Jonathan Todd

I have previously said several times that Labour has three options: 1.) Back Brown, 2.) Replace him, 3.) Allow him to continue without backing him. Comments like the one below from Beverley Hughes only serve to leave us in the third of these worlds, which is the worst option for Labour.

“I really do believe that there has to be a demonstrable and marked improvement now both in our position in the opinion polls and his personal ratings over the next few months and I think if there isn’t then the questions about leadership will inevitably arise again.”

We are all entitled to our private views but when these views now accord with those of Hughes and are made public, then, the words of Clement Attlee to Harold Laski become apt: “a period of silence on your part would be appreciated.”

Some political realities need to be acknowledged if Labour is to move forward. These are:

First, Gordon Brown will lead Labour into the next General Election. The reaction (or, at least, non-resignation) of other leading figures in the party - particularly, Peter Mandelson, Alan Johnson and David Miliband – to James Purnell’s resignation finally confirmed this.

Second, as I have previously said, Labour has three options: 1.) Back Brown, 2.) Replace him, 3.) Allow him to continue without backing him. The third of these is the worst for Labour and choices of Mandelson et al have closed off the second. Thus, the first must be genuinely embraced by the party.

Third, in yesterday’s Guardian ICM poll, Labour only out-scores the Tories on one issue – better protecting public services.

Fourth, as Liam Byrne’s press conference earlier this week illustrated, Labour’s current line on future spending is not the strongest in the world.

Fifth, this is recognised by people. A new poll  on Politics Home finds that only 16 per cent of voters think that Labour is being most honest on tax and spend, behind the Tories on 37 and the Lib Dems on 28. Not even a majority of Labour supporters think Labour is being straighter on this than other parties.

Sixth, the government genuinely is providing real help now, as the tag line goes, to prevent this recession producing the kind of build up of youth unemployment that recessions under the last Conservative government witnessed in the 1980s and 1990s. Martin Bright recently noted: “There are still some potentially promising ideas knocking about. The Future Jobs Fund, which provides a subsidy for employers willing to take a 14-18 year old at risk of long term unemployment, and the Young Person’s Guarantee, which promises to find work for young people unemployed for over a year, are both attempts to tackle the unemployment tsunami about to hit Britain. The Graduate Talent Pool proposed by DIUS to match graduates to internships is the seed of a good idea and the proposals from the Communities and Local Government department to fill empty high street businesses with creative ‘pop-up’ shops and could also help”.

Sixth, the good work  on youth unemployment lacks co-ordination. Bright goes on to say: “Without coordination, (these policies) risk becoming just another set of eye-catching initiatives … One of the most useful jobs to be carried out by Tessa Jowell in the Cabinet Office or Lord Mandelson in his new Department of Everything would be to coordinate all the work being done to stimulate employment and tackle the recession”.

Ninth, while the economy undoubted still faces major challenges, it has started to grow again. Labour’s activism on tax and spend must have contributed towards this improvement.

Tenth, the British public are far from sold on David Cameron, as Michael White notes.

So, where does this leave us?

The first and second points tell us that Labour has no sensible option but to unite behind the architect of the 2005 General Election campaign: Gordon Brown. A key theme of this campaign was Labour investment versus Tory cuts. The third point might suggest that this strategy should be deployed again but the fourth and fifth points imply that this would not be credible. Instead, the government should build out of the support that it enjoys for protecting public services – the third point – to create support for what can be achieved through public services.

Our story on public services shouldn’t be about how much we invest in public services but about what we can achieve through public services. Our politics and policies should be focused on outcomes, like reduced youth unemployment, not inputs, which discussions about investment always constrain us to. Let us make a make a mission of the outcomes that we prioritise and let us be defined in these terms. The spending choices that we make should reflect these priorities, re-enforcing them both in the minds of Whitehall and the public. Which of our missions, for example, is satisfied by persisting with ID cards? The spending commitments that are not central to our missions should be subjected to the strongest scrutiny.  

The upturn in the economy – the ninth point – is beginning to give a taste of the outcomes that might be achieved when government targets its resources and energies on well-defined objectives and makes missions of them. Youth unemployment must be a mission. Thinking of the other things that should be missions makes me think of something Neal Lawson said recently:

“The story of the last thirty years has been the transfer of risk from the collective, the social and the community to the individual”.  

