among others, Charles Kennedy and Mark Oaten, Peter Kilfoyle and Roy Hattersley,
Alex Salmond, Simon Thomas and George Galloway … oh, and a Green member of the
Greater London Assembly called Darren. The only ‘Blairite’ he talks to is
Hazel Blears, who used to be a Trot-fighting colleague in the north west YS.
After arguing about the war and top-up fees she leaves him with a feeling of
‘bleak dejection’, although the passage reveals as much about his own
blinkered views as her ‘contorted doublethink’, as he calls it. His
account is both very personal and, at times, very funny, but it’s always
under-pinned by the author’s apparent presumption that the reader thinks like
him. At points, he displays all the worst aspects of modern journalism – his
tale is full of himself and his own opinions, and short of much in the way of
research or analysis. It’s also riddled with unnecessary observations and
asides that are meant to be enlightening but just tend to annoy. Why, for
example, do we need to know that the young woman who takes him to see Kennedy is
wearing teeth-braces? Elsewhere, he describes one Labour character as ‘an
unremarkable-looking man’, twice. On
the other hand, he describes, in picture perfect detail, the aspiring politicos
who move in and out of Portcullis House, the London building where MPs have
their offices. ‘Here, the fact that the archetypal MP now leaves university,
shuffles to Westminster and experiences alarmingly little of life among the rest
of us is made flesh,’ he writes. ‘Aspirant Blairites (Joe 90 glasses,
slightly garish ties, suits with the faintest hint of designer flash) queue for
the security X-ray machine next to ascendant Conservatives (striped shirts,
paunches, brogues, the usual), united by that strange effect whereby would-be
politicos manage to occupy a non-specific age bracket somewhere between
twenty-four and thirty-eight.’ Harris hears ‘a towering young man’ telling
the receptionist he’s there to see Tory MP David Willetts ‘with that booming
self-assurance that tends to cost parents at least £20,000 a year’. Don’t
you just know what he means? Frightening
tales He’s
good on the Lib Dems too. Anyone tempted to vote for them should read chapter
one, if only to be reminded just how utterly confused they are, although Harris
fails to expose their equally outrageous opportunism. He lets Respect off the
hook as well, failing to probe their disgraceful stance towards the labour
movement in post-invasion Iraq, or Galloway’s arrogant approach to the war
(and everything else). For
all the wit of his face-to-face encounters with politicians, the best sections
are those on ‘hospitals’ and ‘schools’ in which Harris provides
frightening, if not altogether surprising, accounts of what’s happening ‘on
the ground’ under some of Labour’s worst policies. He visits a foundation
hospital in Carlisle and describes the effects of ‘out-sourcing’ on the low
paid workers who service it. And he recounts the inspiring story of two mothers
in Doncaster who fought off a truly scary sounding Vardy-run creationist City
Academy. Unfortunately,
these experiences don’t lead him to the radical conclusion you would hope for
– that voting is not all important; that it’s there, on the ground, that
change might begin. Indeed, he suffers from those old left delusions that what
we need most is a change of leadership, and that giving Labour an electoral kick
in the teeth will somehow make it more left wing – views backed up by an
unnamed ex-minister who almost urges him to vote Lib Dem. When Kilfoyle,
sensibly, says that he aspires to ‘a change of thinking in the party’ rather
than a change of leader, Harris calls him ‘disappointing’, ‘cautious’
and ‘equivocating’. Hattersley,
on the other hand, says that ‘When Gordon Brown becomes leader … he’ll be
very much like Labour leaders I’ve known in the past.’ And this is somehow
seen as a good thing. It’s strange how Labour’s left wing critics never
remember the failings of its old right wing leaders. In Harris’s warped logic,
electoral defeat, or at least a good bruising, would bring Brown and ‘grass
roots thinking’ in its wake, delivering a shock that would send the Labour
Party back to ‘first principles’. Leaving aside just where those principles
got us in the past, wouldn’t a narrow majority and the Blairites’ (accurate)
perception of Britain’s conservative culture push it even further the other
way? Outcomes One
of the most damning failings of the Labour government, especially given its
large majority, is how much it panders to popular opinion, and how little it
does to change it. At least Toynbee and Walker recognise this to some extent,
criticising the government for lack of ambition, on the one hand, and for
failing to knit its achievements into ‘a compelling story’, on the other. Their
scope is both narrower and broader than Harris. Their aim is not to court
opinion and size up personalities, just to present Labour’s ‘outcomes so
far: what was promised, what happened, what worked and what didn’t’. Yet,
while it’s a considerably drier read, their book does succeed where Harris
fails – they recognise the influence of the press and press bias; they comment
on the prevailing political culture; and they discuss the differences between
perceptions and reality, indeed they seek to present the reality through facts
and figures which, they rightly say, no government before this has ever made
available. They acknowledge the shadow of Iraq, but don’t let it dominate,
arguing (contentiously) that it did not ‘loom large in the daily lives of the
majority’. It’s
a strange read. At times you feel surprisingly proud of what this government’s
done, as the authors cite many incidents of positive change that have passed
almost without comment, even in the so-called progressive media. On health, they
point out that 60 years after Nye Bevan failed to kill it off, ‘the private
sector felt a chill wind blowing from improvements in the NHS’. On poverty,
benefits targeted at children rose by 72 per cent. ‘There had never been
