Editorial
Has Gordon bailed out Blair?
Tony Blair's government would have hoped by early November to be basking in the glory of Gordon Brown's budget hand-outs to the NHS and education, and preparing the way for a push-over win at a general election next spring.
Instead, through a combination of bad policies and rotten luck, they wound up stranded in a rising tide of public frustration and hostility, waiting for Gordon Brown's pre-Budget statement as a lifeline to haul them back to popular support.
It appears that his well-leaked proposals for a £5 a week increase for single pensioners and £8 for a couple may have defused the anger that had been stoked up in the pensioners' movement: but only after serious political damage has been done.
The concessions on fuel taxes - offering substantial reductions on the rarest type of unleaded petrol, available in only one tenth of filling stations - and on excise duty for lorries (with exemption for tractors to pacify the farmers!) are said to be worth the equivalent of a 4p per gallon cut in the duty on petrol. It seems that this might be enough to cut the base of support from the fuel price protests.
But Brown has been digging Labour out of a hole he dug in the first place. The government is are reaping the whirlwind of its own dismal and pathetic record since Blair swept to power on a tide of anti-Tory sentiment, promising change.
Much of the optimism and goodwill which buoyed up Labour's poll ratings after May 1997 appears now to have evaporated: but so, too, have the claimed public relations skills of the Millbank team.
Accustomed as they are to getting everything their own way, ministers and Millbank spinners alike seem quite unable to recognise how unpopular key policies are - both with Labour's core voters, and with their chosen base of support, conservative Daily Mail-reading elements in "middle England". Nor do they appear able to cope with the increasingly hostile onslaught on New Labour from the once friendly tabloid and broadsheet press.
For those eager to see the back of Thatcherism, the changes have been few and far between. Brown insisted on sticking to Tory spending limits for Labour's first three years - triggering a mounting crisis in the NHS and in education - and refused point blank to tax the wealthy or big business.
Brown's pre-budget speech has boasted that income from corporation tax is set to fall by a massive £2.5 billion since his concessions to big and medium businesses last March. And the financial press has delighted at his decision to continue not to tax the oil companies on their North Sea oil earnings, even as they pocket astronomical profits (Shell alone creaming off £2m per hour on the latest figures).
Instead of taxing those most able to pay, New Labour bumped up indirect taxes, including the so called "fuel price escalator". But they also went further than the Tories.
Rather than tax all those on higher earnings - which would obviously include high paid graduates - they came up with a new, grossly unfair tax: on the parents of potential graduates, who start paying fees on a family income of just £17,000. Not only has Labour imposed university tuition fees, they have also abolished what remained of the student grant, already savaged by Tory cuts.
Labour's failure to fund local government has brought a constant round of cuts, culminating in the "meltdown" in Hackney, where New Labour councillors are joining forces with the Tories to axe key services in one of Britain's poorest boroughs.
To make matters worse, Labour has shown no willingness to invest in or develop a serious public transport system, resulting in a growing daily sense of chaos as big cities flounder in ever longer queues of traffic.
None of this need have happened: all of these problems flow directly from New Labour's conservative policies, and all created a backdrop to an autumn of misery for ministers - and millions of people.
We would accept that it was rotten luck to find the electorate's spirits depressed by a miserable summer. But then came the sharp rise in oil prices, boosting the profits of Blair's pals in the oil companies - and an unprecedented nationwide campaign on fuel prices.
This brought together an unlikely alliance of lorry drivers and farmers, acting with the connivance of the oil company bosses. Such was the level of disillusion with Blair's team that this strange and contradictory line-up, demanding a cut in duty on petrol and diesel, won up to 90% approval in opinion polls - even as it brought the country close to a standstill.
Socialist Outlook has supported the call for a cut in taxes on fuel, and other indirect taxes which disproportionately hit those on lower incomes, while leaving the weathy largely untouched.
Gordon Brown's response - that the high level of fuel taxes is necessary to sustain health and education - merely confirmed our view that the cash raised in this way from fuel is purely and simply a tax, and has little or nothing to do with any environmental policy. None of the money from this "green" tax is being used to improve or extend public transport.
It got worse: the stand-off at the Brighton conference over Labour's broken pledges to the pensioners underlined the general let-down of Labour's core supporters, and the extent to which Labour's Millbank-controlled constituency activists are now out of touch with public opinion.
Brown's response was to add a new claim: that high fuel taxes are necessary if pensioners are to get an increase next year.
