The Secretary of State for Wales wants Lib Dem voters to tactically back the Labour Party
“I talked about it with my dad, my brother and my son. Three generations of us talked about going – but it just doesn’t work”, says Peter Hain. He’s explaining why he won’t be in South Africa for the World Cup in June.
“I was there for a short break over Christmas and you could see the optimism building up – all the flags and giant footballs leading from the airport.
“It’s fantastic the World Cup is in South Africa, the rainbow nation, the country of my childhood, a country I put a lot of effort into trying to change for the better. I’d love to go”, he declares. “But it’s right in the middle of Parliament, all the venues are in different places and I wouldn’t be able to go to more than one match.”
So the Welsh Secretary will be in Britain, newly re-elected as MP for the very safe Labour seat of Neath and right in the thick of things – whatever the result of the general election. You get the feeling that the scores in Britain are going to be more important for him.
“This election is a moment of truth for everybody on the progressive side of British politics”, he says. “Whatever people’s criticisms of the Labour Government, whatever their deep differences might be – principally on Iraq – I’m not asking them to abandon their principles or to renounce their disagreements.
“But, when you look across the piece, you see a Labour government that’s going to continue investing for the future, protect the maximum number of jobs and frontline public services, and a Tory government that’s coming in with an absolute gleam in its eye to cut public services, cut jobs and really do what Margaret Thatcher might have dreamt of doing but was never able to.
“To trim the state and government right back to the bone and leave everybody on their own to look after themselves.
“David Cameron and George Osborne remind me of George W Bush’s ‘compassionate conservatism’ and all that lovey-dovey phraseology – and you saw what you got with George Bush. You’ll get a really right-wing Conservatism with Cameron and Osborne.”
Hain has already set out the case for increased tactical voting in the key marginal seats, long targeted by the Conservatives’ “Ashcroft money” – and where the swing against Labour runs higher than it does across the rest of the country.
He strongly encourages progressives of all parties and none to vote tactically against the Conservatives in Labour-Tory marginals, But he won’t be drawn on how Labour voters in Tory-Liberal Democrat marginal seats should cast their ballots, beyond referring them to the working-class hero who speaks loud and clear on the issue: “I leave any wiser considerations to my good friend Billy Bragg and other advocates of tactical voting.”
Having spent his early life fighting for political rights in his early home of South Africa, Hain sees no irony in having to defend Labour’s record on what some on the left see as a Government assault on civil liberties in this country.
It’s one area Labour has found tricky in Parliament in recent years. National identity cards, DNA testing, retention of genetic profiles by police – the list of areas where the Government has faced opposition from both the Lib Dems and the Tories has certainly grown.
“I like to think my record on civil liberties is up there with the best of them”, says Hain. “I find this curious – and it comes down to ID cards in the end. I don’t know anybody who thinks we shouldn’t have biometric passports, and you’re eventually not going to be able to travel without them. And clearly there’s got to be a database of passport holders. The argument is you’ve got a central identity register with your biometric passport, so do you actually make this a general card that helps you in other things?
“I’m up for an argument about that. And do you require foreign nationals to have ID cards, rather than simply to come in and then often disappear? What’s perceived as a wide chasm is actually something that you could discuss.”
Hain is similarly up for an argument on opposition to Britain’s national DNA-database – built up since 1995 and the largest forensic database in the world, in part reflecting the discovery of DNA by British scientists.
“I just don’t know what the answer is to someone who’s just had their son killed by a child-murderer or their daughter raped bysomeone or a loved one murdered. We know from the recent past that a lot of these criminals have only been caught by DNA, sometimes years afterwards.
“If your DNA isn’t somewhere, how do you actually stop these things happening, apart from by bringing to justice the people who’ve committed the most horrendous crimes?
“In Scotland, they say let it lapse after a few years”, he says, referring to the devolved parliament’s law allowing only DNA from people charged with serious sexual or violent offences to be kept for up to five years after acquittal. “I find that inexplicable. But I’m up for an adult conversation about this, not for a kind of hurling of slogans.”
But there is far more common ground uniting progressives in Westminster, he believes. He cites the Human Rights Act, introduced by Labour, backed by the Lib Dems and flatly opposed by the Conservatives.
“They’d really like to repeal it if they could”, Hain says of the Tories. “To strip away various rights just as important as individual liberties – the right to maternity and paternity leave, employee and social rights. Who wants to demolish those in abolishing the social chapter? The Tories. Who is pro-European? Labour and the Lib Dems.”
Calculations like this should, he hopes, persuade progressives so far unmoved by the thought of a fourth Labour term. “After 13 years of power, we haven’t satisfied everybody and we haven’t been perfect. We’ve made mistakes, as you’d expect of everybody and every government over that length of time in power.”
“It’s one of the left’s and progressives’ age-old faults, which I’ve seen throughout my political career. You decide you’re going to have a pitched battle on the small ground, the 25 per cent that divides you, rather than hold on to the 75 per cent that would go down the drain if the Tories got in.
“We have a fantastic ability on the progressive side of politics to decide we’re all enemies of each other, rather than to face outwards to the common enemy. But now there is a common agenda for progressives – and we’re up against a Tory threat which is the biggest we’ve faced for 20 years.
He rates Labour’s chances as highly as any England fan would rate the national team’s chances in South Africa this summer. “We’ve got to win this election. And we can.”
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