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758   8 July 2003   

"Brownites! Get ready to steal"

Family Favourites is a gentle, populist TV programme, which I much enjoy, thanks to the easy-going character of Les Dennis.  And the rules give a chance-to-win to the underdogs, if the leading-team should falter before reaching the finishing post.  "Fotheringales!  Get ready to steal" - exclaims Les Dennis with genuine enthusiasm and real energy - as the leaders threaten to falter.

That is what Gordon Brown must now do. I have argued for several months that Tony Blair's self-confidence is deserting him, and that he will at some point - seemingly unpredictably - decide to quit.  He is an advocate by nature, capable of believing passionately in his Case, but without any deep-seated belief in himself.  His steely self-confidence is part of the advocate's performance. He now realises, as he faces his shaving mirror, that he was wrong - both in his relations with the right-wing Bush, and his consequential passionate presentation of the case for attacking Iraq.  He realises too that there is no way back.  And in his reactions to the absurd triviality of the BBC/Campbell spat, we see an injured, cornered animal.

So I agree with Hugo Young, writing in The Guardian  It is time for Blair to quit.  That is why, I suspect, we are being bombarded with "New Directions" conferences - the Old Left last weekend, Peter Mandelson this coming weekend.  With Hugo Young, I find it difficult to imagine any successor other than Gordon Brown - and yet for many (including myself) his responsibility for building a massive new means-tested State weighs heavily against him.  His espousal of means-testing and tax credits was a grave error of political judgment, unwisely extending the dependency State. It is an error from which he must escape, if he is to enter the pantheon of socialism.

This is what he should do.  As Blair fades from the scene, Gordon Brown should assemble a "New New Labour" manifesto based on three themes -

• A new liberalism of style and spirit, a sensitivity to human rights and individual freedoms - reversing the appalling legacy of David Blunkett - giving priority to improving workers' rights as well as union rights, changing the vicious culture of prohibition and criminalisation which has emerged, unforeseen, under New Labour, and targeting a new and liberal settlement on migration management

• A new culture of entitlement, notably benefit entitlement, reversing his own miserable means-testing record - including a much-improved, universal State old age pension, and the creation of more allowances as of right, to replace the corrosive complexities of the means-tested State;

• A new commitment to devolution - a far-reaching commitment to the redistribution of power and democratic involvement, regionally and locally - paradoxically, this could achieve much of the local differentiation of public financial commitment which he has hitherto been trying to achieve by centralist means - local taxation is an entirely acceptable form of hypothecation, which keeps the brakes on public expenditure.

He should ditch the disastrous rhetoric of "rights and  responsibilities", the communitarian claptrap which has seemed to inform many of Blair's most illiberal mistakes.  He should take the opportunity to repair Blair's ruptures with Europe, forging socialist links and using his authority to deliver the Euro.  He should get tougher with the corporate sector, demanding real structural reforms in return for a new political concordat (he should read Tame the Corporations).  He should recognise the limits of representative democracy and generate a greater commitment to the extension of participatory democracy, reaching into every corner of our society.

• With that manifesto, he would unite the Labour Party and win the next Election.

• And the one after that...

759  9 July 2003  

The Salariat is troubled

Salaried politicians are understandably concerned with occupying the centre of the public stage - because that determines their future earning power.  To maintain their position, they must go on winning elections.  So when Welsh politicians discovered they were being ignored by 80% of the country's youth, they were right to get worried...

The country's cadre of salaried politicians has never faced such a serious dilemma.  "Democracy" has effected a genuine revolution, such that politicians are now genuinely facing the need to win elections - above all, to win elections - as a precondition of their future earning-power.  Many of them have never had to earn a living outside the race for the ballot-box.  Yet that basic economic fact converts them all from leaders into followers, creates focus group junkies, subverts political courage and initiative, makes faint hearts out of everyone.  And in that very process, they lose the magic that made their predecessors seem as beacons of wisdom and concern, in the eyes of their constituents and the general public. 

The answer does not lie, however, in fiddling with the apparatus of the voting system.  The hapless Minister Nick Raynsford has been detailed off to devise new and easier means of voting - as if it were the process that was in issue, rather than the very substance of our "politics".  The truth is that Westminster and Cardiff Bay politicians have been stripped of their magic, and they will not recover it.  The path of reform lies through the far-reaching redistribution of power, the involvement of citizens of all ages in the governance of their own affairs - less reliance upon representative democracy, rather than more.

Above all, the search is for a new and imaginative border-line to be drawn between the salariat and the rest of us, ordinary citizens seeking to play an active part in the governance of our own communities.  This border-line has not traditionally been the focus of political attention: throughout my own lifetime, the drive has been all one-way, favouring the expansion of the salariat. 

• We must now, systematically, move in the other direction.

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