Thatcher: There WAS an alternative

The first thing I need to say about Margaret Thatcher is that when it comes to the former Prime Minister, I can scarcely be regarded as a disinterested or objective observer.

I spent most of my early adulthood wishing she was no longer in Number Ten, and much of my later journalistic career was spent in areas such as South Wales and the North-East where the impact of her policies had been most adversely felt.

As Journal political editor from 1997-2004, much of my work revolved around the question of how the region should tackle the North-South divide which, if not created by her, was certainly sharply exacerbated during her long premiership.

So in the unlikely event that anyone has come here expecting to read another syrupy paean of praise to the Iron Lady following her death this week, it’s probably best to look away now.

Many millions of words have already been written and spoken about the woman who led Britain for 11 tumultuous years, but ultimately the debate seems to come down to the question of whether she saved the nation, or destroyed it.

Probably the answer is a bit of both.  Looked at in the round, the Thatcher legacy suggests a strange ambivalent power for good and bad which seems to run through most of the policies with which she is most closely associated.

Take the iconic right to buy scheme, for instance.  Yes, it enabled council tenants to buy their own homes, and the dramatic increase in social mobility it fostered helped break down the class barriers which held Britain back in the post-war years.

But the downside was that housing policy ceased to be a debate about who could build the most homes, and became instead a question of who could do most to artificially inflate the value of the increasingly limited number of homes available.

Then there were the employment laws.  It is beyond question that prior to 1979 the power of the union barons had got out of hand and that Mrs Thatcher’s changes helped restore a measure of democracy to a nation in danger of becoming ungovernable.

Yet in smashing the unions, she also ushered in an era of job insecurity which has had a baleful effect on the national psyche.

I could go on.   Deregulation of the City of London made it a world financial centre that spawned untold riches for Britain’s financial services industry, but led directly to the banking crisis that caused the 2008 crash and the subsequent recession.

Even the Falklands War, by rolling back the post-Suez defeatism in which British foreign policy had been enmeshed since 1956, paved the way for Tony Blair’s disastrous intervention in Iraq twenty years later.

When assessing the Thatcher legacy, therefore, the key question becomes could we actually have had the good without the bad?  Was there, despite what the Iron Lady herself said, an alternative?

I would like to think so.   While the challenges of globalisation would eventually have forced British industry to become more competitive, the impact of this would have been slower and less brutal than the wholesale destruction of our manufacturing base in the early 1980s.

It has to be remembered that, far from being an historical inevitability, Mrs Thatcher was in fact a very lucky Prime Minister. 

Labour in 1980 put itself out of serious contention for power by choosing the wrong leader and then splitting, while a couple of Exocet missiles in the wrong place in 1982 might have sunk not just the Falklands task force, but her premiership with it.

For me, the most interesting counterfactual question about Mrs Thatcher is what would the country have been like had she never become Prime Minister or, alternatively, been ousted in 1982-83.

Had a Tory wet like Jim Prior or a Labour moderate like Denis Healey run Britain in the 1980s, and invested the proceeds of North Sea Oil in social reconstruction rather than tax cuts, would we have ended up with Swedish-style social democracy rather than US-style neo-liberalism?

Since those days, we seem to have become a politically more united country, but a much more economically and socially divided one.

And if forced to make a judgement, I think I like the Britain she created rather less than the one which she destroyed.

David Miliband: A right decision, borne out of a wrong one

So, then, David Miliband – political colossus, or inconsequential footnote?  The greatest loss to British politics since the fall of Margaret Thatcher, or a failed leadership wannabe who will soon be forgotten?

There were plenty of opinions flying around this week in the wake of the South Shields MP’s shock decision to quit Parliament for a well-paid but scarcely high profile role running an international rescue charity in New York.

Predictably, it was his old mentors Tony Blair and Peter Mandelson who led the grief-fest, both expressing the hope that this would be but a temporary exile from which their protege would one day return in triumph.

Many Blairite cheerleaders in the media viewed Mr Miliband as so significant a figure that the ‘project’ would not survive his departure, though in truth it has been no more than a twitching corpse since his 2010 leadership election defeat.

The Conservative commentator Peter Oborne, writing in the Telegraph, took a rather different view of his career, however.

“Any detached judge has always been able to see that David Miliband was not front rank.  He is a hopeless public speaker and has never once expressed an original thought,” he wrote.

Oborne contrasted Mr Miliband’s “cosmic sulk” after losing the Labour leadership to his brother Ed with Denis Healey’s loyal service under Michael Foot after a similarly unexpected setback in 1980.

The difference between them, he argued, was hinterland:  Healey, who fought with distinction in the Second World War, knew that losing the leadership was a trivial matter by comparison, whereas Miliband, who has spent his entire adult life in politics, had no such perspective.

My own view for what it’s worth is that David Miliband was not a complete politician, but nevertheless still the best on offer at the time Labour was choosing a successor to Gordon Brown in 2010.

