Though Cowards Flinch

Today and yesterday many Labour Party members will have received their emails from the Labour Party machine extolling the speeches made at Spring conference, whether specifically trying to boost Gordon Brown’s image or trying to wheedle another £5 out of each member. Yet having watched or read no few of the speeches, I’m left with a gaping hole where my awe and inspiration should be.

The biscuit-takers had to be Hazel Chipmunk and Harriet Nobody. Hazel isn’t terrible in her very direct and clear way of laying out some of the differences between Labour and the opposition in local government, but neither of the two of them had a really positive word to say. For Hazel it was about trumpeting what Labour has (supposedly) done – which didn’t come without the odd straw man argument. For Harriet it was worse.

Beneath every policy which Harman harped on about there is a wide chasm into which that policy might very well sink; claiming that Labour want everyone to have a share in prosperity is great but it simply fails to acknowledge the continuing willful deficiencies in Labour policy. For example, the seven hundred of the biggest businesses in the UK paying zero corporation tax or chief executive wages stretching to 100 times the average wage.

I’m not interested in the populist demonisation of chief executives à la Michael Meacher but nor am I interested in the apologist excuse that corporations escape corporation tax here because they pay it elsewhere. That’s a lie. Most of them don’t pay it anywhere and there is a huge gap in Britain’s so-called progressive taxation that allows companies to get away with massive amounts of money through tax havens.

For all our ministers might go on about equality, prosperity etc, they often don’t have the political will to back up their rhetoric. This is my problem with conference speeches. It’s easy to talk a good show and even easier to be the lesser of two-and-a-half evils with Clegg and Cameron at the top of their parties. That’s not laying out a radical vision for change, it’s laying out more of the same stuff which is losing us votes: privatisation under the cover of investment and meaningless symbolism on women and minorities in Parliament.

Gordon Brown’s speech was probably the most worrying out of all – certainly the one most likely to appeal to nationalist simpletons with rhetoric about how Britain can win back the jobs we’ve lost to other countries, and how we can beat those countries in competition. For Brown, it was a case of breaking out the greatest hits collection on why ‘we’ll’ succeed:

“Because in Britain, with our  international reach, our  flexibility, our  openness, our scientific creativity, our  stability, our language – now the language of the world – our successful membership of the European Union and our long term investments in energy and infrastructure we have the foundations for our future success.”

Our international reach that has our soldiers killing innocent civilians and being killed themselves on behalf of two governments quite content to breed religious fundamentalism – and that’s not counting the United States. Our scientific creativity with some of the lowest research spending in the world after you subtract the military, and private pharmaceutical interests. Our successful membership of the EU – so successful that the Prime Minister is rather worried about the idea of a plebiscite on the subject.

Standing as he does at the very top of the pyramid, the Prime Minister’s speech worries me because his rhetoric is just that; rhetoric. Brown could stand up in front of conference and sing the Internationale for all the world to see – but the difference to policy would be zero. We would still be investing money in faith schools, we would still be mimicking the Tory nonsense about choice in the NHS, we would still be talking about sports activities for children while presiding over the selling off of as many fields as can be hocked.

Finally, it’s easy to wax lyrical about what managing capitalism can do during an economic upswing. We may now be coming to the end of such an upswing – whether we’re jumping on the Kondratieff Wave theory or simply the predictions one picks up every day in any number of economic articles and journals. It will be interesting to see how Labour fulfills its promises in a world much darker than that in which we have governed for ten years.