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1 LABOUR’S THIRD TERM:
A TALE OF TWO PRIME
MINISTERS
Nicholas Allen
In the early hours of Friday 6 May 2005, Tony Blair’s Labour party won its third successive general election and another term in office. Blair was now indisputably his party’s most successful election winner. 1 His modernisa- tion of Labour’s programme and organisation, encapsulated in the name ‘New Labour’, had delivered 43.2 per cent of the vote and a landslide win in 1997 and 40.7 per cent of the vote and another landslide in 2001. Now Blair and Labour had scored a hat trick. Yet, the win in 2005 was far from convincing. Labour’s share of the vote dropped sharply to just 35.2 per cent, a consequence of mounting dissatisfaction with the government’s record and Blair’s personal conduct and opposition to the Iraq war. A weak Conservative opposition and the vagaries of the first-past-the-post electoral system still ensured a handsome parliamentary majority but Labour’s win was only superficially impressive. Labour had never won more than two consecutive elections, and histori- cal precedents from earlier third-term governments offered little guidance about what to expect. Harold Macmillan’s 1959 Conservative govern- ment faced economic difficulties and scandal and went on to lose in 1964. Margaret Thatcher’s 1987 Conservative government faced economic dif- ficulties and internal divisions but went on to win again in 1992. History would, however, be a certain guide to Labour’s third-term prospects in one respect: neither Macmillan nor Thatcher had survived as prime minister to fight the next election, and nor would Blair. 2 Blair had already announced that he would not fight another election so as to placate Gordon Brown, his hugely respected chancellor of the exchequer. Virtually no one thought that Blair would last for very long after 2005, and virtually everyone expected Brown to succeed him. The only real doubt was over whether Brown would subsequently call a snap election to secure a personal mandate, whether he would bide his time, or whether he would hold out until the last possible moment permitted by law. After all, a change in prime minister would not
2 Britain at the Polls 2010
automatically trigger an immediate election. Britain is a parliamentary system, and prime ministers are customarily the leader of the largest party in the House of Commons. When a prime minister steps down or is forced out in between elections, it is a matter for the party, not the voters, to choose a new leader and head of government.^3 In 1997, Labour’s campaign song had been called ‘Things can only get better’. That title summed up the party’s grounds for optimism in 2005. Memories of Iraq would fade, Blair would soon be gone. There was every reason to suppose that Labour under Brown might win a fourth term. But things did not get better. The economy deteriorated and the public turned against a government that seemed accident prone, directionless and haunted by earlier policy decisions. This chapter examines what went wrong during Labour’s third term and how things got worse.^4
Change at the top
To the outside world Tony Blair appeared to dominate the Labour party after becoming its leader in 1994. He persuaded the party to change Clause IV of its constitution and end its commitment to public ownership, and he engendered a previously unknown sense of discipline and unity in the party. But there was always one impediment to Blair’s dominance: Gordon Brown. Blair and Brown had both entered Parliament in 1983, an elec- tion famous for Labour’s lurch to the left and for being a contest in which Labour came close to coming third. This formative experience fostered in both men a shared determination to anchor the party firmly in the centre of British politics. In this enterprise they seemed closer than brothers. When John Smith, the then Labour leader, died in 1994, Blair and Brown reput- edly made a pact: Brown would not contest the leadership and Blair, in return, would make way for Brown at some point in the future. 5 In the meantime, Brown as shadow chancellor was granted unprecedented auton- omy to shape the party’s economic policies and great swathes of its domes- tic policies. Between them, the two men drove forward New Labour’s electoral strategy. After the 1997 election, Blair and Brown worked together in an almost semi-presidential arrangement. Blair was like a French Fifth Republic presi- dent, Brown, ensconced in the Treasury, a Fifth Republic prime minister. Initially the relationship appeared to work well. During Labour’s second term, however, it deteriorated markedly.^6 It began to resemble the French dual-executive during periods of cohabitation, but with Abel in the Élysée Palace and Cain in the Hôtel Matignon. It was no secret that Brown wanted Blair’s job, nor was it a secret that Brown believed Blair had broken his promise to step aside.^7 Moreover, Brown’s frustrated ambitions fuelled an
4 Britain at the Polls 2010
