The dead hand of Tony Blair is throttling the remaining life out of the Labour party.

 

The government has become a Brown-Mandelson coalition. (If you’re a Dad’s Army fan, imagine Private Fraser and Private Walker running the platoon). As protection against a Blairite coup, Brown has given Mandelson a string of titles and an unlimited right to puff himself in the media.

 

Brown has also given him real power and an effective veto over the whole range of government policy. Insofar as Mandelson stands for anything, it is to preserve the legacy of his master and creation, Tony Blair.

 

Sure enough, both in public speeches and private leaks Mandelson and other ministers have signalled the government’s return to a New Labour agenda. After a short period of disuse, the very term “New Labour” is back in favour.

 

This shift will destroy any prospect of Labour recovery. New Labour may have meant something in the Nineties, but its policies and assumptions today are at best irrelevant, at worst detested.

 

Even in its heyday New Labour was popular only by negation, contrasted with the extremist and confused Labour party of the Eighties and the tired and confused Tory Party of the Nineties. Few people actually liked New Labour policies, except for the coterie of professional politicians and hangers-on who built careers on them and the opportunistic businesses which made money from them. When the party actually had to appeal to voters it relied on its traditional strengths (jobs, public services). “24 Hours to Save the NHS”: nothing New Labour about that slogan (except that it was a lie).

 

In office, New Labour applied the politics of Basil Fawlty on Gourmet Night: insult and abuse the regular customers in the hope of attracting a better class of clientele. Tony Blair loved to pick fights with Labour’s traditional supporters – never with Labour’s traditional enemies. This is an ill-advised strategy for any business. New Labour got away with it when there was no plausible competition, but now customers old and new are leaving its hotel in droves.

 

Even when the economy looked marvellous, New Labour contrived to lose over four million votes from 1997 to 2005. It lost very few of them to the Tories as a punishment for being too Left-Wing. Far more of them were traditional supporters who felt abandoned.  Even beneficiaries of New Labour in government deserted it at the ballot box. Thousands of public sector workers who had done well on jobs and wages were driven away by New Labour methods, values and rhetoric.

 

If voters left New Labour during a boom, why should they return to it in a bust? They know that New Labour’s softly-softly approach to high finance was a contributor to the crash and has nothing to offer as a remedy. The economy only started to recover because New Labour’s approach was abandoned in favour of an old-fashioned injection of public money. (Sterling devaluation was also a help – contrary to New Labour’s policy of joining the euro). Voters are angry with the government because of the survival of New Labour attitudes to the banking sector. They want more old-style intervention on bank bonuses and bank lending to business and domestic customers.

 

New Labour is something the party needs to forget. A New Labour election manifesto next year would outdo 1983 as a political suicide note. “We promise to

  • Cut public spending on everything except bank bailouts
  • Apologize to the banks for rescuing them and let them return to business (and bonuses) as usual
  • Make taxation voluntary for the super-rich and punish people who pull themselves out of poverty
  • Continue tinkering with health and public services, while letting the private sector make more money from them
  • Continue tinkering with the English school system, especially over exams, and create more pockets of privilege for the pushy
  • Force more vulnerable people, especially single mothers, into no-hope jobs and expect them to be grateful
  • Abolish more civil liberties and give government more power to spy on you and acquire your personal data
  • Grovel to the United States and to any foreign dictator who might want to buy something from us, especially arms
  • Jam Britain into the euro and give more power to the EU (except when it wants to regulate high finance)
  • Send more under-protected troops to places full of people who want to kill them, with no idea how to get them out again
  • Pump out more propaganda at your expense, and blame everyone but ourselves if something goes wrong.”

 

I bet voters can hardly wait.

 

Labour still has a chance of recovery, especially against a Tory opposition which looks vague and flaky most of the time and strident and threatening the rest of the time. But Tory failings will not save this government unless it saves itself. That means freeing itself from the dead hand of Tony Blair.