Unlearnt lessons from 13 years of Labour

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From Ross McKibben in London review of Books:

Brown accepted as proven what he was told by the City and its spokespersons in the media. He moved from what was perceived to be an electoral necessity – you can’t win elections if you alienate the City – to a belief that prevailing City opinion was right, that it was on the side of history. Much followed from this: light-touch regulation, a culture of remuneration that scandalised most of the country, a banking crisis, dithering in response to that crisis, a colossal bail-out of the banks with consequences that hang over the country’s finances, and then a failure to make the banks behave responsibly even when they were owned by the government. Brown, and Blair, and their colleagues, forgot a lesson most Labour leaders once learned at their mothers’ knee: when the ideologues of finance capital and the market come calling, you keep the door shut.

The next mistake was to embrace ‘choice’. The belief in choice followed naturally from a belief in the efficacy of the market, which was taken for granted by the people Labour ministers listened to. This had very damaging consequences both in education and in health. In education it predicated parental choice as the foundation of policy. It gave parents unique rights. But why should parents have such rights? In the jargon, education is a ‘social good’ not a ‘private good’. How and where our children are taught must be a collective not an individual decision; and that is the view of most parents. They want their children to get a good education, but they are prepared to let the professionals do it, as surveys have repeatedly confirmed. Despite this, the right to choose was thought paramount by New Labour and was to be encouraged by creating an array of different kinds of school where efficient parents could find what they wanted. Except, of course, that they couldn’t. Only some got their choice, and they were often the best connected, best informed. Attempts to correct this via lotteries only outraged the losers even more. Far from encouraging social harmony, choice encouraged a war of all against all. Far from solidifying the Labour vote, choice undermined it. And it left the way open for the Conservative Party’s silly proposals for ‘free schools’: parent-run, state-financed independent schools spuriously claimed to empower the poor.

...Labour now has time to repent at leisure. What should it do? Disowning its immediate past would be a good first step, but it has to elect a new leader and all the serious candidates are heavily implicated, for better or worse, in the New Labour ‘project’. One thing it is in no danger of doing is retreating into socialist rhetoric of the early 1980s variety, which is a relief. It could, of course, do nothing, since as the only opposition party it might expect to be the inevitable beneficiary of the coalition’s unpopularity. That would be risky. The coalition need not become unpopular, and even if it does the smaller parties could also benefit. Rather, Labour should emphasise the extent to which it is the party of public provision and collective life. It should also accept that the obsession with choice was a dead end, that the middle classes, aspirational or otherwise, do not always demand choice or pursue their own interests at the expense of everything else. All that choice has done is to create false markets in which there are as many losers as winners. Such markets do nothing to consolidate the Labour vote.

Then their is constitutional reform....Fundamentally, Labour has a Tory conception of the British state, which is why a Con-Lab government is not as mad an idea as it sounds. Bit by bit over its history Labour has come to accept the political institutions of the imperial state: monarchy, aristocracy, primitive electoral systems, independent nuclear weapons, the intelligence services (once thought the class enemy), the special relationship.

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