him on the backbenches likely to grow, the odds were always against Blair serving a full third term. Blair’s diminishing influence over Labour MPs’ was evident in their opposition to a number of key government measures. In the wake of the July 2005 London bombings, when four radicalised Muslims murdered fifty-two people, Blair pushed hard for new powers to allow the police to hold and question terrorist suspects for up to ninety days without charge. However, the government lost a vote on this measure in the House of Commons when forty-nine Labour MPs rebelled, and Blair had to settle for a twenty-eight- day detention measure. It was the first occasion on which his government had been defeated. Twelve weeks later, the government suffered two further Commons defeats when a number of Labour MPs rebelled over the contro- versial Racial and Religious Hatred Bill, which sought to extend race-hate laws to cover religious beliefs. Blair’s loss of authority also told in his failure to cement his domestic legacy and carry through his ‘choice agenda’. Education was singled out for reform in Labour’s third term. A 2006 education White Paper promised to give parents more rights and to establish new ‘trust schools’ that would have greater autonomy from local authorities in managing their affairs. 14 This policy touched a raw Labour nerve. Many in the party feared that the proposals could lead to a two-tier system, in which only the rich would go to the best schools. Amidst mounting opposition among ministers and MPs, Blair’s education secretary Ruth Kelly was obliged to make a number of concessions, including sacrificing the name ‘trust school’. When MPs debated the principle of the proposed changes in March 2006, a total of fifty-two Labour Members voted against the government. The bill passed but only because it had Conservative support. Events compounded the sense that Blair’s government was losing its way. In April 2006, it emerged that 1,023 foreign prisoners had been released without being considered for deportation, as the law demanded. There was further embarrassment when it emerged that the minister responsible, home secretary Charles Clarke, had been warned of the problem nearly a year before and that 288 prisoners had been released in the intervening period. Clarke was sacked a month later. It was left to his successor as home secre- tary, John Reid, to pass judgement on his own officials and his predecessors’ legacies: ‘not fit for purpose’, was how Reid described his new department to a committee of MPs.^15 By the summer of 2006, Blair’s authority was stretched to breaking point. The prime minister seemed to acknowledge his political mortality when, in June, he began a series of valedictory lectures on domestic policy under the slogan ‘Our Nation’s Future’. Then, in July, he further antago- nised his party by refusing to criticise Israel for its invasion of Lebanon. Many Labour MPs were still outraged by Blair’s consistent support for President George W. Bush’s foreign policy, and this was, for them, the final
Labour’s Third Term: A Tale of Two Prime Ministers 5
straw. More importantly, supporters of Gordon Brown had also reached the limits of their patience with Blair’s reluctance to stand aside and were now prepared to strike. In September, just before the party’s annual conference, over a dozen Labour MPs signed a letter calling on Blair to step down. Brown was widely believed to be behind this move. 16 Meanwhile, and unbe- knownst to the signatories, John Prescott, Labour’s deputy leader and dep- uty prime minister, had already extracted from Blair a pledge to announce a timetable for his departure. 17 The letter now forced the prime minister to bring forward his announcement. Blair confirmed the following day that the coming party conference would be his last as leader. He would step down before the autumn of 2007. Blair had never been loved by Labour but he had been tolerated because of his election-winning talents. Now, with Labour’s popularity in the dol- drums, as Figure 1.1 shows, Blair was finding that support within his party was not broad enough to sustain him in the bad times. Labour MPs and activists were all too aware of their party’s diminished standing. They were also aware of Blair’s diminished personal standing. Each month since he first came to office, Ipsos MORI had asked respondents whether they were sat- isfied or dissatisfied with the way Blair was doing his job as prime minis- ter.^18 During his first term, between May 1997 and June 2001, 56 per cent of respondents were, on average, satisfied with Blair. During his second
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FIGURE 1.1 Voting intentions, 2005– Source : UK Polling Report, ‘Voting intention’, available at http://ukpollingreport.co.uk/ blog/voting-intention. Last accessed on 26 August 2010. Notes : The figure displays average findings by calendar month of all polls published by Angus Reid, BPIX, Communicate, ComRes, Harris, ICM, Ipsos-MORI, Marketing Sciences, Opinium, Populus, TNS BMRB and YouGov between June 2005 and March 2010. The May 2005 voting intentions are the results of the 2005 election.
