Editorial 2
More break ranks to denounce rudderless New Labour
MO MOWLAM, former darling of New Labour, has become the latest and most prominent figure to break ranks and criticise Tony Blair’s increasingly discredited government.
Writing in the Sunday Mirror, Mowlam argues that New Labour is now widely seen as sleazier than the Tories, while Blair seems to regard himself as a president, with little time for domestic problems.
Her anger, like that of many Labour activists, has been brought to a head by the threat that Blair will drag Britain into a war with Iraq at the behest of George Bush, with little or no debate in parliament or government.
And she quotes a nameless minister warning that "People think we are a load of shysters."
Mowlam’s criticisms follow strong words from other former ministers including Glenda Jackson and Frank Dobson, and growing evidence of unease among Labour’s backbenchers at the way Blair’s reactionary politics are alienating the party’s traditional supporters.
The recent alliance between Blair and Italy’s hard-line, right wing premier Berlusconi on deregulation and privatisation within the EU, produced an angry outburst even from the normally docile TUC leader John Monks, who branded it "bloody stupid".
But the first few months of 2002 have seen a succession of events and policy decisions which confirm that New Labour, lacking any principles or policies of its own, is increasingly following the lead of big business.
At the beginning of March Blair chose to appear alongside a privatised rail company boss to launch a 30-page glossy pamphlet entitled "Reforming our Public Services", which served mainly to demand even more "flexibility" from public sector workers, and insist that public services should be subject to more competition and invasion from private sector providers.
Even while union leaders denounced this new declaration of war on public service workers, Blair got up to make a speech supposedly to settle growing doubts of Labour activists: instead he presented a vacuous series of waffling assertions that effectively reaffirmed New Labour’s total lack of guiding principles.
"There is a clear road map to our destination but sometimes it can seem as if it were a mere technocratic exercise, well or less well managed, but with no overriding purpose to it," he burbled.
Indeed frustration is often as much over Labour’s complete inability to manage or deliver on promised policies as it is about its increasingly reactionary political programme.
The complete dog’s breakfast that has been made over reform of the House of Lords, the failure to deliver significant investment in public transport, Stephen Byers’ legendary inability to run even his own office, Estelle Morris’s ability to antagonise not only teachers but even head teachers in her pig-headed refusal to face facts on teacher shortages, the growing cash squeeze on local councils, the fiasco of Labour’s efforts to force in elected mayors … the catalogue of incompetence grows alongside the government’s blinkered commitment to PPP on the tube, PFI in education and schools, and competition in the post office.
Add to this Blair’s uncompromisingly reactionary foreign policy, and his party’s willingness to take cash and provide favours to a long line of unsavoury business figures, its control freakery and its arrogant disregard for the views of its members and supporters, and you have a recipe for an increasingly dysfunctional government.
The coming local elections will offer socialists in many areas another opportunity to test out the extent to which Labour’s base support is not just alienated but actively looking for alternatives. The chances for Socialist Alliance candidates improve with each day of government failure.