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Violent crime and antisocial behaviour are rising. As recent statistics have shown, the government has no idea how its own immigration system is operating. It resorts, then, to lecturing us about fitness, deputing the health minister Caroline Flint to be a sort of national personal trainer. The case of Roger Annies, the postman suspended for trying to help people on his round avoid the curse of junk mail, is a parable for our times. The Royal Mail, a public limited company, all of whose shares are owned by the government, now faces a consumer uprising entirely of its own making. Not for the first time, the public will ask: whose side are you on?
Meanwhile, the Labour party — contemplating life after Mr Blair — conducts a portentous internal debate about its own future which reveals only how detached it has become from its original mission. There was something vaguely sinister about Mr Blair’s claim in 1997 that ‘New Labour is the political arm of none other than the British people as a whole’. But at least that statement reflected an aspiration to transform his notoriously tribal party into a national movement.
Now Labour is reverting to type, but — of course — doing so in a very modern way. Ministers hold forth at tedious length about the challenge of ‘renewal in office’, a meaningless phrase if ever there was one. In the Times last Monday, Stephen Byers, the former transport secretary and an ultra-Blairite, declared it was ‘important that we renew ourselves as New Labour’ — taking a sideswipe along the way at the ‘anoraks in the Treasury’.
On Tuesday Gordon Brown’s camp retaliated. Ed Balls, economic secretary to the Treasury and the Chancellor’s chief lieutenant, made a stinging attack on such ‘maverick voices’, and those who would — heaven forbid — ‘allow division and factionalism to take over’. On the same day, in an article in the Financial Times, Mr Brown himself scorned those who promised ‘unfunded tax cuts’. It is a measure of the Labour party’s present introspection that the Chancellor was assumed to be referring to Mr Byers’s recent call in the Sunday Telegraph for the abolition of inheritance tax, rather than the suggestion in the same newspaper by George Osborne, the Shadow Chancellor, that stamp duty on share trading should be ended, principally to help pensioners.
If it means anything, the repeated use of the phrase ‘renewal in office’ should signal to the voters precisely the complacency to which New Labour said it would never succumb. Though John Reid is emerging as an intriguing eleventh-hour contender, the overwhelming assumption in Labour’s ranks is that Mr Brown will succeed Mr Blair as party leader and Prime Minister. It is also taken as read that this succession to the top job will take place sooner rather than later. Mr Blair’s acolytes have therefore taken it upon themselves to try to box in Mr Brown ideologically, and force him, pre-emptively, to adopt a neo-Blairite agenda.
Anyone with the slightest knowledge of the Chancellor’s personality will know that such tactics can only be counterproductive. The worst way to make Mr Brown adopt a particular course is to chide him in public. The broader point, however, is that a party that claims itself to be fit for a fourth successive term is now behaving like a school debating society, quibbling over terrain in its own private jargon of ‘renewal’. Always irritating, this jargon is now symptomatic of Labour’s disconnection from the electorate. The party speaks its own language because it has forgotten how to speak the language of those it serves. The voters are not interested in ‘renewal’. They are interested in good government.
For David Cameron, who starts the new political season in a strong position, there is a warning and an opportunity in Labour’s predicament. He must indeed remind the public that the Conservatives have changed, but he must not make a fetish of novelty. Victory at the next election will go to the party that persuades the voters, in plain English, that it will improve their lot and that it understands their anxieties. New Labour, muttering to itself distractedly in a private language, is now obsolete. Mr Cameron’s task this autumn is to show that he is ready to step into the breach.
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