Why does everyone find it so hard to understand New Labour?
Read Peter Hitchens only in The Mail on Sunday The trouble with free, generally happy countries is that normal people just aren't interested in politics. They know as much about parties and their leaders as I know about football, soap operas or rock music - that is to say they have a vague idea of who is who, but no real grasp. This is a big mistake. Home Secretaries can ruin your life. Political manifestoes are often the only warning you will get of bad things to come, if only people would read them. But Wayne Rooney's foot is really of no interest to anyone but him. Put it like this: Britain can be beaten or outwitted at trade talks or at an EU summit, and everyone in this country will suffer in the end. The 'England' football team can lose all its matches, and it will not have any lasting effect at all on anyone outside that team. The people in Coronation Street and Albert Square don't actually exist. So pause a moment and ask yourself, have you ever worked out what 'New Labour' is, or have you just swallowed the fashionable version? Everyone is now going on about something called a 'civil war' in the Labour Party. But is it? Most people seem to believe that Mr Blair staged a 'right-wing' putsch in the Labour Party, and that he is himself some sort of Tory. He has followers called 'Blairites' who agree with his plan for Tory-style reform of public services. They are now weak and Mr Blair is, we are told, threatened by the Left. Mr Blair and his Blairites, we are assured, somehow keep in check the crushed but untamed forces of 'old Labour' which want to nationalise everything from ice-cream vans to any remaining industries we have. This belief is in fact pure drivel. It does not stand up to a moment's analysis. Yet it is almost universal. First, there was no 'Right-wing' takeover of the Labour Party. Once, long ago, there really were right-wing Labour MPs. Back in 1948, Ernest Bevin and many other cabinet members, along with plenty of Labour backbenchers, voted to retain hanging. Not one of them would now. Hugh Gaitskell denounced anti-nuclear pacifism in 1960, and soon afterwards made the best and most patriotic anti-Common Market speech ever delivered by a British politician. Which of them would now? Roman Catholic Labour MPs fought against abortion on demand. If there is any Labour opposition to this procedure today, it is very hard to spot. Leathery old working-class street fighters, from Frank Chapple to Terry Duffy, used to grapple with all their might against the Communist fellow-travellers who had penetrated Labour via the trades union movement. They have almost no equivalents at all today in Labour, which is all but devoid of patriots or moral conservatives. Radical anti-British political correctness is pretty much universal among the so-called 'right-wing' legions of 'Blairite' MPs. And if any of them would own up, you would find a surprising number of Labour MPs and ministers have Communist or Trotskyist backgrounds. They don't talk about this because it still says something important about them. The Labour right did not just disappear. They were crushed and erased. Right-wing Labour MPs were purged in the 1970s and 1980s by a concerted leftist campaign to deselect them. Organisations now forgotten, such as the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy and the Labour Co-ordinating Committee (to which Mr and Mrs Blair belonged) eradicated conservative attitudes, and people. from the Labour benches. They were helped by a powerful and tightly organised Communist apparatus in the trades unions. This sinister machine, also now forgotten, went broader, higher and deeper than most people realise. Look up the Trades Union Congress's shifty response to the anti-Communist strikes of Poland's shipyard workers back in 1980, and you will see how bad it was. Britain's official Communist party was always tiny - but that is because Moscow decided in the 1920s that its best militants in Britain should keep their allegiance secret, and work within Labour. The trouble was that they went too far. The left-wing takeover became so obvious, the bloodshed so noisy, that even the voters noticed. The Left foolishly picked Michael Foot as Labour leader. Foot was a kindly, loveable old bookworm, who had once been a fine public speaker, but was obviously incapable of being Prime Minister. When he was rejected by the voters in 1983, Labour then turned to a younger Foot, the charming but verbose Neil Kinnock. This tiny sect, itself a front organisation for an even tinier secret body of fundamentalist Trotskyists called the 'Revolutionary Socialist League’, was the target of obsessive attacks by Labour leaders in the mid-80s. Anyone would have thought that it was a huge and menacing conspiracy, when in fact it had few supporters outside Liverpool, where it had managed to capture an already far left local Labour Party. Its eccentric comrades all seemed to have learned to argue in the same school, where they were taught to jab their fingers rhythmically at their opponents as they harangued them. Even on the left of the Labour Party, they were figures of fun, laughed at for their weird jargon, seemingly translated from late 19th century Russian Bolshevik pamphlets, and their secretive ways. By denouncing them, Kinnock made it look as if he was taking on a great snarling left-wing dragon. In fact, he was stamping on a hamster, albeit a fierce, ill-tempered hamster. The Communist fellow-travellers and the Bennite armies, who had hunted down right-wing MPs, remained in charge. I was a political reporter while all this was going on. I had the advantage of being both an ex-Trotskyist, who understood what these groups were like and how tiny they were, and a former member of the Labour Party (I left in 1983), where my support for Britain's nuclear weapons and my condemnations of IRA terrorism had got me into a great deal of trouble. There