Gordon Brown’s speech today at the Labour Party conference generally passed muster. It was too long, sterted too slowly, but gathered pace and peppered the assembled delegates at the end with a stream of pledges, delivered at machine gun pace, which collectively raised the populist tempo to to uncharacteristic Brownite heights of enthusiasm. The key question however is whether it injected enough fire in the belly to set the election campaign alight and put Labour back in contention. The real problem here for the platform is that having de-politicised the Party for the last 12 years, it is difficult in the last few moments of a 3-Parliament term to re-invent political excitement. Blairism and Brownism (insofar as these concepts exist) have never been ideological programmes. They have been unambiguously power projects, devoid of ideological substance. That’s the problem: the Labour Party isn’t just about power – it’s about social justice, equality, the universality of public services, and democratic accountability of power and all public institutions. And that’s what’s been missing for 12 years, let alone the previous 18.

And that’s the problem too about Labour conferences. They’ve been so tightly controlled over the last 15 years that they exude a kind of virtual reality in which the surface issues are bandied about, but the underlying power realities that determine the fundamentals of the economy and society are wholly ignored. Extraordinarily, all week there was no discussion at all about the nature and causes of the financial crisis, or of the nature and degree of bank regulation required to prevent a recurrence, or about the breakdown of market fundamentalism and how that dealt with, or about the excessive dominance of corporate power both over government and social values generally, or about the extreme degree of de-regulation and privatisation which caused the crisis in the first place, or about the relentless growth of inequality between rich and poor and how it should be remedied. Why? Because New Labour is just as addicted to neo-liberal capitalism as the Tories and the LibDems, which leaves half or more of the electorate entirely disenfranchised and unrepresented.
Against that background, winning over the voters by dangling in front of them a number of limited policy offerings (popular though a number of them were) at virtually the last moment is difficult. Nor will electoral reform, touted as it is by many, stop this relentless slide into a one-party State. What is desperately needed, if politics is to revive, is the ideological restoration of the democratic socialist vision as the alternative to de-regulated markets and the untrammelled commercialisation of society. What people want is an ideal that they can passionately believe in and want actively to fight for, which is precisely the black hole at the centre of New Labour.

Bookmark to: