Decline & Fall

by Chris Mullin

  Sunday, 2 May

  This morning, two hours’ leafleting in Hill View, a leafy estate of fifties council housing, at least one-third of which is now in private hands, courtesy of the right to buy. Twenty years ago, by this stage in an election campaign, Hill View would have been plastered with Labour posters. Today we came across just two or three. Not that the natives are unfriendly. Several people waved and gave us the thumbs up. Only one man shouted abuse from the comfort of his 4×4. Hard to read the mood. No evidence in Sunderland of a Lib Dem surge. Here the issue is, will they vote or not?

  Wednesday, 5 May

  A day in the office spent sorting through boxes. Box after box after box. The simplest solution would be to close my eyes, take a deep breath and shred the lot, but buried here are all sorts of gems from campaigns past – miscarriages of justice, Masonic secrecy, gun control etc. The fruits of more than 20 years’ work. Each reopened file triggers a memory. Several archives are competing for my paperwork, though goodness knows what use it will be 50 years from now. In deference to the Data Protection Act, we have already shredded thousands of constituency case papers, but I can’t bring myself to destroy the rest – and so I must wade through them box by box, file by file. At this rate, it will take months.

  The polls are indicating that the Lib Dem surge has receded, putting them just about level pegging with Labour, while the Tories have pulled ahead, i.e., as in 1983, the anti-Tory vote is split exactly down the middle.

  Thursday, 6 May

  To the count. A wall of cameras, but for the first time in many years I am of no relevance, just an extra on the film set. In Sunderland we count the votes very fast and by midnight all our three seats have declared. Handsome Labour victories all round. We even recaptured several council seats, one a Tory stronghold. Outside our little bubble, however, things are not going too well.

  Friday, 7 May

  The slaughter is considerable. A list of The Fallen is running in a continuous loop along the bottom of our television screen. Among them, many good friends and colleagues. Across the Home Counties, the party of the bankers, hedge-funders and derivative traders is sweeping all before it.

  And yet all is not lost. Not quite. The much-trumpeted Lib Dem revival, like so many previous ones, has failed to materialise. The Great British Public have spoken, but it is by no means clear what they have said.

  Saturday, 8 May

  A pause while we wait to see who the Lib Dems will appoint to government. Everyone is being nice to them. Cameron talking of ‘a big, open and comprehensive deal’. Gordon, meanwhile, is insisting that it is his constitutional duty to remain in office until the mist clears.

  Monday, 10 May

  Gordon announces his resignation. As with his Budgets, however, a careful reading of the small print reveals that, subject to the mercy of the Liberal Democrats, he is actually contemplating another five months in office, until a new Labour leader is elected. Suddenly the political landscape is transformed. Nick Clegg announces that talks with the Tories are at an end and that he could, after all, work with Labour. Much talk on our side of ‘a coalition of the progressive majority’. The Tories, mightily upset, are talking bitterly of ‘a coalition of losers’.

  Tuesday, 11 May

  ‘Venal’, ‘shabby’, ‘grubby’, ‘duplicitous’, ‘shady’, ‘squalid’, ‘revolting’. The Tory press are apoplectic at the thought that the Lib Dems appear to have been two-timing them. Anonymous briefers are using words like ‘treachery’. On our side, too, no shortage of misgivings. Meanwhile the markets are getting jittery.

  By late afternoon it is clear that Nick Clegg is back talking to the Tories again. At which point Gordon threw in the towel. Without further ado he emerged from Number 10, delivered a short, dignified farewell speech and then, joined by Sarah and their two little boys, strode away up Downing Street to the convoy waiting to take him to the Palace. And with that the New Labour era came to an end. Sadly, the little lads are unlikely ever to remember the famous place that was once their home.

  As for me, what does the future hold? A couple more volumes of diaries; perhaps a course of lectures to be entitled ‘The Rise and Fall of New Labour’; a little light after-dinner speaking. And, if all else fails, I shall grow vegetables.

  VALEDICTORY SPEECH

  Goodbye to All That

  As you will know, Mr Speaker, it is the custom when we come to this place for a new Member to make a maiden speech. With your indulgence I wonder if I might initiate a new genre: the valedictory speech.

  I have been in this place 23 years. I hope that, during that time, I have left the occasional footprint in the sand, but I am under no illusion. Only a handful of those who currently strut these corridors will still be remembered ten or 20 years from now and I do not expect to be among them. Before the waters close over my head I would like to take this opportunity to place on record a few random thoughts that might be of interest to those who come afterwards.

