Portrait in an Elegy


  What really passed with the passing of New Labour? What might we miss? Well certainly I for one will not miss Blair and his smiles, Brown and his cod maths, and Mandleson and his reputation for deviousness (real or imagined). Nor will I miss the endless targets and fairly pointless extra tiers of regulation that New Labour was wedded to. Nor the constant erosion of civil liberties (although I assume that after a honeymoon period, the new government will follow this agenda as well – they usually do). All this is well and truly footnoted out of history. And yet with the end of New Labour, and the collapse of the financial system that pre-dated it, a dream has passed, a dream which in the age of austerity to come, we will certainly long for once again. This dream ran something like this: What is holding Britain back is, as often as not, a failure to invest both in infrastructure and staff. If we pay good wages, and build good and modern new buildings, complete with new computer systems, and possibly new software systems as well, then the impetus that this gives to the economy ought to be enough to lift Britain’s game and propel it into the twenty-first century.

  At New Labour’s heart there was a simple faith; the faith that the left has in human nature. A faith which believes that individuals will respond to love and attention (or at least money), by upping their game and becoming more professional and proficient. From which it followed that if one created new environments to work within, and paid adequate wages, then the middle classes would become more engaged with their world and more creative. More than that though, one could extend this policy to groups of society who were not usually reached by such programmes, namely (for want of a better term) the disadvantaged. This group which apparently had grown in the long years of Thatcher and Major, might, the rubric ran, have their lives changed by a little piece of investment and a large piece of hectoring. They might become educated. They might become middle class. Or at least they might escape the dead end of jobs that go nowhere and are constantly under threat and under paid.

  This faith of New Labour had three basic aspects to it. Firstly and most profoundly there was a faith in the rightness of social justice. The faith ran that social justice - that is increasing options across communities that were traditionally ignored - would in the long run pay for itself. In this process, one would liberate very real talent, talent that the current system ignored or wasted. - To educate groups which had never before been educated, or to make work pay for communities that had been used to living on benefits, were seen then as policies that really ought to pay for themselves.

  Put in this way this faith is very reasonable. And yet there was a double and fairly deep flaw within it. On the one hand the faith was restricted in its compass. That is it labelled certain (middle class) aspirations good, and the rest were just ignored (and so by implication were bad). It was good then to aspire to be middle class, to want to get an education, and to better oneself, and if one came from a poor background and aspired this way then New Labour ensured or did its best to ensure, that one did really rather well. However, the problem was, that if one did not aspire to these goals, then the system had very little to say or do for and to one. One simply stayed where one was. The result was then, that odd cultural rifts opened in the system, between those who thought correctly and aspired in the directions which New Labour wanted people to, and those who plainly did not. On the other hand this system only really worked by increasing tax elsewhere. Education was then expanded for all, at the price of making most (relatively well off, well not really poor) students pay for it. Students were then forced to join the New Labour dream, and take a punt on their own future. The hope of course being that with their degrees under their belts, they would be able to get better jobs. On the face of it this seems reasonable, as it is statistically true that if you have a degree you do (or are more likely to) get a better job – or at least one traditionally did so when degrees were relatively scarce. (One suspects although one does not know, and may well be wrong, that this figure might be affected if fully half the population has degrees). However even if the trend was maintained, there are very many exceptions to that statistical rule, and often enough this was particularly true of those only just above the ‘poverty line’ (when the system became free). The result was then once again an odd apartheid; the very poor did very well, and the rich did well enough, but the poor-ish were squeezed. Some did fine, but there was a hard nub of individuals who were really hamstrung by this scheme (and still are), saddled as they are with large debts, and poorly paid jobs. More than that New Labour’s smugness made it very blind to the often desperate plight of such individuals. They statistically did not matter, and were not part of New Labour’s socially just programme and so were simply ignored by a distinctly cyclopean government.

  New Labour was then the British version of a global and troubling phenomena. We are living in an increasingly bourgeois age. That is, a middle class across the globe is emerging, a middle class removed from the poor people and seeming not to care about or engage with them very well. At best it acts as New Labour did to educate some of them, and so lift some, call them the deserving poor, out of their poverty and propel them towards the middle classes (who define the nature of progress). There is then a widespread belief that education is the key, and that we can be all educated (or middle classed) out of poverty. Whether this global fight is true remains to be seen. What is true however is that we may yet come to miss New Labour’s dream of extending the middle class to the very poor, in the austerity to come.

  The second tenet of New Labour ideology was that the government was critical in designing the schemes that would lead the nation out of poverty. It was the government then that could expand the education system by dictat. It was the government that could order the building of schools or hospitals, or the creation of new professions (such as HiPPs inspectors or registered child minders). The government had a real power to control all our destinies, and should (and must) use that power for the collective good. Government was then exalted in what it could create. And yet at the same time of course New Labour somewhat paradoxically held that it was not government’s role to engage in the day to day management of the professions which they had created or the schemes which they had originated. They then also created, running parallel to their endless new schemes, new regulatory bodies, all of which were theoretically independent from the government, and all of which came with a price tag of their own. The professions of school inspectors or market regulators were then also born and with them, the problem of exactly whom it was that one got to do these kind of jobs in the first place. (Who after all is qualified for inspecting schools? Ex-teachers, who have their own agendas? Ex-social workers? Business people?). Politics then changed a gear. The role of regulating day to day affairs was lost to central government. It had no control. This does not mean of course that there was no politics in regulation. Only that it was personal politics and not party politics. University inspectors for example come from other universities, with all the politics that that fact involves. But also at the same time, in removing itself from the inspection process, and in not (theoretically) involving itself with it, New Labour freed itself to spin off what schemes came into its mind regardless of the professions said, safe in the knowledge that if they ever went wrong then the government could blame the regulators.

