Put another way, Nick Clegg ‘sided with the devil’, and ‘made his bed so he can lie in it.’ In an excellent previous article on the ‘Tax Research’ blog, Richard Murphy sets out the case that Tony Blair was a neoliberal, commencing how Blair himself spoke about his new book to the Guardian. The Guardian notes:
Blair’s outspoken remarks about the financial crisis and the aftermath of the British general election of 2010 in his book’s postscript are likely to have a wide party political impact, especially his caution about any embrace of the view that “the state is back”.
Tony Blair specifically cites that:
“The problem, I would say error, was in buying a package which combined deficit spending, heavy regulation, identifying banks as the malfeasants and jettisoning the reinvention of government in favour of the rehabilitation of government. The public understands the difference between the state being forced to intervene to stabilise the market and government back in fashion as a major actor in the economy.”
Murphy then articulates that the Blair administration was thoroughly ‘New Labour’, noting that: “It betrayed as a result the very core of what Labour did stand for and should stand for. It was desperate – power at any cost. But that was wrong. Power comes with a responsibility to those who grant it – and New Labour failed in that duty.” This is an interesting observation, as Blair considered that he was continuing in the tradition of Thatcher, and that Cameron has been continuing in the tradition of Blair. Brown is not included in this ‘chain of indemnity’, save for being a powerful member of the Blair government. Nick Clegg unwittingly found himself holding the ‘balance of power’, and is now a target within his own party.
This morning, Lord Matthew Oakeshott, a very senior Liberal Democrat peer (and friend of Vince Cable) indicated the party must oust leader Nick Clegg if it wants to avoid electoral disaster in 2015. Oakeshott further explained that it was time to examine the party’s “strategy and management” to ensure it has a chance of success at the polls. It is probably fair to say that tribal hostility between Labour and the Liberal Democrats has intensified since the famous general election of May 2010, with many Labour activists blaming Nick Clegg for ‘selling out to the Tories’. In particular, Nick Clegg is blamed for his U-turn on tuition fees (the famous “Nick Clegg pledge”), and not stopping the privatisation of the NHS. This criticism of Nick Clegg has been advanced by many Labour activists wishing to see destruction of aspirations of members of the Liberal Democrat Part in 2015. Labour dare not openly criticise Tony Blair itself – the reason that Ed Miliband can only pussyfoot around the legacy of New Labour is that he fully realises that he risks internecine warfare within Labour.
This is a pointless concern of Labour in perpetually being concerned about the image of the Unions. New Labour made no effort to dilute the anti-Union legislation of the previous Conservative administrations, and Labour has always had a thirst for powerful backers from the corporate sector. This is sheer folly, as corporates will rarely have the welfare of its workers as a primary consideration in formulating its business strategy over profit; the reality of this is brought home with the lack of investment in Labour which will come to Ed Miliband as a result of him envangelising about ‘responsible capitalism’ in politics, or ‘corporate social responsibility’ as it is known to everyone else in law and business.
The history of New Labour’s contribution to tuition fees and the privatisation of the NHS is all too clear, however. In May 1996, Conservative Prime Minister John Major commissioned an inquiry, led by Sir Ron Dearing, into the funding of British higher education over the next 20 years. Published on 23 July 1997, the Dearing report made 93 recommendations. It estimated additional funding of almost £2 billion would be needed over the next 20 years, including £350 million in 1998-9 and £565 million in 1999-2000, in order to expand student enrllment, provide more support for part-time students and ensure an adequate infrastructure. The inquiry favoured means-tested tuition fees and the continuation of the means tested maintenance grants as well as student loans. It recommended that graduates made a flat rate contribution of 25 percent of the cost of higher education tuition and that a mechanism for paying for this should be established by 1998-9. Following the publication of the report, the Labour education secretary David Blunkett announced the introduction of means-tested tuition fees to begin in September 1998. He also announced that the student maintenance grant would be abolished and replaced by student loans.
In fact, New Labour also began to tinker with the NHS almost as soon as it came into office, with promises “to overturn the Conservatives’ internal market structure, vowing to replace it with a more collaborative, quality-based approach”. Following its “Agenda for Change” initiative of 2004, the New Labour government then, in 2006, installed a new chief executive, David Nicholson, whose role was to carry out reforms of the NHS “to tackle its debt crisis”. In a speech delivered behind closed doors back in 2009, it was Nicholson who told health service finance directors that a new programme of reforms was needed to deliver between £15 billion and £20 billion [which equated to 6% of the total budget] in ‘efficiency savings’ over three years from 2011 to 2014. In response, Dr Hamish Meldrum, chairman of the British Medical Association council, warned that if efficiency savings went ahead on such a scale “there is a real danger that patient services could be threatened”. What had started with Thatcherism, and then continued under Blair and Brown, has now reached a critical phase under Cameron, inspired by John Redwood and Oliver Letwin.
I feel that, whilst it is convenient to blame Nick Clegg, the policies being enacted by the Coalition are end-products of significant policy planks of New Labour. Labourites who choose to ‘punish Nick Clegg’ for enactment of these policies are in a way reminiscent of a Shakespearean tragedy attacking the foundations of education and NHS policy that they helped to produce in New Labour. Nick Clegg, instead of being a visionary who changed politics, has simply enacted ‘more of the same’, and it is a moot point whether Labour or the Conservatives would have followed this policy path anyway. It is parsimonious to conclude that all people on the Left who vote against Nick Clegg are voting against New Labour, even if they would never dare to admit it if they were members of New Labour, but the problem is that Nick Clegg is merely a symbol for what has gone on for more than a decade. If Ed Miliband, by fluke or hard work in criticising the demonisation of the disabled or privatisation of the NHS, enters Downing Street on May 8th 2015, it could well be ‘more of the same’, even if Nick Clegg has retired from full-time politics despite winning his very safe seat in Sheffield.
In fairness to us, in Labour, we voted against all these measures, unlike the Liberal Democrat MPs; we voted against this, scrapping the Education Support Allowance, against disability benefit changes, and much more, but we are sadly not in government for the time-being. More than that, Labour has pledged that the maximum university fee for students in England would be cut by a third under Labour. This would be partly funded by higher interest on student loans for graduates earning more than £65,000 a year. Furthermore, Labour currently also has a strategy for coping with the NHS reorganisation. The first of these is a proposal to raise the cap of the amount foundation trusts can receive from private sources to 49 per cent. Secondly we wish to reframe the role of Monitor, the body charged with regulating competition within the NHS, as the small print suggested at the moment the role of the market would be “modelled explicitly on the role of privatised utilities”. Thirdly, it is proposed that GPs might be stopped from commissioning services from themselves, which is felt to be a “a conflict of interest”.
So if Tony Blair and David Cameron got away with it, why can’t Nick Clegg? Nick Clegg can’t, because he has a repeated tendency to say one thing and do the opposite (or do one thing and say the opposite, like the wealthy and taxes). Ultimately, voters hate it if leaders blatantly lie to them. Few people have any feelings towards Nick Clegg apart from complete contempt for ‘selling out’, and Labour has always argued that it had no intention of ‘going this far’. I don’t wish to diminish any scrutiny of Nick Clegg’s rôle in implementing policy in the UK, but I do wish us in Labour to learn lessons about how evolve our policy for the future in a constructive way. Believe me – on this Matthew Oakeshott is completely right, I feel – Nick Clegg is finished! Most importantly, history will be the best judge of whether Tony Blair or David Cameron have in fact ‘got away with it’, after all. Ed Miliband’s own political career, in distancing himself from these policies (or not), will be the best testament to that.