  To those who ask where am I coming from, I reply that I am a socialist with a small ‘s’, a liberal with a small ‘l’, a green with a small ‘g’ and a Democrat with a capital ‘D’.

  Although most of us are more prosperous than we have ever been, we live in an age of disillusion and of corrosive cynicism. It is fashionable to believe that all politicians are useless. That nothing works, that everything is bad and getting worse and that all political activity is pointless. I do not accept this.

  Despite the catastrophe of Iraq, I sincerely believe that the achievements of the last three Labour governments have been considerable. I have only to look at my own constituency to see the truth of that proposition. With hand on heart I can say with confidence that during these last 13 years the lives and life chances of many of my least prosperous constituents have been immeasurably improved. We have been rather shy about it, but we have redistributed some wealth. The minimum wage, working tax credits, pension credits, huge investment in health, education and public transport have made a considerable impact and I defy anyone to argue otherwise. In my constituency in 1997 there were a significant number of people – security guards, mail order workers, care workers – earning as little as one pound an hour. The waiting time for a hip operation at Sunderland Royal Hospital was up to two years (it is now 18 weeks and falling).

  There is a secondary school in my constituency, Sandhill View, at which 15 years ago less than 10 per cent – I repeat, less than 10 per cent – of GCSE pupils were achieving five A to Cs. Today Sandhill View has dynamic new management. It has been entirely rebuilt, sharing a library, sports and other facilities with the surrounding community. It covers exactly the same catchment area as the old school and getting on for 80 per cent of pupils obtain five A to C grades. Still room for progress, but a dramatic change on what went before.

  Nor do I believe that such changes are confined only to Sunderland.

  City centres such as those in Leeds, Manchester, Newcastle – once in near-terminal decline – have been reborn. No doubt there are many reasons why this has happened, but I do believe that it has something to do with the fact that we have had more than a decade of Labour government.

  There has been progress, too, in other important areas – the environment, criminal justice, international development and above all Ireland, where peace has been achieved after many years of apparently intractable conflict. And who would have thought that we would live to see the day when a New Labour government took a controlling interest in three major banks with – eventually – Conservative support.

  There are social and constitutional reforms which were controversial in their day but which, having been enacted, will endure for ever: the ban on smoking in public places and on cigarette advertising; the requirement that political parties disclose their source of funding; the Freedom of Information Act – painful though it has proved for we humble servants of the people. Whatever the outcome of the election, no one can take those achievements away from the governments of the last 13 years and I n
ote that none of the Opposition parties is intending to do so.

  Mr Speaker, I would like now to address the future. Whatever the achievements of the past, we are all well aware that we are as far away as ever from achieving nirvana. Although in some respects my political views have modified over the years, I continue to doubt that there is a long-term future for an economy based on shopping. The frenetic consumerism of recent decades surely contains the seeds of its own destruction. Even more so now that China and India are falling over themselves to make – with knobs on – the same mistakes as we have made. I truly believe that this age of consumerism is only a very temporary period in the history of the human race and that, if we carry on as we are, it will end badly – perhaps within the lifetime of our children and grandchildren. As things stand, we are using up the resources of the planet as if there is no tomorrow and, if we are not careful, there will be no tomorrow.

  One way or another, we have to devise lifestyles that are sustainable – and that may well require changes to our way of life that most people have only dimly begun to contemplate. This, Mr Speaker, I regard as the single greatest challenge facing the new generation of political leaders – regardless of which side of the spectrum from which they come.

  I think we can all agree that the neo-liberal experiment, which for the last two decades has bewitched politicians on both sides of the divide, is well and truly over. The near meltdown of the global banking system was a wake-up call, if ever there was. Not everyone has got the message, however. Three months ago, at the annual dinner of the Institute of Directors, I was interested to hear the director still chanting the mantra of light-touch regulation and demanding less government intervention in the workings of the market. I thought to myself, ‘Lucky there was some big government around when the banks went belly up.’

  Nor should we imagine, as we sit tight in fortress Europe, watching other people’s catastrophes on our television screens – and perhaps averting our eyes by switching channels – that we will remain indefinitely immune. The world is increasingly a village. What happens in one part has consequences in another. The danger for western Europe is that, if the world beyond our frontiers is allowed to disintegrate – as the oceans rise, the rivers evaporate, the deserts expand and populations multiply – the flow of economic refugees from Africa and Asia will gradually become a tide which will eventually overwhelm our fragile social, economic and political systems. I do not say it will happen, but it must be a possibility that cannot any longer be overlooked. We are deluding ourselves if we imagine this process can be halted by increased repression. In the end it can only be reversed by addressing the root causes and that requires political leaders of courage and vision, willing to face their electorates with home truths and not merely pandering to the basest prejudices.

