Leading Labour into economic fantasy land
John Mcdonnell’s speech sounded like an early Christmas gift list. And the public might just fall for it
When the exit poll was announced at 10pm on the night of June’s general election, a swathe of previously sacrosanct political rules were consigned to history.
For years, Labour leaders of the opposition had pleaded with their party to constrain its demands on the nation’s finances, to minimise talk of tax rises to pay for over ambitious programmes. Such loose talk sinks manifestos and delivers government perpetually into the hands of the Conservatives, they repeatedly warned.
Yet an ambitious Labour manifesto in 2017, launched when the party was more than 20 points behind Theresa May’s seemingly unstoppable bid for a fresh mandate, propelled the party to within two percentage points of victory. Had Labour gained another 30 seats directly from the Conservatives, Jeremy Corbyn would today be prime minister.
For Labour to have been written off as losers – not just by commentators but by voters and most of its own MPS – only to make such a dramatic recovery in the polls was impressive. It should not be surprising that the threshold for victory should now be seen as rather different in each of our main parties. To Conservatives, anything short of an overall majority is disastrous, even if the result keeps them in government. To Labour, any result that keeps its number of MPS in double figures is a cause for celebration.
Which is why Len Mccluskey, the general secretary of the Unite union, Labour’s biggest benefactor, boasted to Labour Party conference delegates yesterday that the party had, in fact, won. And by “won” he meant not votes, seats and office, but the far more important prize of “hearts and minds”. Mccluskey, who was re-elected as head of his union by barely six per cent of his total membership, was inevitably cheered by party members hanging on to every word of his psephological genius.
The union baron was merely one of the warm-up acts for the main event of the day: the speech by the shadow chancellor, John Mcdonnell. Long gone are the days when Mcdonnell dismissed membership of the Labour Party as no more than “a tactic”, a vehicle to be abandoned when it became no longer useful. The man who reportedly joked about kneecapping councillors opposed to his friends in the IRA, and who seems to believe that “insurrection” is a legitimate form of campaigning, has been transformed into a kindly, caring, empathetic uncle figure.
He is the kind of uncle who turns up at family gatherings and hands out expensive goodies to children whose parents want to object to his largesse but who remain silent lest they cause a scene. The goodies announced yesterday were numerous and of the very highest quality, if cost is the same as quality.
And why shouldn’t the country welcome such generosity with open arms? After all, if the old Thatcherite and Blairite rules of politics really have been abandoned, if voters no longer care about the consequences for their pay packets of free university tuition and unlimited public sector pay rises, why should they not embrace further such gifts from Labour?
Mcdonnell’s early Christmas list was impressive: a new high-speed railway line to Scotland, a new Crossrail scheme in the north of England and the electrification of the main line in the South-west, all existing PFI (private finance initiative) programmes brought “in-house”, new housing, the buying back of the railway and energy companies and the reiteration of the party’s pledge to abolition tuition fees.
The shadow chancellor was suspiciously silent on how even a fraction of this programme will be paid for, and resorted to the now clichéd “let’s close all the tax loopholes” form of words to which every shadow chancellor in the past 30 years has resorted. If such a measure can pay for the largest capital programme ever envisaged, then surely it could be used tomorrow in order to end the structural deficit without another penny of cuts?
It is quite possible that this tactic by Mcdonnell and the rest of the Labour leadership will work. Labour’s 2017 manifesto is often referred to as “the star” of the party’s campaign earlier this year. And it was: it managed to be both an ambitious programme for government as well as providing a moderate camouflage for Corbyn and Mcdonnell’s more extreme and long-held ambitions. And 40 per cent of the electorate approved.
If it worked once, it can work again, Mcdonnell has calculated. The public are no longer worried about tax rises to pay for unaffordable projects. Corbyn has managed to impress and inspire a range of people far wider than the twentysomethings who attend open-air music festivals. If the opportunity to implement fullblooded socialism in our time cannot be grasped now, then when?
The likes of Len Mccluskey seem content to settle for moral – some might say “imagined” – victories. John Mcdonnell’s ambitions are not so modest. No doubt he feels that his choice of the Labour Party as a “tactic” was well made indeed.