  Spend more, then regulate more, and ensure the spending was appropriate - that was New Labour’s Gambit. The trouble was that this move broke at three critical points. Firstly and most simply, even if regulation worked as New Labour wished it to, and everything worked perfectly, it was always reactive to any cock up. Regulation did not stop abuses, it merely exposed them. One might then endlessly witter on about lessons learnt and best practice, and maybe that sometimes prevented future cock-ups – well maybe. What it certainly did was to increase the overall amount of red tape in the system, spinning off new regulations to prevent the problems that had already occurred, and never really getting to grips with what was to come. The regulators (with government support) were then endlessly proscriptive and reactive, and never felt that convincing.

  The second flaw in the system was that at a fundamental level, it opposed government and regulation. Government after all wanted to spend its money, it needed to as it had put its faith in such spending. It was not then that willing to hear that a policy really was not working very well, or that a cherished scheme was failing. More than that, it had all the power in the end. It could simply ignore what the regulators told it (or even suppress their findings). If it wanted to carry one with a terribly expensive computer system, or endless high status developments, or ban drugs pointlessly, nothing could stop it, and so it did.  In addition, the fact that it could blame others (well the regulators) for the failure of the schemes, seemed to make it more likely that it would follow its desire, and interfere. New Labour’s unspoken position was that the regulators were more than welcome to critique the small guy and possibly even medium-sized organizations, but woe betide them if they attacked large scale organizations - and government itself was sacrosanct.

  Finally every teacher knows the flaws of repeated examinations, - one simply trains the pupil to pass the exam. To have a culture of endless inspection is therefore to warp a system into endless training for a series of exams to come. Large organizations become merely agencies for surviving the all-important regulation process. A move which makes a double nonsense of that process:  Firstly it is not examining the pure organization, but merely what it has made that organization become; and secondly it then reacts to that reaction, and writes reports and helps to set policy based upon it. Regulation then becomes embedded within the institutions of the system, and loses its objective third party status. In effect it become useless and no longer effectively regulatory.

  Thirdly the final deep belief of New Labour is the one that ruined it all, for it was a belief in the power and virtue of the unfettered market. That is, a belief that money borrowed via private finance initiatives or selling of bonds was not really money borrowed at all, it was merely natural leverage. - A figleaf that protected New Labour from the old accusation that the Labour Party spent what it did not have. New Labour then managed by de-regulating the city, to create the perfect financial engine to finance its hopes and dreams. A free money market where it might find the money to finance its punt on the future. At its heart this punt was a reasonable move. It assumed that if one educated the people, then in future times these people would make more money, all of which was (potentially) taxable: The philosophy was then, that one needed to spend in the present to earn more later. It was then reasonable now to invest in the name of what would be, once the schemes had run their course. Borrowing was then merely investing (which is of course not the same at all). The logic here sounded alright. And yet of course finance never works that way. For once unfetted it does not merely do what government wants it to do, but also what it does not. That is it gets caught up in a spiral of greed of its own. More than that, the government that is feeding off the market’s greed to get cheap money, cannot then regulate or interfere with those greedy spirals.

  And here a real irony cuts in. What ruined New Labour in the end was nothing to do with its own punt on the future. That might still come good. What ruined it, was not that, but that the same markets it had set free for its own purposes, then became caught up in greedy speculation about that most immovable of assets – land. Land became expensive and desirable in itself, land that actually was rather valueless and would never be worth what individuals were paying for it. The system then collapsed because it expanded beyond the endless potential revolution of an increasingly educated workforce and into the commodity that one cannot expand - namely land. That (on the back of an oil crisis – another finite resource) was enough to reveal the greed for what was it was – a risky punt on the future. The ruin then that followed bought down not merely global finance but also nations who had to step in to manage that crisis (and take over the debt). Countries ended up being saddled not only with their own debt (which they had been hiving off to banks), but also the debt which the excess greed of the banks had created. The result was that we all ended up in an even worse pickle, than if New Labour had honestly borrowed the money in the first place (and not invested for our future in the de-regulated markets).

  What then destroyed New Labour’s dream of the potentiality of an endless tomorrow was the finite resources in the present: Ultimately there is only a certain amount of good land, and a certain amount of oil and all the dreams and all the hopes of the world itself cannot stop or reinvent that fact. A hard truth broke the dream. What will one miss then in the age of cuts to come? One might come to miss, I think, the fundamental optimism and hope that one can profoundly change society by challenging what is present in the name of what could be; i.e. a government prepared to genuinely challenge expectations and beliefs, and more than that, to invest in that challenge. This sentiment might have often been irritating and was never reflexive enough (it never challenged the dreams of what future one should look to) and yet in an age where only existing dreams are allowed and developed, it will look like very heaven itself. For in the kingdom of the blind and the bigot we are likely to enter (what else is the Big Society but the development of what is, and not what might be?), the one eyed will seem visionary in the extreme – and I for one might miss that!