From clunk to cluck
Rattled, hoarse and angry, Gordon Brown did not look a happy man at Prime Minister's Questions on Wednesday. Small wonder: it is only weeks since his clunking fist was pounding the Tories into submission. Now, he has allowed himself to be caricatured as a clucking chicken, as fearful of an election as he is of an EU referendum. 'How long are we going to have to wait till the past makes way for the future?' David Cameron asked — and the PM had no convincing reply.
It may be true that Mr Brown's decision not to go to the country this November will fast fade from public memory, and that the nickname 'Bottler Brown' and the jokes about 'bottle banks' will not last. But the impression of the Prime Minister as a diminished, hesitant and defensive figure is likely to prove more durable.
Mr Brown's greatest coup in his first few weeks was to appear new and fresh: in pollsters' jargon, 'to be the change'. Yet in the past fortnight his behaviour has been wearyingly familiar, bearing all the trademarks of old New Labour: spin, stunts, evasiveness and outright deceit. In his press conference on Monday, inevitably dominated by his election decision, Mr Brown was asked: 'Can you say, with your hand on your heart, that the polls had nothing to do with your decision?' He answered: 'Yes, I can.' Yet there, in clear view of the cameras, were the words 'saw polls' on his notes. Mr Cameron was quite right to say at PMQs that Mr Brown is 'treating the British people as fools'.
The PM claims that he decided not to hold an election because he wants to explain his 'vision' first. That, of course, is a reason for him to go to the country now. The mandate he inherited from Tony Blair is based on the 2005 Labour manifesto. If he has a new and quite different plan for the nation then he is morally obliged to present it to the people, and to let them have their say.
It is odd, moreover, that a PM so allegedly keen to explain his 'vision' to the electorate allowed his conference speech in Bournemouth — surely the ideal moment to unveil his grand philosophy — to be overshadowed by feverish election speculation. And this in turn reflects a deeper problem: that the PM, for all his undoubted academic gifts, is losing the intellectual initiative.
Alistair Darling's combined Pre-Budget Report and Comprehensive Spending Review on Tuesday was a humble bonsai tree of an announcement when Labour needed a mighty oak to be planted in the political soil. Its littleness lay in the fact that so much of it was derivative: openly lifted from the Tory party's proposals at its Blackpool conference last week. George Osborne feigned the outrage of a householder who has caught a burglar red-handed. In truth, he could barely conceal his delight that a Labour Chancellor should so brazenly copy — or half-copy — Conservative ideas on inheritance tax, aviation duty and the taxation of non-domiciled residents.
New Labour, of course, has always been good at stealing Tory ideas and repackaging them in pastel colours. John Major used to complain that he felt like a man who had gone for a swim and found that his clothes were missing when he got back to shore. Indeed, part of Mr Blair's political genius was to grasp that it was the Tory party rather than Tory ideas that the public was sick of.
But what Messrs Brown and Darling did this week was not an act of confident opportunism. It reflected a new mood of panic and defensiveness, of intellectual exhaustion. As Disraeli said of the Liberal government in 1872, this Cabinet already resembles 'a range of exhausted volcanoes' — not because it lacks vigorous personalities, but because it is running desperately short on ideas. Worse, Labour is starting to run against the grain of popular opinion.
Nowhere is this more evident than on tax. In 1997, Labour read the public's mood on taxation correctly: the voters wanted certain reassurances on direct taxes, especially the 40 per cent top rate. But their priority was what Labour called 'investment' — that is, spending our money — on health and education. The Tories' promises of lower taxation in 2001 and 2005 made little if any impact, and fuelled Labour's often hysterical claims that a vote for the Conservatives was a vote for hospital and school closures. But what Labour failed to recognise was that the past decade has also been, in the voters' eyes, an experiment in the capacity of government to spend taxpayers' money responsibly and effectively.
That experiment has been a failure: Britain now has higher tax levels than Germany, yet the untold billions poured into our public services have not brought about the revolution in health and education promised in 1997 — very far from it. Dismayed by the pathetic value for money offered by the unreformed public sector, with their disposable income down by 5 per cent since 1997, the voters are once again receptive to tax-cutting proposals, especially those such as inheritance tax relief which encourage aspiration and providence.
Meanwhile, Mr Cameron's muchmocked but necessary 'brand decontamination' strategy has helped voters trust the Tories again. The conditions are in place for the Conservative party to offer voters a new and very different vision of the state, the role of public spending, and the limits of taxation — a vision entirely consistent with Mr Cameron's sound principle that society and the state are different things.
It would be absurdly premature to see a veteran politician of Mr Brown's abilities and accomplishments as a busted flush: he may yet win Labour a fourth term, just as Mr Cameron might well stumble. There is no reason yet to believe that an electoral 'sea change' of the sort identified by Jim Callaghan in 1979 has occurred in 2007. But an intellectual 'sea change' in politics is well underway.
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