The opposition has a 30 per cent lead and is seen as the next government, so what's wrong with it?
Governments only matter if they have done some serious thinking before coming to office. Attlee could call on the work of Beveridge and Keynes and 30 years of Fabian thinking. Margaret Thatcher in 1979 ran hard with the work of the Institute of Economic Affairs and the Adam Smith Institute.
Politicians don't nationalise or privatise without someone first proposing it in a boring pamphlet. But the Blair leadership, for all its apparent interest in new thinking, seems not to read boring pamphlets and to resent all unauthorised ideas. It may be that lucid plans are being laid-away from public notice. If they are not, the Blair leadership will be the most vacuous since Stanley Baldwin.
Labour would be right to withhold detail, to observe prudence. The Tory press, if not still trying to kill John Major, will be predicting tidal waves of tax increases, treble-costing every Labour policy and forecasting trade union tumbrils in Hyde Park. But that should not prevent a ferment of ideas without formal avowal. There is life outside the manifesto.
The trauma imposed by the tax scare of 1992 risks turning reaction into paralytical over-reaction. Witness the railways. There is no good reason for the distribution of the network among creamers-off and subsidy-bibbers. And in opposition Labour could have hobbled it-by a firm commitment to re-nationalise Railtrack and punitive regimes for private rail companies. A little resolute heavy breathing by an opposition wanting to stop the sale would have blasted the entire thing.
The bleakest fear is that the leader didn't want to stop the sale. When has Tony Blair found a Conservative idea wrong? One doesn't mind him being small "c" conservative, but hopes and trusts that he isn't becoming gently upper-cased.
Of course Labour had to rethink its position. No one wants it saying it will do this because it is Labour and exists to do it. Nor do we want union heavies calling the shots. The Benn diaries are too full of what, 15 years ago, "Moss and Clive" would or wouldn't wear. But liberation from the dismal boyars of the unions ought to have meant the flourishing of ideas, a brew of debate, a hundred flowers blooming. Instead, we have a regime of foot-stamping imperiousness, hitting on the head the impudent presumption of thought. Clive Soley's careful suggestions on housing are one example, Brian Wilson's view about Railtrack another, simply muffled and knocked off.
An opposition in which incuriousity is garlanded with authoritarianism may indeed become a government, but what sort of go-vernment? The justification is that no left wing troublemaking must disrupt the business of winning. But there is no left wing. The furies of 1979-82 are fled into thin air.
What will Labour do about the coming crisis in the health service? What constructive ideas do they have about housing? Why are they afraid of devolution? Where do they stand on media monopoly?
We can answer that. They stand to the right of the Conservatives. Tony Blair's journey to the Murdoch resort in Queensland has been followed by a vote in the Commons to weaken Tory limits on cross-media ownership. Feebleness is one thing, and we grow used to it-but militant feebleness?
An opposition needs more than the smile of a synchronised swimmer. I would prefer a bias to the poor and to employees-downsizeable employees-and a healthy respect for public services.
No one opposes intelligent and critical adaptation of Conservative ideas which have intellectual and moral validity. But if he blandly accommodates Labour to everything from Murdoch's writ, to cutting benefits, to the rise of Stagecoach, Blair will become a reverse Macmillan-accepting the other side's design of the garden while standing handsomely at the hedge enjoying the sunshine. But Macmillan, at least, had a humane inheritance. Blair inherits the underclass and the closed cottage hospital.
So what should he do? Faced with the campaign to make filthy forei-gners eat British beef despite 26,000 notified cases of BSE, he doesn't say "Yes, war indeed, but we'd be nicer about it." He says "This is a tawdry corruption of patriotism and one which will fail."
That way he maintains consistency, plays a long game instead of haplessly buying short, and keeps open a sympathetic line to Europe. The price is a bad morning in the Daily Mail and much illiterate lip from moronic Tory backbenchers. Speaking of which devil: when David Evans talks about punishing "immigrants we can do without," a good leader forgets the profit and loss and behaves like a Mensch. He treats poison as poison. Maybe he loses a few thousand votes, but he makes the constituency of humane, reasonable people happy. And they aren't happy, are they, even with the prospect of winning? What "New" Labour does not have, and must get, is the decent pride upon which self-respect is built. A wise leader would not make play with his Christianity and then forget the bit in the Bible which asks: "What shall it profit a man to gain the whole world if he lose"-what was it?-his soul, I think.