Labour’s Third Term: A Tale of Two Prime Ministers 7
to macro-economic management. As chancellor, he had initially reined in public spending before rapidly increasing the money available to pay for schools and hospitals in the 2000 comprehensive spending review. He had also used his position in the Treasury to determine large measures of domes- tic policy, especially in the field of social security, through his tax-credit schemes. In a 2006 survey of British political scientists, Brown was judged to be the most successful post-war British chancellor by a country mile.^24 The second foundation of Labour’s optimism was the expectation that Brown’s leadership would be more in tune with the party’s traditions and ethos than Blair’s. Even though Brown had been Blair’s co-architect in the creation of New Labour, and even though the policy differences between them were difficult to discern, Brown was thought to be closer to Labour’s ideological heart. Labour party members tended to regard Blair as a centrist or even right-of-centre politician and Brown as a left-of-centre politician whose views were much closer to their own. Such perceptions were partly a consequence of many in the party wanting or needing to believe that this was the case. They were also a consequence of what Brown said and did. Unlike Blair, Brown was steeped in Labour history and his speeches were carefully crafted to project an image of him being the champion of ‘True Labour’. 25 Many in the party, longing for reassurance as Blair took them to unfamiliar places, lapped it up. It probably helped that Brown spoke with an authentic Labour accent, a Scottish accent, whereas Blair spoke very un-Labour public-school English. Blair’s electoral success had given him license to change the party. Now, with memories of success fading, many in the party hoped that Brown would return Labour to its roots. The third foundation of Labour’s optimism was more mundane: there was simply no one else other than Brown who seemed to offer a clear sense of direction. In most governments, heavyweight figures emerge who wield an unusually large influence and who often come to be thought of as potential leaders. Clement Attlee’s government had Ernest Bevin, Herbert Morrison and Sir Stafford Cripps. Harold Wilson’s had George Brown, James Callaghan, Roy Jenkins and others. Callaghan’s had Dennis Healey. During Blair’s premiership, there was only ever one prime minister in wait- ing: Gordon Brown. At various points, others were mooted as possible alter- natives, including Charles Clarke, Alan Milburn, a former health secretary, and David Miliband, a youthful rising star of the party. But none managed to acquire a significant following. With the exception of Blair, Brown stood head, shoulders and torso above everyone else in the government. Brown was unrivalled but he was still subject to criticism. Some col- leagues were concerned about his operating style and his followers’ tendency to brief against opponents. Clarke, never one of Brown’s fans, labelled him a ‘control freak’ and ‘totally uncollegiate’.^26 Others were concerned about his indecisiveness when big decisions had to be taken. 27 Yet others expressed concern about Brown’s obsession with politics, his obsession with detail
8 Britain at the Polls 2010
and his thin skin. 28 In a particularly withering attack, Frank Field, a former social security minister who had once crossed swords with the chancellor, warned that: ‘Allowing Gordon Brown into No 10 would be like letting Mrs Rochester out of the attic. He has no empathy with people’. 29 Neutral insiders echoed such reservations. Just before Brown’s last budget as chan- cellor, Lord Turnbull, a former cabinet secretary, Britain’s most senior civil servant, accused Brown of acting with ‘Stalinist ruthlessness’ and treat- ing cabinet colleagues with ‘more or less complete contempt’. 30 Turnbull also accused Brown of possessing a ‘Macavity quality’; like the cat in T.S. Eliott’s poem, Brown was never there when things went wrong. In the event, such warnings did not induce any fellow cabinet minister to oppose Brown, who inherited the leadership and premiership by acclama- tion. A challenge by John McDonnell, chairman of the left-wing Socialist Campaign Group, failed to secure sufficient nominations. There was, how- ever, a contested election for the post of deputy leader, which was triggered by John Prescott’s decision to bow out along with Blair. Six MPs were nom- inated: Alan Johnson, Hilary Benn, Peter Hain and Hazel Blears, all cabinet ministers; Harriet Harman, a junior minister; and Jon Cruddas, a backbench MP. Through successive rounds of counting, the field was gradually whit- tled down. Blears, the most Blairite candidate, went out in the first round, followed by Hain, Benn and then Cruddas. In the final round, Harman surprised most people by narrowly defeating Johnson, 50.4 per cent to 49.6 per cent. 31
