I have one simple question to ask about the hullabaloo that has engulfed the Parliamentary Labour Party over the past three or four weeks. I want to be told what it is all about. Why are Labour MPs tearing their party to pieces, to the enormous satisfaction of the Daily Mail’s columnists and Rupert Murdoch’s leader writers?
What, I would like to know, are the great issues of national policy which motivate the Blairites and the Brownites in their duel to the death? What is the nature of the earth-shaking disagreements over, say, alternative ways of fighting the economic crisis which is costing British workers tens of thousands of jobs every week?
The simple fact seems to be that there are no such disagreements or none, at any rate, profound enough to justify plunging the party into yet another leadership contest. The disgraceful truth about the current uproar among MPs is that it is mostly about panic-stricken backbenchers trying to save their seats.
And among the likes of Hazel Blears, James Purnell and Caroline Flint it is good old-fashioned Blairite hatred for Gordon Brown and his allies.
But, alas, this absence of genuine policy debate has been one of the defining characteristics of “new” Labour ever since that well-spun conception was launched upon us by Tony Blair, along with his abandonment of the original, socialist Clause IV of the party constitution.
That explains why the present crisis at Westminster is totally different from most of the many internal party rows that have taken place during my political lifetime.
No one, for example, could doubt that the conflict between Aneurin Bevan and Hugh Gaitskell was about massive issues of policy, both in domestic affairs and in the great issues of foreign policy associated with the Cold War.
True, these disagreements sundered the party for more than a decade, but they mattered.
Equally, there were real disagreements between Harold Wilson and his allies on the one hand and Roy Jenkins and his followers on the other, leading to endless plots by the latter to unseat the former.
And even the vile, uncomradely infighting between right and left in the 1980s – a long-running civil war which kept Margaret Thatcher in office for 11 years – was very definitely about policy.
Certainly, the Militant Tendency’s policies were crazy – and so were those advanced by the assorted Trotskyist factions which competed with the Militants in their bid to hijack the Labour Party. But the differences were about policies and they sparked endless – sometimes almost literally endless – policy debates from top to bottom of the Labour Party.
The same rule, I believe, also applies to divisions in the Tory Party. True, Winston Churchill’s lengthy campaign to keep Anthony Eden out of Number 10 was pretty personal, but it probably stemmed from the belief that Eden wasn’t up to the job – which proved to be correct.
And Harold Macmillan’s efforts to block Rab Butler from succeeding him were certainly nasty, but may have had something to do with the fact that Butler had been a “Man of Munich” when Macmillan was an anti-appeaser.
But the differences between Churchill and the supporters of Neville Chamberlain at the time of Munich were very definitely matters of high policy which were big enough to affect the direction of world history.
Similarly, there can be no doubt that Margaret Thatcher’s duels with Michael Heseltine and later with Geoffrey Howe were about real issues. They were mainly concerned with Britain’s role in Europe and stemmed from Thatcher’s visceral hatred of all things European. They are still central to the arguments in the Tory Party today.
But what on earth are the major policy issues that divide the Blairites from the Brownites now? I suppose James Purnell was a bit to the right of most of his former Cabinet colleagues.
However, Gordon Brown showed no sign of reining him in over his plans to drive single mothers back to work with threats to cut their benefits.
What’s more, I haven’t heard much about Cabinet revolts by Brownite ministers over the treatment of single mothers. Criticism seems to be confined to places like the pages of Tribune and letters to The Guardian.
The fact, I fear, is that Brown’s “new” Labour is depressingly similar to Blair’s “new” Labour.
Amid all the talk of “modernisers” as opposed to – well, Gordon’s stick-in-the-muds, I suppose – it does not seem to be recognised that most of the “modernising” over the past 10 years was done by Gordon Brown during his long stint as Chancellor. If the Blairite ministers and ex-ministers hate him, it is clearly personal.
And there is no escaping the fact that all that modernising landed us with the greatest financial crisis for almost a century. Happily, the Prime Minister’s behaviour over the past few months suggests that he may now recognise this truth. Moreover, his enemies cannot escape the fact that he saved the banking sector in this country, and thereby played a major part in saving the world financial system.
It would be a strange way to reward that achievement by saying goodbye, even if there were an alternative leader who could be guaranted to the seats of those poor quaking MPs. Which, I fear, there isn’t.
