Daily Mail, 2 May 2005

This is the crucial bit. It is only now that millions of people will be beginning to focus properly on the decision to be made in casting their vote on Thursday.

If the polls are to be believed, something mighty strange is about to happen on that day. The public believe in large numbers that Tony Blair is a liar, that the war in Iraq was a fraud, that immigration policy is an outrageous shambles, that violent crime is out of control and that health and education are in dire straits.

And yet the pollsters tell us that this same electorate is about to vote Labour back with a large majority, trouncing the Conservatives for an unprecedented third time in a row.

Such predictions surely need to be treated with some caution. There are so many variables in this election, all with unpredictable effects, that anything might happen.

More voters than ever before will only make up their minds at the last minute, having been round the electoral course many times only to reach no conclusion. If there were a box on the ballot paper marked ‘none of the above’, such a candidate would doubtless storm to victory.

This is the disaffection election. People vote when they are presented with a distinctive political vision which lets them hope for a better life for themselves and a more decent society. But this election has not been about hope. It’s been about defensiveness, damage limitation and knocking the other fellow.

This is the ultimate no-confidence election — illustrated almost comically by the two main parties vying with each other to play down their chances, both to get the vote out and to keep it firmly at home.

The Labour government has palpably lost confidence in the Blairite project itself. For all the dense verbiage in its ‘Little Red Book’ manifesto, the fact is that its vision of transforming society has gone belly-up and it doesn’t know why.

Education standards have disintegrated. Social mobility has gone into reverse with fewer disadvantaged children rising up the social ladder than before.

Billions have been poured into the NHS, only to be largely swallowed up in bureaucracy. Micro-management from Whitehall has transformed the aim of ensuring people don’t have to wait weeks for a GP’s appointment into the farcical situation — of which I have personal experience — where the only appointment people are told they can make is within the next 48 hours, but which they can’t make because they find all the phone lines are jammed at the time they are told to make the appointment.

For this no-confidence party, Tony Blair is the ultimate no-confidence leader. He is the leader who is not going to be leader, who will bow out at some unspecified time during the next Parliament.

Faced with this unnerved, incoherent and defensive government, the Conservative party has a vast open goal. But it too has played a largely defensive and negative game.

The key to the Blairite implosion is political control. It is only by removing politicians from the public services altogether that they will improve. Yet the Tories’ proposals on school discipline and clean hospitals merely tackle symptoms of the malaise, while their plans to increase taxes and spending guarantee that Whitehall’s grip on these services — whatever they say about ‘red tape ‘ — will remain.

And because they have presented no alternative overarching vision, everything they say — even on immigration, the one issue where their approach really is fundamental and distinctive — seems like opportunism.

The LibDems have made headway over Iraq. But their domestic policies don’t survive serious scrutiny, as the punitive nature of their local income tax plan embarrassingly revealed. As for the Tories’ attack on Blair as a liar, this merely reminds many voters that they think all politicians are liars. If people are presented with a set of self-cancelling negatives, why bother to vote?

Pressed on this yesterday, Mr Howard insisted that he was bringing hope. But specific policy proposals do not by themselves offer hope of a better society. That only comes from a vision that reflects a society’s deepest values.

The word that’s missing here is surely ‘aspiration’. People want to hear how they will be enabled to better themselves, how their children will be helped to rise out of disadvantage and that society will be run on the principles of fairness and just deserts. The great theme might well be ‘no-one left abandoned’.

Education is the crucial territory. The aim should be to end the scourge of rotten education that is holding children back, not only by freeing up the schools but by removing the political stranglehold of universities promoting lethal education theories. Why aren’t the Tories making more, much more, of the scandal of illiteracy and innumeracy in our schools?

‘No-one left abandoned’ would also mean new ways of organising the whole range of welfare services, so that patients or pensioners are no longer passive and helpless supplicants but people who, through social insurance systems, take responsibility and control over their own provision.

It would mean using tough love approaches to tackle moral disintegration by promoting family responsibility and a zero tolerance approach to drug taking, crime and disorder.

And it would also mean defending the nation’s ability to govern itself and to prevent it from abandoning its identity, which enables everyone to share in a national project of betterment rooted in ancient institutions and values.

This all forms the essence of progressive politics. Labour once stood for just this, when it believed in patriotism, meritocracy and the grammar schools. But it turned its back on progressive politics when it abandoned meritocracy for ‘levelling-down’, and when the left decided to attack democracy and the nation state in favour of supra-national institutions like the EU and ‘universal’ values like judge-made human rights.

In addition, because the welfare state created a culture of dependency and entitlement, a vicious cycle was created in which more the public demanded as their rights, the more politicians felt obliged to deliver — and the more they delivered, the more it went wrong and the more they tried to cover it up.

Labour pretends to be progressive, but in fact its agenda is one of social control, reducing the public to serfdom as more and more depend on the state for either work or welfare.

What’s needed is to take Neil Kinnock’s famous warning not to be old, poor or sick under the Tories and show that currently it is the old who are being abandoned by the inadequacies of state-run policing, the poor by state education and the sick by state health care.

But who will do so? Labour is the problem; the LibDems don’t understand what a problem is; and the Tories run away from the problem, because to tackle it means taking great political risks over such things as welfarism, Europe and the cult of public sentimentality.

The parties are thus reduced to platitudes because they will not articulate the passionate differences of opinion within our society about how it should be organised and where its place is in the wider world. With the exception of immigration, the impression is that they are dancing on the head of a pin while the great issues of our time remain unaddressed. There are three days left for the polticians to put this right.

Posted by melanie at May 2, 2005