From Stalin to Mr Bean
The widespread hope that Gordon Brown would bring a new sense of direc- tion to the government soon withered. In the space of a dramatic twelve months, Brown’s authority evaporated, and the government’s standing col- lapsed, never fully to recover.^32 In contrast to his reputation as chancellor, and probably because of it, Brown sought to demonstrate a more inclusive style when he became head of government. He appointed some of Blair’s supporters to top jobs, most notably David Miliband as foreign secretary. He also sought to involve a number of figures from other parties: two Conservative MPs, John Bercow and Patrick Mercer, and a Liberal Democrat MP, Matthew Taylor, agreed to act as advisers to the government. Brown’s attempt to entice the former Liberal Democrat leader Paddy Ashdown into his cabinet was rebuffed, but he was gifted with the defection of Quentin Davies, a Conservative MP who crossed the floor to join Labour. 33 Brown also invited a number of political outsiders to join his ‘government of all the talents’, including Sir Alan West, a former head of the Royal Navy, Professor Sir Ara Darzi, a consultant sur- geon, Sir Digby Jones, a leading businessman and former director general of the CBI, and Sir Mark Malloch Brown, a former UN deputy general
10 Britain at the Polls 2010
Brown and Labour might have recovered from this setback. But it suddenly seemed that everything that could go wrong did go wrong. In September, as speculation mounted about an election, there was a run on the Northern Rock bank, one of Britain’s largest mortgage lenders. Thousands of jittery investors queued to withdraw their funds. The government was forced to pump more and more taxpayers’ money into the institution until about £55 billion had been spent. It was all to no avail. In February 2008, the government reluctantly took the bank into public ownership. It was difficult to blame the government directly for the run on Northern Rock but it was possible to blame the government for the loss in October 2007 of two data disks containing the personal and banking details of more than 20 million people. Although the episode was a low-level operational failing by Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs, it contributed to a growing sense of an inept government that was bungling from one failure to the next. Things went from bad to worse when, days after the data discs were lost, the Mail on Sunday published allegations that a wealthy Labour donor, David Abrahams, had donated large sums of money to the party in other people’s names. On becoming prime minister, Brown had pledge to provide a ‘moral compass’ to his government. Questions were now raised as to how much he had known. During an exchange in the House of Commons, the Liberal Democrat Vince Cable joked about Brown’s ‘remarkable transformation in the past few weeks from Stalin to Mr Bean creating chaos out of order, rather than order out of chaos.’^37 There were howls of laughter on both sides of the House. The last major fiasco of Brown’s first year was all the more damaging because it was entirely of his making. As chancellor back in March 2007, Brown had announced a surprise cut in the basic rate of income tax, from 22 pence in the pound to 20 pence. At the same time, he had abolished the 10 per cent starting rate for income tax. The announcement was a blatant ploy to appeal to aspirational middle-class voters; the move actually harmed the very lowest-paid workers, Labour’s traditional constituency. Brown got away with it at the time because his prestige and reputation were such that few in the party dared challenge him. The situation was very different in March 2008 when the tax-rate changes were due to take effect. Many Labour MPs, led by Frank Field, now pressed the government to compensate those most affected by the changes. A threatened rebellion by MPs was only averted after ministers promised a compensation package. It was an embarrassing climb down and it challenged the assumption that Brown would be more Old Labour than Blair. The cumulative impact of all the events of Brown’s first year can be seen in his approval ratings, which plummeted after he took office. Figure 1.2 tracks responses to a YouGov question that asked respondents whether they thought Brown was doing well or badly as prime minister. In August 2007, two months after Brown’s accession, 65 per cent of respondents said Brown was doing well, as opposed to 17 per cent who said he was doing badly, a net rating of 48 points. Twelve months later, a mere 16 per cent of
