The most significant purely domestic event in what has turned into a terrible week on the international stage was a speech by Jack McConnell to Labour’s Scottish conference in an arctic Inverness. McConnell looked ahead to next year’s general election, as all politicians are beginning to do, and emerged with a subversive proposition: Labour should fight on the economy.
There is a litany of statistics that will enable Labour to go into the general election with a winning hand on this front: inflation and unemployment at their lowest since the 1960s, seven years’ uninterrupted growth, spending on health and education powering ahead, etc.
The McConnell proposition is subversive because it has a subtext: Labour can now move away from the issues stressed by the party in 1997 and 2001. McConnell has made the first public contribution to a question growing ever more urgent within the Labour party: will the 2005 election manifesto be a manifesto for government by Tony Blair or by Gordon Brown?
There has always been fierce argument about this — so much so that the contrast of vision between the Chancellor and the Prime Minister has paralysed domestic policy-making for the last six years.
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