This is not the time for Labour to indulge in a scrap in its own navel
|
Version 0 of 1. A house divided against itself cannot stand. It is one of the basic laws of politics that visibly disunited parties don’t win elections. The voters are signalling a strong disinclination to make anyone a clear victor in May and that may have something to do with the fact that all the parties are split. The most obvious fissure through the Conservative party is the great schism over Europe, but that’s far from the only thing that divides them. The Lib Dems have their Cleggites and their Cableites. The more we examine the insurgent parties, the more we find that they are doing the splits as well. Within Ukip, blue Kippers wrestle with red Kippers over whether they should offer ultra-Thatcherism or leftish populism. The Greens have their mangoes (green on the outside, Lib Demish orange on the inside) and their melons (green on the outside, red on the inside). Labour also has its divisions, but the party has generally been quite adept at containing them. While Tories have spent much of the time since the last election warring with each other or their Lib Dem coalition partners, Ed Miliband has largely managed to keep a lid on his party’s internal tensions. This has often been a source of despair to David Cameron and his advisers. Gatherings of Tory MPs always receive the same lecture from Lynton Crosby, the prime minister’s Australian strategist. “Remember,” he says. “You’re a participant, not a commentator.” Critiquing the performance of leaders and the content of policies is a job that should be left to people like, well, like me. The task of an MP is to stick to the script and mouth the messages handed down by party command. That is the Crosby doctrine. This turns MPs into slavish automatons, so I would normally find it deplorable. But when electoral battle is engaged, it is rather sensible for a party interested in winning to at least pretend that they are all on the same team. Tories finally seem to be heeding that advice. They have decided that they’d like to win. They will resume their civil war once the election is behind them, but they’d rather fight it out in government than in opposition. “The Conservative party has at last decided to shut up,” says one of the prime minister’s relieved friends. This facade of togetherness is entirely cosmetic. It won’t last beyond 8 May. It may crack before then. But for now, the Tory party is managing to mask its divisions and put on a reasonably united face to the world. Show is all it is, but that matters in an election campaign when all is show. So it is with strange and damaging timing that some Labour personalities have decided that now is the moment to start blasting bullets at their own side. Alan Milburn, the former health secretary, took to the airwaves last week to attack his party’s approach to the NHS as a “fatal mistake” and deride its campaign as a “pale imitation” of Neil Kinnock’s losing one in 1992. To add injury to insult, this cabinet member of the Blair years made his caustic intervention on the very day that Labour was launching its health policy. The Tories were thrilled of course, and their press allies translated it into anti-Labour headlines. “Labour big beasts savage Ed,” yelled a delighted Daily Mail. “Labour election chaos over NHS,” cried the Daily Telegraph. Unfriendly fire on his own party has also come from Peter Mandelson. He recently attacked the mansion tax as “crude” and “short-termist” and complained that the policy would “clobber” people. It would surely be too cynical to suggest that his intervention was influenced by the fact that one of the people who would be liable for the mansion tax would be Lord Mandelson himself. Re-examining that interview, the baron appears to be agreeing with the idea of some sort of wealth tax, which was quite interesting coming from him, but it was inevitably his attack on his party’s version of a wealth tax that attracted the attention. Then there are the interventions of New Labour’s main man. Tony Blair has got into an unfortunate habit, which is also a surprising one for such a master communicator, of getting himself “misinterpreted” whenever he gives an interview. The result of these “misinterpretations” have been a lot of unhelpful stories saying that he thinks Ed Miliband is too left wing and too hostile to business to win. What are they up to? I can’t find any evidence of a co-ordinated plot by the grandees of the last Labour government to deliberately hurt their party. Some suggest that they are getting in their criticisms of Ed Miliband now in order to be able to say “we told you so” if he loses. If that is the game they are playing, it is a very dangerous one. Hurting their party’s prospects during the campaign will leave them open to the accusation that it is they who are to be blamed if Labour doesn’t win. What is certainly true is that the older generation of Blairites have never been reconciled to Ed Miliband and where he has taken their party. They think he made a major strategic error by explicitly trashing or implicitly detaching himself from Labour’s 13 years in government. Voice was given to that view by Mr Milburn and his friend John Hutton, the former business secretary, when they co-authored a piece for the Financial Times. They accused Eds Miliband and Balls of having “worked harder to distance themselves from New Labour than to defend its record”. That had “foolishly” gifted the Tories “a needless advantage”. This is not just politics, it is also personal, particularly for Tony Blair. The former prime minister and Labour’s most electorally successful leader is bound to feel wounded and betrayed when his premiership has been treated as a gigantic error by the party to which he delivered a hat trick of election victories. This argument could have been had at any time since 2010. Any time except now. The election is on. Battle is engaged. It is far too late for Labour to engage in a scrap in its own navel between Milibandites and Blairites. Not if it is interested in winning. The party’s leader is not going to be changed. Its direction is set. Nothing will be altered by criticism from former Labour ministers – except possibly their party’s chances of securing power. In retaliation, John Prescott tweeted that Mr Milburn and Mr Hutton were “Tory collaborators”. I suppose that sort of rather mindless abuse is only to be expected from him. More telling was the response from the younger generation of Labour MPs, including those who would be considered Blairite. Liz Kendall, the party’s impressive shadow minister for care and older people, gave Mr Milburn a hard slap by calling him “just plain wrong” and describing how he had failed to grasp the big reforms of the NHS in Labour’s plan. Labour MPs of many different ideological complexions are expressing annoyance – in some cases, it is boiling fury – that these retired generals are taking pot shots at their own side at precisely the moment when the party needs to be united. Says one frontbencher: “It would be nice – wouldn’t it? – if people like Alan and Peter could occasionally remember that the Tories are the enemy.” Sometimes they do remember that. In the past, Alan Milburn has been fiercely critical of the Tory approach to the NHS. Lord Mandelson has dripped his special brand of scorn on the Conservative posture towards Europe. Whenever Tony Blair is accused of being unhelpful, he protests that he always tells anyone who comes to interview him that he hopes and expects that Labour will win. But such experienced operators surely know how these things work, especially when election battle is joined. This is hardly their first rodeo. When they say anything critical about their own side, it is that which is going to be translated into headlines that are hostile to Labour. Who do they want to win? The Tories or their own party? Who do they want to see in Number 10? Ed Miliband or David Cameron? The luminaries of New Labour need to give a crystal-clear answer before the suspicion spreads that they don’t care whether their party wins. That is particularly so in the case of Tony Blair. He’s said enough about Ed Miliband for everyone to understand that he’s not the world’s greatest enthusiast for his successor. What the former prime minister has not said enough about is what he fears will happen if the Conservatives are returned to power. No one is better equipped than Tony Blair to deliver a speech taking apart David Cameron on the subject of Europe and the danger to the national interest. It could do the former prime minister’s reputation within his own party a power of good if he made such a speech sometime soon. It would also clarify whose side he is on. When he was leader, Tony Blair schooled his party to be disciplined and united, not self-indulgent and divided. Nothing, he often told them, mattered as much as winning. Many people in their party would be grateful if he and his New Labour companions practised what once they preached. |