Anthony Barnett (London, OK): I am trying to assess the implications of Labour's cash crisis. Yesterday I wrote about parts I - IV and that what matters most was the effort to hide David Abraham's huge donations at a time when everyone knew transparency matters. Jon Mendelsohn will have to go. Now I want to look to what it means in terms of the nature of New Labour and Gordon Brown. I asked before, is he like the Laocoon struggling to free himself of the deadly serpents of Blairism? Is this the picture of our Prime Minister for those of you who do not know the famous work?
I think that, on the contrary, what is emerging is that Brown was trying to be a better, more efficient, less hysterical version of Blair - that the aim of the distancing, most notably and admirably over Iraq, has been to preserve a domestic continuity.
Brown positioned himself as more of a Labour man. To work this needs to recognise the claims of other tendencies and interests within the party. No Prime Minister can succeed unless they respect the way their own party is itself an alliance. For example, when Thatcher retained the loyalty of both the modernising, pro-Europeans and the Powellite nationalists she ruled the roost. When she lost the support of the former, and indeed attacked them, she crashed. Blair crashed too. All parties have at least two wings. To fly you need both. When Brown achieved the uncontested coronation he desired and prevented splits within the party. But the result was not an enlarged and generous party reaching out to the country as a party, with the self-belief and energy which this releases, but a hollowed out machine unable to appeal to its members or convince a disbelieving public. Brown made a personal hit at first, over the heads of the party. His strategy, which he fell back on after the election debacle, seems to be to use the state to deliver the 'competence' that will persuade public and press that he should continue to shape the future.
If so, this is a purely administrative approach, even more apolitical than Blair's. And thus a stifling one. There is little or no voice for anyone else, the essence of politics and democracy. Also, the definition of competence belongs to the market.
There is some analysis of all this on left blogs (please send in more links). The overview, that Brown's strategy, shorn of any movement of support, can neither revive nor escape from New Labour. Without the feedback mechanisms that real party life provides, the crash was bound to come.
As Gerry Hassan puts it on the Compass site, New Labour became "an unapologetic party of the business classes: a party which pretends that ideology is dead, but which apes and embraces the ideology of business and the market". He extends this to "the entire Westminster class" and concludes
The unedifying situation we now find ourselves in is whether there is enough energy, interest and integrity left in the Labour Party and wider body politic to challenge the vested interests and take back the party and wider politics in the name of the people.
Even Labour Home is obliged to look at the larger picture,
were it to be shown that people acted in good faith in this business, and nobody knowingly broke the law (something which it is actually quite hard to believe) it is the culture at the centre of the party which needs to be revolutionised if we are to prevent this sort of thing from ever happening again.
There needed to be a much more fundamental change at the end of the Blair era. As such it was an historic mistake - one which the PLP must bear responsibility for - to avoid a leadership contest and facilitate the much-yearned-for 'dignified handover' - a process which signalled to people inside and outside the party: 'business as usual'. That's in the past and cannot now be put right, but there are things that can be done:
If this is old leftist talk, accurate perhaps but shallow, then there is a different class of analysis in Martin Bright's reporting in the Statesman on his close analysis of what was happening within New Labour for a Dispatches film,
It has always been my contention that Brown's government would be in big trouble if it did not realise that the cash-for-honours revelations had identified a canker eating at the soul of the party. The fact that no one was convicted of a criminal offence does not mean that the Labour Party was given a clean bill of health. Brown cannot draw a line under party funding issues until he addresses its implications.
This is a must read article where he points out something I had not taken on board (despite its disclosure in Private Eye) that New Labour's accounting seems to have been clearly criminally negligent (isn't this anything to do with the Treasurer?)
For Chris Dillow at the Liberal Conspiracy (long may it grow!) takes a similar approach that something structural is amiss and argues that
the biggest scandal of all - that we’ve taken the death of mass politics for granted? And this is where bloggers come in. Insofar as we have a role, it’s to resuscitate mass politics - to assert that politics is something the people do, not something that’s done to us.
and Vino S makes a strong plea to make sure that the crisis does not fulfill the dream of Blair and Co which was to break from the trade union links and funding altogether. Elections in the UK are not so costly and it would be a tragedy if the incompetence of last gasp Blairism was to provide the dreamt for opportunity of annihilating Labour as the party that represents working men and women.
If all this is true, then it looks as if the answer is going to have to be raising money on the web. We've seen in the US that this is possible and not only for insurgent candidates. Can you imagine Brown doing this?
The BBC has just released a graph that shows donations to the Labour Party since Brown took over. The dependency on large individual funders of £250,000 plus could not be more vivid. Perhaps red was not the best chosen colour.
