Edward Docx
On 6th December, 30 years ago, on a dark and miserable night in south London, a few streets from where I am writing this, a young Peter Mandelson was elected as a Labour borough councillor to the world’s most insane local council—Lambeth. Representing Stockwell, the 26-year-old Mandelson found himself sitting on a Labour council led by a man called “Red Ted,” who was backed by a grim cast of Trotskyites and Bennites. Though few pause to consider it now, this was Mandelson’s first experience of real politics. It was winter 1979 and the Labour party was just about to forget about the British people altogether in favour of a long and enthusiastic tour of the hinterlands of lunacy and irrelevance. Mandelson was living in a tiny flat in Kennington. His bed—in the living room—folded into the wall.
On 17th February this year, Baron Mandelson of Foy and Hartlepool was attending a drinks reception at the Manhattan penthouse that is the official residence of the British consul-general in New York. The secretary of state for business, enterprise and reform was in America to talk up the British economy. The centrepiece was a speech to the Council on Foreign Relations. But, as he waited at the studios of CNBC during a busy day of interviews, Mandelson overheard the chief executive of Starbucks, Howard Schultz, claiming that Britain was in “a downward spiral.” On screen Mandelson reacted robustly; later on though—at the party and in the presence of journalists—he let fly: “Why should I have this guy running down the country? Who the fuck is he?” he was overheard to say. Thus a mini-media storm was set in motion. And yet there was a further, more private, layer to the evening’s events. At some point, Mandelson took a moment to send a text to the young daughter of a close friend who was also in New York and with whom he had been in touch throughout his visit—a text to the effect that the evening was deeply tedious and that he wished they had gone to the Armani party instead as they had discussed. It was New York fashion week and he would much rather have been with David and Victoria.
The two dates are illustrative. The first, in 1979, because many people forget the political landscape into which Mandelson first ventured and from which he has spent the last 30 years in flight—both individually and, with Gordon Brown and Tony Blair, as one of the triumvirate who created new Labour in the mid-1990s. Imagine that you are in your mid-twenties and that, for the next three years, your diary is full of meetings at which you will discuss lamp-posts and dog mess with people who have no interest in the practical necessities of government (or even lamp-posts and dog mess) and who believe that Trotsky is humanity’s best chance of salvation and denounce you as “an enemy of the people” if you demur. Of course, Mandelson is famously the grandson of Herbert Morrison (Labour home and foreign secretary, deputy prime minister), but it is on Lambeth council where Peter had his first real experience of the actual workings of the Labour party. And it is important to remember that he was not a media-fixer there but an elected representative; that he had to fight these people hand to hand through every policy decision, and that these experiences, as much as his ancestry, are what will have shaped his future thinking. A man’s life is set on its course and his opinions begin to ossify in the years between leaving home and his early thirties; and for Mandelson this period coincided with the far-left frenzy in the Labour party. It must have been dismal, and it is why the SDP was formed in 1981 and why Mandelson left politics for television the following year.
Read more »
Peter Kellner
For 40 years I have been a devotee of public attitudes data, both as a journalist and now as president of the polling company YouGov. When the New York Times first coined the term “the second superpower” to describe world public opinion, I thought: “Yes! I help to give this superpower its voice.” But I have come to believe that giving public opinion direct political expression is a dangerous folly.
Nevertheless, following the Westminster expenses scandal and the backlash it has created, a range of populist, direct democracy measures are now being proposed, particularly by the Conservatives. At their heart lies a tool virtually unknown in Britain until the latter part of the 20th century, but which Labour has encouraged and the Conservatives now embrace with the fervour of repentant sinners: the referendum. If David Cameron becomes prime minister, we face not only a referendum on the EU, but a blizzard of local votes on council tax and other issues. Cameron, along with some on the left, is also considering open primaries to select MPs and petitions to recall (or depose) them if enough voters disapprove of their actions. Also on the agenda are a sharp reduction in the number of MPs and California-style ballot initiatives, meaning the right to table further referendums. Yet I believe almost all of these will lead to worse government.
Direct democracy is superficially attractive. Politicians think it puts them in touch with the people, and it is popular with an electorate now used to being asked its opinions, not least through popular votes on programmes like Britain’s Got Talent and Big Brother. But it hollows out the accountability and legitimacy of parliament just when these should be strengthened. Indeed, taken together these mooted reforms could lead us down a slippery slope towards the California model, where referendums and recalls have destabilised politics, seen schools and hospitals go broke, and civil liberties threatened. The time has come to reassert the case for a robust representative democracy, in which politicians listen to the concerns of voters, but do not surrender their judgement to them, or to the polls that people like me produce.
Referendums are a recent addition to British political life, beginning in their modern form in an argument about Welsh pub opening times in the mid-1960s. A handful followed in the 1970s, over Northern Ireland, Europe and devolution.
