Apologies for lack of postings over last 10 days.
I have been on holiday with my family sailing round the Norfolk Broads in largely wind and rain but having a great time. So it is particularly depressing to get back to a Guardian poll showing the Tories with a 9 point lead over Labour. It gives me no pleasure in saying that the poll simply confirms the warnings we have been issuing that New Labour policies and activities in Government are alienating whole sections of that broad coalition that threw the Tories out of office and decided to give Labour a chance in government in 1997.
This is just one poll but it adds further evidence to confim the trend of the 2005 general election, the 2006 local elections and other polls that more and more people are losing trust in Tony Blair and New Labour.
When people vote they do so on the basis of a leap of trust. They take a conscious decision for a whole range of motivating factors to place their trust in the party they are voting for. Often they are motivated by a longstanding commitment to that party, sometimes passed on over generations. For others it is because they have lost confidence in the existing party of power and have gained sufficient trust in an alternative party to enable them to undertake this leap in trust.
Labour Party members and the organisations affiliated to the party need to wake up fast to the fact that large numbers of people who have supported us and who have turned out to vote for us in past elections have lost trust in both Blair and New Labour. This breakdown of trust is so fundamental and deep rooted that without sigificant change the party is drifting to loss of office and allowing the return of the Tories.
Of course Cameron is vacuous when it comes to deatiled policies but that isn't the point. His strategy is simply to create an image of the Conservative Party as a safe pair of hands in which to catch the falling disillusioned Labour supporters.
Support for New Labour is falling apart because its policies, particularly its international policies, are not just unpopular but also have meant that members of the public are increasingly feeling that they just can't believe a word the Prime Minister or any government minister or spokesperson tells them any more.
This latest poll is interesting not because of the Tory 9 point lead but startlingly because it has demonstrated that trust in the Government under Tony Blair has fallen so much that only 20% of the public believe that the Government is telling the truth over the terrorist threat. For all John Reid's appearances in the media, people are not reassured about the trustworthiness of the Government. The poll also reveals just how out of touch the Government is with the judgements of the British public.
For over a year now minister after minister have repeatedly asserted that there is no link between the Government's policies in the Middle East and the risk of terrorist attack on Britain. This poll demonstrates that 72% of people do not find this credible and judge that Government policy has made Britain more vulnerable to terrorist attack. Staggeringly only 1% of voters think that the government's foreign policy has made Britain safer.
What has been New Labour response over the last week to the obvious plummeting of support for the Government? Extraordinarily New Labour is so lacking in anything new to say it falls back on the traditional neo con solution of offering a tax cut. Bizarrely the person they roll out to float this new policy of abolishing inheritance tax is Steve Byers, the very person who as a minister embodied along with his press officer Jo Moore the breakdown of trust the public had in New Labour ministers telling them the truth. This is how desperate and how far the New Labour project has sunk.
How do we regain the confidence of the British public? Only a radical break with New Labour will restore some basic trust in Labour. Simple changes of personnel in leadership positions won't be enough, especially as all of them Brown,Reid, Johnson, Hain, have all been architects, advocates and loyal supporters of the existing policies.
If one of the main reasons people no longer trust the government is its foreign policy then this is the ideal place to start the radical break with New Labour.
Step by step this would involve a declaration of independence from the foreign policies of George Bush, the withdrawal of troops from Iraq and Afghanistan, a return to the United Nations to seek new initiatives under the UN for Palestine, Iraq and Afghanistan and the reformulation of British foreign policy as a peacemaker lead by a new British Ministry for Peace.
A radical break of this kind would give us the chance of convincing people that Labour can be trusted once again. Without it we will continue to allow New Labour to put us out of office and let the Tories back.
16 Comments:
Hope you enjoyed your holiday, John - haven't sailed round the Norfolk Broads for years!
Some people will point to the details of this poll and suggest that it shows that our 'core vote' has held up reasonably and it is a middle-class vote that we have lost to the Tories and that a move to the left will not win those votes back. I think that would be a short-sighted analysis. In fact, Labour's working-class vote has collapsed too, it has just collapsed from a higher starting place. The issue of trust you have raised is clearly fundamental and is a very clear argument why a mere shuffling of leadership positions amongst the current Cabinet will not save the government. Tony Blair is not alone in not being trusted: he has barely spoken about the 'terror threat' - it is the likes of Reid and Alexander who people have chosen not to believe.
