Kenny Farquharson: Brown must show a little old Labour grit

Published on Saturday 21 February 2009 18:40

POLITICAL nostalgia is beguiling, and there's a lot of it around. The next few weeks will see the 25th anniversary of the miners' strike and the 20th anniversary of the introduction of the poll tax, each of which will be an excuse for many an unreliable reminiscence.

And on our TV screens this week the actress Lindsay Duncan is recreating Maggie Thatcher's downfall, managing – somehow – to make the old battleaxe look glamorous. Now that's what I call revisionism.

Yesterday afternoon in a meeting room at Glasgow Caledonian University there was a gathering of people who seem to have taken political nostalgia a little bit too far. They have resurrected the Labour Representative Committee, founded in 1900 and a forerunner of the modern Labour party. More than a century ago the LRC gathered together the disparate forces of the left – MPs, trade unions and working-class organisations – in an alliance that would eventually coalesce under the leadership of Keir Hardie in 1906.

The 21st-century version of the LRC stands for political principles of which Hardie would have approve: nationalisation; redistribution of wealth; free education; social housing; trade union rights. A more recent echo might be the Labour party manifesto for the 1983 general election, famously described by Gerald Kaufman as the "longest suicide note in history", a textbook example of a political party more interested in polishing its nostrums than listening to the people it seeks to govern.

Even a year ago a gathering like yesterday's in Glasgow could easily have been dismissed as political onanism, hopelessly irrelevant to the concerns of ordinary voters. But now? In the grip of a deepening recession? As governments around the world use hundreds of billions of dollars to prop up ailing economies? As car firms pin their survival on government assistance? As Scottish banks are nationalised? As ministers impose curbs on the dosh taken home by spivs and speculators?

Gordon Brown is a student of Labour history who can't help but acknowledge the socialist antecedents of the strategy that will make or break him as prime minister. And yet socialism – red in tooth and claw – is far from being acknowledged as a current force in British politics, even within the Labour party.

Brown is struggling to come up with a way of talking about his economic policy in a way that Middle England wont find alarming. So he talks of a "can-do" government, contrasting this with David Cameron's "do-nothing" Tories. Yet he is struggling to find a convincing narrative that doesn't sound like it should be accompanied by a Welsh male voice choir humming The Red Flag.

Labour's nervousness reveals itself in hesitation. Take last week's decision by Chancellor Alistair Darling to reduce the bonus payment for key Royal Bank of Scotland staff by up to 90%. This was first mooted months ago, but all the signs were that the Chancellor would shy away from such a bold and politically motivated intervention. But then President Barack Obama acted against Wall Street and declared that those who had brought capitalism to the edge of a precipice should not be rewarded for their recklessness. That allowed Darling to act, to popular applause. It's a lesson Labour should heed.

Opinion polls published last Friday showed Labour currently trailing the Tories by 20 percentage points. Labour leadership hopefuls, silenced while Brown strode the international stage dispensing advice on economic rescue, are once more positioning themselves for the contest that will follow near-certain defeat at the general election.

Brown has to decide now on his election pitch, to allow the message to marinate in the public mind. He has to decide whether to present the current splurge of Keynesian intervention as a temporary diversion from the true shining path of free-market capitalism, or as a paradigm shift for our politics, economy and the way we view the world.

The timing alone should force Labour's hand. No way will the economic gloom have been dispelled by June 3 next year – the last day on which Brown can hold an election. If anything, the full effects will only be starting to be felt. "Calm down dear, it's only a recession," is not a convincing election slogan.

The fact that Darling has belatedly found the guts to act on bonuses presents him with a dilemma – and an opportunity. No longer can he claim, as he did when the government became a majority shareholder in RBS, that the bank would be left to operate as much as possible as an independent commercial entity, free of ministerial interference. If RBS is now to be run in accordance with the greater good, then why not insist that it takes a more kindly attitude to loans for new business start-ups? Or a more understanding approach to mortgage defaulters as unemployment starts to rise? Or a helpful disposition when faced with small firms renegotiating their borrowings?

At a time when the British banking model is hardly a paragon of virtue, there could be little objection to the majority shareholder setting the tone for the way the business operates. Isn't that the way capitalism is meant to work? We pay the piper, so why not let us call the tune?

For 30 years Gordon Brown has been trying to unlearn his socialism, or at least to disguise it. Every utterance, every policy detail was calibrated to ensure that New Labour was not tainted by the socialist economics of old. It may go against every instinct he possesses, but the time has come for Brown to roll up his shirt sleeve and reveal the James Maxton tattoo that has been there on his bicep all along.