Oborne is right to point out that he certainly wasn’t in the front rank as an orator, but this didn’t prevent John Major reaching Number Ten and staying there for nearly seven years.

Where he was more lacking was in his tactical acumen – as was seen in his various hamfisted attempts to set out a distinctive New Labour policy agenda during the Gordon Brown years.

If these were covert leadership bids, they were spectacularly unsuccessful ones.  If they weren’t, he should have taken much more care to ensure they were not interpreted as such.

In his favour, he was certainly one of the brainiest people operating in public life over the past decade or so and also, it has to be said, one of the nicest.

As regular readers of this column will know, I was never a huge fan of New Labour, but with David it never spilled over into personal acrimony in the way it occasionally did with some of his North East Labour colleagues.

But it was not so much his cleverness or niceness that made him the best candidate to lead the party in 2010, it was simply that he was the party’s most popular and well-known figure among the wider public.

It may seem obvious that a party wanting to return to power at the earliest opportunity should take note of what the public thinks when choosing a leader, but actually they seldom do, as both Mr Healey and later Ken Clarke also found to their cost.

In the end, it is this very popularity that has forced Mr Miliband to the point where he now feels Labour’s chances of winning the next election would be better if he were 3,000 miles away from Westminster.

It was this, coupled with the peculiar dynamics of Labour’s electoral college which showed he was also the most popular choice of Labour activists and MPs, which would always prompt those comparisons with his brother’s performance.

Has he taken the right decision?  For himself, for his brother, and for the Labour Party, almost certainly yes.

But that still doesn’t alter the fact that the Labour Party made the wrong one when it decided to pass him over.

Seldon is right: Balls should fall on his sword

At the end of last week’s column, on the back of an opinion poll showing the party 11 points clear of the Tories, I suggested that the next general election in 2015 was beginning to look like it might be Labour’s to lose.

Premature? Well probably. But there seems to be a growing view in political circles – not least on the Tory backbenches - that Labour is on course to become, at worst, the largest single party in another hung Parliament.

At the same time, however, there remains a strong awareness that despite favourable poll ratings and the growing unpopularity of the Coalition, the party still has one huge Achilles Heel: the economic record of the last Labour government.

And the man who, more than any other, personifies this is the Shadow Chancellor, Ed Balls – Gordon Brown’s chief economic adviser for most of his time at the Treasury and his closest political ally once he got to Number 10.

In my political preview of 2013, published on the last Saturday of 2012, I predicted that Labour leader Ed Miliband might eventually be obliged to resolve this difficulty by relieving Mr Balls of his responsibilities.

So it came as no huge surprise, to me at any rate, to see this view being repeated by no less a figure than Anthony Seldon, Master of Wellington College and the pre-eminent historian of the Blair-Brown years.

“As somebody who has written about you for many years it falls to me to say this: the time has come for you to fall on your sword,” he told Mr Balls in a New Statesman article this week.

“Ed Miliband would be a much stronger leader without you. Forgive me, but you stop Ed breathing fresh air. With you close to him, his breath will always be stale and smell of a toxic brand… Without you, Labour could present itself as a clean party, free of the factionalism and brutalism that so tarnished it when Brown was boss and you were his consigliere. “

If the Godfather allusion seems unnecessarily brutal, Seldon at least went on to hold out the prospect that Mr Balls could one day return to the front bench as a “redeemed and respected figure.”

He even went so far as to say that he might yet succeed to the party leadership one day, predicting that the public will eventually tire of the trend towards young leaders.

Unsurprisingly, it didn’t take long for Tories to start leaping to the defence of the man they believe is their greatest electoral asset.

One prominent Conservative blogger praised his “good political brain” and grasp of economics, and suggested that, far from being a drain on Ed Miliband’s leadership, he acts as a useful lightning conductor for him.

The irony of all this is that Mr Balls has, broadly speaking, been proved right in his attack on the government’s economic policy since 2010, namely that it has cut too far, too fast and in so doing snuffed out an incipient recovery.

With growth still sluggish, it is hard to gainsay the central thrust of his argument that the Coalition needs a ‘Plan B’ in order to get the economy moving again.

But whereas people may agree with Mr Balls’ analysis of the problem, this does not mean they necessarily agree with his solutions.

And Mr Balls’ real difficulty is that, rightly or wrongly, many voters assume his much-vaunted Plan B would be no more than a return to the policies that got the country into such a mess in the first place.

One of the most successful and oft-used Tory slogans of all time is the one originally coined by Harold Macmillan’s government at the 1959 election: “Life’s better with the Conservatives – don’t let Labour ruin it.”

It was used again to good effect in the last week of the 1987 campaign after the Tories’ “wobbly Thursday,” and variants such as “Britain is booming – don’t let Labour blow it” have resurfaced from time to time.

So long as Ed Balls remains in the shadow Treasury brief, the Tories won’t need Saatchi and Saatchi to devise their next election slogan for them.

It will be quite straightforward: “Britain is on the way back. Don’t let Labour Balls it up.”