The optimists in Liverpool detected a positive change of language in Gordon Brown’s TUC speech. Even as he played the media game in order to outflank the Tories by using the word “cuts” – five times, just so there was no room for confusion – the Prime Minister spoke about Labour priorities.
He spoke of more spending for council housing, international “blacklisting” of “uncooperative” tax exiles, of international action to tackle bank bonuses and the protection of frontline services. The day before the latest unemployment figures rose again, he sought to define not just the nature of those cuts but the next general election when he said the choice would be between “Labour who will not put the recovery at risk, will protect and improve frontline services and make the right choices for low and middle income families…and a Conservative Party [which] would reduce public services now and immediately make across the board spending cuts to pay for tax cuts for the wealthiest few”. The choice, he said, would be between Labour and Tory instincts.
The optimists believed that Mr Brown had finally seen the way ahead was to recognise the 1997 alliance with the Tory middle class was over and that the time had come to address and help the people who matter most to Labour. But even the optimists were unanimous in the view that it is madness to make cuts in a recession and that to do so would actually end up hurting the very people Mr Brown is pledged to protect.
It is no wonder trade union leaders left Liverpool in defiant trepidation. Just exactly what is a “lower priority budget” or a “realistic” public sector pay settlement, or an “unproductive asset” that can be sold off so effortlessly? Why was there nothing but a spooky silence on the privatisation of public services? Mr Brown was buying time on all these questions until the pre-Budget statement in November.
Just a couple of months ago, the Prime Minister declared that the clear difference between Labour and the Tories is that Labour would stand for investment and the Conservatives for cuts. It has not been the economic climate that has changed so significantly since then but the political winds that have made preparedness to make cuts an electoral virility test; winds one again driven by the Tories. A readiness to use one specific four-letter word is no substitute for bold, distinctive policies.