Labour’s Third Term: A Tale of Two Prime Ministers 11
respondents said Brown was doing a good job, and 78 per cent now said he was doing a bad job, a net rating of minus 62. The sense of authority lost that pervaded Brown’s first year in office was compounded by his failure to establish a distinctive agenda for his premier- ship. In fairness, that was never going to be easy. Labour’s mandate to gov- ern was based on its 2005 manifesto, and Brown had been Blair’s virtual co-ruler for the last ten years. The new prime minister was unable to offer much that was new. The best he could offer was a programme of constitu- tional renewal, something that was never likely to resonate with the public or provide a clear sense of direction for the government as a whole. His apparent conversion to political reform also sat uneasily with his total lack of enthusiasm for constitutional change ten years earlier. Brown may thus have been unlucky during his first year, but he was also the author of some of his own misfortunes. Many of the decisions he had made as chancellor returned to haunt him in his new job. More generally, Brown was the victim of a misplaced hope that he had cultivated. He could never provide the break with New Labour that many people craved because he had helped to create it. As a result, there was a structural expectations gap between what the party – and indeed the public – thought Brown would do and what he was actually capable of doing. That gap would magnify the political damage when things inevitably went wrong.
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FIGURE 1.2 Gordon Brown’s approval rating as prime minister Source : YouGov, ‘The Party Leaders’, available at http://www.yougov.co.uk/extranets/ ygarchives/content/pdf/YG%20trackers%20-%20leaders.pdf. Last accessed on 26 August 2010. Note : The figure reports the percentages of those who answered ‘well’ when asked: ‘Is Gordon Brown doing well or badly as Prime Minister?’
Labour’s Third Term: A Tale of Two Prime Ministers 13
Storm clouds were gathering, however. Figure 1.3 shows how the run on Northern Rock in September 2007 triggered a sharp and extended fall in the ‘feel-good factor’ (the proportion of people expecting their household finances to improve minus the proportion expecting them to worsen). It also triggered a drop in Labour’s lead over the Conservatives as the party best able to run the economy. Labour governments past had struggled to maintain any reputation for economic competence, and since 1997, Brown as chancellor had carefully nurtured it. Now that reputation was crumbling. Brown resisted using the word ‘recession’, even when it was obvious that that was where Britain was headed. Beginning in the second quarter of 2008, the economy entered a recession, the worst since the 1950s, 1940s or 1930s, depending on which newspaper you read. Inflation began to climb, so did unemployment, and so too did levels of personal debt, which had stimulated consumer spending. In August 2007, Britons’ personal debt exceeded gross domestic product (GDP) for the first time ever. Twelve months later, in August 2008, the new chancellor Alistair Darling warned that the economic
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FIGURE 1.3 Labour and the economy, 2005– Sources : YouGov, ‘Daily Telegraph political trends’, available at http://www.yougov. co.uk/extranets/ygarchives/content/pdf/Political%20trends%20post%202005.pdf; and ‘The Economy’, available at http://www.yougov.co.uk/extranets/ygarchives/content/ pdf/YG%20trackers%20-%20economy.pdf. Last accessed 26 August 2010. Notes : The feel-good factor is calculated by subtracting the percentage of people who, when asked: ‘How do you think the financial situation of your household will change over the next 12 months?’, say ‘get worse’ from the percentage of people who say ‘get better’. Labour’s lead on economic competence is calculated by subtracting the proportion of respondents who answered the Conservatives were more likely to run Britain’s economy well from the proportion who said Labour were more likely to.
