Denis MacShane urges his Labour colleagues to stop criticising their own party and start attacking the Tories
LABOUR MPs should take break from tearing into their party and concentrate their energies on just how dangerous the Tories are becoming.
Let us leave the business of burying Labour to the gravediggers on The Guardian and other erstwhile friends. The Guardian’s comment pages devoted acres of space to telling us that Labour under Tony Blair was no good while the party under Gordon Brown would alter the laws of economy and society to usher in a better, kinder, fairer Britain.
Now The Guardian has discovered that you cannot abolish the global market economy, or stop oil, food and commodity prices from going up and, if you want ever-increasing tax revenues, taxes must go up and then taxpayers get angry.
I share the concern over scrapping the 10p tax band and other mistakes, but we should get real. Prime Ministers make mistakes and those mistakes are shared by ministers who are paid a great deal of money to make sure their government gets it right. Thus, the roll call of Labour ministers moaning about Brown is both unedifying and unworthy. If they cannot support their own leader, they should return to the backbenches and make way for those will speak for their Government, not against it.
A period of silence would be welcome from the foghorns among Labour MPs who write for the likes of the Daily Mail or make statements and speeches insisting the Government is going in the wrong direction. Careless words cost votes. I know, like and respect many of those who are hawking their views from column to conference telling us what is wrong with Labour. But each time they pontificate, I see Labour seats lost. If we go into opposition, Labour will move sharply to the left and be out of power for two political generations. My constituents – and the people of the country – deserve better.
So here are 10 reasons for attacking the Tories: in the House of Commons, in the pages of The Guardian, at trade union meetings, with constituency activists and when engaging with voters.
- David Cameron wants to scrap the European Union’s social charter. Among other things, this gives working people five weeks paid holiday a year. If the Tory leader gets his way, such an attack on the rights of 28 million employees would mean a return to the return to the worst excesses of Thatcherism.
- Shadow Chancellor George Osborne let slip that a Tory government would restrict still further the right of public sector workers to defend their pay or protest against bullying management.
- Cameron would allow patients to wait in pain to see their GP as he opposes the deal between the British Medical Association and Health Secretary Alan Johnson to open surgeries during the evenings and at weekends.
- William Hague is the most isolationist Shadow Foreign Secretary in decades. His plans to take the Tories out of any relationship with the ruling conservative parties in most EU nation states would reduce Britain ’s presence in Europe to levels lower than under John Major.
- New London Mayor Boris Johnson who has used Powellite language about black children. He has a career-long nationalistic and xenophobic contempt for the EU and foreigners in general. He has mocked regions and cities in Britain in his writing and broadcasts revealing the ugly face of Old Etonian Toryism.
- Cameron has said working class parents will lose Sure Start places to fund tax-breaks for the better-off to hire nannies. This is dressed up as allowing mothers to stay at home, but the tax-breaks and closure of Sure Start would mean be a massive re-distribution from the poor to the richer families in Britain.
- The Tory leader is actually promising higher taxes. His party would not reinstate the 10p tax band. Cameron proposes that ever-greater subsidies would be poured into the Post Office to keep open every counter in Tory villages even if no one uses them. We may like the idea of a post office sign in every corner of Britain, but public money can be used better elsewhere.
- The Conservative Muslim Forum defends the idea of Iran acquiring nuclear weapons, despite the bellicose rhetoric from Iranian leaders concerning the Jews and the sate of Israel. However we view on the Middle East conflict, this is a disgraceful position for an important Tory group to take, yet. Cameron refuses to take any action to dissolve it.
- Shadow Defence Secretary Liam Fox is stridently opposed to American moves to co-operate more with Europe on defence and security issues. The decision of the United States Air Force to work with Airbus in building a new generation of refuelling tankers is an important boost for engineering workers and other in the defence industry. Tory opposition to European and US defence co-operation – which will be increased by whoever replaces George Bush in the White House – is irresponsible and dangerous to Britain ’s national interests.
- Damian Green, the Tories’ immigration spokesman, has said Britain should have copied protectionist France and Germany and banned Poles from working in Britain after EU enlargement. In contrast to Liam Byrne’s calibrated new approach to immigration, this would have been deeply damaging to British firms. Labour should highlight how dangerous Tory xenophobia about European workers is to our economic future.
Alas, however, it is much easier to attack Gordon Brown and a hard-pressed Labour Government going through a bad patch. In France, after 11 months in office, President Nicolas Sarkozy got terrible local election results, losing city after city to the left. But his MPs still back him. In Britain, after 11 years of Labour in power, we also suffered bad local election losses. But instead of rallying around and attacking the Tories, solipsistic Labour MPs turn their fire on their own leader, Government and party. Do we deserve to stay in office if we behave like this?
Denis MacShane is Labour MP for Rotherham