Read more »
Ed Howker
To discuss this article visit First Drafts, Prospect’s blog
To his critics on right of the Tory party, David Cameron is a modern-day Ted Heath: an energetic young politician with a veneer of electoral appeal, but lacking the iron to make tough decisions, and with a tendency to triangulate—that Blairite technique for making policy only in the centre-ground. His sometimes detached relationship with his parliamentary party, his propensity to consult a meagre team of trusted advisers, and his association with fashionable lifestyles all match Heath too. Just as Cameron’s wife Samantha, the creative director of Smythson, designed one of 2007’s “must-have” handbags, Heath was asked on becoming leader in 1965 by the Sunday Times: “Do you appreciate that you are the first Tory leader with wall-to-wall carpeting?”
Even before Gordon Brown’s electoral humiliations in June, Cameron’s critics on the right thought the backdrop of a global recession and Labour party strife had prevented a proper examination of the Tory leader. Labour now uses a similar argument to explain Cameron’s successes during the expenses debacle: scandal always hits the government hardest. The prime minister’s uneven response and the mass resignations around the European election only made Cameron look better by comparison.
Read more »
Richard Reeves
If the 2005-10 parliament is consigned to ignominy in the history books, will the next be better? Whatever the final result of the next election, the Commons is set for a big clearout. Some MPs have resigned over expenses. But a big swing to the Tories could see as many as half the current crop of 646 replaced—the biggest turnover in modern history. A great deal rides on the quality of those newcomers.
Complaints about the health of parliament are, of course, nothing new. “It has been a permanent condition of its history,” wrote Andrew Marr in Ruling Britannia, to be “regarded by intelligent observers as being in a state of grave decline.” Parliament was a mere “rump” in 1648. After the election of 1868—the first after a significant expansion of the franchise in 1867—the writer John Morley dubbed the Commons “the chamber of mediocrity.”
But even by historical standards the volume of vitriol now tipped daily onto MPs is high. They are, according to popular prejudice, largely self-serving, lazy cheats. In reality, of course, they are largely public-spirited and hard-working. But if our constitution contained a populist mechanism for the early dissolution of parliament, there would have been a general election by now.
Read more »
Manneken Pis
Could David Cameron kill the Lisbon Treaty?
Gordon Brown was always regarded with suspicion in Brussels and now he’s a lame-duck premier to boot. But he still has one thing going for him in Europe: he’s not David Cameron.
With a Conservative victory in the next British general election looking inevitable, pro-Europeans are beginning to worry about what it will mean for them. Some diehard integrationists in the European parliament believed that when it came down to it, Cameron would not pull his MEPs out of the centre-right bloc, the EPP-ED (European People’s party and European Democrats), in search of more Eurosceptic allies. Now he has done so, to the displeasure of Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy.
Read more »
Richard Reeves
“We are the servants now,” Tony Blair said in 1997, as he pledged to “restore trust in politics.” Blair’s goal was not to destroy the establishment but to update it, replacing a tired and slightly corrupt conservative elite with a new establishment forged through meritocracy and entrepreneurialism. As Chris Mullin, the former junior minister, wrote in his diaries: “Blair went funny around money.” But it wasn’t just any money. It was new money. The entrepreneurs and risk-takers were the business wing of his new elite. Branson, Stelios, Sugar, Goodwin; all were knighted under Labour. Parliament also began to resemble the nation, with more than 100 women, MPs from ethnic minorities and openly gay cabinet ministers.
Having risen to power on the wave of Tory sleaze, Blair wanted a “purer than pure” party. This may never have been a realistic ambition. Even so, 2009’s events have left this new Labour establishment profoundly weakened. The once lauded City entrepreneurs have been bailed out with a new form of “social corporate responsibility,” as one wag put it. Banking chiefs’ defence of playing by the rules no longer seems viable, at least not in the fickle court of public opinion. Meanwhile, a brick was thrown through the window of ex-Royal Bank of Scotland chief Fred Goodwin.
Now parliament too finds itself bloodied and disorientated, as once respected Labour and Lib-Dem MPs are caught helping themselves just as eagerly as the Tories. The defence was again of acting within the rules, although some of course were not. It was a hard line to sustain when MPs set the rules, inflating expenses allowances in lieu of salary hikes that they knew the electorate would not accept. It will now be much harder with a new, reforming speaker in place, and rules set independently.
Read more »
David Willetts
View the details of the Prospect/YouGov poll on Margaret Thatcher’s legacy here; and discuss this article at First Drafts, Prospect’s blog
The election of the Conservative government 30 years ago on 3rd May 1979 is one of the key dates in Britain’s modern political history. That anniversary is not being marked by careful analyses of monetarism or privatisation but a focus on the character of Margaret Thatcher, with old animosities and caricatures out on display again. It is still very difficult to get a measured judgement of the 1980s without it all turning on what you think of Her.
