Jonathan Todd

“Kill the body and the head will follow”, says old boxing wisdom. The struggles of Gordon Brown and the grumbles of all sections of the Labour Party might seem a portent of the reverse: that the blows inflicted upon Brown will not just produce his demise but expose bitter wounds within the Party. Sadly, this would not be the first time that Labour has so acquainted itself with the political canvass.

“Gaitskell’s death left Labour in a state of flux”, wrote the historian Kevin Jefferys, “demonstrating that the long civil war of the 1950s had never been satisfactorily resolved. Despite Gaitskellite domination of Party institutions since 1955, revisionism had never completely captured Labour opinion. Fundamentalist socialism may have been down, but it was not out”.

The ideological grandchildren of these fundamentalist socialists sense that New Labour’s long hold over Party institutions may be coming to an end. Derek Simpson’s knifes, for example, sharpen for John Hutton. If Labour post Brown were to slip into a funk akin to its post Gaitskell malaise, this would complete a symmetry between the New Labour era and the revisionist years of Gaitskell.

Blair may have fought far more shy than Brown of positioning himself within past Party traditions or identifying himself in such terms. However, in style and philosophy, New Labour had clear revisionist antecedents. From Blair succeeding, where Gaitskell failed, in reforming Clause Four onwards, New Labour can be understood as revisionism plus. Indeed, Roy Jenkins described Blair as the best Labour leader since his idol, Gaitskell.

Jenkins’ friend and rival Tony Crosland provided the great revisionist text in the form of The Future of Socialism (1956). That the country we live in seems so different from the one this book looked towards has been assigned by Raymond Plant to Crosland’s penchant for mechanical, rather than a moral, reform.

Plant distinguishes these two kinds of reformers. “Moral reformers are essentially bottom-up reformers. Values can only be effective in politics when they are widely shared, and the task of the moral reformer is to take the long view and to try to transform the values by which people live in the direction that he wants to see. The mechanical reformer is a top-down reformer, who believes that there might be political, social and economic strategies available which would produce the desired results, without necessarily having to transform the underlying moral culture of citizens”.

Conservatives, particularly those fired by the social passions of an Iain Duncan Smith like bent, deride “stealth taxes” and tax credits as the ultimate mechanical weapons. “Broken Britain” is, it is claimed, nothing if not the “demoralised” abdication of moral reform. Equally, the advances that the past eleven years have witnessed in terms of the revivification of the public sphere, from the strengthening of community institutions in the form of schemes like Sure Start to the unprecedented increases in public spending, suggest that New Labour has traded in the currency of the moral reform.

The debate will doubtless go on as to the extent to which New Labour has repeated the supposed error of Crosland in an excess of mechanical reform. However, recent comments by David Lammy would imply some kind of failure as a project of moral reform. “It’s wrong to describe New Labour as a movement. I don’t think that it could be described as a movement that filtered down to ordinary people on the ground.”

Never mind ordinary people on the ground, the Labour movement can seem as confused about the values of New Labour as they were about revisionist values after Gaitskell. The irony is that no epochs in Labour’s history have made more of an attempt to have the party defined around a set of values than the New Labour and revisionist periods. The two attempts to reform Clause Four around a set of values pay testament to this. Yet the articulation of these values was evidently lacking.

Crosland, the towering figure of a value-driven Labour politics, distinguished between ends, which are defined by values, and means, which are ever flexible to these ends. It could be, however, that means are inherently easier to grasp than ends and so are latched on to more easily than ends.

Just as the selling of council houses and the taming of the Unions gave Thatcherism coherence in the popular mind, so too these were beachhead policies that created a direct connection between how this project was popularly understood and a Hayekian philosophy. It may be that New Labour’s failings as a project of moral reform relate to a lack of beachhead policies that give New Labour’s values meaning in a concrete sense to the broad mass of the electorate.

The tragedy is that New Labour has always had a strong sense of the values that define it. “We believe that people should be able to rise by their talents, not by their birth or the advantages of privilege”, said Blair in 1996. Gordon Brown, as Prime Minister, has, likewise, embraced the X Factor – the unlocking of untapped talent. This is, essentially, the vision that he promised to set out to the country when he spurned an early general election. For whatever reason, perhaps the lack of a coherent set of beachhead policies, this vision has failed to find resonance with the electorate.

And what does this failure presage? In the divergent thinking of people like Neal Lawson and Charles Clarke the outlines of an emerging civil war within the party can be detected; a scramble to define the party in the post Blair/Brown era in which all of the party’s
neuroses and neurotics will demand blood. However, the real winners in this civil war will be the Conservatives and the real losers will be the ordinary people who stand to gain most from Labour properly becoming “the natural party of government” for this century.