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. But in 1997, and even in 2001, few seriously doubted Tony Blair’s readiness to serve a full term. The critical difference this time is that nobody — with the touching exception of Lord Chancellor Falconer, the Prime Minister’s former flatmate — thinks that Tony Blair will stay on for long after next year’s election.
An embattled and exhausted Prime Minister has lost the energy to fight for his most cherished personal beliefs, and in any case their time has come and gone. Proportional representation is long buried, while the formal obsequies for the euro will be read out by Chancellor Gordon Brown in this month’s budget.
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