A clear and demonstrable collapse

Crewe. Henley. Glasgow East. Are the voters trying to tell us something? Here's today's Newcastle Journal column.

***

When in years to come, historians pore over the long, slow demise of New Labour, the series of by-elections in the spring and summer of 2008 will, I believe, be seen as a crucial period.

First there was the catastrophe in Crewe, after the contest held in the wake of Gwyneth Dunwoody’s death saw David Cameron’s Tories win their first seat off Labour for nearly 30 years.

Then it was humiliation in Henley, as Labour lost its deposit and slumped to fifth place behind the British National Party and the Greens.

Finally, on Thursday night, the earthquake in East Glasgow, after Labour’s hitherto third-safest seat in Scotland disappeared to the Scottish National Party on a 22pc swing.

As he surveys the wreckage this weekend, Prime Minister Gordon Brown must be cursing the malign combination of political circumstances that forced him to fight three by-elections in as many months.

Had they not taken place, he might by now have been able to shore-up his position and even build some political momentum. As it is, a clear alternative narrative is now emerging.

There can be no writing-off these results as a short-term protest vote such as happened in the post-Iraq War by-elections in the predominantly Moslem constituencies of Leicester South and Brent East during the last Parliament.

No, the story of the three 2008 by-elections is of a clear and demonstrable collapse in public support for Labour in general, and Mr Brown in particular.

What is particularly damaging about the Glasgow East result is that this was a revolt not of the swing vote but of the Labour core vote, which now seems to be bleeding away.

When the by-election date was set for July 24 – two days after the start of the summer Parliamentary recess – there were those who claimed it had been deliberately timed to minimise the threat of MPs plotting against Mr Brown.

If that is the case, then Mr Brown’s strategists have clearly never heard of email or the mobile phone.

Labour MPs may be scattered to the four winds this weekend, but expect the lines to be humming between the beaches of Europe and beyond.

As it is, a number of Labour MPs and ministers will not be sunning themselves, despite the current unaccustomed spell of decent summer weather.

Instead, they will be at the party’s national policy forum in Warwick, discussing the contents of the next Labour manifesto with the trades unions and grassroots constituency activists.

Ostensibly, the conference is about whether or not to implement a.long shopping list of demands ranging from scrapping NHS prescription charges to the reintroduction of secondary picketing.

But the subtext will be the position of Mr Brown. To paraphrase the Bible verse, when two or three Labour activists are gathered together, the talk shall quickly turn to the leadership.

Up until now, the prospects of a successful challenge to Mr Brown have been hampered by the absence of a clear alternative candidate, but if one is to emerge, then now is surely the time.

Work and Pensions Secretary James Purnell set out his stall this week by publishing a Green Paper on welfare reform, advocating the scrapping of Incapacity Benefit and making those out of work for more than two years work full-time in the community.

At one level, it demonstrated that there is intellectual life in New Labour yet, in terms of fresh ideas which could underpin what would be an unprecedented fourth term in power.

But at another level, it was hard to escape the conclusion that it was designed as a piece of pre-leadership election positioning, a warning to Foreign Secretary David Miliband that he is not the only Blairite pebble on the beach

Despite his undoubted intellect, though, Mr Purnell carries the air of a lightweight about him and his election would manage the considerable feat of making Mr Cameron look statesmanlike.

South Shields MP Mr Miliband remains the man to beat, although it seems clear he will not be the one to raise the standard of rebellion.

His old alliance with Health Secretary Alan Johnson could be key. The two were education ministers together under Mr Blair and became huge admirers of eachother’s work.

Mr Johnson has said he is not up to the job of Premier, but the idea of him playing John Prescott to Mr Miliband’s Tony Blair could be an increasingly seductive one.

Mr Brown’s instinct will be to plough on. We read this week that he is planning a September reshuffle, the centrepiece of which will be to bring back Margaret Beckett as the government’s chief apologist, or “Minister for the Today Programme.”

Now Mrs Beckett has been a loyal servant of the nation, and despite an undistinguished spell as Foreign Secretary, she was rather harshly treated when left out of Mr Brown’s first administration last year.

But if the Prime Minister really believes that bringing her back into a senior Cabinet role is going to restore his or Labour’s political fortunes, it demonstrates how out of touch he is.

Increasingly, the view among Labour MPs is that the only minister Mr Brown should consider reshuffling is himself.

A dream scenario for Mr Brown is that no clear challenger emerges over the course of the coming weeks, and he restores his authority with the conference speech of his life in September.

But such has been the scale of the public backlash against the government in recent months that it is unrealistic not to expect his leadership to now be openly called into question.

The corresponding nightmare scenario for the Prime Minister is that, against a backdrop of dissension and even open revolt, he makes a poor speech which reinforces the speculation about his position.

Sadly for him, this seems overwhelmingly the likelier of the two outcomes.

Vote for your Top 10 political blogs

It's that time of the year again. Iain Dale is compiling his 2008/9 Guide to Political Blogging and is once again asking for your help in putting together his annual popularity poll.

