New Labour
misses key tricks

This is bound to seem churlish, nay curmudgeonly - as both Gordon Brown and Tony Blair jostle to spell out their great New Year plans for debt relief abroad and SureStart at home.  Both sets of policies have respectable socialist roots in the abiding principles of equality, and both will read well as part of a May 2005 Manifesto.

But they still miss the point.   Both Leaders are abandoning key socialist objectives for a preoccupation with secondary issues.  With a "historic" third-term in sight, Labour ought to be frying much bigger fish.  In the case of SureStart, the aim is redistributive justice in children's preparation for the market-place of life. Children should all be fit young boxers when they enter the ring of life for the first time, all metaphorically join the Army at 16 - and that is not an ignoble political aspiration.  In the case of debt relief, the aim is to release more resources for the construction of successful Third-World societies.

• But what then? What comes next?  We have no new ideas about the waging of the market battle, once the boxers are in the ring - who should be the Umpire? Who should write the Rules? Does each fighter have a doctor in his corner?  What if an opponent cheats? 

And what of Third World Aid and Debt Relief?  It certainly makes more resources available.  But the harsh truth is that nobody really knows how to foster equitable and thriving economies in the "third world".   We simply do not have the expertise.  Indeed, nobody really knows why the "Western economies" function as they do - except perhaps that they have had the historical advantage of imperial domination, which still in part persists.  Why are the German and Japanese economies so weak?  We don't know, really: if we did, we would know what to do about them.  Even the serried ranks of Thatcher-funded management-consultants unleashed upon the Soviet Union could not generate a strong economy...

My point is this.  Politics is about far more than the allocation of resources.  Even in the Tsunami Disaster case, the reports now suggest that "resource scarcity" is not now the problem: the questions are all about what to do and how to organise it.  And Labour is saying nothing about these vital questions of social order, and ordered development.

Which tricks is Labour missing?  There are four principles which we should be cultivating, to demonstrate the practical success of socialism - just as the National Health Service demonstrates it.

• The creation of a just system for the redistribution of wealth in older age, i.e. an honourable State Pension Scheme.  Markets cannot do this.
• The cultivation of universal, secular, state education as the primary fundament of a sustainable civic order.  Markets cannot do this.
• The introduction of a fair and sustainable system of support for those facing unemployment.  Markets cannot do this.
• The assertion of the primacy of public service and public servants in the delivery of public goods. Markets cannot do this.

These all represent great socialist opportunities, addressing questions which the whole world is asking.  As socialists, we do have distinctive answers. That is why the "European model", for all its faults, is more closely matched to the requirements of the future that the American free-market model.

These are all challenges which New Labour is passing up, in favour of less difficult, less demanding tasks. 

That's why I say that New Labour
is missing the socialist tricks.

• What do you think?