A long conversation with a now former minister keeps coming back to me as Labour MPs, the newly-elected as well as the resurrected, speak of the relief of opposition.
This ex-minister was a constituency activist on the Bennite left in 1979, part of the internal opposition to Jim Callaghan. It’s fair to say the ex-minister has travelled a fair way politically since then, but the issues she cares most about – fairness, equality, fighting for working people, combating poverty, tackling powerful vested interests – remain the same.
Back in 1979, said the minister, she wanted to win, but when Labour lost she thought a spell out of power might not be too bad and indeed could do some good for the party. Labour would rediscover its radicalism, the Conservatives would blow it and the natural order would reassert itself the next time the country went to the polls with Labour resuming office under a new leader.
Well, she said, to admit it didn’t turn out like that would be a colossal understatement. For 18 years, the Conservatives let rip – first under the Iron Lady Margaret Thatcher then under her plastic imitation John Major. He may have appeared hapless, but he did a lot of damage, too.
Trade unions were attacked as the enemy within, treated as outlaws, legally tied up in knots or, in the case of GCHQ in Cheltenham, banned.
Entire communities were devastated as industries such as steel, shipbuilding and coal were deliberately destroyed by the vandals. Unemployment soared and poverty stained the nation.
Wages were as low as £1 an hour, a couple of million workers denied paid holidays.
The family silver was sold off in a wave of privatisations. The phrase “private affluence and public squalor”, coined earlier by American economist JK Galbraith, was made for a Britain. We had City spivs and yuppies who earned so much they couldn’t squander it all no matter how hard they tried. At the same time, it was hard to find a school without a leaky roof or a hospital where a bed often meant a trolley in the corridor.
The former minister shuddered at the memory of 18 long, miserable years and recalled a mixture of relief and genuine excitement in 1997 when the Tories were turfed out and Labour was reinstalled. Now she’s worried that dozens, perhaps scores of her Westminster colleagues feel what she did in 1979 instead of her horror in 2010 at what may lie ahead.
What if the Con-Dem coalition doesn’t collapse? Or the Conservatives swallow the Liberal Democrats and we return to two-party politics consisting of a bloated Tory Party versus a Labour Party unable to get its act together? Or Labour picks a leader who learns none of the lessons of the past
13 years, remaining wedded to markets and deregulation, looking for profits in public services instead of valuing education
and health, offering Con-Dem-plus to the electorate?
Maybe I’m misjudging the mood of Labourites licking their lips in anticipation of the Lib Dems receiving their comeuppance for signing a pact with the devil and putting David Cameron into Downing Street.
My initial reaction on hearing John Reid and David Blunkett talking about how Labour lost the general election so should be in opposition, sounding as if they preferred opposition to a cobbled together pact with the Lib Dems, was that these two seasoned operators were probably wrong and spoke for themselves and perhaps a few others.
But they didn’t. They spoke for many, perhaps even a majority, of their senior colleagues.
Yet I can’t help recalling the chat with that former minister and tremble at the thought we could be in for a hideous re-run. It was better to seek a deal with the Lib Dems than surrender because restricted influence in government is better than the impotence of opposition.
If Labour shapes up and the Con Dems carry on as they started, the 2015 election might be different to 2010 – although millions will suffer before then.
How many of us who never saw the radical Labour government we hoped for are now watching a Conservative-led administration we definitely didn’t want?
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David Cameron launched an Eton coup to turn meetings of the 1922 Committee of Tory backbenchers into a mirror of the Parliamentary Labour Party meetings. The Tory leader won the right of Conservative ministers to attend the 1922 and vote on issues, but humiliatingly backed away from insisting the payroll mob elect officers. That was the only sensible option when he engineered 118 votes against his leadership in the first full week as Prime Minister – which is surely a record.
But it set me wondering whether Labour should have its own 2010 committee – backbenchers meeting without shadow ministers present to squash discussion. Just wondering.
