The current Labour row about what, if anything, the party
should learn from Bill Clinton's American Presidential victory is not really
about Mr Clinton.
Everyone involved in the argument knows that Mr Clinton won
a particular election in a particular place at a particular time and that
there is no way that his campaign can simply be copied in Britain. We do not
have Presidential elections, there is no British equivalent of Ross Perot and
our political culture is radically different from America's.
Various prominent Labour figures are actually at each
other’s throats about what went wrong in the British general election last year
and who is to blame.
On one hand, the "Clintonisers" - most
prominently, Patricia Hewitt and Philip Gould, two of the key Labour
strategists in the run-up to the election, but also a group around Tony Blair
and Peter Mandelson who see themselves as "modernisers" of Labour's
message and organisation - are saying that the problem was that the party had
not gone far enough in distancing itself from the trade unions and making
itself trustworthy in the eyes of the affluent working class (in Clintonese,
the working middle class). What is needed now, they argue, is more change along
the lines pursued by Labour between 1987 and 1992.
On the other hand, their opponents, led by John Prescott,
say that the problem was that, precisely because of all the changes between
1987 and 1992, Labour came across in the run-up to the election as lacking all
conviction. Far from continuing the 1987-92 process of change, Labour needs to
return to its traditional values and do it with feeling.
The row is undoubtedly something of a spectacle in an
otherwise boring time for Labour politics, and it is conceivable that it will
yield something of substance before it fizzles out. So for, however, it has
generated more heat than light.
The self-styled modernisers, for their part, have nothing
more substantial to offer than making Labour ever more bland in pursuit of
elusive affluent working-class and centrist middle-class voters. They have
failed to recognise that Labour needs to appeal not just to these voters but
also to poor working-class voters, among whom Labour performed miserably last
time. More importantly, they
have also failed to see that the main reason for "lack
of trust" in Labour, constantly recorded by opinion polls of the party's
target voters, is that people can see through politicians who appear to be all
packaging and no substance.
The traditionalists, meanwhile, have done little better.
They have failed miserably to recognise that it is not enough to keep on
playing the same old tunes and that Labour is desperately out of touch with
young people and with affluent non-unionised workers in the private sector,
particularly white-collar workers and particularly in the south-east. The traditionalists
have nothing better to offer than sentimental rhetoric.
In other words, Labour desperately needs to change, but not
in the direction that the modernisers want. Instead of becoming blander or
retreating into yesterday's slogans, the party needs a new cutting edge in
politics, a new intellectual creativity and a new confidence. What is most
depressing about the past week's controversy is that no one apart from the
proponents of an even more vacuous Labour Party seems prepared to put forward
an alternative to business as usual. It is impossible to dismiss out of hand
the possibility that the columnists who are crowing about Labour's intellectual
bankruptcy are absolutely right.
