The noise before Labour's defeat

[Albus]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/feb/20/labour-leadership-miliband-harman

In among the newspapers and magazines I fetched from the newsagents this morning, there lurked two rather sobering headlines. The Independent's film and music supplement was floating the idea that U2 might be the "saviours of the music industry", while the New Statesman's cover featured a black and white picture of David Miliband, and the words, "Is this the man to save Britain?" Staring at them both made breakfast feel rather more doom-laden than usual.

The Miliband story, needless to say, fits neatly into the current storm of Labour leadership whispers: essentially a re-enactment of a pantomime first performed last September, but this time with a larger cast, no Miliband banana, and a focus on a post-Brown contest after Labour's likely defeat next year. Some commentators still fancy Alan Johnson's chances; Ed Balls might have a go; so might James Purnell, or one or both Milibands. Andy Burnham? Why? Or then again, why not?

And then there is Harriet Harman, whose current notoriety is bound up with her reportedly hard line on bank bonuses, that great torrent of speculation about leadership ambitions, and some of the most brutal newspaper hatchet jobs in recent memory. I'm not sure she makes her life any easier with easily caricatured wheezes like a parallel G20 women's conference. But the question deserves to be asked: might at least some of the anti-Harriet briefing be down to her highlighting just how behind the moment both Brown and the more hardline New Labourites find themselves? Certainly, it's some token of how rattled some people are that Yvette Cooper (overseas readers take note: she's the chief secretary to the Treasury, but no big player) was identified yesterday as a "stop Harriet" candidate – though that may apparently be down to a wish to make life difficult for her husband Ed Balls … at which point, it hits you once again: this is all absurd, isn't it?

It isn't the leadership speculation that gets me; it's the absence of any convincing politics underneath it, and one question in particular. Why, even in the usual political code, is hardly anybody at the top of the Labour party saying anything of any interest about – and I don't much like this term, but it just about fits – the crisis of neoliberalism?

There are plenty of people in and around Labour who can sketch you out a picture of a social-democratic politics that could fit the moment. Not that many people write about it, but they are fizzing with ideas. They understand that the prevailing government idea of an eventual return to "normal" is pretty much bankrupt. They talk about a re-drawing of the tax system, how the imperatives of climate change might assist Britain tilting its economy away from dependence on the City, why it's time to mark new times by scrapping such schemes as Trident replacement and ID cards, and many more things besides. There is, in fact, a low hum of fascinating conversation that includes people from way beyond the Labour left: one thinks, for example, of Charles Clarke, an advocate of unilateral nuclear disarmament and quietly interesting policy thinker, recently heard claiming that "the grand story is very clear: 30 years of Thatcher/Reagan, tempered by Clinton/Blair, are over."

With the exception of Harman, have any of the most likely leaders of tomorrow even subtly suggested that they might be open to any of this? Do you get the sense that they're even halfway engaged in the great issues of the moment, or might the great turnabout Clarke identifies be causing New Labour almost as many problems – or many more, come to think of it – as the Tories? Why is it that, as one political columnist points out this morning, "most of the potential candidates have given little or no thought to the economy"? Even in the context of their ministerial portfolios, isn't that mind-boggling?

Go to the Miliband interview in the NS, have a look at what he says about domestic politics, and you get to the heart of the problem. There may be something there, but there again, they may not. His words read, as they often do, like the political equivalent of magnetic poetry. From the top, then:

In 2009, we've got to show strength, unity, resilience and determination … The core of the New Labour insight was to put social justice at the heart of the British economy … I passionately believe that you cannot solve the problems of the modern world without progressive values … If you're a 12-year incumbent government you have to work quadruply hard to be the insurgent, not the establishment.

On and on it goes, over several paragraphs. Should you wish, you can critique just about all of it in a matter of seconds and instantly spot the holes (eg as those recently fired agency workers at BMW's Oxford factory could tell you, "putting social justice at the heart of the British economy" was exactly what "the New labour insight" missed out), but reading it forensically isn't the point.

The lesson lies in its emptiness. To my ears, all this sounds like what a Chinese general once called the noise before defeat – and not just of the current government, but most of the people involved in it.