Robert Taylor argues that Labour’s humiliations must mark the start of a progressive political fightback… and that a good start would be a change of leader

REJOICE, rejoice. May 1 2008 should mark the death of the 14-year-old “new” Labour project. The date should be regarded as the day when the long and necessary struggle to restore the lost values and principles of the labour movement to the mainstream of British politics really began.

To judge by the depressing but unsurprising reaction to Labour’s worst local council defeats for 40 years from Gordon Brown and his younger callow Cabinet colleagues, this is not what will happen. They are in denial. But for far too long, they have acted with all the arrogance and pretension of a protected, well-heeled political ruling class, out of touch, not only with those “hard-working” families whose pain and anger they now belatedly claim to feel, but with everyone else outside the ranks of the super rich – the true beneficiaries of the project since 1997. As Bertolt Brecht once famously said of the odious East German regime in 1953, they thought the trouble was not them, but the people, and it was they who should be dissolved and replaced by another.

“New” Labour was invented as a cynical public relations construct, designed to bring the manual working class and “middle” England together in a winning coalition. However, under the hopeless leadership of Gordon Brown, the shallow project has been rumbled and utterly rejected by those it was supposedly designed to benefit. When Tessa Jowell, as campaign manager for Ken Livingstone, had to argue Londoners should vote for him as Mayor to ensure non-domiciled plutocrats in the City were saved from having to pay taxes, anyone with common sense and reason could see the project had lost whatever credibility it once enjoyed.

Brown and his Cabinet have spent far too much of their time trying to appease corporate interests and collaborate with the most vicious forms of global capitalism. In contrast, they have done far too little in devising programmes and policies to tackle social injustice and inequity for the poor, the sick, disabled and elderly. Tax credits were never a sensible way of redistributing income in a more progressive direction. If they were, why is there an estimated £1 billion in unclaimed benefits due to lack of take-up and a monstrous and arbitrary under-payment and over-payment to those in desperate need?

The abolition of the 10 per cent tax band, which will not be reversed, reflects the official, uncaring mind of the kind of bloodless bureaucrats you can find in the pages of Charles Dickens’ novels. And let no one be in any doubt: most of the five million, low-paid “hard-working” people who will suffer a tax rise as a consequence will not be compensated in full for their losses. Like the year when state pensions rose by a paltry 75 pence a week,

Brown has displayed an extraordinary contempt for the people the Labour Party claims to support.

Perhaps Labour’s elitist leaders thought the party’s core support among the manual working class had no alternative but to carry on voting for them, no matter how badly they were treated. Thankfully, May 1 2008 has shown otherwise. Across Labour’s northern heartlands, the party suffered appalling defeats. It is a dramatic vindication of all those who have always questioned the “new” project’s commitment from the beginning to making this country decent, civilised and more socially just.

Nor has there been any southern comfort for the Labour leadership. The party’s fair-weather friends in suburbia have also shown their contempt for the project’s inability to produce policies to assuage their sense of deprivation in these hard times of rising food prices and plummeting property values.

Of course, the troubles of Brown’s Government are only partly of its own making. We are living through a crisis of global capitalism, perhaps the worst since the Great Depression of the early 1930s – and it may last for many years. “New” Labour convinced itself in the 1990s that the laws of free-market economics were somehow suspended and the business cycle had been abolished. All that a government needed to do in order to succeed was deregulate and reward the so-called risk takers, encourage a reckless consumption based on unsustainable private credit and resulting private debt, embrace the world of high finance without any restraint and demonise the socially excluded. We do not have a useful British word like the German schadenfreude but that is the most appropriate way to describe the current debacle.

A mere change of Labour leadership will not be enough, although it would be a good start. Unfortunately, there is no one with the vision and courage ready to take on the task of returning Labour its ethical roots inside mainstream European social democracy. It may need a horrendous defeat comparable to John Major’s in 1997 or the 1931 Labour massacre to start the painful process of revision. That is not a pleasant prospect to contemplate.

So why do we have to spend the next two years until May 2010 – the latest date when a general election can be called – before we begin the renewal? “Listening and hearing” with a visibly exhausted Prime Minister through a series of humiliations is going to make a likely defeat turn into an utter rout. If Labour is consigned to the political wilderness for a generation as a result at the end of such a dismal process it will only have itself to blame.

Perhaps we might see some decisive action if Labour loses the Crewe and Nantwich by-election. The defeat of Brown’s senseless policy to extend detention without trial to 42 days may add to the pressure for change. Frank Field could find enough Labour backbenchers who are willing to support him as he exposes the inability and unwillingness of Brown and the Treasury to compensate the poorest taxpayers in full, as they vaguely promised to do.

But on issue after issue – from nuclear power and nuclear defence to imperialist wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, from more appeasement of private capital with tax breaks and credits to further attacks on public sector workers – the project should be opposed with an increasing ferocity.

The decent and blameless Labour Party members who have suffered for far too long at the hands of the elitism personified by Tony Blair and Gordon Brown need to speak out loud and clear. The Prime Minister seems quite incapable of renewal in office. His political instincts are not those of a social democrat, but a Daily Mail leader-writer. An array of populist right-wing policies will not save this government from oblivion.

There has to be a fightback , but one based on the best ideas and practices of social democracy across the world. We need Labour to reject the Blair/Brown approach and reconnect the party with the centre-left mainstream. This does not mean a return to “old” Labour as narrowly defined by the project’s ruthless enthusiasts through a conformist and hostile media. To recover, Labour must appeal, not just to its northern core or a discomforted south, but to the nation as a whole. This is what it was able to do in 1945 and 1964.

Labour should rediscover its mass appeal as a genuine people’s party with a reforming agenda and a moral and ethical purpose. The project’s plan to consolidate and advance Thatcherism has failed – and deservedly so. Now is the time for change, not in the despair of opposition after 2010.