Whatever happened to the Labour Party? Has Ed Miliband accidentally mislaid it somewhere between his home and the House of Commons? It has been almost totally invisible since the fiasco of the alternative vote referendum, the disaster of the Scottish parliament elections and the less-than-encouraging outcome of the English local government elections. We have a Conservative-led coalition government in turmoil, with Tory and Liberal Democrat ministers publicly at each other’s throats. Yet the silence from our lot has been deafening.
True, Ed Miliband managed to hit the headlines just once, but only because of his wholly misjudged and totally crass demand that David Cameron should sack Ken Clarke – described by The Guardian’s admirable Simon Hoggart as the only member of
the Cabinet who is a paid-up member of the human race – because of the Justice Secretary’s perfectly sensible, although unwisely phrased, remarks about rape. Miliband got in the papers because what he said was so obviously daft.
But it isn’t just the leader who is at fault. Pretty well the whole of the Shadow Cabinet has been invisible. Even The Other Ed – Ed Balls, whose belated appointment as Shadow Chancellor we greeted so enthusiastically because we saw him as a toughie who would duff up the dreadful George Osborne – seems to have disappeared from the scene. The deputy leader, Harriet Harman, has kept a slightly higher profile, but seems to be moved to utter almost exclusively on feminist issues at a time when the phrase “it’s the economy, stupid”, has never been more applicable.
The most depressing of all, though, has been John Healey. Who he? You may well ask. Almost no one in my pub – and not many people in the Labour Party, in my experience – seem to be aware that he is the Shadow Health Secretary and therefore supposed to be leading the fight against Andrew Lansley’s demented plan to “reform” the National Health Service out of existence. Let us face it: if the health bill is halted or radically changed for the better, it won’t be the Labour Party that will get the credit; it will be the Lib Dems. They have been making virtually all the running, recognising that opposition to Lansley is their “get out of jail” card. If they pull it off, it could save them from the total obliteration that would otherwise await them at the next general election.
Now, I am fully aware that the Lib Dems have a particularly effective platform for this campaign, and one that is not available to the hapless John Healey. They hold the balance of power in the Government’s Commons majority, and they actually sit round the Cabinet table. So when they cut up rough it is undeniably news, and goes straight onto the front pages. That is not necessarily the case when a minnow such as Healey opens his mouth, however eloquently.
However, the problem with Labour started long before the Lib Dems woke up to the potency of the issue – something that didn’t really happen until after they had suffered their appalling humiliation in the AV referendum. The trouble is that Healey and his colleagues made virtually no impact before the Lib Dem awakening. On the contrary, the running was made largely by Shirley Williams, the octogenarian ex-Gang of Four Lib Dem and former Labour Cabinet minister, who read the bill, saw what it meant, and raised magnificent hell.
So is there any prospect of an early improvement in the overall performance of the Labour Party? I can’t say the omens are encouraging. Ed Miliband wrote an article last week in The Guardian, in which he acknowledged that there were people who were saying that Labour should provide “louder and prouder” opposition to the Government. His answer was that noise
was not enough, and I guess he is right about that. But noise is a vital element in the mix and I reckon he ought to set about providing it before he starts to add on whatever he thinks is needed to create a fully-rounded alternative government.
He is, after all, the Leader of the Opposition. That is his job description, and it’s time he got on with it.
David Cameron’s public rubbishing of Gordon Brown’s supposed ambition to be Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s successor as head of the International Monetary Fund was squalidly mean-minded. But I can’t help feeling that it was unnecessary, because I suspect that poor old Gordon’s chances of getting the job weren’t very good anyway. He is, I’m afraid, damaged goods, in spite of his record as the man who saved the world from financial meltdown.
But the prospect of getting Christine Lagarde instead is, frankly, frightening.
Yes, she is a highly intelligent woman. But so was Margaret Thatcher and look what she did. Lagarde’s economic views are more sophisticated than Thatcher’s, but they come from the same stable.
She is a right-wing, orthodox economist who would impose the same kind of destructive, deflationary, make-the-poor-pay measures on crisis hit countries for which the IMF has long been notorious. That’s exactly why George Osborne, Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy back her.
Indeed, Lagarde would probably tighten up the regime of DSK (as the French apparently call him), who was supposed to be a bit of a lefty – an idea that might surprise the millions thrown out of work in Greece and Portugal. Under her leadership, the IMF would certainly live up to its reputation as the hammer of the poor. Let’s hope she doesn’t get the job.