were Militant supporters in my local party, but they were a tiny few. It was the unshakeable far leftism of the rest that was important. Ken Livingstone, for example, was neither driven out nor defeated by Neil Kinnock and is now one of the most influential politicians in the country. I also knew quite a bit about the Communist industrial organisation, from my years as a Labour Affairs reporter - where the Communist sympathies of many union officials and activists were taken for granted. These people are mostly still around, as are the campaigners who destroyed Labour's right wing. Why should we imagine that they have changed their aims? They have switched their allegiance from the USSR to political correctness, that's all. But it was hopeless trying to point out what was really going on. The official story was 'Kinnock takes on Militant', and anything which did not fit in with this conventional wisdom got little space in the papers or from the even more gullible TV political editors. This often happens. The media work as a flock, like sheep, and follow a common line, and so are easily stampeded - as most of them were over the non-existent threat from Iraq. With a few brave exceptions, political journalists in this country are the mouthpieces of their contacts - the politicians themselves. And this idea, that Kinnock slew the 'Hard Left' and prepared the way for Tory Blair, is the root of the great misunderstanding of New Labour, the fantasy that it has been taken over by the 'right-wing' Blair' who keeps the left from power. New Labour is about image and presentation, and about tactics. But it has never changed its objective It wants a socialist, egalitarian Britain - but through cultural revolution, taxation, education and political correctness rather than through state control of industry. Nationalisation was actually abandoned by Labour in the late 1950s, when it switched to support for comprehensive state schools as its main weapon. It is just not true that Labour has adopted Tory policies. It has adapted its policies to then times, while hanging on to its basic aims. It is the Tories who have spent the last 50 years stealing Labour's clothes, so that they now support everything they once opposed and have completely abandoned any aims they may once have had. That is the big difference between Labour modernisation - a shift of tactics to gain the same end, and Tory modernisation - a complete change of aims to stay in office without having to fight for their ideas. That is why they can't think of anything they really dislike about the Blair government, and why they are such a passionless, gutless official opposition. Privatisation of state industry, which everyone goes on about so much, was never a specially Conservative policy. Conservative governments in the past nationalised electricity generation and airlines, and never thought there was anything wrong in the state running the armed forces, the Post Office or the prisons. Who controls is much more important than who owns. All that is going on in the Labour Party is a series of calculations among Labour MPs, who see politics as a job, over how best to hang on to their seats in the 2009 election. That's a long way off. Remember, the last poll only took place a year ago. Gordon Brown, a committed and old-fashioned left-wing socialist, has had far more power and influence over 'new' Labour than has Mr Blair. Mr Brown has used the tax system to punish the middle classes on a scale not seen since 1945, and reward Labour supporters. He is the man who decided that the NHS could be cured with trainloads of money and who now has the same mad idea about schools. No policy goes ahead without his approval. I am told on good authority that he backed the Iraq war in the crucial meetings where his opposition might have kept Britain out. Quite what it is that causes the alleged quarrel between the two men, I am not sure. I am not even certain it really exists. If it does, I suspect it is thanks to Mr Brown's pique over his agreement to let Mr Blair be leader. This was based on the belief that Mr Brown would lose the 1997 election because he looked too dour and socialist. As it turned out, of course, the Tories collapsed so utterly by 1997 that Labour could probably have won with Leon Trotsky as leader. Mr Brown, who has a real political brain, must also despise the butterfly mind of Mr Blair, and envy the Princess Diana-like magic, which flickers around the Prime Minister. Why does the TV camera love him so? How does he fool so many people into believing that he is brilliant when he isn't? If there really is a rivalry between the two, then this is what fuels it. But the only 'civil war' in the Labour Party is about power and jobs, not about objects. A 'Blairite' is an ambitious MP who has toadied to Downing Street to become a minister. He or she may well have been a 'Kinnockite' and a 'Smithite' (remember him?) and will have no trouble becoming a 'Brownite' in time, if necessary. The target remains, as always, the same - egalitarian socialism. The basic anti-British, anti-middle-class, anti-marriage, anti-suburb politics are universal in Labour (and pretty common in the other two parties as well). It really is time that political journalism penetrated the thin disguises in which our leaders advance themselves.
So the state of Wayne Rooney's metatarsal, or the talents of Coldplay, or the latest death in Coronation Street grip the public mind while they can barely be bothered to remember who is Home Secretary.
Kinnock was not half as bright or well--educated as Foot, nor so principled. It is hard, now that he is a retired Euro Commissioner and a Baron, to believe that he was once the darling of the radical left. But many who mistook him for a champion of the Left in those days, now equally wrongly think that he defeated the Left in the Labour Party, because of a single speech in which he attacked something called 'the Militant Tendency'.
