Peter Wilby - London: TONY BLAIR, it is often said, has been a lucky Prime Minister. He came to the Labour leadership as the Conservative party was ageing and crumbling; he has faced a series of inept Conservative leaders; he has held office during a prolonged economic boom. Now with the deaths of Robin Cook and Mo Mowlam, two figures on the Labour left who might have rallied opposition to him, he has been lucky again. Neither, it is true, were leaders in the accepted sense. Both had been demoted by Blair and were conscious that outright opposition might seem like sour grapes. Mowlam left the Commons in 2001 and, partly because of illness, had long ceased to be a political force.
 

Cook, though he remained a trenchant critic of the Iraq war and had been a more established member of the left than Mowlam ever was, refused to put himself at the head of opposition to other new Labour projects. He was too intellectually honest (or, if you like, too intellectually proud) to provide the instant judgments and quotes that the media require from a leader of backbench opinion. But at least they were recognisable to the public and were liked and respected. Now only Clare Short – who was International Development Secretary – remains, but she was fatally compromised by her on-off resignation over Iraq and is, in any case, too erratic of judgment and temperament. Who now do current-affairs producers and newspaper comment editors ring when they want a credible politician, with a bit of gravitas, to express a view to the left of new Labour? A few names come to mind – London’s mayor Ken Livingstone, former Defence Minister Peter Kilfoyle – but not many. The left’s cupboard is bare.

This is a peculiar state of affairs. The appeal of Blairism, the pundits told us, was wide but shallow. Blair had no following in the party. The new Labour project was the invention of himself and a handful of others, several of whom – Peter Mandelson, Alan Milburn, Stephen Byers, for example – have now left high office. Yet if Blairism fails to inspire Labour MPs and activists, nothing and nobody else does either, with the solitary exception of the UK finance minister Gordon Brown. Labour used to have Gaitskellites, Bevanites, Croslandites, Morrisonites – each type name after a leading politician of the time – and all manner of other factions, bubbling with distinct ideas about the party’s future. Now there are only Blairites and Brownites, and nobody is quite sure there’s a significant difference. The Chancellor, as the British call their finance minister, is still expected to inherit the crown around 2007-8 and was allegedly successful in getting his supporters into vacant safe seats at this year’s general election.

But is Brown, the architect of the public-private partnership for the London tube (subway rail network), the long-time admirer of American capitalism, the entrepreneur’s friend, really a man of the left? A few figures inside the government, notably the Northern Ireland secretary Peter Hain, issue occasional coded warnings about the drift of events. Comparisons with the Tories, as the Conservatives are also known, are instructive. Labour has become rather like the pre-Thatcher Conservative party, a vehicle for keeping power, with no particular end in view. In the first term, those who wanted more vision and radicalism were told to wait for the second term; in the second term, they were told to wait for the third; now, they are told to wait for Brown. Then what? The truth is that, if Blair lacks a vision, so do his opponents on the left. The Campaign Group of MPs is clearly against what’shappened, but isn’t exactly overflowing with ideas. The new Compass think-tank recognises the problem, but its leaders see its project as a long-term one, perhaps as long as 10 years and perhaps including (though they wouldn’t admit this) a period with Labour in opposition. It is gradually dawning on the British left that, throughout the world, and not just in Britain, the left is still on the defensive. The high tide of social democracy in the 1990s, when most OECD countries had left-wing governments, has receded and hasn’t significantly altered the underlying dominance of neoliberalism.

The big new political idea sweeping Europe (and now being whispered about in Britain) is a conservative, not a social democratic one: the flat tax, which envisages everybody from Sir Richard Branson to the supermarket shelf stacker paying a single, low rate of tax (18 per cent, say), with tax-free exemptions as well as graduated rates abolished. It started in Estonia, spread to several other former Soviet bloc countries, may soon be introduced in Greece, could well be embraced by a new centre-right German government and is now being studied by the Tories. Its supposed attraction is that it maximises Treasury revenues (because nobody minds paying a low tax rate), gets rid of complex regulations and puts the tax accountants out of work. But it would also scupper social democratic hopes of redistribution and, behind the whole project, lies the belief that the world needs to be made safer for entrepreneurs.
What would a left alternative look like? Democratic renewal, with buzz words such as localism, participation and empowerment, would play an important role, but nobody has a clue how it would work in practice. A few big ideas, such as basic income, whereby every citizen gets a minimum from the state that’s adequate for survival, more effective inheritance taxes and a proper land tax, all have their enthusiasts. But nobody seems near moulding them into a coherent programme.
In the Thatcher-Reagan era, neoliberals approached everything with a simple question: how can we best create a market? Before that, the post-Second World War left asked: how can we transfer more economic power and resources to the working classes? Such simplicity eludes the early 21st-century left. If there’s a question at all, it’s how to ameliorate the worst excesses of neoliberalism.

The left’s position now is similar to that of the right in the 1960s and early 1970s. The Conservatives had spent years in power but were unable to alter the sociAl democratic settlement created by the post-war Labour government. They recovered only when they discovered Hayek and Friedman, and got a host of think-tanks to apply their ideas to a new era. The left may need a similar intellectual ferment before it prospers again.
Just possibly, Robin Cook could have played a role, acting as John the Baptist for a future leader who could do for the Labour left what Thatcher did for the Tory right. True, he had no record of strategic thought and showed only the beginnings of interest in such an enterprise. But his death makes it clear that the left has nobody else of sufficient prominence to do the job, just as Mowlam’s passing shows it has few genuinely popular and inspiring figures. “Perhaps it’s as well,” said one leading light in the democratic left pressure group Compass, “that we now know exactly how bad things are.”
(Peter Wilby was editor of the New Statesman political magazine)
– Guardian Newspapers Limited