Skip to main content

Labour needs a better narrative

Labour has rarely been kind to the party's former leaders.   The memberships, or activists at least, are quick to slate them as 'traitors'.  Decades later, the view is different.

This was certainly so with Harold Wilson who was despised on the right of the party and abandoned by the left.  Labour tends to over-state its failures and minimise its successes.   Now we look back and see how successful Wilson was in the circumstances of his time.

This has also been so with Tony Blair.  The record of Tony Blair's government is remarkable by any standard.  His sin, for the left of Labour, was that he hunted with the hare and the hounds.  He set out to make capitalism work better.  It was a laudable aim and his achievements were considerable.

Blair's government massively increased funding of the NHS and waiting lists and times tumbled.  It made inroads in reducing child poverty with targetted policies.  It reduced pensioner poverty.  It put more police officers on the streets.  It produced remarkable constitutional reform with devolution to the nations, and it pushed the peace process in Northern Ireland to an agreement.

It transformed our human rights laws and introduced openness and accountability with freedom of information legislation and the Human Rights Act in 1998.

But this article isn't written simply to praise Tony Blair.  It is to make the point that very little of this achievement has been presented by the Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn.   Even the minimum wage was a major achievement of the Blair years.   The Labour Party should be writing its history and not leaving it to others to denigrate it.

When I left school in 1964, I went to work in a branch of the Home Office.  It was just at the time of the first Wilson Government with a slender majority after thirteen long Tory years.  Most of those working in the office were shocked by the result of the election that October. My immediate superior told me that Wilson would bankrupt the country, just as they had done under Attlee.

I found that odd, given that the Attlee government had achieved so much, but I was sixteen and a bit wet behind the ears.

Of course, Labour did not bankrupt the country.  When I read the history of it I found that not only had Attlee's government introduced the welfare state and the NHS but that during the years that followed the war the national debt plummetted.  Of course, it would because we were no longer funding the war.  But increased welfare spending and spending on infrastructure didn't bankrupt the country.

On the contrary,  as people were put back to work and wages rose, so tax revenue increased to pay for social funding.  Libraries and schools and council housing were built.  People's lives were transformed, and opportunities created.  My generation, in particular, benefited substantially from the welfare state.

Decades have passed since then, and we can now see that far from Labour governments bankrupting the country, they tend to run smaller budget deficits!  Their record on the economy is, in general, just as good if not better than the Tories.

The Tories tend at some point to push up unemployment, and paying for that increased the budget deficit under the Tories.

But if you consider the perceptions.  The generally held view is that the Tories are good with the economy and Labour bad.     This is why it was easy enough for Boris Johnson to suggest that Labour always left the country in an economic crisis.   It remained unchallenged.  But it is wrong.  It is a distortion of history.

But that distorted history is aided by the tendency of the left to critique Labour governments.  They use the language of failure.  They call former leaders 'traitors'.  They question the 'socialist' credentials of former leaders.  But by doing so they add to the Tory narrative of socialist failure.

Already, the knives are out for Jeremy Corbyn.  He has not yet stood down, but he is being blamed for the election defeat.  Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonell have accepted their responsibility as leaders.  Yet the knives are plunged.   History is being written.  Blame apportioned.  Even the word 'traitor' is used.

Yet, this is before anyone has been able to fully reflect on what went wrong.

Of course, we all have our ideas on that.  But we should be wary of writing a Tory history of Labour.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Prioritising people in nursing care.

There has been in recent years concern that care in the NHS has not been sufficiently 'patient centred', or responsive to the needs of the patient on a case basis. It has been felt in care that it as been the patient who has had to adapt to the regime of care, rather than the other way around. Putting patients at the centre of care means being responsive to their needs and supporting them through the process of health care delivery.  Patients should not become identikit sausages in a production line. The nurses body, the Nursing and Midwifery Council has responded to this challenge with a revised code of practice reflection get changes in health and social care since the previous code was published in 2008. The Code describes the professional standards of practice and behaviour for nurses and midwives. Four themes describe what nurses and midwives are expected to do: prioritise people practise effectively preserve safety, and promote professionalism and trust. The

Half measures on heat pumps

Through the "Heat and Buildings Strategy", the UK government has set out its plan to incentivise people to install low-carbon heating systems in what it calls a simple, fair, and cheap way as they come to replace their old boilers over the coming decade.  New grants of £5,000 will be available from April next year to encourage homeowners to install more efficient, low carbon heating systems – like heat pumps that do not emit carbon when used – through a new £450 million 3-year Boiler Upgrade Scheme. However, it has been widely criticised as inadequate and a strategy without a strategy.  Essentially, it will benefit those who can afford more readily to replace their boiler.   Undoubtedly, the grants will be welcome to those who plan to replace their boilers in the next three years, and it might encourage others to do so, but for too many households, it leaves them between a rock and a hard place.  There are no plans to phase out gas boilers in existing homes.  Yet, that is wha

No real commitment on climate

Actions, they say, speak louder than words.  So, when we look at the UK government's actions, we can only conclude they don't mean what they say about the environment and climate change.  Despite their claims to be leading the charge on reducing emissions, the UK government is still looking to approve new oil fields.  The Prime Minister, Boris Johnson,  has announced his support for developing the Cambo oil field and 16 other climate-destroying oil projects. Cambo is an oil field in the North Sea, west of Shetland. A company called Siccar Point has applied for a permit to drill at least 170 million barrels of oil there. If it's allowed to go ahead, it will result in the emissions equivalent of 18 coal plants running for a year.  What? Yes, 18 coal plants a year!  Today, as I write, Greenpeace is demonstrating in Downing Street against this project.  I suppose it will get the usual government dismissal and complaints about inconveniencing others.  Well, we know it won't