Verdict first, then fix the evidence
The Verdict: Did Labour change Britain?
By Polly Toynbee and David Walker, Granta, 2010, £18-99
Reviewed by Sean Figg
THIS BOOK is not a serious analysis of the 1997-2010
Labour government. Polly Toynbee and David Walker do not attempt an
over-arching characterisation of the thirteen years of Labour rule, by
examining in whose interests it ultimately governed. Instead, the
account is selective, fragmentary and biased.
Statistics are splashed around as evidence for
either achievement or failure. But the authors treat their evidence in
an isolated way without considering how the outcome – good or bad from
their point of view – was arrived at. However, this is crucial in
reaching any ‘verdict’ on the Blair/Brown years. Because what is not
said is often more important than what they do say. The hallmark of this
book is ‘the lie of omission’, a dishonest and duplicitous method for
any writer.
Toynbee and Walker consider education Labour’s
greatest achievement. Figures are provided of increased spending and
improved exam results. But the way they deal with Labour’s academy
programme is woefully inadequate. Academies allowed schools to opt out
of Local Education Authority (LEA) control and come under the management
of ‘philanthropists’, frequently businessmen. This ‘reform’ marked out
the route for the marketisation and privatisation of education. The
Con-Dem coalition is using the framework bequeathed it by Labour to try
and take every school out of LEA control, effectively ending
comprehensive education. Yet Toynbee and Walker do not discuss this
point, which gets to the heart of the character of the Labour
government. The only comment they can muster is the assertion that
"behind the academies was a fierce desire to raise ambitions in the
poorest urban areas", and that they were only "intended to be an extra"
to comprehensive education.
In the same way they gloss over the introduction of
university tuition fees, a hugely controversial policy. They dishonestly
claim that "whichever party had won in 1997, it would have faced the
tide of demand for higher education on limited funds. The new government
had to choose between further degradation in the amount of support,
apportioning more of the education budget to universities, or new income
from fees". This is simply not true. Labour chose to pass part of the
cost of higher education onto students, graduates and their families.
Ultimately, Labour opened the breach in free higher education that the
Con-Dems used in November 2010 to triple tuition fees.
This method is used throughout the book. Leaving the
Tories’ anti-trade union legislation fully intact is not mentioned.
Worse, in one of only two mentions of the trade unions, the authors
commend Labour for rescinding the ban on union membership at the GCHQ
intelligence services centre. The only possible purpose of omitting the
former and including the latter is to create the impression of a
union-friendly government. Nothing was further from the truth.
The extensive privatisation that took place is not
mentioned despite it being greater than that which took place under
Thatcher. Although a chapter is spent discussing housing, no mention is
made of Labour’s attempt to privatise the entire council housing stock,
through transferring ownership of council housing to allegedly
‘not-for-profit’ housing associations. These were pushed to operate as
commercial firms: to borrow on the markets and enter into deals with
private developers and contractors, giving them easy profits. Over the
last decade, a £40 billion subsidy has been paid to these ‘private’
organisations. Similarly on the railways, an £811 million subsidy was
paid to the private train operators in 2006-07 alone.
Toynbee and Walker present the raw statistics for
health spending, which increased 7% in real terms every year. Seven
chapters later, we are let in on the fact that much of the spending was
siphoned directly to big business through the private finance initiative
(PFI). Labour-era PFI deals have saddled the public purse with £215
billion in repayments to private companies. But the capital value of the
hospitals and treatment centres built is only £55-65 billion. The
separation and isolation of these two pieces of information deliberately
tries to present Labour’s health policy in the best possible light. The
real beneficiaries of Labour rule were the fat-cats profiting from
public services.
In 2006, Labour enacted a European directive
stopping employers compulsorily retiring workers at 65. Under Labour the
proportion of over 65s still working rose to nearly 20% of men and 10%
of women. Labour attacked public-sector workers’ pensions, provoking
strike action in 2006. But Toynbee and Walker agree with the way Labour
viewed the ‘problem’ of increased life expectancy: "The choice was
either to save more now or extend working lives". The Con-Dem government
uses this argument today to further attack public-sector pensions. It
has already provoked one day of strike action by 750,000 teachers,
lecturers and civil servants. Toynbee appeared on the BBC’s Question
Time on 30 June, the day of the strike, but did not openly support the
Tory minister putting the same argument to attack the strikers. Her
book, however, shows that she supports the coalition’s position.
This episode draws attention to an intractable
dilemma facing reformist writers like Toynbee and Walker. The basic
position of reformism is that capitalism can be controlled and regulated
to meet broader social ends than just the enrichment of the capitalist
class. This false view is especially exposed in a period of capitalist
crisis. To maintain a reformist position will ultimately lead to
accepting the ‘need’ – from the point of view of capitalism, whether
recognised or not – to attack the living conditions of the working
class. Toynbee and Walker try to iron out this contradiction by posing
pro-big business policies as an abstract ‘inevitability’. As the class
struggle intensifies, this inherent feature of reformism will be exposed
in practise.
The reality was that Labour policy was a
continuation of the neo-liberalism of the Thatcher years. In 2001,
corporation tax was 35%. By 2008 was reduced to 27%. Capital gains tax
was cut from 40% to 10%. Under Labour the size of the financial sector
within the economy rose from 5.3% in 2001 to 9.1% in 2008.
Manufacturing, on the other hand, was decimated. Between 1997 and 2007,
nearly 1.3 million manufacturing jobs were lost and manufacturing’s
share of the economy declined from 20% to 12%. But the authors treat
these facts in isolation as if there were no connection between the two.
When easy profits could be made through financial speculation there was
little incentive to invest in productive capacity.
Labour consciously helped the rise of the financial
sector. Although the international dimension to the 2008 banking crash
was decisive, Labour created a regulatory landscape that ensured it had
a catastrophic impact in Britain. Even after the crash, Labour refused
to deal any significant blows against the banks, instead bailing them
out with the minimum of strings. In this way, Labour helped prepare the
way for the assault now taking place on the welfare state by the Con-Dems.
The wealth gap ballooned under Labour. Directors’
pay increased from 47 times the average pay in their firms to 81 times
the average. The working class borrowed to maintain living standards.
The ratio of savings to GDP in the early 1990s was 12%. By 2008 it was
zero as savings were run down.
Another key promise when Labour was elected was to
eliminate child poverty, which affected 3.4 million children in 1997.
Labour left office with 2.8 million children still below the breadline.
Toynbee and Walker admit that "more adults fell into poverty than
children escaped it". Typically, however, they throw Labour a lifeline
by saying that at least they "slowed down the rise in inequality". In
other words, marginal achievements in one area were wiped out by an
increase in inequality and poverty overall.
Instead of drawing these points out, we are offered
a mishmash of truisms and apologetics. The authors tell us that Labour
ministers were "a clever and well-intentioned group of men and women"
who had set themselves an impossible task. Apparently, "Labour
governments are destined to disappoint their followers because the
centre left sets the bar higher and hopes are inflated". We are told
that Labour lost the 2010 general election partly for "just having been
in power for so long". But the real reason that Labour lost the votes of
some four million working-class people between 1997 and 2010 was because
many could not see the point in voting for them. For millions more, a
vote for Labour was a vote for the ‘lesser evil’. Millions can see ‘the
verdict’ that Toynbee and Walker refuse to acknowledge: Labour is a
party of big business and the rich. |