It is not all over. In spite of their continuing lead in the opinion polls, support for the Tories in the country has little depth. Their campaign is held together by mood music alone. David Cameron’s policies – even when he can understand them – are revealed to be weakly developed and often fall apart when scrutinised. The majority of the country does not share the Tories’ support for the rich and not the many, inequality over fairness.
As the general election gets closer, voters will be able to see that the Tories have not changed.
Tribune will continue to raise its voice with other progressives in order to defeat the reactionary forces of conservatism and to return a true Labour government. We will focus on the damage a Tory government would do to the fabric of the nation and its most vulnerable. But we will not shirk in posing difficult questions for the Labour leadership.
To win the election, Labour and its policies must speak to the vast majority of people who would support its values. Yet there has been a shift in the language and tone among Labour’s senior leadership figures which has handed the message over to Peter Mandelson and a new electoral strategy.
The botched leadership coup earlier this month was not, as is widely believed, a bloodless escape for Gordon Brown. Out of the frantic meetings on that critical afternoon, public spending cuts and the promotion of them as an answer to the Tories re-emerged as paramount.
As Michael Burke convincingly argues on page 13-14, fighting cuts with cuts is a grave mistake that will worsen not improve the economy. Investment, the policy that Mr Brown endorsed just days beforehand, is the Labour way, and the right way, forward. The shift that has taken place is a regression to the darkest corners of the party’s Blairite past, a burial of change.
There is a significant group of Labour MPs in government and on the backbenches who recognise this and who are prepared to work with others in the labour movement to argue that Chancellor Alistair Darling’s focus on “sharpening his axe” to cut the deficit is wrong.
Mr Burke’s piece this week is the first of a series of articles that Tribune plans to publish in order to show that there is a credible alternative to following the Tories. We will aim to demonstrate that the argument, led by Lord Mandelson, in favour of cutting taxation on the richest is in stark contrast to the overwhelming view of a public, whose median income is £23,000 a year, that wants to see, especially in a time of austerity, fair taxation and burden sharing. These people represent a wide coalition of social, ethnic regional and national groups. It is ludicrous to write them off as targets of a “core vote strategy”.
On the contrary, this is the coalition that Labour needs to rebuild in order to win.