The risk of being left on the scrap heap of unemployment is not a risk that anyone, least of all the young, should have to face alone. The risks of growing old in an ageing society will be far larger than they should be for far too many people unless we collectively decide to make a mission of improving health and social care for the elderly. The risks of climate change are massive for all of us and can only be tackled by any of us on a collective basis.

This is the stuff of a positive case for government. It is in setting out this positive case that Labour’s best hope for the next General Election resides. This is a different kind of strategy from the 2005 campaign but one which needs to be embraced. It wouldn’t pretend that government can provide the answers to all our problems – this country still needs to have a more mature conversation about what government can and cannot do and what the responsibilities of citizens are and are not - but it would provide a coherent basis for Labour building upon the success which the beginnings of a turn-around in the economy represents. 

The anti-government reaction of the Conservatives to the banking crisis (e.g. opposition to fiscal stimulus, etc) suggests that they may be wrong footed by a strategy predicated on a positive case for government. From George Osbourne’s economic policies to Iain Duncan-Smith’s social policies, they still see government as more problem than solution. Let’s start, however, by building a positive case for what we can use government to achieve, rather than erecting unconvincing dividing lines on spending. 

The trend detected by Lawson implies that the Conservatives’ anti-government tendency is out of kilter with the times. This may explain – the eighth point – the fact that the public remain to be sold on Cameron. Labour successfully presenting a positive case for government over the next year may make him more politically vulnerable than he now appears.

I departed the UK for a family holiday in the US the morning after the night of James Purnell’s resignation. I have been desperately trying to keep up with events in the UK, despite the time difference, family obligations and the lack of Adam Boulton. But, in effect, though the much anticipated meeting of the PLP is still to happen, my sense is that Labour’s fate was sealed before I boarded Virgin Atlantic. The Cabinet’s failure to follow Purnell’s lead means that Gordon Brown remains Labour’s destiny. 

Throughout the debates about Brown’s leadership, I have always maintained that Labour has three options: 1.) Back him, 2.) Replace him, 3.) Allow him to continue without backing him. The third of these options is the worst for Labour but the choices made by key figures in the Party over recent days have placed us definitively with this option, while effectively closing off the first of these options and not quite reaching the second. So, the transatlantic view from Virginia Beach is that of a “wounded elephant” – as a Labour MP described Brown to the Guardian – continuing to lead Labour.

The Conservative performance in the local and European elections wasn’t awfully impressive – less than 30 percent of the national vote in the Europeans. Yet, David Cameron will delight at facing off against this “wounded elephant”. Labour’s Cabinet might lack a killer instinct but Cameron certainly doesn’t. He will relish the prospect of savaging a beast now wounded by blows inflicted by his own comrades.

Labour’s weakness, more than Cameron’s or the Conservative’s strength, opens up the possibility of a victory at the next General Election that will keep the Conservatives in government for a generation. Given this, why have senior members of the Labour tribe chosen to leave us in the third of the worlds described above?

We are told that this is a Blairite resurrection. Ken Livingstone has obliged Number 10 by beating this drum. But it is a funny kind of Blairite resurrection that is beaten off by Peter Mandelson – and how curious it is that Livingstone and Mandelson, once great foes of Brown, should join ranks with an ex-Tory MP, Shaun Woodward, in being Brown’s most reliable defenders. The terms Blairite and Brownite are now as hackneyed as they are meaningless and do not help us understand the events of recent days.

There is no ideological or policy divide between those called Blairites and those called Brownites, as Europe divided the Tories in the 1980s or nationalisation separated Bevanites from Gatskellites in the Labour Party of the 1950s. There are, however, those that doubt Gordon Brown’s capacities as a leader and communicator – in various senses, this was the message of resignation statements not just from Purnell but also from Caroline Flint and Jane Kennedy – and those that do not.

To these resignations Jon Cruddas has retorted: “What I don’t understand is that there are all these resignations and yet there is no difference in policy. Everybody is taking their bat home with them, but they are not staking out different ideological or policy-based ground”. John Harris has dubbed it a “confused rebellion” for the same reason.

But when Labour has suffered its worst result in a national election for 99 years, is it necessary to have a policy difference with the leadership to call into question its effectiveness? Isn’t it enough to say that our message is being lost by the messenger? 