14 Britain at the Polls 2010
circumstances were ‘arguably the worst they’ve been in 60 years.’ 40 His gloomy prognosis was borne out weeks later when the Wall Street giant Lehman Brothers went bankrupt, a consequence of the credit crunch stran- gling the American economy. British banks were soon in danger of going the same way as the financial crisis began to bite (see Chapter 5). On one day in October 2008, share prices in London suffered a record fall, as nearly £100 billion was wiped off the value of the leading 100 com- panies, and the banks found themselves without money to lend. The govern- ment responded promptly by providing a £50 billion bailout, equivalent to £2,000 for every British taxpayer, and by making available a further £ billion to fund short-term loans and inter-bank lending.^41 Over the crucial weekend of 11–12 October, the government further brokered a deal among G7 finance ministers to recapitalise the banks. As a result, the British gov- ernment soon took major stakes – in some cases the majority stake – in several banks. Labour’s unpalatably left-wing 1983 manifesto, mocked as ‘the longest suicide note in history’, had threatened to nationalise one or more of the major clearing banks. By 2009, Lloyds TSB and Royal Bank of Scotland, together with Northern Rock, were effectively in public hands. With the economy contracting throughout the summer and autumn of 2008, Alistair Darling used his November pre-budget report to unveil a fis- cal stimulus package, estimated to be worth about £20 billion. This package included a temporary cut in the rate of VAT, Britain’s sales tax, which is levied on most goods and services. Darling also announced a plan to reduce the deficit by implementing spending cuts and by increasing national iInsur- ance contributions by half a point and raising the top-rate of income tax to 45 per cent in 2011. 42 Raising income tax in this way was a gamble. It broke a long-standing manifesto pledge not to do so, and it risked alienating aspi- rational voters. However, in the straitened circumstances, Darling had little choice. The following spring he announced a further increase in the top rate to 50 pence in the pound, and the following autumn he announced a further half-point increase in national insurance, which the Conservatives criticised as a ‘tax on jobs’. The logic behind the stimulus was obvious: deficit spend now, tax later. Keynes was back in vogue. Another casualty of the stimulus measures was Brown’s ‘golden rule’, a self-denying ordinance that pledged the state to borrow money only to finance investment. A further casualty was Brown’s ‘sustainable investment rule’, which stipulated that the national debt be kept below 40 per cent of national income over the economic cycle. In the 2008–09 financial year, public debt, as a proportion of GDP, climbed to 43.8 per cent.^43 In his 2010 budget, Darling predicted that debt would rise to 54.1 per cent of GDP in 2009-10 and to around 75 per cent a few years thereafter. 44 To address this mounting debt, he pledged to halve public borrowing over four years from its expected peak in 2009–10.
16 Britain at the Polls 2010
Serving the public
Not surprisingly, as Table 1.2 shows, the economy was the dominant issue during Brown’s premiership. But other issues mattered to voters throughout Labour’s third term, just as they had always mattered. The public services, especially health and education, were of particular concern. Most Britons continued to rely entirely on the government for their healthcare and chil- dren’s schooling. Labour therefore had a strong electoral incentive, as well as a long-standing ideological commitment, to fund and maintain these services. Striking the right balance between taxing and spending was as important as ever, but in the new economic circumstances, with levels of public debt rising, it was more difficult than ever.
TABLE 1.2 Most important issue facing Britain today, 1997–
First term
Second term
Third term Blair Brown Total 1997– Crime 20 26 32 36 35 27 Immigration 7 26 34 32 33 22 Economy 14 11 10 42 30 17 Health 44 44 34 21 26 38 Defence/Foreign Affairs 6 31 34 17 22 20 Education 34 29 23 14 17 27 Unemployment 25 8 7 14 12 15 Inflation 4 2 3 12 9 5 Environment 6 3 10 8 9 6 Pensions/social security 13 11 10 5 7 10 Europe 24 11 4 3 3 13 Source : Ipsos MORI, ‘Issues Index: Trends since 1997’, available at http://www.ipsos- mori.com/researchpublications/researcharchive/poll.aspx?oItemID=56&view=wide. Last accessed on 26 August 2010. Notes : Figures are the average percentage of respondents citing each issue in reply to the following questions: ‘What would you say is the most important issue facing Britain today?’, and ‘What do you see as other important issues facing Britain today?’ The answers combine responses and are unprompted. Only the most frequently cited and other selected issues are included.