On a different matter - if the CLPD successfully get a resolution on the leadership in front of conference, will it be in the interests of this campaign for it to be passed? The strategy behind this campaign appears to be based on a 6 to 12 month campaign, so would sparking an early contest be counter-productive?
I do think we have to have a strategy to stop Cameron as the Tories are getting a lot of air-time for their so-called regeneration - I heard on Radio 4 though that they their much feted women candidates are still having to answer questions such as how will they look after their children if elected and they were being told that the panels would still be looking for bright young men with "glittering political careers ahead of them" - so the Tories obviously haven't changed a bit in the heartlands as we on the new left already know of course. But I'm worried that they will pick up a lot of floating voters and those that are only dimly aware that Brown would be similar to Blair policy-wise and who therefore want a change and who obviously aren't aware of the full implications of conservative policies. We can point to Cameron's lack of experience as well as the Tory policy vacuum and point out that he is their "Tony Blair" ten years too late. I think we should stop apologising for being left wing (which is the most humanitarian position when you look into it and surely everyone wants that) as that is giving in to the way the right wing from New Labour to the Tories have managed to hijack the agenda; though we musn't be in totally in your face but we must just win people over to our point of view by explaining that New Labour as a phenomenon has had it's day, perhaps it had to happen (though I wish it hadn't) but it dosen't have to be an irrevocable shift and we won't cause a civil war within Labour by doing this as Labour was never completely New Labour in it's thinking it was only ever a faction but unfortunately this faction who never represented true Labour values of fairness, equality etc in practice despite their protestations to the contrary have seized control and will now do absolutely anything to keep hold of power despite the fact that the implications of their policies have alienated most of the people who elected them. They are definitely out of touch and everyone can see it except themselves so we do have a duty to do something about it. Thatcher went when she lost the support of her Cabinet but this is a different situation -otherwise the Cabinet would have split over Iraq or the Middle East situation by now, I think it will take a move by the whole Labour party in general to make Blair go so a radical break with New Labour as John says is the only way. I was shocked when in July some people from my ward Labour party said they accepted we'd have to spend the next electoral term in opposition before we changed Labour enough to be electable again as they didn't agree with the was things were going but it was the way that they were just resigned to losing which got me. Not likely! We have got to pull back from the brink now and rescue ourselves! We should not fall into their trap of waiting and seeing and not rocking the boat -you hear this at conference when you hear a Blairite Minister's response to an issue which obviously needs sorting out such as shortage of affordable housing they just effectively say "leave it with us, don't make a fuss, we're sorting it out" but what when you look at the actions they take to solve the original problemn such as lack of housing, they create a much worse situation than existed in the first place with the the bad side effects of the resulting solution (privatisation usually) and yet they patronise us by telling us they are doing what works! As has been said before, these people don't live in the real world and they really need to take their heads out of the sand and see the writing on the wall before it's to late but the trouble is that they are not going to do this by themselves, they need a wake-up call as they are ignoring the evidence in front of their own eyes as John points out. The only way we can beat Brown is to make sure we vote against him in a leadership election whenever it finally is, to do so we need to keep our Labour membership up to date or join if we are outside as after six months membership we can vote on the leadership at an election. We also to remind the public that not all Labour MPs are like Blair and explain the values of those that aren't, not let the rebel tag mean their views are dismissed as the contrary should be the case and also make it be known that these are not the MPS in vulnerable seats when you look at the statistics.
