Perhaps the 2010 general election will go down as being a good one to have lost. There is a widespread acceptance that whatever complexion the resulting government would have been would have had, as a matter of urgency, to deal with the stunning level of national debt. How hard, indeed, did Labour try to win?
Their last year in office was marked by a series of debacles, including botched leadership challenges, Gordon Brown’s hapless attempts to interact with the electorate and rumours of his temper paralysing the workings of inner government. To say that the previous government followed a scorched earth policy would probably be to take it too far, though Liam Byrne, Labour’s last Chief Secretary to the Treasury, appeared to allude to his government’s reckless spending habits when he left a note to his successor advising him that “there’s no money left”.
It is very hard to imagine a Labour government wishing to face the problems now encountered by the coalition government. One party staying in office for three terms naturally makes the public weary and increasingly attracted by the prospect of change (though the Conservatives failed to fully capitalise on such feelings during the campaign).
Yet the issue of cuts would still have needed to be addressed, in a Labour fourth term, whatever some Labour leadership contenders might pretend. As we are beginning to see, a conflict with the unions would become inevitable, and while this might be seen by some as a predictable result of a Conservative in Downing Street, for a Labour government to be presiding over general strikes might be seen as civil war.
Admittedly, Labour would have been less likely to have been quite so harsh to implement cuts, but the legacy of the winter of discontent, which brought down James Callaghan’s government and brought about eighteen years of Tory rule, still haunts Labour’s relations with the trade unions.
As it is, Labour is now on the verge of choosing a leader who may well be the next prime minister. Unlike the post-1997 Tories, who had three unsuccessful leaders (William Hague, Iain Duncan Smith and Michael Howard), Labour has a realistic chance of returning to office relatively soon, and therefore realises that it must choose wisely.
For the government, it may all seem a little unfair. They have no choice but to reduce the public debt, something which Labour failed to address – (perhaps intentionally) – whilst they were in government.
The problem is the issue of how savagely expenditure should be cut. Public sector workers, perhaps eyeing developments in Greece and France, are naturally very worried about austerity packages, and scorn the Conservatives’ insistence that “we are all in this together”.
Unfortunately there is very little choice. We cannot continue to spend beyond our means. Unfortunately, some services will have to go, or else the situation will continue to be exacerbated for future generations. The sooner the clichéd ‘tough, long-term’ decisions are taken, the better. The later these cuts are left, the closer Britain will get to joining the economic graveyard of the GIP countries.
The previous Labour government, which endowed us with the majority of the problems, including giving bankers such as Fred Goodwin a free rein to borrow far beyond their means, will hope to appear as an innocent party in the sorry tale of the current problems we face. The Conservatives and Liberal Democrats have started the attempts to clean up this mess, and have been predictably pilloried for it.
It is to be hoped that their decisions shall, in time, not be seen to have been taken out of a particular desire to slash public services, but out of an unfortunate forced necessity.
