Richard Leonard: Tony Blair’s ‘middle ground’ is a right-wing nightmare

The bedroom tax, rape clause and hostility to migrants show just how wrong Tony Blair was to say Labour had abandoned the “middle ground” of politics, writes Richard Leonard.

Tony Blair claimed Labour had abandoned the middle ground to the Conservatives in Scotland (Picture: Stefan Rousseau/PA Wire)

Remember the bedroom tax? That pernicious Tory policy that encapsulated so much about what and who the Tories represent: seeing a housing crisis and punishing those who had the least to do with causing it and the most to lose from being forced to move out of their homes.

Labour forced the SNP Government to scrap it in Scotland, after it initially refused to act. And we have called for it to do the same with the two-child cap on claims for tax credits and Universal Credit, and the rape clause that comes with it. Let’s call this what it is, a particularly abhorrent piece of Tory social engineering, which forces women to re-live the trauma of being raped as part of a claim for financial support for a child.

These measures, as illustrative as they are, barely scratch the surface of the level of cuts to social security imposed by the Tories since 2010 – and, of course, supported by the Liberal Democrats in the coalition government. Billions of pounds slashed from benefits and support programmes for the very people who most need our help: sick, disabled and unemployed people, and those who rely on extra support because they are not paid enough to live on. Cruel cuts underpinned by a cruel sanctions regime, so painfully and accurately portrayed in the film ‘I, Daniel Blake’, based partly on people’s experiences in Scotland.

This is the brutal reality of austerity. A political choice to use the power of the state in one of the wealthiest countries in the world, not to make individuals’ lives better and to improve society as a whole, but to tear people’s lives apart. And this is without even mentioning the tens of billions of pounds cut from our public services.

And it is before we have even begun to consider the Tories’ despicable hostile environment that targets migrants, conceived by Theresa May as Home Secretary and continued under her as Prime Minister. Remember those ad vans sent out by May’s Home Office with the nasty threat “Go home or face arrest”? Policies rooted in the worst instincts of the Tory Party, egged on by sections of the press whose front pages regularly scream about the threat posed by migration but never shout about the positive benefits it brings to our country, our culture and our way of life.

But it is not some fanatical Tory clique in England that claims all of this is “necessary”, this is the Conservative Party right across the UK including here in Scotland. Ruth Davidson has proudly talked about how she backed Theresa May as leader, and how she “will back her in the future”. Scottish Secretary David Mundell and stand-in Scottish leader Jackson Carlaw line up foursquare behind the Prime Minister, even as her Brexit shambles goes from farce to horror.

This is the Conservative Party that former Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair bizarrely said last week had claimed the “middle ground” of politics. If that is the middle ground, I shudder to think what would be right of centre.

Scottish Labour has serious work to do, no one in our party is pretending otherwise and no one has ever claimed it is easy-going. We are rebuilding after years of decline and a series of electoral shocks, not least the 2015 General Election when all but one of our 41 MPs were voted out, including the then leader Jim Murphy.

Far from abandoning the mythical “middle ground” which, in truth, only pundits talk about, we are rebuilding on the basis of popular, common sense policies that focus on the real change that Scotland needs. An end to austerity and the cuts to social security and local services, and public ownership of our trains, buses, energy and Royal Mail, to put people before profit. We need Labour governments in Scotland and across the UK to put this into practice.

Of course, it was gravely disappointing that just over a week ago a small group of Labour MPs chose to walk away, to join forces with former Tory MPs in a new Independent Group. In going, they have raised some important issues about Labour, not least the issue of antisemitism which we are determined to root out of our party and wider society. There is no place for antisemitism in the Labour Party.

But they have also been clear that their disagreements range wider and are on matters of policy. In a magazine interview, one of the former Labour MPs has already criticised plans to bring the railways into public ownership and raise the top rate of tax. Another has suggested the group could replace the DUP in propping up the Tory Government. The first act of one of their former Tory colleagues was to declare that the coalition government, which ushered in austerity and led to record levels of poverty and homelessness, “did a marvellous job”.

These are very different ideas to the ones that proved so popular in the 2017 election and which they were elected to Parliament on, so it is right that their constituents get the chance to ask them in by-elections what they now stand for. The group claims to represent a new, forward-looking “centre ground”. But if all it is going to offer is support for austerity, tax breaks for the rich and privatisation of public services, it will look very much like the failed politics of the past.

No one yet knows what the political fall-out will be. But it will not deter Labour from our mission to bring the curtain down on this rotten Tory Government and so to see the back of the party of social security cuts, the two-child cap, austerity, homelessness, foodbanks and inequality. And it will not deter us from campaigning to win back people’s trust and so to win power again in the Scottish Parliament.

We stand for something completely different. We don’t look at the housing crisis and see an opportunity to blame and punish the very people it affects the most. We won’t cut the lifelines from our communities and our industries, we will invest in them, and we will build an economy and a society where everyone benefits, not just a wealthy few.