Neil Harding draws a comparison of sorts:
..being able to marry who you want whatever their gender…guaranteed paid holidays…more choice of jobs…better pay…low inflation…low interest rates…no recessions…this aint no Tory-Lib Dem world.
Unfortunately, Neil being Neil, this is a partisan viewpoint. So, if we are to draw comparisons, let’s look a little more broadly.
On the plus side, Gordon Brown’s decision early on in Labour’s administration to pass the control of interest rates to the Bank of England made sense to me. I recall suffering directly at the hands of successive chancellors who thought my mortgage payments were a nice little political football. So, one to New Labour. Having said that, the recent upward trend in interest rates is not one I am happy about.
Better pay? Well, that all depends… While the minimum wage was brought in by this administration, how many people are not in employment because employers just can’t afford to pay them? More choice of jobs? Yeah, right, if you want to work in a call centre, maybe. Facetiousness aside, I am prepared to grant the points Neil makes; i.e. I accept that for the moment Gordon Brown has managed to keep all the plates spinning. The fall is yet to come.
But let’s look at the dark side shall we? The one Neil conveniently omits from his list. Ten years ago we had a prime minister who swept to power on a ticket of cleaning up politics and an ethical foreign policy (remember that?). We now have one who is irrevocably tarnished, having lied to the country and parliament and has been seen to do so. Nothing he says can be trusted. Then there’s the gratuitous grabbing of power; the civil contingencies act that mirrors Hitler’s Enabling act of 1933, the legislative and regulatory reform bill, the systematic erosion of the rule of law (summary justice) and the loss of habeas corpus. We are now the most spied upon nation in Europe with the ever increasing use of CCTV to monitor our movements – now with extras. Then of course, the truly repugnant identity cards act designed to catalogue and track us like farm animals.
We have a burgeoning prison population; hardly surprising given that in the mere space of a decade we have 3,000 new offences on the statute book. Indeed, it is probable that every adult in the country is guilty of breaching some law or other, so many are there that it is difficult to keep pace.
While it is true that John Major was less than assertive as a prime minister and that was probably his biggest failing – well, that and the botched railway privatisation – underneath, he differed from Blair in one significant detail; he was, above all, a decent man. Blair on the other hand is a charlatan and a liar. Anyone who hasn’t figured that one out after ten years hasn’t been paying attention.
Governments have a habit of growing old and weary. By May 1997, the Tories were stale and clearly heading for electoral defeat. We were so ready for a change that anything with a red rosette would have won on that spring evening. Today, Labour is in a similar position. Unfortunately, the opposition is not yet sufficiently prepared for its opening. A Cameron government does not look likely. At least Blair gave us a promise of policies; that the policies we actually got border on the fascist is another matter. Cameron offers us… Well, what, exactly? Other than more of the same? The problem is that we really do need a change. Parties that remain in power for too long become a little too used to the idea, they start to take things for granted. A change is necessary if for nothing else than a salutory lesson to those in power that the real power lies in the ballot box. At least, it damn well should.
Looking back at the euphoria and the decade of erosion of our civil liberties that followed, my answer to Neil’s question is that we would probably have been better off waking up on May 2nd 1997 to a Major victory. As someone who worked hard during the campaign and revelled in the Labour victory that morning, I never thought I would say that.