By Tim Montgomerie
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If I had to name half-a-dozen moral failures of the Labour years my choices would be…
- Borrowing during the good years so that the cupboard was bare when
the rainy years arrived and leaving huge debts for the next generation; - Creating a complex, demotivating welfare system that trapped people on benefits and discriminated against the two parent family;
- Allowing uncontrolled immigration that didn't discriminate between
the skills of migrants so depressing the wages and opportunities of
Britain's working class communities; - A grade inflation in schools and a neglect of vocational education
that means many young people are under-equipped to prosper in a
competitive world; - Creating new inequities between the private and public sectors –
loading taxes on the private sector to pay for government employees to
enjoy higher wages, better pensions, more job security and shorter hours
than their private sector equivalents; - Mishandling the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Labour wasn't all bad, of course and most on
the Left are well-motivated. As a whole, however, the Labour Party has drifted away from its early moral clarity and has become
chained to vested interests, dangerous ideologies, short-termism and
materialism:
- Vested interests:
There are a range of very powerful groups that have grown up to
administer the welfare state including teacher unions who strive to
defend their monopolies and public sector unions generally who oppose
measures to deliver fairness between the private and state sectors in
employment conditions. - Political ideology:
On much of the Left there is an opposition to traditional family life
and religion that leads to bad public policy. The two parent family may
be the best poverty-fighting organisation ever invented but the Left do
nothing to support it. Faith-based charities and schools may be
incredibly effective but Left-wing politicians are often attempting to
limit them. - Short-termism: The real extremists in the debt debate are not those, like America's Tea Party, who want a
country to live within its means but those who think we can continue to
borrow without consequence for our competitiveness or the balance of
world power. What do we think the Chinese and Middle Eastern nations
will do with those ever-increasing interest payments? The allies of our
essential public services aren't those who advocate more and more
borrowing but those who don't want to spend money that we don't have. - Materialism:
The Left cannot see a social problem without reaching for the
taxpayers' chequebook but many social problems reflect a lack of social
rather than economic capital. They reflect bad parenting, inadequate
schooling and a culture of dependency.
The last generation of Labour politicians squandered a decade of
economic prosperity to leave Britain ill-prepared for a very challenging
world. In today's Times (£)
I argue that the generation of Labour politicians who presided over
these moral failings should be in political exile. The idea of them
returning to office without serious repentance should be laughable. Yet
Ed Balls, Ed Miliband, Douglas Alexander and Yvette Cooper – all key
players in the Brown/Blair years – are at the top of a party scoring 43%
in some opinion polls. In The Times I offer an explanation. I argue
that they’ve bounced back because Labour possesses a morally powerful
brand. Left-of-centre governments may mess up economies but their
incompetence is supposedly forgivable because their hearts are in the
right place. Labour are relentless at presenting themselves as the party
of the working class, minorities and the little guy. They are also
relentless at demonising us as politics' bad guys. Labour politicians
instinctively get up every morning and are deadly serious about
protecting their brand and contaminating ours.
I end my article with these words:
"I
don’t blame the Left for their attempts to monopolise the moral high
ground; I blame the Right for allowing it. It’s time for the
Centre-Right to attack systematically the Left’s claims to moral
superiority and to sustain that attack for a culture-shaping generation.
It’s time for conservatives to get off our knees and argue that sound
finances, strong families, school choice and unshackled job creators
provide a much superior approach to social justice than that favoured by
the big-union, big-government Left. We must start advancing our own
vision of the good society or we’ll suffocate in the moral vacuum."
If we compete with the Left for the moral high ground we're not just targeting their achilles heel, we're striking at their whole raison d'etre.