Between 1996–97 and 2008–09, government spending on education as a proportion of national income increased from 4.6 per cent to 5.7 per cent. Spending on the National Health Service increased from 5.1 per cent to 7. per cent in the same period.^46 There were undoubted improvements in terms of NHS waiting lists and the education infrastructure, but Labour’s largesse did not transform perceptions of these services or prompt universal praise. In March 2007, ICM asked the public: ‘Overall would you say that the extra money the government has spent on public services such as health and
Labour’s Third Term: A Tale of Two Prime Ministers 17
education over the last decade has generally been spent well or spent badly?’ Exactly a quarter of respondents said the money had been spent well. Nearly three-quarters, 71 per cent, thought said it had been spent badly.^47 Popular scepticism was doubtless fuelled by newspaper tales of badly negotiated GP contracts, which meant that doctors earned more for working less; of many hospitals ending their financial years in deficit; and of ‘fat cat’ senior public-sector managers, who earned more than the prime minister. Vast sums were certainly being spent on salaries in parts of the public sector. There were tens of thousands more doctors, nurses, teachers and support staff as a result of Labour’s increased spending. All these salaries contributed greatly to the structural deficit in the public finances. One obvi- ous solution, reducing manpower, was always difficult. It was even more difficult amidst an economic downturn and before an election. The 2007 comprehensive spending review scaled down projected increases in health and education expenditure, but Labour took care to package the reductions as efficiency savings. Where it could, the government also sought to meet public concerns about the salaries of senior managers. In a 2009 speech on smarter government, Brown promised that overpaid public sector workers would be ‘named and shamed’ and resources would be switched ‘from the back office to the front line’. 48 If people were sceptical of Labour’s spending, it was also easy to be sceptical of yet more promised reforms. During its first term, Labour had introduced hundreds of binding targets in various public-sector agreements to improve the delivery of public services. During its second term, it had tried to decentralise education and healthcare provision. A key objective for Blair in Labour’s third term was to inject a greater spirit of choice into Britain’s public services and to make them, as its 2005 manifesto put it, ‘free to all, personal to each’. 49 The ‘choice agenda’ was Blair’s. It was ahead of mainstream Labour thinking, which favoured uniformity in public- service provision, and it was ahead of public opinion. Voters liked the idea of choice in accessing public services but did not necessarily want those services to be provided by the private or charitable sectors. 50 Moreover, even if the reforms were effective, there would be a considerable lag before voters perceived any marked improvements. Contrary to the expectations of many in the Labour party, Brown had indicated his commitment to the choice agenda before he became prime minister. In March 2007, he enthused about public services that were ‘per- sonal to the citizen’s needs, and to the citizen’s wishes’, and called for ‘greater choice, greater competition, greater contestability’ in their provi- sion.^51 By 2008 commentators were noting the near-total conversion of Brown to Blairism. 52 The idea that Brown had undergone any kind of con- version was misleading, however. Brown had always had much more in common with his predecessor than some liked to admit. To be sure, Brown was more of a statist than Blair by inclination, but the difference between
Labour’s Third Term: A Tale of Two Prime Ministers 19
incident was not as damaging to the government as it might have been; most voters broadly favoured a tougher anti-drugs line.^55 Toughness also characterised Labour’s approach to dealing with terrorism. Blair pushed to allow the police to hold and question terrorist suspects for up to ninety days without charge, which fuelled concerns that the government was trampling on civil liberties in the name of security. An especially tragic cause célèbre was the 2005 shooting of an innocent Brazilian, Jean Charles de Menezes, who police mistook for a suicide bomber. Campaigners like Shami Chakrabarti, the director of the campaign group Liberty, criticised Labour’s authoritarianism. She and others also campaigned against the growing number of closed-circuit television cameras as well as government plans to introduce a national identity-card scheme. Concerns about the erosion of civil liberties also drew the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats closer together. When Brown replaced Blair, the new prime minister proved just as keen to take a tough approach to dealing with terrorism. In June 2008, he reignited the controversy of detaining terrorist suspects without charge and pushed for an extension of the current twenty-eight-day limit to forty-two days. Like Blair, Brown met resistance, and his proposals were defeated in the House of Lords. Although Brown lost face among his colleagues, he did not do himself too much damage in the eyes of British voters, who tolerated such measures in the name of security.^56
