“I was sent a memo [writes Gordon Brown] from Tony [Blair]’s private office that contained an astonishing proposal: to abolish all income-tax reliefs and allowances, other than a small personal tax credit, and use the proceeds to reduce the basic rate of tax to 20p and the top rate to 35p.”
I’m indebted to John Rentoul for tweeting this passage from Gordon Brown’s autobiography this morning.
Rattle. The sound of another score being settled in Gordon Brown’s My Life, Our Times pic.twitter.com/DPwzWJFAqN
— John Rentoul (@JohnRentoul) December 11, 2017
In the passage, Brown reveals one reason why New Labour left us in such a political mess, something we’ve been too quick to forget. He who forgets the past etc etc.
It turns out, you see, that Blair actually did have one good idea before resigning (though deciding to resign does remain his single best decision).
As Gordon doesn’t write, Blair’s simplification proposal represented the antithesis of the central Brownian notion: to generate Labour voters by designing a tax (and tax credit) system of such mind-boggling complexity that even couples on relatively high incomes would find themselves dependent on state benefits (called “tax credits”). Earn money, pay tax, fill in a form to ask for some of it back, feel grateful. Such a useful dividing line for elections (“The Tories will cut your benefits! Vote Labour!”).
So, naturally, Brown killed off Blair’s flatter-simpler-taxes policy. The rest is history: seven years in to a Tory administration and the tax system is more complicated than ever; any Budget (under both metropolitan Osborne and suburban Hammond) that tries to unpick Brown’s cats cradle is defeated by lobby-group shrieking and backbench marginal-seat nervousness.
One part of the Blair-Brown legacy? You will live and die under a tax and benefits system which the country can’t afford, that no one of reasonable intelligence can possibly understand, which slimy oligarchs and A-lister slebs (ooh Tony! You’re so Cool Britannia!) can abuse almost at will, and which will beggar your children when the fiscal reckoning finally arrives. Another great achievement from the men who brought you Iraq.
Of course, this Blair-Brown bequest isn’t even their most poisonous. We may live long enough to look back upon a complicated tax credit system and smile, with wistful nostalgia, should their true heir — Jeremy Corbyn — take power.
To link Corbyn to Blair-Brown as an inevitable historical consequence is unfashionable; didn’t moderates fight hard against Corbyn’s accession, and warn the electorate against him?
Well, sort of: simultaneous with their warnings, they also encouraged people to vote Labour. “Vote for the man whom I think is wicked” isn’t the most persuasive of messages, and it’s perhaps not surprising that younger voters listened to the principal clauses of their election addresses while ignoring the subordinate cautions.
In any case, since the election, the moderate refugees of the Blair-Brown era have clearly given up, happy to take any frontbench shilling on offer, while their party’s leader (whom they believe, remember, to be wicked) inches ever closer to power. I’m not sure how they can sleep at night, or look themselves in the mirror, to be honest.
And when you read of some Labour candidate who thinks ISIS doesn’t exist, or yet another Labour member using anti-semitic tropes, or of (surprise!) corruption allegations in Tower Hamlets’ Labour-run council, don’t believe for a minute that these manifestations of kinder-gentler politics winked into existence when Jeremy took over.
They’re not a cosmic accident: Lutfur Rahman was originally a Blair-Brown council leader, remember. The narcissism of the Blair-Brown differences led both to turn a blind eye to what was happening in places such as Tower Hamlets (Never mind the politics! Just count the Labour votes!).
However much the moderates wave their hands under their noses about Jeremy Corbyn, it was Tony and Gordon who eviscerated the Labour party of its intellectual and cultural traditions, replacing the patriotic social democracy of Attlee-Wilson-Calaghan with What Works [To Keep Us in Power], and leaving it ripe for takeover.
Is evisceration a strong word? Stronger ones would be required to describe the voids that were the anti-Corbyn leadership campaigns of Yvette Cooper, Andy Burnham, and then that other guy whose name I’ve thankfully forgotten. Such faith had the Blairites and Brownites, that their fatuous slogans and electoral bribes represented some shining new third-way philosophy, that, when challenged by the most intellectually-limited candidate ever offered by the Labour Party for leadership, they were left, mouths gaping, vacant of any response.
So Jeremy Corbyn isn’t a surprise in a party once dominated by Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. Suck the virtue from an entity and use it as a vehicle for power, power, always more power; make a principle out of strangling the traditions on which your party for labour (“a sort of bigoted woman”) was founded; then leave it for dead once you’re done and are ready to move on: how can you be surprised that your former party’s carcass is then reanimated by extremists? Corbyn isn’t a surprise. Blair and Brown made him inevitable.
