News from the New Party

Getting away with it

You've got to hand it to Gordon Brown.  Our "new" prime minister is doing a magnificent job of repackaging Old New Labour as New New Labour.  Guido Fawkes comments:

Looking through today's speech from Gordon about his aspirations for Britain, it struck Guido that it is all more of the same. After ten years all the goals of 1997 are still the goals of 2007.

Child poverty, social mobility, youth unemployment, basic literacy and crime are still unsolved problems. In some of these areas things have gone back, not forward - youth unemployment is worse, violent gun crime is higher. How can Gordon be the change?

Quite.  Tom Clougherty at the Adam Smith Institute comments:

Gordon Brown made his first conference speech as Prime Minister yesterday. It lasted one hour and three minutes, and contained virtually nothing new. In fact, it was a masterclass in using lots of words to say very little. Early in the speech Brown said New Labour was "not just occupying, but expanding and shaping the centre ground" of British politics. Can anyone explain what that means?...

What's clear from the speech is that Brown is interested only in top-down micromanagement and an ever-expanding central government. Structural reform didn't even get a look in. How will Brown deliver the 'personalised' NHS he promises? By setting new government targets, of course.

In short, it looks like command and control politics is here to stay. More money and more regulation will, it seems, continue to be the answer to every problem.

And yet Brown is getting away with it.  Every opinion poll shows a comfortable lead for Labour (and even level-pegging at this stage would probably guarantee a Labour majority).  How is he doing it?  Melanie Phillips has the answer:

Talk about the cult of the leader! Gordon Brown’s face is everywhere, and the not so subliminal pitch is obvious. He represents strength as opposed to David Cameron  - who was not mentioned at all in the Prime Minister’s speech this afternoon; no need for nasty vulgar personal attacks which so upset the voters when everyone can make the comparison for themselves between Gordon, the stern and unflinching hunk of Caledonian moral granite and Cameron, the spivvy PR man who is a blank sheet of paper currently being torn to shreds between competing bandwagons. Strength is the Labour word of the moment. Around the conference hall are posters of all kinds of people with the rubric: ‘Strength to change Britain’ - which is code for ‘Gordon isn’t Cameron; Gordon isn’t Blair; Gordon is Britain’.

[The conservative heartlands] were being wooed in this speech with language that could have come straight from my own newspaper, the Daily Mail, and made utterly explicit Brown’s strategy of reaching out to the conservatives of middle Britain who have been so completely abandoned by the Tories. Thus Brown started with the terrorist threat and made repeated references to the ‘strength’ as well as the ‘heroism’ and ‘resolve’ and ‘resilience’ not to mention the ‘indestructible’ spirit that were ‘powerful proof of the character’ of something he repeatedly referred to as ‘our country’;

In other words, David Cameron has been out-Cameroned.  Brown has occupied, expanded and shaped not just the centre ground, but natural Conservative territory too.  The good news, however, is that Brown slipped up.  Melanie again:

This pitch for ‘Brown conservatives’ was somewhat marred, however, by a telling piece of incoherent thinking at the heart of the speech. This is how it went:

In the new Britain of this generation, we must unlock all the talents of all the people.  Not the old equality of outcome that discounts hard work and effort.  Not the old version of equality of opportunity - the rise of an exclusive meritocracy where only some can succeed and others are forever condemned to fail.  But a genuinely meritocratic Britain, a Britain of all the talents.

Eh?? Meritocracy inevitably means some people fail to achieve what others do, and get left behind. It was the belief that no-one should be allowed to fail anything, ever, that created the alternative ‘equality of outcomes’, which is what we now labour under and which leads to such gross injustices as the overt discrimination by universities against candidates from well-educated families or the better schools - the very policy enforced by Chancellor Gordon Brown. His ‘third way mark two’ would appear to be nothing other than that same ‘all must have prizes’ philosophy which has resulted in radical injustice and also caused social mobility to go backwards.

So there you have it.  Look beyond the new serious, reassuring tones of Gordon Brown, and you find the same spurious nonsense that defined and undermined the New Labour project during Tony Blair's first term in office.  There is nothing original, nothing new about Gordon Brown's Labour.  Style is still striving to overcome substance.  Time will tell whether it will succeed again.  The signs, however, are not encouraging.