With the corpse of New Labour's government still warm on the mortician's slab, an inquest into the death of its salesmen has already begun. David Miliband, the bookies' favourite to take over as leader, says he will tour the country to find out what went wrong. At the risk of doing his party an undeserved favour, let's save Bananaman the cost of a trip. Despite its record of fiscal incompetence, constitutional vandalism and disregard for Middle England, Gordon Brown's administration ought never to have collapsed. It had, after all, created for itself a client class of supplicant voters. As part of a grand plan for permanent office, more than one million immigrants were handed British passports (80 per cent of first-generation arrivals vote Labour) and 900,000 workers added to the public-sector payroll. More pernicious still, Mr Brown and his ministers were delighted to overlook a grotesque distortion in the make-up of parliamentary boundaries, which meant that a 30 per cent vote for Labour produced about 300 seats, whereas the same percentage for the Conservatives delivered only 200 seats. In short, just about everything that could have been done to bend the system in New Labour's favour was in place by the time the election was called. The problem, however, was that the project had been constructed upon a moral cesspit. The party's membership had been taken prisoner by a gang of desperadoes who clung to a conviction that honesty and integrity were disposable luxuries, and substance an unwelcome substitute for propaganda. The upshot was a dystopian regime in which Lord Mandelson and Alastair Campbell were recalled from ignominy to orchestrate a campaign of lavish deceit. Together they became Mr Brown's very own Squealer, the insidious porker inAnimal Farm who manipulates language to justify his boss's tyranny, while limiting debate and confusing the lower orders. In extremis, when awkward questions persist, Squealer fires off statistics to "prove" that life is improving, and warns darkly against the return of the farm's previous owner. Lord Mandelson had twice been ejected from Cabinet over improper conduct. Mr Campbell was a central figure in the work of fiction that masqueraded as a security dossier on Saddam Hussein's "threat" to the United Kingdom. They had stripped themselves of legitimacy, yet were regarded by Mr Brown as uniquely qualified to help him retain the keys to No 10. It was a revolting union of unprincipled, unelected, unloved charlatans. As the campaign developed, it was soon clear that New Labour was not going to win another Commons majority. After a decade of the government's chicanery, voters had had enough. Ministers, of course, blamed persecution by the press (even The Guardian deserted), but it was Mr Brown's financial mismanagement that hung like a burning tyre round his MPs' necks. Unemployment is higher today than in 1997, as are taxes. The pound is worth less than 13 years ago, as are many private pension schemes. Personal insolvencies are at record levels. Worst of all, the state is borrowing one pound in every four that it spends, and our collective debt is set to double by 2014-15 to about £1.4 trillion, equal to one year's GDP. The "success" of New Labour's economic expansion was a sham, based on a simple formula: spend more than we earn; pass off consumption as investment; wallow in self congratulation. Through the "boom" times of 2003-2007, all of Mr Brown's budgets involved massive borrowing. He told us we were getting richer, while in effect making us poorer. In those five years alone, he clocked up £160 billion of debt. These are harsh, unavoidable facts. The legacy of that profligacy will bear down on British taxpayers for generations. As Niall Ferguson, professor of history at Harvard, has concluded, Mr Brown's stewardship of the economy was a "disaster". With their jobs gone and bank accounts empty, a large number of New Labour voters worked out they had been conned. Millions deserted the party. Faced with the horror of eviction, Labour's top brass came up with a political confection in a last-ditch effort to alchemise miserable defeat into glorious victory: the Progressive Alliance. Do you remember seeing this on your ballot paper? No, that's because it was not there; it doesn't exist. Never mind, shame has never been a burden to Mr Brown's Squealers. On election night, as the exit polls indicated that the prime minister was no more popular or trusted than Michael Foot had been in 1983, his favourite emissaries rushed to the microphones to "interpret" the results. My jaw dropped as I heard Jack Dromey (aka Mr Harperson) claim: "The real losers tonight are the Conservatives." This was life mimicking art: Orwell's allegory had become the how-to-cope manual for New Labour's response unit. The Progressive Alliance (a Lab-Lib coalition, plus anyone who had not voted Conservative) was hailed as the new force in British politics by Mr Brown's dwindling band of sycophants. Mr Cameron, they incanted, had been rejected. The electorate had spoken: permission had been given for a quick return to the eternal summer of a tax-and-waste under a New Labour-led government. Foremost among these comedians was Mr Campbell, who, having battled gamely to overcome alcoholism, appears to have succumbed to an even more powerful intoxicant: the fumes from his own exhaust. Others, such as Peter Hain and Ed Balls, are, one suspects, inhaling similar hallucinatory gases. Overlooking the inconvenient truth that of the 29 million people who voted, 21 million did not endorse New Labour, they tried, for a few, frantic, embarrassing days, to persuade us that their party's role in government remained the natural order of things – the way it was meant to be. How crushing for them to discover that power-hungry rivals see life differently. When the Liberals prefer to get in bed with Conservatives than sleep with New Labour, it's time to admit that the deodorant is not working. Having provided first-class travel for 13 years, New Labour's gravy train has just pulled away, leaving the party's leaders and apologists stuck on the platform without a ticket. For them, the free ride is over. We, however, will continue to pay a heavy price, as taxes rise, services are cut, interest rates increase, businesses are lost and jobs wiped out. According to Professor John Kay, the Oxford economist: "Whatever action the new [Con-Lib] government takes, the underlying structural problem will get worse." As Mr Miliband trudges across Britain in his journey of discovery, he could do worse than read Sun Tzu's The Art of War, in which the author warns of the pitfalls for a general, including: Recklessness, leading to destruction; Cowardice, leading to capture; and a Hot Temper, prone to provocation. It was these flaws, allied to what The Economist identified as Mr Brown's "mania for scheming" and "moralising drivel", that finished New Labour.It will take a long time for the new boys to unravel Gordon Brown's mess
Long after it is buried, New Labour will continue to inflict economic pain,
says Jeff Randall
Saturday 15 May 2010
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