This blog was placed 10th in the 2006 poll and 18th last year. I would love to do as well again, but seriously don't expect to, as I have had considerably less time to spend on blogging over the past 12 months or so and the frequency (though hopefully not the quality) of postings has suffered as a result. Obviously I'm not going to stop anyone voting for me though - email your Top 10 to toptenblogs@totalpolitics.com.

One or two well-known left bloggers are refusing to take part in the poll on the grounds that Iain Dale has consistently made a point of slagging off the left blogosphere, and also that by competing, we are feeding into Iain's image of himself as the "granddaddy of political blogging."

Although I should declare an interest both as a columnist for Total Politics and an (unpaid) contributor to the Guide - I'll be writing about the state of the MSM blogosphere - I disagree on both counts.

On the first point, refusing to take part in an election because a Tory blogger disses your blog is a bit like refusing to vote Labour because the Tory Party says they are shite. Unfortunately for those who would like to see the blogosphere as some sort of neutral platform for the exchange of ideas, political partisanship goes with the territory.

Iain's claim that the entire left blogosphere is rubbish is, in any case, a banquet of bollocks and I don't know why he goes on making it, especially when it contradicts the complimentary things he has said about this and other centre-left blogs in the past. But opting out of the only blog popularity poll currently in town is not the eway to counter that wrong impression.

Secondly, Iain is only the granddaddy of the blogosphere for two reasons - (1) Because Tim Worstall decided he didn't want to be any more, and (2) Because he is the only blogger who has the time and resources to compile the Guide. These aren't good enough reasons not to take part, in my view.

So what of my nominations? There are four leftish blogs in my top 10, three that are centre-ground and three that are right-leaning - a fairly balanced list!

1 Political Betting. Mike Smithson's one-man punditry factory is still the must-read among political blogs.

2 Liberal England. Well-written, funny and wistful, it's about time Jonathan Calder (Lord Bonkers) achieved wider recognition.

3 Benedict Brogan. One of only two newspaper lobby men (Sam Coates is the other) who really "gets" blogging and uses the medium to maximum effect.

4 Liberal Conspiracy. The best attempt thus far to corral together the disparate voices of the left blogosphere - far more so than Comment is Free.

5 Iain Dale's Diary. Still a right riveting read most days despite the (sometimes overdone) anti-Brown propaganda.

6 Hopi Sen. The best new blog to emerge over the past year from Labour's uber-Blairite former North-East press officer.

7 The Daily Pundit. First to predict David Davis's resignation - in 2006. What more can be said?

8 Coffee House. Fraser Nelson usually gets the credit, but in my view James Forsyth is the real reason for this group blog's success.

9 Rupa Huq. Didn't quite take the blogosphere by storm in the way some predicted, but still interesting and insightful.

10 Skipper. Consistently sharp political analysis, though from an increasingly Blairite perspective, from the much underrated Dr Bill Jones.

My list contains a couple of notable omissions in the shape of Dizzy Thinks and Bloggerheads. Both are still excellent blogs in my view, but they have spent too much time attacking eachother over the past year for my liking.

I also left out Guido Fawkes, even though I visit his blog most days. It's still a must-read most of the time, but he has published too many nasty smears about Gordon Brown over the past 12 months to be in my Top 10, not least trying to prove that there was something corrupt in his close relationship with a think-tank set up in memory of his great friend and mentor John Smith, and repeatedly rehashing Mandelson's Gay Gordon smear that was discredited sometime in and around 1994.

I think that's probably enough controversy for now...

The collapse of the "progressive consensus"

Do centre-left governments have any room for manoeuvre on tax anymore? Here's my column in today's Newcastle Journal.

***

Aneurin Bevan once famously described socialism as the language of priorities. It has been a fairly long time since the Labour Party talked about socialism, but at times like the present, it can't help but talk about priorities.

And few issues go more to the heart of what a centre-left government's priorities should be than the ongoing controversy over fuel taxes.

Is it the primary job of a Labour government, especially in times of economic hardship, to protect the living standards of the worst-off by trying to keep household bills as low as possible?

Or in this era of climate change, do governments of the left have a higher responsibility - to try to save the planet from the potentially deadly effects of the free market by curbing the use of fossil fuels?

The consensus of opinion within the wider public on this score has ebbed and flowed back and forth over the past decade.

Nearly eight years ago, in the autumn of 2000, New Labour's political hegemony was brielfy threatened by the eruption of the fuel protests, following the imposition of a "fuel price escalator" designed to curb greenhouse gas emissions.

Public sympathy at the time was initially with the protesters, though it evaporated pretty swiftly once they started blockading power stations and generally behaving like a bunch of 1970s flying pickets.

And over the ensuing years, opinion swung decisively back in the direction of the "green" lobby, to the point where any government which failed to do something to tackle car use risked being seen as irresponsible.

But that was before the credit crunch. The environment, which at one time was a big enough issue to persuade David Cameron to start cycling to work, has now slipped back down to its customarily more lowly place in the public consciousness.

