Erith scandal: a sign of Labour’s degradation
I have not had anything to say about the Draper/McBride smear story, mainly because the government actually had nothing to do with it, and it was all about suggestions being passed around by staff which had yet to be acted upon. The issue of the Erith by-election, in which the “party machine” is effectively sponsoring the 22-year-old daughter of Lord Gould, a close aide to Tony Blair, in preference to candidates with genuine local connections, is more disturbing in terms of what it says about the party and how it operates internally.
Quite simply, aspring MPs simply did not get safe seats at their first try; they had to work their way up by first contesting no-hope seats. This is one reason why the Blairite wing of the party was so strong in the 1997-2001 parliament: many of the MPs were young people who had stood in what were thought to be safe Tory seats, some of them occupied by Tory cabinet ministers, and had not expected to win, while the traditional safe seats were more likely to be occupied by traditional Labour activist politicians. In other cases, candidates would have had long records as councillors or union officials. They would not have been put straight into a safe seat straight out of college.
One letter in the Guardian today cynically suggests that Georgia Gould has at least something in common with many residents in the Erith seat, namely that “many, like her, haven’t had a proper job since leaving school, though many, unlike her, are only ever offered low-paid work with few prospects”. The party has a history of parachuting candidates into such seats, of course; a former Tory MP who defected to Labour in the mid-1990s was promptly rewarded with a safe Merseyside seat, much to the consternation of many local Labour activists. The party machine regards these activists as a nuisance, of course; it takes the votes in these areas for granted, but if it were to pitch its election manifesto to them, it would probably lose vital middle-class votes.
My family were Labour right through the 1980s, and I briefly joined the party in 1994 in Croydon, which had been considered safe Tory territory right into the 1990s. I dropped out because I was disenchanted at the Labour party’s obsession with centralising power and with controlling organisations like the National Union of Students and even local student unions to use them for their own purposes. I was at NUS conference in 1996, at which the union voted to abandon the demand for a return to student grants at 1979 levels (which was admittedly impractical as the numbers of students had increased dramatically since then), and the party’s student wing had “spectators” planted in the galleries above, and not only were they signalling to delegates how to vote, but it also appeared that the cheering was prompted by them as well.
It would be no surprise if Labour lost this by-election, and if Gould gets nominated, the Liberal Democrats could get a huge boost by putting up a candidate with genuine local connections. Labour itself is starting to look like a worn-out shell of its old self, and it is difficult to see where it will go from here, with the old radicals retiring and the modernisers increasingly discredited with the economic bust or tarnished with corruption. At the next election, they will face a Tory party which, if nothing else, will have learned the lessons of 2001 and 2005, and will not be relying on obvious dog whistles and themes culled from mid-market tabloids and talk radio. They will not stand much chance if they are perceived as having such contempt for even their own voters as appears to be the case in Erith.