Europe and Immigration
Britain’s membership of the European Union had the potential to derail the government in its third term thanks to a commitment made in its second. In 2004, Labour promised voters a referendum on the proposed EU Constitu- tion, a referendum it was widely expected to lose. 57 However, thanks to the people of France and the Netherlands, who rejected the Constitution in referendums in 2005, Labour was spared the need to hold a vote and the potential embarrassment of losing it. The Constitution, with all its symbol- ism, was dead. It was no more. It was an ex-Constitution. In its place, EU leaders cobbled together at Lisbon in 2007 an ‘amending treaty’, which sal- vaged most but not all of the Constitution’s provisions. This time, following the lead of the French and Dutch governments, Labour declined to hold a referendum on the new treaty, which it again probably would have lost, on the grounds that it was ‘substantially’ different to the abortive Constitution. On a strict legal interpretation, the two texts were clearly not identical. 58 But some took a different view, including a committee of MPs, who insisted that the Lisbon Treaty and the Constitution were ‘substantially equivalent’.^59 For most voters, however, Europe was, by now, an unimportant issue. Calls for a new referendum never fired the public imagination. Of all the government’s third-term policy hangovers, immigration was one of the hardest for Labour to deal with. It might easily have become
20 Britain at the Polls 2010
a race issue, especially after the London bombings in July 2005; it soon became an economic one, especially when figures released in 2007 sug- gested that half the new jobs created since 1997 had gone to foreign work- ers. 60 Labour had no wish to be seen supporting racist tendencies in British society, but it did wish to be seen supporting blue-collar workers who were fearful of foreign workers taking their jobs. Brown talked of ‘British jobs for British workers’, and in March 2008 the government unveiled a new points-based system to deter unskilled economic migrants from entering the UK from outside the EU. A majority of the public seemed to approve of Labour’s approach to restricting immigration. In a 2009 ICM sur- vey, 54 per cent said that the best policy of dealing with immigrants from outside the EU was to ‘allow entry based on a points system’ compared with 28 per cent who said the best policy was to ‘set an annual limit on the numbers allowed into Britain’, the solution proposed by the Tories.^61 Only 15 per cent said no more immigration at all should be allowed. Nevertheless, for those for whom the issue burned, the Conservative policy appeared more attractive. In one curious episode, the government was actually criticised for its restrictive policies towards one group of foreign nationals, the Gurkhas. Gurkhas are Nepalese mercenaries recruited by the British army, and in 2004, the government had decided to allow those who had retired after 1997 – the year the regiment moved its base from Hong Kong to the UK – to live in Britain. A Gurkha Justice Campaign called for all former Gurkhas to have residency rights. Led by Joanna Lumley, the popular actress and star of Absolutely Fabulous , the campaign brought enormous pressure to bear on the government. At times, it seemed, the actress was dictating terms to ministers. A government defeat in the House of Commons on a Liberal Democrat motion only added to the pressure, and the government eventu- ally decided to allow all Gurkha veterans who had served for at least four years to settle in Britain. It was an enormous loss of face for Brown’s gov- ernment, which had managed to appear on the wrong side of the argument even when it thought it had been following public opinion. Once the mood turns against a government, it can potentially get everything wrong.
Iraq and Afghanistan
The most costly hangover for Labour in its third term – at least in human terms – lay in the field of foreign policy. After 9/11, Blair had been an active cheerleader of President Bush’s war on terror. He had led Britain to war in Afghanistan to oust the Taliban regime, and he had also been an ardent sup- porter of the invasion of Iraq. The Iraq war was especially controversial. Hundreds of thousands if not millions of British citizens had taken to the streets in 2003 to march against it, and four ministers resigned from the government in protest.
