In every area of our public life, the Left is losing the argument
proclaims the online headline to Peter Oborne’s Telegraph column today. The standfirst goes further:
The facts of life are Conservative – as Labour’s smartest minds now realise
Er, not they aren’t. I consider Peter to be a good friend and one of the finest minds, and boldest writers, on the centre-right. Unlike so many other Tory-supporting columnists, he isn’t tribal and has been willing to denounce Cameron and co when the occasion demands it.
Today’s silly column, however, contains a series of unfounded, unsupported and curious claims and assertions, e.g.
It is now widely accepted that the years of New Labour government were an almost unalloyed national disaster. Whichever measure you take – moral, social, economic, or the respect in which Britain is held in the world – we went into reverse.
Er, no it isn’t. This sounds like the kind of party-political propaganda which Peter has so often denounced fellow hacks for producing, purveying and peddling in the past. The Tories and their supporters in the press, of course, want people to believe that 13 years of Blair and Brown were an “almost unalloyed national disaster” in order to (a) discredit the social-democratic ideas and values, (b) undermine the legitimacy of the state and, in particular, the welfare state, and (c) make themselves look good, no matter how high unemployment gets, no matter how many riots or protests erupt, on their watch. It is brazen historical revisionism.
Peter begins:
Let’s start with economic management, the scene of New Labour’s most obvious debacle. In the early months after the 2010 general election, Labour’s shadow chancellor, Ed Balls, refused to accept the clear fact that high spending and high borrowing had driven us to economic disaster. He called on George Osborne to spend even more in order to avert recession.
A year on, Balls has lost the argument.
Sorry, has Peter been abroad for the past twelve months? Has he not read the papers? Or looked at the unemployment figures? It is Osborne who lost the argument and lost it badly last November when his growth forecasts were downgraded yet again, his deficit-reduction timetable had to be extended and the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) then revealed that the Chancellor would be borrowing more – an astonishing £158bn more! – than he had planned to in October 2010’s Spending Review and an embarrassing £37bn more than the much-mocked Labour plan (or “Darling plan”) to cut the deficit in half over the lifetime of this parliament (as outlined in the March 2010 budget). Meanwhile, pretty much everything Balls said in his Bloomberg speech in August 2010 has come to pass. Read it for yourself; judge for yourself. The Keynesian argument, or what the US economist and former White House adviser Christina Romer calls the empirical argument, has, once again, been vindicated.
On a related note, if you want a more nuanced and less gloomy take on the UK’s economic performance between 1997 and 2010, check out this recent report from the LSE’s Centre for Economic Performance.
Throughout his column, Peter makes the basic mistake of conflating the Labour Party with the left, and acts as if all Labour leaders and politicians believe the same thing (when, of course, there is an ideological gulf between, say, Tony Blair and Ed Miliband). He argues:
Labour has come to accept Duncan Smith’s profound insight that welfare payments can trap people in poverty, rather than offer them a hand out of it, thus forcing generations of families into dependence on the state.
This is absurd and ahistorical. There has been a bipartisan consensus for several decades now that the welfare trap exists and needs to be tackled. This isn’t some unique or “profound” insight of IDS. The reason left-wingers object to Duncan Smith’s welfare “reforms” is because you can’t cut the number of people on welfare when there are no jobs available. Meanwhile, it is immoral and unjust to slash £18bn from the welfare budget – that is, from money spent on the poorest, most vulnerable members of society – while taking only £12bn or so from the big banks who caused the economic crisis.
Peter also claims:
The vital importance of this experiment lay in the special circumstances of the post-war period. Throughout this time, the liberal Left, as general election results show, has tended to be unpopular with voters.
That’s only if you judge “popularity” on the basis of our disproportionate and dysfunctional first-past-the-post electoral system. For example, the general election of 1983 – widely considered to be Margaret Thatcher’s greatest electoral triumph – saw 53 per cent of the public vote for liberals (the SDP/Alliance) and the left (Michael Foot’s Labour Party) compared to 42 per cent who voted for Thatcher’s Tories. There has never been a Conservative majority in the country in the post-war period – in fact, at the last election, Cameron’s Conservatives failed to secure a majority in the country and in the Commons.
Peter writes that
. . . a handful of prime ministers have led governments that reshaped the world we all live in. Since 1945, only two – Clement Attlee and Margaret Thatcher – have fallen into this very rare second category.
It now looks as if Cameron may turn out to be the third. In some ways this is very strange, because Cameron, at heart an
old-fashioned Tory pragmatist, is the least revolutionary Prime Minister one can imagine.But he has taken the job at a fulcrum moment, when some of the most intelligent minds on the Left have come to realise that the facts of life are Conservative.
Three quick points here: 1) Peter defines Liam Byrne and Stephen Twigg as examples of his “intelligent minds on the Left”. This is totally arbitrary and subjective; some would say that such a label better suits, say, Stewart Wood or Gavin Kelly or David Marquand. 2) It is amusing to see Peter now singing Cameron’s praises given how critical – and personally critical! – he was of Cameron just a few months ago. 3) He again just declares that “the facts of life are Conservative”. Yet, high Tories like Thatcher biographer Charles Moore, seem to be saying otherwise. Unlike Peter, who says literally nothing in his column about the monumental failure of financial capitalism and deregulation, Moore has acknowledged, for instance, that “it turns out – as the Left always claims – that a system purporting to advance the many has been perverted in order to enrich the few”. Writing in Oborne’s own paper in July 2011, Moore declared:
I’m starting to think that the Left might actually be right
Hear, hear!
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