redistribution like it,’ say the authors. ‘No Labour government had done as
much.’ In education, spending will have doubled by 2008. Having risen by 1.4
per cent a year in the Tories’ 18 years, it’s gone up on average by 4.4 per
cent a year since. There are 30,000 more teachers than in 1997. Unlike
more left wing commentators, these authors attack both the media and the
government for failing to make more of their positive reforms. ‘Slight monthly
changes in house prices were eagerly reported, but deprivation indicators were
not news,’ they say. ‘Labour came to power barely breathing a word about
social justice and yet accomplished more than anyone expected.’ Their
stats blow holes in a few common myths too. Take crime, where the risk of being
a victim fell by 40 per cent. ‘But crime facts were for experts. Attitudes
were shaped by the front pages and the bombardment of horror stories, tales of
useless judges and ineffective policing… Blair and Blunkett were their own
worst enemies, running with the hue and cry.’ Or asylum, in which claims to
the UK fell more swiftly than in any other EU country. ‘Yet even as asylum
figures plummeted no one quite believed it … when the bean counters reported
it hardly made a ripple in the press.’ They
comment little on the ‘tough’ policies that contribute to such results,
however, although they are critical of Labour’s failure to tackle widening
inequality and directors’ pay (‘no one tells them of their rights and
responsibilities’), and Blair’s ‘needless cowardice’ in not raising tax
rates for the rich. However, some of the most contentious policies are skirted
over – City Academies are dealt with in one extended paragraph, for example;
while they say the eventually ‘generous and attractive plan’ for tuition
fees ‘never got the public acclaim it deserved’ because of the
government’s poor handling of the issue. The
whole Iraq affair and its aftermath is recounted in unemotional detail. Blair is
criticised for allowing his political fate ‘to depend on the whim of the White
House’, for consuming the party’s energies, and for being forced onto the
defensive. No doubt, many will see that as a rather soft slap on the wrist. Galloping
expectations They
conclude by recalling Clare Short’s comment, that the Blairites are
‘creating a Labour government without telling the story’. ‘The public is
congenitally ungrateful; memories are short and expectations gallop on ahead,’
they write. The facts, they say, ‘make pretty impressive reading’ although
‘many barely see the light of day in regular media reporting’. New
Labour’s ‘spin tag’ stuck like the proverbial, but ‘it equally deserved
to be known as the most scrupulously self-monitoring government ever’. Maybe. According
to Toynbee and Walker’s research, Britain is a richer, fairer, healthier,
safer and better governed place in 2005, not that you’d know it. ‘Time and
again,’ they say, ‘we were struck in writing this book at how little people
have a chance to know about what goes on.’ Or as Billy Bragg once sang:
‘D’you ever wish you were better informed?’ The
question is, how informed are we by these two books? Neither makes an explicit
case for voting for or against Labour – Harris assumes you’re against, while
Toynbee and Walker report what’s happened, commenting merely that ‘there’s
still time on the clock to do better in a third term’. The problem with both
is there’s no political perspective, no sense of what voting for a Labour
government might be for in the long term. In
the end Harris comes down in favour of tactical voting as a kind of self-made
proportional representation. All his chosen alternatives have their faults, he
says, but ‘all of them, oppose the government on at least some of the right
issues, and hold out the prospect of delivering a shock. For one election at
least, that’s surely enough.’ At the end he lists the Labour MPs who’ve
rebelled on one or more of his ‘right issues’ – Iraq, foundation hospitals
and top up fees – as if that’s all that mattered. He assumes, it seems, that
Labour will be elected anyway. Bizarrely,
it’s Hattersley who delivers the one bit of thinking that approaches political
wisdom. ‘I don’t think political parties ever improve with failure,’ he
tells Harris. ‘The Labour Party remains the only possible vehicle for
achieving the ideals I have. If there’s ever going to be a vehicle for
egalitarianism in this country, that’s it… The idea of equality will remain.
And the Labour Party is the best possible vehicle for it.’ In
truth, supporting Labour has never been straight forward. That students’ hall
20 years ago wasn’t packed with lefties. It was Loughborough, for Keir
Hardie’s sake, one of the most conservative (and Conservative) unis in the
country. The half dozen of us who made up the Labour group, CND and
Anti-Apartheid didn’t engage in the usual student sectarian infighting simply
because there weren’t enough of us. The enemy was bigger and all around. They
had the power. We shook tins and fists in vain, united in our opposition.
Comfortable. Back
in the Spitz last month, Billy Bragg explained why he, an opponent of the war
and much else that’s new Labour, is supporting candidates like Oona King.
‘I’m not a party member,’ he said. ‘But what fills me with dread is the
thought of a resurgent Tory party or a government led by Michael Howard. I’ll
do what I can to defeat them and the fascists.’ As
we all cheered, I looked around. The crowd was mostly my age, or thereabouts.
Thatcher’s generation. There were not many students, but there in the audience
was Oona in her dress down jeans and t-shirt, and a few blokes in Joe 90 specs
and casual jackets with the faintest hint of designer flash. Then Billy launched
into ‘The World Turned Upside Down’ and, suddenly, just for a moment, it
felt like we all knew what we’re for again, what we’re against. So
now who do we vote for? by John Harris is £7.99 from Faber and Faber. Better or
Worse? Has Labour delivered? by Polly Toynbee and David Walker is £7.99 from
Bloomsbury |
