Politics
Brown must always remain on the side of the working poor
Published 24 April 2008
The parliamentary party is not making it easy for its natural supporters to vote Labour with enthusiasm
The London and local elections will be the first ballot-box test of the leaders of the three main parties: Gordon Brown, David Cameron and Nick Clegg. It is not looking comfortable for Brown. Many in the Labour Party are predicting alarming losses: up to 200 seats, along with a fall in the share of the vote to as little as 25 per cent: 1 May 2008 could be as grim for Labour as 1 May 1997 was glorious.
Psephologists can offer a little comfort. Labour under Tony Blair performed abysmally in the local elections of both 2000 and 2004, yet the party bounced back sufficiently to win general elections in 2001 and 2005. But the catastrophic losses of 2004 were compounded by an equally poor performance from Labour in 2006 when it lost 319 councillors and took only 26 per cent of the vote, its worst share since the early 1980s. So, further losses at these elections would be on a historically low base. Already, outside London, there is only one Labour council in the south-east: Reading. That could easily be lost. The mood in the Labour ranks could hardly be worse. Locally, there are simply not enough troops on the ground to get the vote out.
That is not the end of Labour's electoral woes. In the capital, the battle for Mayor of London, which should be a racing certainty for Labour, is looking uncomfortably close. Here, it is hard to see how Labour can emerge with honour, whoever wins the vote. If the Tory candidate, Boris Johnson, succeeds, it will be seen as a huge boost to Cameron. But there is no reciprocal prize for Brown. If Labour's candidate, Ken Livingstone, wins, it will have been with such faint-hearted support from his party that Labour can hardly claim the credit.
Nor has Labour managed to wring any concessions out of Livingstone over his style of running the capital. He is the Labour candidate in name only. That doesn't stop Labour being damaged by the charges made against Livingstone: his overpaid cronies, his lack of accountability, his disdain for the Assembly, his dalliance with radical Islam and his involvement (for which he has no electoral mandate) in Latin American politics. On none of this does he accept Labour's bidding or even its advice.
The other serious contender for the position is the gaffe-prone Johnson. His odious views, coupled with his trademark lazy arrogance, should make it unlikely that he would capture any but extreme right-wing votes. Whoever wins, the powers of the mayor (due to be strengthened under the new GLA Act) need urgently to be reined in. The danger is that Londoners, weary of this badly reported Punch and Judy show, will simply not bother to vote.
That would be a serious error. With whatever misgivings, Londoners should protect the gains that have been made in transport (bendy buses aside), policing, the environment and social cohesion and vote for Livingstone. Equally important, they should vote for a strong London Assembly that insists on holding the mayor to account.
Another urgent reason to vote is that support for the British National Party is close to the threshold at which it could win seats. Elsewhere in the country, the BNP is securing high votes in council by-elections. Last month, in the Yapton ward of Arun DC, it polled 19.8 per cent from a standing start.
As such, apathy is not an option on 1 May.
The government has not been making it easy to vote Labour with enthusiasm. Never has the divide between the concerns of core Labour voters and those of the media-coached cabinet seemed wider.
The perceived lack of connection with core voters is also why, within the party, the 10p tax-rate argument became such an explosive issue (as Martin Bright explains on page 12). The promise by the Chancellor, Alistair Darling, to compensate the victims of Brown's final Budget as chancellor may have come in the nick of time for Brown as Prime Minister.
The five million low-paid workers who would lose out by abolition of the 10p tax rate are natural Labour supporters. Darling's U-turn might save Labour from meltdown on 1 May. But to secure his own future as Prime Minister, Brown must continue to make clear that the working poor can always depend on his government to treat them fairly.
Still good to rock against racism
Thirty years after the original Rock Against Racism (RAR) concert in Victoria Park, London, the event has returned with an eclectic all-star line-up that includes Damon Albarn's new band The Good, the Bad and the Queen, the rapper Wiley, the indie group Hard-Fi and Pete Doherty's former bandmates Babyshambles. News of the concert has already caused quite a stir in the PR-driven, determinedly apolitical world of contemporary pop music.
Do we still really need such a festival? On the one hand, there is no doubt that London today is a far more tolerant place than it was in the 1970s, when skinhead gangs fought pitched battles in the streets of east London. On the other, three decades has not heralded the kind of progress RAR's founders might have hoped for. Not only is the BNP growing in strength, particularly in areas of high immigration, but segregation persists in British cultural life.
Bands such as the Clash, who were the stars of RAR in 1978, would have been horrified at the response of some rock fans to news that the rapper Jay-Z has been booked to headline this year's Glastonbury Festival. Message boards buzzed with criticism of the decision, which many - including the festival's organisers - interpreted as thinly veiled hostility to the idea that a black artist should perform at a "white" festival. It is as important as ever that artists show their contempt for such narrow-minded attitudes.
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