It’s not just Gordon Brown who looks like a dead man walking, Labour now looks like a party of zombies. Polling lower than ever recorded, with its leader sunk below any previous floor, no party has ever come back from here before. Bad news is only replaced by worse every week that passes. It’s hard to know if the living dead walking toward their doom are in denial or have already decided nothing can save them.
A few Cassandras try to wake the rest from their torpor. But they go unheard: those voices usually come from outriders of the two edges of the growing divide between the tax-cutting, devolving marketizers (Hutton, Purnell, MacShane) and the back-to-core-values-heartlanders (McDonnell and the usuals).
The sleepwalkers can be heard murmuring reassurances to each other as they go by. Their low hum sounds like this: steady as she goes, don’t rock the boat, don’t drop the pilot, carry on governing to July — the summer break always sees governments rise in the polls when absence makes the heart grow fonder. Refresh ourselves at the autumn conference, Cameron has no policies, 11 years’ experience is the country’s best defense against the current global storm. Be dull, be solid, don’t look down, don’t look at the polls, don’t look at the party’s £24-million debt. Remember, polls can go up as well as down. That’s the way Labour’s world risks ending — in a sorry state of delusion.
The whips who arm-twisted so manfully on the 42-day detention vote did Labour no service: better by far to lose. Those many MPs who voted against their will were foolish to fear destabilizing an already capsized party. What are they trying to preserve? Whatever the outcome of the bizarre and maverick by-election called by David Davis, even if it causes Cameron some minor turbulence, for Labour to be saved by Ukip, Ann Widdecombe and the DUP was a humiliation. It was a personal shaming of Gordon Brown, who forced his unwilling MPs to pass a bad law born of crude political miscalculation.
At least when Tony Blair dragged his MPs to war there was no doubt he did what he thought right, though unpopular: because he was wrong, it was the end of him. But here Brown knowingly did what was wrong in an absurd attempt to out-tough the Tories and please a punitive public. The public may have supported it when asked by pollsters, but it was a low priority they never mentioned spontaneously. It no more inclined people to vote Labour than when Brown bribed them with 2p off tax, stolen from the pockets of the lowest earners. Both these are character-destroying catastrophes from which Brown can never recover, because they betray dishonorable and dishonest intent — and that has been rumbled by the voters. He can certainly never mention that old moral compass again.
Most serious of all, his chancellorship is unraveling. How many times did he say “No more boom and bust”, though wiser heads warned of hubris? Many of us warned that his willfully untaxed property bubble would end in tears. Even the independence of the Bank of England looks a less good idea, or at least the remit given it too narrow. Unemployment always lags and has jagged up in latest figures this week, but the bank is tasked with only considering inflation. Just when Britain may soon need a Keynesian, FDR response to recession — borrow, spend and cut interest rates — we may have a whiff of old-fashioned monetarism in charge at the bank.
There’s a danger Mervyn King will fight the last war against 1970s inflation with its wages spiral. But what we have now is inflation caused not by wages, which have hardly moved, but by world food and energy prices. No amount of raising interest rates and putting people out of work in one small country will have any useful deflationary effect on prices of global commodities. Inequality — its highest since records began in 1961 — makes GDP growth a virtually meaningless statistic. Ministers apologizing for the poverty figures said they had been running up the down escalator — but they could have controlled it with a higher minimum wage and a new top tax band for the explosion of superwealth. John Hutton can celebrate city bonuses all he wants, but well over half of the country —- what used to be Labour’s half — will not join him.
The miserable child and pensioner poverty figures were entirely predictable because for three years no extra money was given to them; so next year’s figures will show a third rise. There is one budget left to try to reduce figures before a May 2010 election. (Ironically a deep recession would improve relative poverty figures, though absolute poverty would rise.) The £2.7bn Brown spent on a tax bribe could have been used to nearly reach the child poverty target. But he made other choices, regressive and effectively irreversible, such as his 3p total cut in basic income tax, cuts in capital gains and corporation and inheritance tax. Bad financial luck has dogged his first year but his worst woes are all his own pigeons flapping home to roost. MPs, supporters and observers like myself were promised new clarity, purpose and conviction. We should have listened less to the promises of his myrmidons, but looked more critically at the numbers in his treasury accounts.
What’s to be done? Too passively, Labour faces its imminent destruction — an electoral wipeout of such severity it could last as long as last time. Ministerial cars and red boxes seem to dull the edge of panic. It’s unkind to kick friends who are down: Labour is caught in the vortex of the media’s theater of cruelty. But what does it take to wake ministers and MP somnambulists still dozing despite the Crewe, Boris and local election shocks? The Cabinet’s docile acceptance of the pointlessly destructive 42-day vote suggests they prefer to dumbly walk the plank than to mutiny. If so, the water will close over their heads in a couple of years with hardly a splash. Never mind them, but what of the half of the population bound to fare even worse under the Conservatives?
Two years is a long time in politics, Labour ministers keep saying to reassure themselves. Indeed, waiting for the inevitable may feel interminable. Unless they seize their last chance. What couldn’t you do with two years and a majority of 66? With the recklessness of those about to die, they could do everything they never dared for fear of the Daily Mail and the polls. Things couldn’t get worse — that could be liberating. Fearlessness is now the only possible chance of victory. The question is whether they still have the will to live and the youthful energy to remember what it was they meant to do.