Of course nobody could have predicted that some of the worst autumn weather for decades would inundate towns and cities across the country, compounding the dislocation of the rail network, and bringing whole areas to a soggy halt.
But why was the rail network already on its knees? The train crash near Hatfield that killed four people and injured dozens more, and led to an immediate panic shutdown of track for long-overdue safety checks and repairs, was a predictable - and predicted - result of the dire level of maintenance on the privatised railways.
True, New Labour weren't the ones who carved up and flogged off the railways, creating such a dog's dinner of a network. But as the call for renationalisation has grown from all sides, and even some Tories have been forced to admit how they bungled the privatisation, Labour ministers have done nothing to resolve the problems.
Instead they have attempted to use the feeble stick of "regulation", coupled with the lavish carrot of growing subsidies to the various profit-hungry train operators and other rail companies. The result has been a real disaster: a third-rate service, and two major train wrecks in the last year, while gleeful shareholders and directors pocket even more cash.
The failure to renationalise the rail industry is not just a result of Labour's traditional timidity in the face of big business, with whose bosses Blair, Brown and co seek to build a "partnership". It flows from New Labour's eager acceptance of the neo-liberal, Thatcherite view that the private sector is superior - in "efficiency" and in quality - to the public sector.
That's why - even as the privatised rail industry's contempt for passenger safety was so mercilessly exposed - Labour ministers have been pressing relentlessly ahead with even more privatisation, seeking to flog off the Air Traffic Control system and part privatise the London tube network.
The scandalous neglect of the rail infrastructure has been met by Labour's ... increased subsidies and grants to Railtrack!
In the same way, Labour's answer to the historic under-resourcing of the NHS has been to turn to the private sector. Private consortia are building new hospitals, and will lease them to the NHS for decades of guaranteed profit under the "Private Finance Initiative". The NHS Plan looks forward to PFI projects totalling an estimated £7.6 billion, siphoning vast amounts from the public purse into private firms.
Health Secretary Alan Milburn has outraged hard-pressed NHS nursing and medical staff by announcing a "concordat" with private medical firms, under which private hospital beds would be used to treat NHS waiting list patients when there are not sufficient NHS beds available. The fact that this will simply drain off more staff trained by the NHS and more money required for NHS Trusts does not appear to have occurred to New Labour's blinkered "modernisers".
These deliberate moves towards privatisation and bolstering the desperately unpopular private medical industry come after years in which Labour's cash squeeze has taken a heavy toll on NHS Trusts. Ministers are now concerned that they may not be able to spend all of the extra money they have been allocated this year in Brown's budget, because of problems recruiting and retaining qualified staff on miserable wages.
This is why we are already being softened up to expect that - despite the extra cash available - any bad weather or flu outbreak is likely to bring yet another NHS winter crisis, in the immediate run-up to the planned election date.
Labour's prostration before big business is also typified by the publication of the recent whitewash inquiry into the BSE epidemic, which has done so much to wreck the fortunes of Britain's smaller farmers.
The inquiry conspicuously failed to point the finger of blame at the deregulation of the agricultural feed industry, which seized on the opening created by the Thatcher government, and - in naked pursuit of profit - began systematically feeding ground up cows' brains and spinal cord to cattle. Not one feed company has paid a penny piece in compensation for the billions in losses they have inflicted on the industry and the taxpayer.
Letting these firms get away with their actions is symptomatic of the New Labour view that the profits of these so-called "social partners" are sacrosanct, while the jobs and living standards of working people must take second place.
42 months of New Labour rule have done the unthinkable: they have cheesed off Labour's core support, but given new credibility to the Tories, and to a whole range of right wing and anti-social pressure groups - from the Countryside (pro-hunting) Alliance, to the racists and fascists cashing on the paranoia created by ministers over immigration and asylum.
Having decided to turn a deaf ear to any public protest or alternative approach, Blair must now depend upon the response to Brown's pre-budget statement - and the pathetic disarray of Hague's increasingly extremist Tory Party - to decide whether or not he can risk an election next Spring, or whether he should wait for a better moment.
For the left in the labour movement and those campaigning to reverse the policies of a government which most of the time seems neither to hear nor see the anger of its natural core supporters, the message is clear: the pressure must be stepped up.
Brown has clearly made some concessions under pressure from pensioners and from the fuel protests: let's see more campaigning, more action, more confrontations in the run-up to the election.
The building of a strong working class and progressive opposition to New Labour's neo-liberalism is the best way to prevent legitimate grievances and frustration being annexed by the Tories and the far right.