On a point of hope if politics goes in fashions which I sometimes tend to think often does, are we not well overdue for a left wing revival??! We've had everything else! Today's eighteen year olds are too young to remember the Bennite days when we nearly won the deputy leadership I don't remember much myself as I was too young but I do remember certain parts of the era such as when the "greed is good" aka Michael Douglas in Wall Street philosphy came along in the eighties, when a schoolfriend of mine bought shares in BT aged 14 and the like there was still conversely a great counter to this sort of thing in things like the Greenham Common demos, the anti-apartheid campaigns etc which were really respected and seen as essential to the future of our democracy and indeed the world. But nowadays there is a tendency to think the big battles have been won when nothing could be further from the truth -witness the struggle to get fair trade formally adopted by all countries -but the world has changed a lot in the last twenty to thirty years and we should get the message across that the new left's policies have been updated and well thought out to reflect this, they are not simply old Labour, nothing could be further from the truth. But we will explain our policies in simpler form from the BLairites - if I hear one more list of statistics or quotes of billions of pounds spent on this that and the other with nothing to translate this into a meaningful amount such as a percentage of the total budget for say health I will scream! I think the Blsirites just tried too hard because they were trying to cover their lack of experience in government when in fact having fresh ideas can be a blessing instead of a curse but they have missed their opportunity to be radical so we must step in and fill the void by extolling the sort of ideas John is putting forward on this website so that we can get them on the agenda and also because the majority of people would agree with them as we are currently witnessing over the recent unanimous calls for a cease-fire in the Middle East and save the public services campaigns such as Keep Our NHS Public etc so in that respect we're not radical at all!
With both the Tories and Neo-Labour chasing the middle ground there will soon be no party politics and any opposition to either party when in government will be left to Prince Charles ;-)
I NOTICED AN ARTICLE ON THE FRONT PAGE OF THE "ATLANTA JOURNAL-CONSTITUTION" COVERING PRESIDENT BUSH'S 8/20 NEWS CONFERENCE AND SUBLIMELY ENTITLED "BUSH: STICK IT OUT IN IRAQ." WHAT IS THE "IT" HE IS TALKING ABOUT "STICKING OUT"? WHAT IF WE STICK "IT" OUT, AND EVERYONE LAUGHS AT "IT"? WHAT IF "IT" GETS CUT OFF? WHAT WILL BECOME OF THE U.S.A. AS A NATION IF WE DO NOT HAVE "IT" ANYMORE? ALL
THE OTHER NATIONS (AND EVEN THE TERRORISTS) WILL SNICKER BEHIND OUR BACKS ABOUT US NOT HAVING ONE! TONY BLAIR WILL NO LONGER BE
INFATUATED WITH US, AND WILL START LOOKING FOR "IT" ELSEWHERE!
AS TO THE PRICE OF GASOLINE, BUSH IS QUOTED AS SAYING: "IT'S TAKING MONEY OUT OF PEOPLE'S POCKETS. I KNOW THAT. ALL THE MORE
REASON TO DIVERSIFY AWAY FROM CRUDE OIL." DIVERSIFY AWAY FROM? THAT'S NOT AN OXYMORON. IT'S NOT QUITE A REDUNDANCY. I SUPPOSE IT'S
MERELY ILLITERATE AND IDIOTIC! PERHAPS WE CAN INVENT CARS THAT WILL RUN ON "PENUTS"? OR IS IT "PEENUTS"? NOW I UNDERSTAND WHY
ALL OF THE ISRAELI SPOKESMEN DURING THE INVASION OF LEBANON KEPT SAYING HOW FORTUNATE WE AMERICANS ARE TO HAVE GEORGE BUSH AS PRESIDENT! JOHN DICKERSON, ATLANTA, GEORGIA, USA
It is the stonking lack of self-awareness that is so clear with Noo Labor. They seem to have no idea just how negatively they are viewed by us so it is no use looking at selected polls. Cameron is on his way and I blame Blair the baby-killer for this too.
' Oh wad he had the giftie gie us,
To see oursels as others see us'
George Burns.
1st Sept
On refusing to name the day Tony tells the Times :-
"The danger for Labour is actually stasis: in other words the party doesn’t realise that 2007 new Labour is not 1997 new Labour.”
This is our problem and why we are calling for a change in leadership. Tony's policies today are not what we voted for. John's policies are closer to New Labour than Tony's. Can TB convince his membership of the differentiation between his policies and those of the Neo-cons or the Tory Party. I doubt it.
TB argues that we want a change of direction - yes we do and the direction required is AWAY from the RIGHT.
I see some of the bloggers are are getting behind you. That can only be a good thing.
I for one wish you well. It's time the people got back their Labour Party.
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