Downing Street is now the last refuge of the electorally damned

By Martin Bright / @martinbright

Here, LabourList exclusively publishes Martin Bright's column from this week's Spectator, which is in the shops tomorrow (Thursday).

Where does Gordon Brown find solace in these darkest of times? In Downing Street, a rather desperate numbers game is being played. It starts with an assumption that the Labour vote has stabilised at around 28 per cent. This is rounded up to 30 per cent, and is forecast to sneak up to 32 at the turn of the year — because the race tends to narrow as polling day approaches. Then, with the coming of spring, the flimsiness of the Cameron project will finally become clear to the British people. The legendary Brown street-fighting election machine will swing into action. With one last push, and if the weather is good on election day, Labour hits 35 per cent of the vote and a hung parliament is in the bag.

There are several obvious problems with this as an election strategy. The most obvious is that it is not built on polling evidence, policy arguments or the government’s record — but on wishful thinking alone. Labour strategists will find comfort in the latest poll, which has the party at 29%. But the party had been consistently stuck at 27, with one poll putting them at 25. The Conservatives may struggle to push beyond the 40 per cent mark, yet this is hardly, in itself, reason for celebration.

As a nation’s pity swirled around Gordon Brown like a seasonal storm last week, he must have felt like someone blown off his feet by a force far greater than himself. It is now beyond Shakespearean. A man with failing sight blamed for ‘scrawling his attempt’ to express his condolences to a grieving mother. This is so abject it could have come from a script by Samuel Beckett. In many ways, the ageing Brown and Mandelson bear comparison with Estragon and Vladimir in Waiting for Godot, a desperate pair railing at the world to ‘keep the terrible silence at bay’.

It is not entirely clear how things have come to this. The team around Gordon Brown is not completely bereft of talent. When I visited 10 Downing Street recently, in quick succession I bumped into Patrick Diamond (formerly of the LSE and the Equalities and Human Rights Commission), Wilf Stephenson (founder of the Smith Institute) and Michael Lea (until recently a political correspondent at the Daily Mail). All may have their faults, but they are no slouches. Add to these David Muir, Brown’s director of political strategy, policy advisers Dan Corry and Nick Pearce, and his ‘external relations’ adviser Kirsty McNeill — this should be a formidable operation. But then again, as one former Number 10 insider told me this week: ‘The questions you need to ask are: “Does the person take the advice?” and “Can it help?”’

Peer through the autumn gloom, and it is just possible to see the outlines of a Labour plan. Gordon Brown’s speech on immigration last week is evidence of the serious realisation that the core vote could wither still further. Brown is now claiming he has always taken seriously working-class concerns about levels of migration to this country. For five years people as diverse as Peter Hain, Jon Cruddas, Denis MacShane and Anne Cryer have been warning the Labour leadership not to be complacent about the threat of the far right and to develop a sophisticated liberal position on the immigration debate. At this late stage though, it just looks as if the Prime Minister has decided to adopt the same dog-whistle policy that helped lose the Tories the last two elections.

On the battlefront of policy ideas, Liam Byrne bravely soldiers on. His ‘John Lewis’ model for direct stakeholder involvement in running the public sector is where New Labour’s perpetual revolution meets the politics of the co-operative movement. Turning schools and hospitals into mutual institutions sounds like the beginnings of a proper agenda. It might even be persuasive if this government hadn’t previously proposed several other ingenious models to crack perceived public sector underperformance, most recently settling on ‘trusts’.

It is easy to mock ideas, and especially easy to mock tired New Labour ideas after a dozen years in power. But any renewal of the party must be based on new patterns of thinking. One obvious place for this to emerge would be the Labour-leaning think tanks and pressure groups. Demos and the Institute for Public Policy Research were both instrumental in gestating the ideas that became New Labour. Neither is moribund — despite struggling to navigate their way through a political world where corporate money is fleeing to the right. Last weekend, the Fabian Society reported that its membership is at an all-time high, while the Blairites at Progress claimed a swift victory in its campaign to force a government compromise on scrapping tax relief on childcare vouchers.

Yet the talk of electoral reform, inequality, decentralisation and green social democracy has yet to coalesce into a programme for a Labour government. The one exception here is Compass, the left-of-centre pressure group with close ties to Jon Cruddas. It is unusual in that it combines a coherent philosophy with a degree of organisation. The argument over whether the country is ready to embrace a more left-wing Labour Party is likely to dominate — up to and beyond the next election.

Real change will be driven by necessity. Ambitious young Labour politicians who want to make a difference will head for local government, where residual Labour power will lie in the event of a Tory victory. Some even talk of a new era of municipal socialism (a word increasingly used, even by those on the right of the party). For this to happen, Labour will need genuinely to embrace local devolution. Ed Miliband has shown that it is possible to steal a march on Cameron on the environmental agenda. If he gets it right, he may even be able to persuade the Labour core vote that green technology can create jobs for the working class (another term that has crept back into excepted Labour Party usage).

The government is exhausted. The parliamentary party looks and behaves like it has already been defeated. The wider labour movement is divided, and bracing for civil war. And the polling numbers are dreadful. Just a quarter of the electorate are on Labour’s side: that Number 10 could seek any solace in that fact proves just how hopeless the situation really is.