Cruddas and Harris want to say that policy changes are required because they desire policy changes. But, while there are certainly important policy debates to be had within the Labour Party, it seems easier to find evidence in the local and European elections for deficiencies in our ability to communicate our message than in the content of the message itself. 

Slogans that are redolent of past General Elections – Labour investment versus Tory cuts, etc – no longer cut any ice in a much changed fiscal and economic context. The public may not understand the full details of this context. (Who does?) But they sense – and they sense rightly – that the real debate isn’t about investment or cuts but about how much cutting and what kind of cutting. The wisdom of the crowds is too great for the wool to be pulled over their eyes for long. 

We need to be more imaginative in our policies – as I said, there is certainly much room for debate about Labour Party policy. But, even more crucial than this in averting complete and utter disaster at the next General Election is an increased capacity to be more straight-forward, empathetic and emotionally intelligent in how we communicate these policies. Peter Kellner sees in the local and European elections an indication that Labour has lost the ability to persuade ordinary voters that we are on their side. This is both the tragedy of these elections and the challenge that they pose for the next general election. 

John Prescott was scathing about the European campaign. It seemed to me like a sorry hangover from the 2005 general election campaign, which was itself a little brother to the 2001 general election campaign. Massively improving upon this seems more important than policy revisions, irrespective of who is our leader, though my instinct now is that our leader will remain the architect of the 2005 general election campaign: Gordon Brown. However, what worked in 2005 will not work now.

MPs have abused their expenses, seeming to treat them as perks or part of their remuneration. In doing so, they have shattered a social contract with actions that sometimes appear criminal.

It is ironic, then, that in this week Gordon Brown has given us his first key note speech on crime as PM and John McFall has alleged that remuneration packages in the financial sector have lead to a social contract being broken.

So, MPs and bankers both stand accused of breaking a social contract. What does this mean? And what are its consequences?

Wikipedia defines a contract in these terms:

“A contract is an exchange of promises between two or more parties to do, or refrain from doing, an act, which resulting contract is enforceable in a court of law. It is a binding legal agreement”.

But what is a social contract? An exchange of promises between two or more parties to do, or refrain from doing, an act, which resulting contract is enforceable in a court of public opinion? Harriet Harman once threatened to throw a banker to the lions in this court but MPs are now as likely to suffer a mauling as even Fred the Shed.

That said, the long history of the term social contract, appealed to by thinkers from Thomas Hobbes to John Rawls, makes it harder to properly define in terms as concise as Wikipedia’s definition of a contract. The vagaries of legal courts are legion but are nothing as compared to the vagaries of the court of public opinion, for one thing. In contract disputes, it is also usually clear between whom the original promise was reached. In contrast, it may be a surprise to some bankers that they have a contractual obligation - a social contract – to anyone beyond their employer. Presumably, MPs have, at least, a dim memory that the Fees Office are not the people with whom they have entered into a contract. Electors, I believe, they are called. The ultimate sanction in the case of MPs who break their social contract is also clearer than it for bankers. It is to be found at the ballot box. Fred the Shed will be grateful that this doesn’t determine his fate, as he would only receive two votes: one from a Hearts player and another from Jackie Stewart. Though, there are MPs, elected with fat majorities, who must now wonder whether they are any more capable of attracting popular support.

When once respected MPs and bankers can dredge such depths of unpopularity, the ballot box may not seem for all an entirely adequate sanction for the breaches of the social contracts that have occurred – not least when this sanction doesn’t even apply directly to bankers. Some may sigh and shrug, feel even more powerless than they do already and not vote. Some may vote for a party like UKIP, up 12 points in the polls in the past 7 days, in the belief that minor parties will be more respectful of the social contract than major ones. Some may react even more extremely: voting for the BNP and/or engaging in violent protest. Am I getting too excited?

I’m not sure. Trust has been lost on a massive scale, as it is when any contract is broken. This is very difficult to recover. Tony Blair, for example, never regained the trust that he lost over the invasion of Iraq. Broken trust begets broken trust, as violence begets violence. Broken trust often begets violence and vice versa. Certainly, neither broken trust nor violence begets anything positive. Only negativity suggests itself.

