Could it ever have worked? Was New Labour, which seemed to offer the best of all worlds – freedom as well as "fairness", unlimited wealth creation without social inequality, opportunity without the possibility of failure – always a mythical beast? The disillusion has become an epidemic: first the public service professionals – the doctors and teachers – became alienated, even though they were precisely the people who should have been most enthusiastic about the munificent new dispensation. Then it became clear that the equality which this new "social market" was designed to deliver had not materialised: disparities of income and educational achievement were greater than ever. Now the business community, whose support was so essential to the credibility of the reconstructed Left, has repudiated the Labour government: that irreducible core belief in tax-and-spend has finally exhausted the goodwill of those who cannot afford to deny reality any longer. So was there ever a plausible Left-wing political programme that could have provided what Labour proposed: a no-risk, no-pain, no-losers version of a free-market economy and – even more important – of a meritocratic society in which individual aspiration would be seen as a virtue rather than a form of selfishness? Even describing the project now makes the contradictions clear. Freedom involves risk, by definition. The possibility of loss is implicit in the concept of enterprise. A dynamic, competitive economy and a socially mobile society necessarily involve the possibility of disparities of achievement and inequalities of outcome. But the power of language defeated the forces of logic: there seemed to be an assumption at the time of New Labour's inception that what could be said could be accomplished, that finding the right rhetorical expression was sufficient to make something objectively possible. If you could couple the words "free market" and "equal society" in the same phrase, you could make it happen. The illusion of a political miracle was maintained for as long as it was by an unprecedented economic boom – which turned out to be a bubble. For over a decade, Labour actually appeared to have squared the circle. True, they hadn't eradicated economic inequality, or social deprivation, or educational underachievement. But most of the influential, opinion-forming classes stayed rich enough and satisfied enough to keep the ship – and the myth of the "social market" solution – afloat. Then came the crash, and the game was up. Suddenly, tax increases aren't so much fun any more. The hidden objective of Labour's philosophy – promoting the free market so they could soak it for their spending projects – seems blatantly obvious. What needs to be recognised (so that we do not fall for this conjuring trick again) is that it never worked: it isn't the case that Labour's tax-and-spend, make-the-market-serve-your-political-purposes plan was a success until the global economic crisis pulled the rug. Britain was heading for an inevitable bust-up of its own making. This was exacerbated by the international banking collapse, but there is a good reason why we are the last to emerge from worldwide recession. Our government was spending and borrowing far too much because it had never, in fact, renounced its fundamental belief in state control of the most important functions of national life. New Labour may have embraced the free market, but it regarded it as a milch cow whose over-riding purpose was to provide the funds for government activity. Private wealth creation was only legitimate insofar as it enriched the state and enabled it to intervene more and more in society. And those interventions involved taking power away from all those individuals of whom Labour disapproved: preventing "pushy" parents from getting the best education for their children, penalising people who worked and saved because they had more "advantages" than those who lived on benefits, discriminating against married couples because they were more likely to be middle-class and "privileged" than single parents. In other words, Labour never really got it. It never actually saw the inherent moral worth of allowing people to aspire, to succeed on their own terms and to live by their own values. But the most destructive effects of this were not on those whom Labour persecuted and fleeced. The maligned middle classes became ever more ingenious – especially when the education of their children was at stake – at negotiating Labour's obstacle course. It was the deprived, the disadvantaged, the socially and economically impoverished who were most disastrously affected, because they were completely at the mercy of what government thought was best for them. This brings us to the principle that has always been at the heart of the British Left: not Marxism but paternalism. The Labour movement's traditional message to "our people" had always been "stay where you are and we'll look after you". After the 1980s and the mass defection of working-class voters to Thatcherism, this theme was transformed: "We realise (at last) that you don't necessarily want to stay down there at the bottom of society. So we will respect and support your desire to improve yourself." So long, they might have added, as you do it in ways of which we approve. You can have individual ambitions so long as they don't damage the life chances of anyone else. You can have economic competition so long as no one loses out in the contest. And it would always be the state that decided who was deserving, and those decisions were always based on collectivist solutions: the softer, more palatable rendition of this is that every policy or enterprise must benefit "the many not the few", which in practice means that no individual may be allowed to prosper (in any sense of the word) if others (for any reason, even their own choice) do not. Wealth and success and achievement are regarded as finite commodities, so the accomplishments of any one person always constitute a threat to others. Reconciling the new commitment to individualism with the traditional class loyalties of the Left turned out to be very expensive indeed: only by extending the welfare state to cover everyone could you abolish the distinctions between the poor, who were dependent on the state, and the "privileged", who were free and self-determining. Anthony Giddens, in his seminal New Labour treatise The Third Way, wrote: "There will never be a common morality of the citizenship until a majority of the population benefits from the welfare state." It is not surprising that in 13 years, Labour has effectively bankrupted the country in pursuit of that goal. What is remarkable is that so few people over that period noticed how sinister it was.The New Labour project was always destined to fail
The power of language defeated the forces of logic, says Janet Daley.
Sunday, 4 April 2010
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