LABOUR GOVERNMENTS AND SOCIALIST HEGEMONY DANIEL LEACH
The behaviour of the last Labour government is, to put it mildly, far from uncontroversial - especially as the current and last former Labour leaders were heavily involved in challenging the government's foreign policy in Iraq. However, there has been a reassessment of their domestic policies within the party, beginning under Corbyn and continuing under Starmer.
Perhaps this should come as no surprise. While Blair and others seemed indestructible, the question was how they could do more. Making any kind of policy seems a distant dream for Labour these days; very few frontbench members were MPs before 2010. Being able to make any kind of policy would be an improvement over the current situation. Indeed, it seems that it is the dire current situation that has triggered a wave of nostalgia within the party for the more electorally successful days. This raises an interesting question. If Labour has been so successful in government - in domestic politics they have indeed achieved so much - why is there so little left today? Like the Ozymandias statue, New Labour's political programme lies in tatters after a decade of austerity. The Sure Start programme has been terminated, tax credits and child benefit have been cut, funding has been cut across the board, and, perhaps worst of all for a government whose mantra was 'education, education, education', school funding is worse than ever, buildings are crumbling and teachers are leaving the profession. It is not enough to say that these things would have been better had we been in government: of course they would have been better, but defeat is inevitable in electoral
politics. Even the Japanese Liberal Democrats and the Swedish Social Democrats were in opposition. There was always going to be a time when Labour would be driven out of government.
However, it is not at all inevitable that outgoing governments have the next abolish their programs. In fact, Labour had more long-term ministries that lasted far less time than New Labour: Attlee's post-war government lasted only 6 years, including only 5 years with a substantial majority. But the policies pursued by his cabinet, including schooling under 15, nationalised industry and, of course, the NHS, survived for decades. Yes, the Tories reversed the nationalisation of the steel and road industry, but they allowed the railways, coal, telecoms, energy and many other industries to remain under government control. This did not change until the Thatcher government. In fact, the 13-year period of Tory rule that followed Attlee continued a number of his policies, such as building more council houses. If that's not convincing enough, just look at Thatcher to see what the right has achieved in 11 years in power.
Thatcher once said that her greatest achievement was Tony Blair. No doubt she was trying to wind up the left, but there is some truth in that. Thatcher privatised all the industries that Attlee had fought to bring under state control. She broke the link between pensions and earnings, with the result that the elderly are still living worse off to this day. She introduced the right to buy, a policy that still causes housing problems in this country, and destroyed the power of trade unions, making workers more disen
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