Leader, New Statesman & Society, 1 March 1996
Last weekend's defeats of social democratic governments in
Australia and Spain will embarrass new Labour. But it's the Tories who should
be really worried
It is hardly surprising that the British Tories have seized
upon last weekend's election defeats for the Australian Labor Party and the
Spanish Socialist Workers' Party (PSOE). Australia and Spain were the two
biggest countries in the world with social democratic governments (assuming,
that is, that you don't count Bill Clinton or Japan's bizarre coalition as
social democratic). And the fact that both will now be governed by the right
is undoubtedly embarrassing for new Labour in Britain.
Most obviously, Australia has been something of a model for
Tony Blair and his colleagues. He went there twice last year, got on famously
with Australian Labor prime minister Paul Keating and praised Australian Labor
for creating "a fair society and a prosperous economy". Other senior
Labour figures – notably Gordon Brown,
John Prescott and Chris Smith – have also made the trip down under to study
welfare reform, economic policy and the business of government.
Labour in Britain has been less than enamoured of the
corporatist accords with the trade unions that have been a hallmark of the
Australian Labor regime since 1983 – and Blair's slapping down of Welsh
spokesperson Ron Davies for saying that the Prince of Wales was unfit to be
king shows that there is no room in new Labour for Keating's vigorous
republicanism.
Nevertheless, British Labour has been inspired by the way
Keating and his predecessor Bob Hawke managed to combine liberal economic
policies with maintenance of the welfare state. British Labour's policies for
getting single parents off welfare benefits and into the labour market owe much
to Australian Labor's Jobs Enterprise Training Scheme (JETS), and Blair and his
colleagues are looking closely at Australian approaches to pension provision
and infrastructural investment. Keating's defeat, in economically favourable
conditions, is a defeat for the nearest thing existing anywhere else in the
world to what Labour wants here.
Spain has been less of a model for Labour in Britain – which
is not altogether surprising, and not just because most Labour politicians'
Spanish is a little ropey. At least for its first decade in office after 1982,
the overwhelming priorities of Felipe Gonzalez's PSOE administration – the
entrenchment of democracy in a country that had only recently emerged from
fascism, the reform and modernisation of its creaking corporatist economy, and
the integration of Spain into Europe politically, economically and culturally
– found few echoes in the concerns of Labour in Britain.
Nevertheless, until last weekend Spain was the last
socialist government in a "big five" European Union country. Barring
victories for the centre-left in Italy's forthcoming general election or
(improbably) the German Social Democrats in an early poll, his defeat means
that an incoming Labour government in Britain in the next year or so will have
social democratic allies only among smaller EU governments.
Yet it would be foolish to take this argument too far. A
major factor in Labor's defeat in Australia was voters' growing dislike of
Keating's personal style, and the PSOE was at least in part the victim of
widespread revulsion at its corruption. Both Australian and Spanish governments
were beaten not so much because of their commitment to social democracy – which
actually didn't amount to very much in either case – but because voters felt
that they had run out of steam after long, uninterrupted spells in office and
that it was time for a change.
Seen in this light, the two election results should cause as
much concern for the Tories as for Labour. Like Australian Labor and the PSOE,
the British Conservatives have been in power for a long time – and voters are
fed up with them. There is a stench of corruption about them at least as
powerful as that surrounding the PSOE; and in John Major they have a leader at
least as unpopular as Keating. Even though, like Australian Labor, they are
approaching a general election with the economy coming good at just the right
time, and even though, like the PSOE with Jose Maria Aznar's Popular Party
(PP), they face an opposition that they have hitherto found easy to scaremonger
about (although there's a difference between spreading fear about Labour's tax
plans and frightening the voters with tales about the PP's murky origins in
Francoite fascism), they look doomed. Last weekend's elections say more about
the difficulties facing tired incumbent governments than they do about social
democracy.
