Vol. 19 No. 11 · 5 June 1997
pages 14-15 | 3107 words
After the May Day Flood
Seumas Milne on the new Labour Government
There might be only an inch of difference between Labour and Conservatives, the one-time counter-culture celebrity Richard Neville said long ago, but it is in that space that we live. The opening weeks of the first Labour Government for a generation have been a daily reminder of how far Neville’s aphorism still holds. So tirelessly had Tony Blair strained to ratchet down expectations during the run-up to the election, so assiduously had the Millbank machine tailgated Tory policy, that almost any innovation by the new regime was bound to seem like a political thunderbolt.
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[*] Vintage, 125 pp., £4.99, 7 April, 0 09 977881 5.
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Letters
Vol. 19 No. 12 · 19 June 1997
From Graham Smith
Seumas Milne’s grudging acknowledgment (LRB, 5 June) of the new government’s impact on the country reeks of sour grapes. However, his pique is less interesting than his fantasies about the radical nature of the British electorate, John Smith’s electoral appeal and Tony Blair’s lack of a political majority among constituency parties. Labour might just have won under John Smith’s leadership. However, given Smith’s 1992 tax proposals, it is inconceivable that Gordon Brown would have been able to run such a sustained and successful argument to neutralise the Conservatives’ tax weapon. The British public may well be ‘hopelessly collectivist’, but while average incomes remain well short of those of national newspaper reporters, it will probably continue to lack the will to pay the taxes that hopeless collectivism requires. It is also difficult to envisage, given Smith’s famous caution and the much smaller majority he would have won, a Smith-led government taking many of the bold steps that drag Milne sneeringly to the edge of applause.
Graham Smith
London E17
From Brian Biggs
I wish the Labour Party had just won a landslide victory on a manifesto of real equality of opportunity – achieved only by increased taxation of the rich and big business. But it hasn’t. It swept to power by being cautiously centrist. Lurking behind Seumas Milne’s article is one of those dratted counterfactuals: would Labour have won a viable majority on the basis of a more radical tax-and-spend programme? The electorate has indeed moved to the left since the late Eighties, as Milne points out, but how far? Is it still basically Thatcherite? And would we therefore be enduring another Major Administration if Blair had been bolder on tax? After all, a majority of 179 isn’t a weak hand for Blair to hold in claiming to represent the opinion of the nation. Lost in the realms of the counterfactual, all that malcontent lefties such as I can now do is, first, claim that the electorate wanted some tax increases and, if this doesn’t work, fall back on beloved ideas of false consciousness – the malign influence of the press etc – to argue that it would be better off if it did so. In fact the task is more arduous. Blair doesn’t even seem to grasp the justice of higher taxes for the rich – it’s old-fashioned and statist. He has to be persuaded that we are as needy of economic as of constitutional radicalism, and that you can’t achieve this without making enemies. Milne rightly ridicules Blair’s high-and-mighty goal of taking the ‘ideology’ out of elections. This is simply conservatism by another name.
Brian Biggs
Newcastle-upon-Tyne
