Rarely has a Budget been delivered so close to an election and rarely has the annual ritual of an economic packaging been so tightly geared to an electoral outcome. While economically fitting that old-fashioned description of what used to be called steady-as-she-goes Budgets, it was designed politically to put some clear blue water between Labour and the Tories. Alistair Darling’s Budget Box opened to reveal serried rows of hooks where manifesto pledges are due to be pinned. The Chancellor’s message was brutally simple: we got it right, they got it wrong and, if the Tories were given the purse strings of power, they would wreck the economy.
Thus, the Government deserves to stay in power. On that single measure, he cannot be gainsaid.
As expected, the Chancellor held back from deep hacking into the public sector, which is to welcomed. But the fact that he had to cross a civil service picket line to deliver the Budget is a portent for what may be waiting in the not-too-distant future. So-called frontline services have indeed been given ring-fenced protection. But that does not justify other vital services being made soft targets.
Although the take-back from the bankers’ bonuses might have been double what was expected, it is nothing to celebrate if public sector workers are still to bear the brunt of the City’s past and continuing excesses.
The Budget was delivered against a backcloth of creeping economic recovery: unemployment and inflation falling and Government borrowing down. There was much in its content to commend and Mr Darling may deservedly claim that its thrust was guided by core Labour values of “fairness and opportunity”.
And – notwithstanding that Gordon Brown is placing an isolated Britain at the head of the opposition to new European Union curbs on the powers of hedge funds – he might have added: Vote Labour on May 6.
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Nobody spoke more eloquently than John Knight, Labour leader of Ashfield council, on the venal ambitions of “new” Labour’s trio of discredited outriders. Focusing his fury on his local MP Geoff Hoon, whom he has observed for some years, Mr Knight told the BBC: “Here you’ve got a man who’s a cold-blooded unprincipled usurper of a once-great political party. If we carry on like this, this will be the slow death of the Labour Party – it’s like a black hole that’s going to implode on itself.”
Mr Knight speaks for the thousands of members around the country who have fought against “new” Labour and for the principles of real Labour from within as well as for those for whom the implosion has already forced their exit from the party they once believed in.
At Westminster many were celebrating the “end of new Labour”. Such triumphalism is misplaced. The damage runs deeper. Those who talk about the need for renewal – the buzzword which conveniently skirts round while at the same time embracing any election result – need to think beyond the establishment of a new monolithic power base. The imperative need is to harness the variegated vibrancy of the broad left to the constant, as well as the changing, needs of a changed society.
