Question Time is always a good show, but it made for particularly instructive viewing last night. Ken Livingstone put in a truly awful performance, which included a rambling attack on the intervention in Libya (via Burma and an intellectually incoherent historical journey through American involvement in Vietnam and Cambodia), which was brutally eviscerated by the historian Niall Ferguson who sat on the opposite side of the panel.
Ken is an engaging fellow, who is usually much better than this, but the broader point that struck me was the extent to which Labour now seems to be losing the argument on the economy. I don’t say that they should be, merely that they are.
Danny Alexander is not always a brilliant media performer, but he was very impressive last night. The first thing I want to hear from the Labour Party, he said, was the word ’sorry’ for the mess they’ve left the country in.
The panel then discussed the party political broadcast Ed Balls had made just prior to the progamme, in which he had indeed said ’sorry’ for Labour’s failure to regulate the banks properly.
But the trouble is that, as I have rehearsed many times here, this doesn’t really go to the heart of it.
For the truth of the matter is that Gordon Brown came to believe he had abolished the economic cycle and was therefore proceeding extremely incautiously during the runaway boom years when, in retrospect, as we can now see, he should have been saving for a rainy day.
Ed Balls can say all he likes that our historical debt position was not outrageous, which is true. But we were running deficits in these years when we needn’t have and we were much, much too reliant on what we can now clearly see was highly speculative income from the financial sector.
Ed Miliband admitted to me in Afghanistan that this reliance on the City had been a mistake, but at no point has any senior member of the shadow cabinet tackled this issue head on. Combine it with the fact that the party was incredibly slow to acknowledge the dangers posed by the deficit and the way in which it is still barely able to come up with a single cut it would make in public spending, despite being committed in theory to at least eighty percent (and who knows, perhaps, in reality, more) of the spending cuts the coalition is currently implementing and you can see why the patience of most non-aligned Westminster observers is wearing thin.
It is, in so many ways, a shame. Because if they were able to properly acknowledge their mistakes, they would have plenty to shout about. Gordon Brown and Alastair Darling’s stewardship of the economy during the financial crisis now looks nothing short of outstanding. And, of course, it is absolutely true that the Tories would have made all the same mistakes, since Cameron and Osborne publicly committed themselves to Labour’s spending totals.
It is certainly true that the situation in Portugal is not helping Labour. Ed Balls can say all he likes that we were never going to be in the same boat, but most of the rest of us are a lot less sure about that. Confidence is an ephemeral sentiment and we have seen how quickly and easily markets can panic. Nor does the argument that the coalition is taking a reckless gamble with our future have much resonance at Westminster. As I have said, Labour would have been committed to four fifths of these cuts anyway and we can all see that paying more interest for longer would have its own impact on growth.
Yes, it’s possible Osborne is doing too much too soon. Maybe it will all blow up in his face. But the longer the European debt crisis continues, the more people may tend towards the view that his is the less risky option.
As I watched Ken Livingstone flounder around last night, I found myself dwelling on two things. The first and most important was the fact that the party now seems to me to be in serious danger of losing the economic credibility that Gordon Brown and Tony Blair worked so hard to build. The second is that Ed Miliband does sit at the heart of a rather small tent, which has been denuded of much important talent.
You can be as rude as you like about Peter Mandelson, but he is a very clever man. And if Ed Miliband really wants to win, it would be a good idea to have every available piece of talent at his disposal, which means finding someone more convincing than Ken Livingstone to go on Question Time, for a start.
You think these views are a little harsh? Too cynical? Too jaded? Too unfair?
Well, I can assure you that there are plenty of very senior Labour figures who would agree with every word.
The only question is what they’re going to do about it. Because the honest truth is that most observers at Westminster believe Labour’s poll lead is illusory, that Cameron is totally dominant, and that Labour is well on course already to lose the next election.
Miliband needs stronger arguments and better troops. And he needs both fast.
I don’t dispute that Labour left a high budget defecit. However the amount of this is aprox £123 billion. But the government underwrote the debts of the banks which amounted to £176 billion. Some of this has been repaid leaving the oustanding defecit of £126 billion which is almost entirely due to the failure of the banking fraternity, and has very little to do with extravagant public expenditure. Had the banking collapse not occured we would not have such a large defecit and it would be easily manageable.
Lets face it every country runs its ecconomy in the red due to investment in the future and it is prudent to do so providing it does not go beyond 25% of GDP. We are well past that, but the cause was exeptional and although Labour were on watch at the time any other course of action would have driven the economy into 1930’s style recession. That is where we would be if the Tories had been in Charge then, and now they are trying their best to bring on another great deppression.
I have to agree with you that Labour are probably loosing the argument but that is entirely due to the leadership trying to distance itself from Gordon Brown instead of being proud of the fact that they averted a potentialy devastating recession.
The nail in the coffin of the last Labour government was the expenses scandal. How could anyone vote for a party which condoned fraud and embeselment, but the Tories were just as bad if not worse. Enter the Tory-Liberal alliance. I am not impressed! and it will surely be the kiss of death for the Liberals if the Tories continue to ride roughshod over them.