The Problem for Labour - and for the majority of the British people

The Labour Party has a serious problem, which it must rectify if it is ever to deliver for the people the party was formed to represent.  The problem is an ideological one.  Since Tony Blair managed to get the party to ditch Clause IV of its consitution, it has been almost impossible to identify one single feature of the party which makes it distinctive.  I acknowledge that the Labour Party has never been a socialist party (though it has aways contained socialists), as Tony Benn has reminded us often; but Clause IV did give the party some, perhaps idealistic, philosophical underpinning.  Even those who never really accepted it nevertheless eschewed the kind of rampant economic liberalism that was encouraged to flourish under the Blair government; Clause IV acted as a kind of ideological check, a touchstone, for many in the party, which is precisely why Blair consigned it to history.

The reason why Blair got away with his ideological rebranding of the party is because, after long years of opposition, many people within the party were so desperate to get into power that they were prepared to say and do almost anything to secure it.  Tha attainment of power became the first principle, and many of the leading lights in the party simply crucified their consciences to this end.  Principle was replaced by pragmatism. 

Blair, with his chancellor, 'Prudence' Brown, set out to show the electorate that they could be fiscally responsible; and this roughly translates as being able to run capitalism better than those who really believed in it.  The eighteen years of opposition, which could have been used fruitfully to rebuild a party committed to its founding principles, were wasted.  Instead, Labour people toured the country under Kinnnock engaging in the so-called 'Labour Listens' initiative; this amounted to the conveying of a message to the electorate along the lines of 'tell us what you want and we'll provide it'.

During the years of Labour administration, under Blair and then Brown, Labour was often accused by some in the trades unions, among others, of simply aping the Conservatives.  It is certainly true that, whilst Labour did find more public money for schools and the like (easy at a time of economic prosperity), the gap between rich and poor widened significantly - a severe indictment for a party traditionally concerned with wealth redistribution.  It is also true that Peter Mandelson declared the party to be 'relaxed' about extreme wealth.

Now, back in opposition, it would appear that Labour is determined to retain its new character.  Yesterday, Ed Balls, hitherto more stubbornly Keynesian than some of his cuts-driven colleagues, actually committed Labour to the Tories' public sector pay freeze agenda.  Today, Ed Miliband defended him in the party's latest plea to be seen as 'fiscally credible'.  It is almost impossible to identify any real difference between Labour and the Conservatives, other than that the former would like to go more slowly and less aggressively.  Philosophically, they are the same.  Labour traditionally benefits from higher electoral turnouts, and yet the party is doing everything, it would appear, to discourage people from bothering to go out to vote.

Because of its philosophical deficit, Labour is now quite unable to offer voters an alternative to the Tories' approach to the current financial challenges.  It's as if There Is No Alternative.

Yet there is.  The total personal wealth in the UK is £9,000bn, a sum much larger than the national debt.  The richest 10% owns £4,000bn; this sector of the population has an average per household income of £4m.  The bottom half of the population owns 9%.  As Greg Philo argued last year in The Guardian, a one-off tax of just 20% of the wealth of the richest 10% would pay the national debt and reduce the deficit significantly, precisely because of the fact (as the Tories keep reminding us) that interest payments on the debt represent a large proportion of government spending.  There is no reason why this tax could not be graduated within this sector of the population.

The policies of the coaltion government, by contrast, are having the effect of increasing unemployment and reducing benefits; these policies are hitting the bottom 6 million people the hardest.  We have already seen some serious social unrest; there is likely to be more.  We are emphatically not 'all in this together' - a fact shown by the recent record profits for Rolls Royce and a huge increase in profits in 2011 for Fortnum and Mason.  The rich are most certainly not 'in this' with the rest of us.

We are the sixth richest nation on earth, and yet we are cutting the school meals services and making even more unjust what are already regressive forms of taxation.  The scandal is that the Labour Party is complicit, and that ordinary working people have no major political party to represent them.  There may be a fiscal deficit - we hear about it all the time - but there is also a philosophical deficit within the Labour Party and a democratic deficit in our nation.