Instead, we're back on the old, familiar ground of "the economy, stupid."

When the proposed fuel tax increase was first outlined in last year's Pre-Budget Report, inflation was still well under control and the effects of rising food and fuel costs had yet to be seen.

But nine months on, it seems, greenery has once again become a luxury that the nation cannot afford.

The pressure had been on Prime Minister Gordon Brown and Chancellor Alistair Darling over the fuel tax issue since the start of the year when the business and motoring lobbies first begun to hone in on it.

At one time, it might have been seen as a test of the government's resolve. I myself wrote in this column that the question of whether ministers were still prepared to make the case for the tax rise would show whether the Brown administration retained a shred of self-belief.

In the end, though, it was no great surprise when Mr Darling announced on Wednesday that the increase had been postponed once again. He probably had little option.

Indeed, with another crucial by-election for the government coming up in Glasgow East next Thursday, perhaps the only surprise was that he didn't do it sooner.

It won't stop there, either. Now that the government has u-turned on the fuel tax rise, expect it to come under sustained pressure to scrap the planned changes in vehicle excise duty to discourage "gas guzzling" cars.

When this idea was first dreamed up, the government probably had the so-called "Chelsea Tractor Set" in mind - a fairly convenient political target.

But in yet another example of the law of unintended political consequences, it turns out that the cars most likely to be hit by the proposed changes are overwhelmingly owned by the worst-off.

In the end, backbench Labour MPs are no more likely to let this happen than they were likely to allow the government to scrap the 10p tax rate.

I recently saw the planned changes to vehicle excise duty rather unfairly but amusingly caricatured on a satirical website as a spoof news item about Labour's "master plan" to restore its political fortunes.

"Labour will today unveil a detailed plan to alienate its last remaining pockets of support. The central plank of the party's strategy involves identifying the ten most popular family cars in Britain and then making them a nightmare to own," it read.

A “Labour spokesman” was quoted as saying: "We're going for the double whammy of making them too expensive to drive, but also impossible to sell."

Silly? Maybe, but it was a light-hearted way of making the serious political point that Labour simply cannot afford to antagonise its natural supporters any more than it already has done.

But the vehicle taxation issues are an illustration of a much wider political truth, that the government now finds itself in a position on tax where it has virtually no more room for manoeuvre.

Both Tony Blair and Gordon Brown have talked at length over the past decade about the need to build a “progressive consensus” in which people accepted that decent public services required taxes to be maintained at a certain level.

In fact the opposite has happened. People seem increasingly less and less happy to pay their taxes, with the result that the existing tax-take as a proportion of GDP is likely to come more and more into question.

It is this that has essentially brought about the Liberal Democrats’ near-total volte-face under new leader Nick Clegg from being a party of 50p tax rates to a party of tax-cutters.

Back in the early days of New Labour, John Prescott and others dreamed of using the tax system to bring about a major shift in public behaviour, making private transport progressively more expensive and using the proceeds to fund better and more accessible public transport.

However desirable this might once have seemed, the government’s inability to impose even small increases in fuel tax show that it has now become a political impossibility.

When Bevan talked about the “language of priorities,” there was a basic assumption that governments had the ability to choose between competing interests and concerns.

Increasingly, for this government at least, those choices no longer exist.

Linford v Smithson on Brown v Blair

Mike Smithson is one of the genuine giants of political blogging so I'm always rather flattered when he namechecks this blog. Today he devoted an entire post to a discussion I raised on his blog last week over whether Labour would be in quite the mess it's in now had Tony Blair stayed as leader.

My view on this has always been that Blair had become a liability for Labour long before 2005 and that had Brown been leader at the last GE the party would actually have won a majority in excess of 100, but Mike disagrees and thinks that if Blair were still leader the Tories' lead now would still be only in single figures.

Most of the posters on PB.com sided with Mike on this but there was some support for my point of view from the distinguished pollster Robert Waller who made the following very interesting comment:

"By 2005 Blair was a very significant disadvantage to Labour, with Professor Harold Clarke and other academics using the British Election Study claiming that there would have been another 100 plus landslide majority if he had not been PM at the last general election.

"Thereafter, he did have to go, forced out earlier than he intended by pressure within various sections of the party culminating in the ‘plots’ around the time of the Lebanese invasion/crisis.

"With his party as well as the public thoroughly fed up with him, there was no possibility of remaining; the massive sigh of relief was the cause of the ‘Brown bounce’ (that really wasn’t Brown’s attractions!) in the third quarter of 2007. If for some reason Blair had managed to avoid all the pressure to go in mid 2007, the head of steam of ‘time for a change’ would just have got stronger and stronger.

"In addition he would have faced almost all the significant problems Brown does, unless he would be able to work a miracle with the oil and other commodity prices and economic peessimism which are the reasons for Labour’s current dire position in the polls. They would surely have been even worse off under Blair."

Ultimately, of course, as one other poster pointed out, all such counterfactuals are meaningless. But they are good fun, nevertheless.