Politics
The politics column - Martin Bright
Published 10 April 2006
The priority of the Blairites is to ensure that, even when Brown moves into No 10, he and his people do not hold all the levers of power
The plan is simple enough: to take on Gordon Brown directly over policy, force him into an open debate over the direction of Britain in the post-Blair era and flush out what he stands for. You might expect this strategy to have been dreamed up by David Cameron's partly revived Conservatives, but it comes from a group of ultra-loyal Blairites who are engaged in a fight for the soul of new Labour from within the party.
The latest wave of attacks on Brown began with the interventions in the Budget debate of the former cabinet ministers Stephen Byers and Alan Milburn, who challenged the Chancellor about pensions and tax credits on successive days in the Commons. It is now an open secret that this was co-ordinated and planned in advance. What is less well known is that these Blairite loyalists intend to sustain the pressure on Brown up to and after he becomes leader of the party and prime minister.
This is no coup aimed at destroying Brown's premiership before it has begun, nor are the Blairites preparing the ground to run a candidate against the Chancellor (all involved know that would be suicide). Neither is there any evidence that Tony Blair personally sanctioned his political soulmates to intervene. But this is a determined attempt to develop a dissident position to ensure that "Gordon does not have a monopoly on ideas". Allies of the PM let it be known that Blair will not, on vacating office, disappear to a faraway country or remove himself from party affairs.
The issue has been portrayed as a battle over the timing of the succession. But it is more serious than that. The priority of the Blairites is to ensure that even when Brown moves into No 10, he and his people do not hold all the levers of power. Brown's retreat on pensions reform will be claimed as a first victory for this strategy.
Byers and Milburn may be described as "outriders", "ultras", or even "madmen" by their opponents, but their views are taken very seriously by Blair. One senior Downing Street source says: "Alan and Stephen are serious people with serious thoughts, who are not right-wing nutters. They are trying to foster a proper debate about the future." Another leading Blairite says: "Milburn and Byers are not going anywhere. They are here to stay."
Talk of a dual premiership is said to have "scared the horses" and persuaded Blair to withdraw from negotiations with Brown over a pain-free handover. This, and the recriminations over the "loans-for-peerages" crisis, have caused a renewed outbreak of hostilities.
There is deep frustration in the anti-Brown camp that the Chancellor seems intent on keeping his policy agenda close to his chest until he becomes leader. The language can be colourful. "They [the Brownites] should get up off their arses and talk about the post-Blair agenda," one protagonist says. "From where I'm standing, there are issues that are going to have to be addressed. We are almost a policy-free zone. Where is the agenda?"
There is equally deep frustration that Brown appears to brook no opposition to his views: "We can't have a policy silence," one Blairite former minister told me. "Nor can we have a position where, if you aren't 100 per cent in favour then you are 1,000 per cent against." Asked whether the strategy of dissent was damaging to the party, another former minister says: "It is more damaging to have a political direction which doesn't recognise where the bulk of people are at."
On the other side, feelings are running equally high. "Blairite outriders such as Milburn and Byers are out to cause a civil war," says one backbencher sympathetic to the Chancellor. "The situation as it stands is unsustainable." Another dismisses Blairite calls for engagement on policy, saying: "Their position is pretty insubstantial."
Although the timing of their intervention was designed to cause maximum embarrassment to Brown, the Blairite opponents of the Chancellor are right to demand to know what a post-Blair policy agenda would look like. This magazine has consistently argued for the same clarification.
It was Freud who said that the "narcissism of small differences" was at the heart of all deeply felt hatred, resentment and envy. Yet even the father of psychoanalysis would have struggled to treat the neuroses within the Labour Party. This narcissism is the key to understanding the divisions (Brownite v Blairite, modernist v traditionalist, social democrat v socialist) which are destroying the new Labour coalition. All factions have everything to gain from agreeing with each other, but you wouldn't know it from the virulence of the off-the-record briefings.
One warlord in Labour's conflict told me: "It is completely wrong to read it as sectarian. We all want more social mobility, equality, opportunity. But how do we best achieve it?" Yet surely this is the very definition of what it is to be sectarian: to take minimal points of distinction and magnify them into differences of principle. This is not to undermine the seriousness of the civil war; quite the opposite. Much blood has been shed thanks to the narcissism of small differences.
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