Labour's conference

[Jim heartfield]

The Week
ending 1 October 2000

The listening Blair

The Week reports from Labour's conference in Brighton. Blair's big
hurdle was to convince the press that he was 'listening', as criticism
that his government was out of touch had accelerated during the petrol
blockade. In the event, a mistake with the air-conditioning gave the
picture editors all the evidence they needed that he was working to win
back the public's confidence as Blair drenched his shirt in sweat:
listening and glistening. 

Blair's government is defined by its distance from a distinct social
base - which is the condition under which Blair has created the room for
manoeuvre in an apolitical age. The demand that Labour should 'listen'
is itself an expression of the lowered expectations of government. Any
notion that a radical party exists to advance people's interests and
ambitions is forgotten. All we want, apparently, is to be 'listened to',
irrespective of whether our views are acted upon.

According to the spin-doctors this was a party conference that
reasserted that Labour was a 'party of values', such as 'solidarity'
(but not 'socialism'), that were the 'irreducible core' of the Prime
Minister's speech. In the event the listening was reduced to an
acknowledgement that the Millennium Dome was not a success (an issue
that only ever motivated the miserablist critics in the chattering
classes), and that the 75 pence pension rise was probably an error. 

The 'irreducible core' of the Prime Minister's speech proved to be
fairly conservative. Blair's five 'hard choices' were for economic
stability (no 'boom and bust'), for a government that 'helps people
through change' (getting them into work with the 'new deal' and
guaranteeing their minimum wage), for an investment in public services
(principally education and the NHS), to 'build strong communities' and
to govern in the world (in Kosovo and Sierra Leone).

The commitment to an increased £43 billion for public services in the
Comprehensive Spending Review recommended the leader's speech to his
more radical critics. But even this should be treated cautiously. In the
main the money is directed less towards making real resources available
to people, in favour of regulating their lives and behaviour. Britain's
increased NHS spending has enlarged the health bureaucracy that
regulates people's behaviour, monitoring diet, drinking and other habits
- information that is made available to employers and insurance
companies. The expansion of education has not increased people's job
opportunities either, it has only delayed the average age at which
people enter the jobs market, but increased the time spent under
supervision by quasi-official college authorities. The growing caste of
professionals associated with the job of regulating people's health and
educational careers are the only true beneficiaries of the Chancellor's
largesse.

Barely commented upon was the extensive raft of directly coercive
measures Blair promised under the heading of 'building strong
communities'. These included police powers to close pubs, ban drinking
in public, impose curfews on young people up to the age of 16, on-the-
spot fixed penalty crimes, a threat to offenders with a drug problem
that they 'must get treatment or lose your liberty', and extension of
the provisions for seizing offenders' assets, even where these are not
got criminally. Blair also put victims of crime on a pedestal, the
better to get tough on offenders. Victims will get more compensation
money (effectively paying people to lay charges), be informed of
offenders' release dates (with all the danger of revenge attacks), and
present statements of the impact of the crime to be taken account of in
sentencing. Victims are to get their own special ombudsman, as Labour
turns back to the medieval vendetta as a model for criminal justice.

Pensioners revolt

The Labour leadership was reported to have suffered a revolt at the
hands of delegates who supported a resolution tying pensions to
earnings. Though Chancellor Gordon Brown let it be known that the
resolution would be ignored the revolt was more artificial than at first
appeared. By raising the two themes of core values, personified by the
presence of old Labour stalwarts like Michael Foot in the limelight and
a willingness to listen over pensions, the platform created a ready-made
avenue of acceptable protest by the rank and file. Former Unison leader
and pensioners campaigner Rodney Bickerstaffe even left a deliberate
loophole in his motion (link pension to pay, or some other comparable
arrangement) so that it would not offend the leadership. Bickerstaffe
even made it clear that he would drop the motion if asked, but was
overruled by the Trade Union Congress leader John Edmund, who, realising
that the presses were ready for a revolt, saw the chance for a headline.
The intervention of the ninety-one year old conference-darling Barbara
Castle ensured the revolt succeeded. But the truth is that the
leadership had established the authority of the argument without there
ever being a movement of any weight demanding the restoration of the
pension-pay link. 

Saint Mandela

The Labour delegates high-point was the blessing conferred by President
Mandela, who promised them immortality for their role in opposing
Apartheid. The involvement of the party's rank-and-file in such radical
activism is mostly a distant memory, but the conference organisers saw
the emotional charge of a blessing from the one political leader with
any standing in the world today. Overplaying their hand, they played
Gabrielle's video of her Mandela song for nearly as long as the speech
itself. Elsewhere leader Blair saw good his military campaign in Sierra
Leone, saying that troops were 'standing up for Britain' in Sierra
Leone. 'And I say to Milosevic, Go! Your country and the world has
suffered enough,'  - a reference, presumably to the aerial bombardment
of Serbia by British forces. 


-- 
James Heartfield

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