There are many reasons for challenging this focus on her personality. For a start it fails to give adequate weight to the formidable intellects and political operators around her. Even in opposition in the late 1970s the process whereby Geoffrey Howe and Keith Joseph argued their way through key documents such as “The Right Approach to the Economy” turned out to be an effective way of preparing for government. A recent BBC play presented her as driven by the need to humiliate the men around her. But this is to misunderstand her argumentativeness—she believed in truth through conflict. She challenged and tested people and their arguments but, at least until her final period in power, there were always ways of arguing back which the key people around her mastered and which she respected. I know because I saw it. I was a middle period Thatcherite. I had been a junior treasury official during the battles of the early years when we just had to get a grip on public spending and stabilise the finances. Then for three years in the mid-1980s I was a member of her policy unit. The challenge, one of the hardest for any government, was to develop new ideas after years in office.
Read more »
Ian Irvine
12th May 2003
Chris Mullin, Labour MP for Sunderland South, writes in his diary:
To London on the 10.42. Just after Doncaster, the Scarborough MP, Lawrie Quinn, passed by and said he had heard on the radio that Clare Short had resigned. [That afternoon in the Commons] Clare rose as soon as Jack Straw had finished his statement on Iraq. She was seated a couple of rows back from the Speaker, between Tom Clarke and Dennis Turner, who, after the twists and turns of the last few weeks, are about her only friends in this place. I was standing a couple of yards away. Clare was heard, for the most part, in dead silence. Only when she broadened her attack, away from Iraq and on to The Man [Tony Blair] personally, was there a certain amount of mumbling and when she sat down there was no hear-hearing, not even from those who share her view on the handling of the war. She has alienated everybody. A sad end. Until two months ago, Clare was arguably one of our most successful ministers. It is down to her, and the battles she fought in the early days, that aid policy has been prised free of trade and foreign policy and no-one can take that away from her. If she’d gone, alongside Robin Cook (and with his dignity) she would have retained the respect of everybody and would probably have had a future running a UN agency or even the IMF or World Bank. As it is she has blown every bridge.
(From A View From The Foothills by Chris Mullin; Profile, £20)
21st May, 1979
Roy Jenkins, EC President, writes:
Read more »
Mark Gevisser
On 27th April 1994, I stood with thousands of other South Africans for hours, in the great leveller of a long, snaking queue as we waited to vote in the country’s first democratic elections. I was 30 years old, and although I am a white South African, I had never previously voted. Along with 63 per cent of my fellow voters, I put my cross next to the image of Nelson Mandela, and the African National Congress. Although I have never been a member, being “ANC” has been central to my identity since my late teens. I not only subscribed to the liberation movement’s values—I also thought it essential, for both my own healing and that of our brutally divided country, to cross the racial line and merge my aspirations with those of the majority. Most professionals and intellectuals in my multiracial world felt similarly. Many of us took jobs in the new government.
Now, 15 years later, barely anyone I know still works for the state. A significant number of us have left the country; those who remain have retreated into suburban comfort, finding more personal ways to remain engaged. Perhaps our utopian dreams have been shattered, as we have had to reckon with the reality of a dangerously restive society. Many of us have been victims of crime. I have been burgled twice while at home. In the subsequent trauma counselling, I grappled with feelings of powerlessness; my inability to protect myself and my family. It gave me insight into the damage that crime is doing to the national psyche.
But the violation of my personal hearth is nothing compared to the despondency I feel at the loss of a political home. When I went to the polls on 22nd April 2009, I found myself—for the first time—unable to vote for the ANC. I was not alone. Although the party retained its majority, not a single person in my world, black or white, put their cross easily next to the picture of Jacob Zuma, the party’s presidential candidate. Most voted for an opposition party for the first time, spoiled their votes, or stayed away. A few people I know held their noses and voted ANC anyway, for want of a better alternative.
Read more »
Andy Beckett
In 2005, when Tony Blair was still prime minister and people still believed he was presiding over a British economic miracle, his party conference speech made a pointed historical detour. Jim Callaghan, his predecessor as Labour premier, had died a few months earlier. Blair paid him, and other Labour politicians who ran Britain in the 1970s, a distinctly double-edged tribute: “they were great people. But [they] were not ready… to see change was coming.”
Conservatives are less restrained about Britain’s 1970s governments. The IMF crisis, the winter of discontent, overwhelmed ministers, Britain at a dead end—such bogeymen have sustained right-wing speeches and editorials for decades. Even now, with many of the economic and political orthodoxies of the last 30 years in doubt, the conviction endures that the regimes of Callaghan, Heath and Wilson were uniquely incompetent, short-sighted and obsolete in their thinking.
But how justified is this? It would take a bloody-minded revisionist to argue that the decade was a golden age. Footage of Wilson’s return to Downing Street after the February 1974 election shows the mischievous ringmaster of postwar Labour politics looking worn out, slack-shouldered, and joyless. For my book on the 1970s I interviewed his chancellor, Dennis Healey. Faced with an oil crisis, inflation and out-of-control state spending, Healey cheerfully told me that for his first year in the job: “I knew bugger all about economics.”
Read more »
Post a comment »