Britain has, rightly, moved away from the absurd, unjustified hierarchies that defined us as a deferential, class-based society. But it is hard to imagine a society that doesn’t need leaders of some kind in politics, business and elsewhere. Social contracts are formed between these leaders and those that they lead but such contracts are only viable when the leaders can command respect on some basis. This respect has long since ceased to derive from class, while most of our present leaders in politics and business struggle to command respect by virtue of their abilities and virtues. The breaking of social contracts would, therefore, seem to have produced a crisis of leadership. Whether it produces anything graver than that will depend what, if anything, emerges to fill the vacuum of trust and respect that this crisis has opened up.

The Sunday Mail reports that support for Labour has fallen to 23 percent – the lowest since opinion polls began in 1943. If Labour polled this badly at a general election, the party would lose 200 seats to the Conservatives, who would hold a massive, carte blanche majority of 220. The survey was also the first to record that the majority of voters want Gordon Brown to stand down now as PM.

These are desperate times, indeed, for Labour and while the expenses revelations “will hurt the reputation of all politicians”, argues Andrew Rawnsley, ”the damage is likeliest to be greatest to Labour at the next election”. Another poll supports Rawnsley’s view. There have been many highs and lows under PM Brown. But each low seems lower and more desperate than the last one. I didn’t think it was possible to go any lower than the McBride affair but recent days have probably managed it.

It may be that everything that has been revealed in recent days was “within the rules”. What McBride was up to certainly was not. Nonetheless, Brown’s response in both cases was to blame the rules and insist upon their reform. But people, especially public figures, have to take responsibility for their actions, irrespective of what the rules may or may not say. While the McBride affair was undoubtedly depressing in the extreme, there is something even more depressing about the expenses revelations because the people concerned are people who are widely respected and admired within the Labour Party, in contrast to McBride.

Of course, as I have heard Tessa Jowell and Ed Miliband say on TV, we should avoid making judgements on the basis of partial information and Ben Bradshaw and Phil Woolas also challenge the versions of events that have been reported about them. I am afraid, however, that, whatever the reality of the situation may prove to be, the damage has already been done and the dye has been cast for Labour. The party can now only, to mix metaphors, walk into the hurricane of public anger.    

What a prospect. It must make the most battle hardened Labour campaigner nervous about door knocking. Those lions have been lead to this by the expenses claims of the donkeys that lead them. Alan Johnson, however, doesn’t appear quite so donkey like. According to Rawnsley, he, along with Hilary Benn and Ed Miliband emerges ”as acmes of frugality who make modest and entirely reasonable claims for performing their duties”.

James Forsyth argues that this increases the likeihood of Miliband “winning the leadership after the next election”. But the question will increasingly be asked whether, if this were to happen, this would make him the next leader of the Labour Party. Even before the expenses story broke The Mirror did not seem disinclined to the prospect of the frugal Johnson, who has recently appeared to indicate more of willingness to take on the top job than previously, replacing Brown before the election. That frugality must have been good for his conscience at the time and now also appears a smart career move.

 Matthew D’Ancona speculates that he ”may yet be the first person to become Labour leader by going on television and radio repeatedly to deny that he is either capable of the job or interested in it”. These denials mean that Johnson is considered to lack a steely, Michael Heseltine or Brown like determination to accede to the very top. Given this and past experience – the lack of any challenge to Brown either when he became leader or last summer – D’Ancona seems justified in his view that “for all the sound and fury we can expect over the summer”, in terms of plots against Brown, ”the PM will still survive and fight the general election”. But D’Ancona was writing prior to the expenses story. Is this story a game changer? And, if so, how will the game end?

Martin Bright is right think to that there is a “distinct possibility that (it may end with) the Labour Party (going) into terminal decline as a credible political force”. He argues that the best way to avert that outcome is for “the younger generation of Labour politicians … to take control now”. Who can he have in mind? I don’t think Johnson or Harriet Harman, another potential successor to Brown, can be considered part of the younger generation. But James Purnell and Jon Cruddas could. Allegra Stratton has them down as a ‘dream ticket’.

“Why don’t James and Jon grow some balls and get together and challenge GB”, a “Labour grandee” apparently recently told her. The “grandee” will presumably hope that the expenses story has made these balls grow. At this stage, however, I am not sure whether it is certain that Purnell, nor Ed Balls or Yvette Cooper, either of whom (but surely not both?) might well consider standing in any contest that featured Purnell, is out of the expenses wood - though, this is far from the only question that might be raised about the supposed dream ticket. They are usually considered, for one thing, to be on opposing wings of the party. David Miliband – another member of the younger generation with leadership ambitions – certainly hasn’t come out of the expenses story as well as his brother or Johnson.    

If Brown can be prised from Downing Street – and that definitely remains a big if – then the number of names discussed here (Johnson, Harman, Purnell, Cruddas, Balls, Cooper and both Milibands) would seem to open up the spectre of an unseemly scramble for Number 10 – if they all were to grow balls, as it were - at a time when we face challenges so grave that Frank Field has been talking about the need for a national unity government. Peter Mandelson may insist that Brown is focused on these challenges, not his cleaner, but polls of 23 percent cannot fail to darken Labour’s mood music. It may now be the Tories turn to hold the expenses spotlight but David Cameron senses enough weakness around Brown to be edging towards a confidence vote, via the Royal Mail vote.

The chances are that Brown will avoid a confidence vote by giving enough concessions to Labour backbenchers to win the Royal Mail vote with Labour votes, while losing Cameron’s support for his Royal Mail plans. But how many concessions can Brown give without losing the support of the responsible Minister, Mandelson, a potential Geoffrey Howe in this drama if ever there was one? It’s bizarre that Brown has ended up in a position of such dependence upon his old foe – The Sunday Telegraph speculates that Brown may reduce this dependence, in respect of the Royal Mail vote at least, by moving Mandelson to the Foreign Office, “a post he has long coveted”. How these once bitter rivals play their cards on the Royal Mail vote may go some way to determining whether everyone’s favourite ex-postie, Johnson, ends up as PM. The Sunday Telegraph also suggests that Brown may try to prevent this happening by making Johnson Chancellor and, thus, “binding him in” to Brown. This creates the risk, however, as Peter Hoskin notes, that Alistair Darling will play Howe.

All of this, however, is just fluff and hot air – or “sound and fury” to use D’Ancona’s term. Not only is it fluff and hot air, it is fluff and hot air at a time of crisis. Shuffling deckchairs on the Titantic is the right expression. Martin Bright correctly grasps the depth of the crisis facing Labour. The worst thing Labour could offer now (and I have stopped assuming that things can’t get any more desperate, as that assumption has proved sadly, too unrealistic) is more fluff and hot air. That is to say more talk of a challenge to Brown. Talking about challenging Brown but not actually challenging Brown, i.e. not growing balls but pretending to, is the worst of all Labour worlds. It is worse than growing balls and challenging Brown. It is also worse than not growing balls and supporting Brown.

This is a crisis of fluff and hot air in a deeper and more dangerous sense than this, however. Brown promised the country a vision but, frankly, this only came into view with the credit crunch. This gave his government a sense of purpose that it otherwise lacked. Once a government and a party becomes so lacking in purpose that it needs a global crisis to give it one, it is little surprise that the public have little sense of what the party’s purposes, motivations and convictions really amount to. I fear that those battle hardened Labour campaigners, who are newly nervous about door knocking, would struggle to give a convincing answer as to what the point of a fourth Labour term would be, if asked on the doorstep. These lions have again been let down by the donkeys that lead them. And just as badly let down as they have been in respect of expenses.

The Labour Party, whoever leads it, desperately needs a stronger sense of direction. Until the party rediscovers, re-imagines and revivifies its purposes, it cannot complain about these purposes being unclear to the electorate. The most encouraging thing about the latest ‘date‘ between the ‘dream ticket’ is that it occurred at the launch of an exciting new Demos pamphlet. The Liberal Republic is a great publication by Richard Reeves and Phil Collins, which is likely to appeal to Alan Milburn, a name sure to be mentioned among the plotters. The likes of Milburn, Purnell and Cruddas are intelligent and bright enough to think through the thoughts that will need to be thought through for Labour to really rediscover its sense of direction. They should have the balls to do so and not to get distracted by the fluff and hot air. Only one of these pursuits, ultimately, will make a real difference. We were promised vision and we were promised substance. That is still what is required, whoever leads Labour.