  Here in the United Kingdom our problems are exacerbated by the fact that, for a generation or more, our citizens have been encouraged to believe that they can enjoy European levels of public services and American levels of taxation. Sooner or later choices must be made. Perhaps the moment has come. If we want higher standards in our schools, better hospitals, better pensions, long-term care for the elderly then they will have to be paid for out of taxation. And let us not pretend that such benefits can be paid for merely by taxing the rich. They can’t. We, the pampered inhabitants of Middle England, will have to make a larger contribution. By all means crack down on waste and demand value for money, but do not pretend this alone will solve the problem. At the end of the day, there are choices to be made and each choice has consequences which we must face maturely. I keep reading how heavily taxed we are, but I note that the basic rate of income tax today is well below what it was in Mrs Thatcher’s day.

  Mr Speaker, government needs to become a little less frenetic. The practice of annual reshuffles is massively destabilising and confers enormous power on the civil service. There have been eight secretaries of state for work and pensions in the ten years since that department was invented. Of late we have been getting through Home Secretaries at the rate of almost one a year. Goodness knows how many health and education secretaries we have had. We are on our tenth Europe minister. Our ninth or tenth prisons minister. I was the sixth Africa minister, the current incumbent is the ninth. Mr Speaker, this does not make for good government.

  I turn briefly to our 24-hour media. The free flow of information is the life blood of democracy, but I do wonder if we politicians haven’t gone too far in trying to ride the tiger. Perhaps future prime ministers should spend a little less time feeding, appeasing, canoodling with tabloid editors and their proprietors, which, anyway, almost always ends in tears.

  I refer to another issue which ought to be of concern to all those who care about the condition of our democracy. The funding of politics. We have come some way in recent years in regulating party funding, but it remains an unhappy fact that all the main parties are to a greater or lesser extent dependent upon the favours of rich men. I believe this demeans our politics and it is time it was addressed. The dilemma we face is that we live at a time when the public are less inclined to join political parties. They do not wish to donate and above all they don’t want their taxes to fund political parties. BUT – and here is the rub – they all want to live in a democracy. That is the circle that we poor, despised, inadequate politicians have to square. There are no easy solutions, but the one I favour is for every taxpayer to be given a tax-free allowance, up to say £250, which he or she is entitled to donate to the political party of their choice in return for a strict cap on individual donations.

  In passing can I say a word about what I regard as one of the most insidious developments in recent years? The growth of outsourcing or agency work. The outsourced are all around us and growing increasingly resentful of their lot. There are two classes of working people in this country. Those fortunate to be employed full-time, entitled to paid holidays, occupational pensions, sickness pay, redundancy pay and all the other hard-won benefits that we used quaintly to associate with the twentieth century. And a class of people who qualify for none of these things. Who can be put down and picked up at will and who are often paid less than others doing the same work. Regrettably the practice of outsourcing is spreading. There is a school of thought that believes this to be desirable. I regard it as a most ominous development, storing up great problems for the future. We talk of lifting families out of poverty, but outsourcing drives people into poverty and insecurity. We are heading remorselessly back towards the nineteenth century. Back to the days of casual work when workers assembled at the shipyard gate and the foreman said, ‘I’ll have you, you and you, and the rest of you can go home.’ I hope that future governments will consider long and hard before pushing more people down this road in the name of the great god efficiency. At the very least, if it cannot be reversed, it needs to be carefully regulated.

  Finally, Mr Speaker, a word to the coming generation of politicians. I have one simple message: Take Parliament seriously. If we, the elected, do not, then why should anyone else? By all means support the programme on which your party was elected, but we are not automatons. We are not sent here merely to be cheerleaders. Or to get stiff necks looking up at the fount of power. We are sent here to exercise our judgement. To hold ministers to account for the power they hold. That means proper scrutiny. It means insisting that ministers engage seriously with Parliament and that they are open to dialogue. It means, so far as possible, insisting that the government publish legislation in draft so that it might be improved before it is set in stone. And, if you want an easy win, so far as the public are concerned, do away with the 80-day summer recess.

  In conclusion, Mr Speaker, there are many people I must thank. The people of the Sunderland South constituency for having allowed me to represent them these last 23 years. Members of the Sunderland South Labour Party for having allowed me to be their candidate through five general elections. Friends and colleagues on all sides of the House for the pleasure of their company. Official
s great and small with whom I have worked over the years, both in government and in the House.

  Last but not least yourself, Mr Speaker, for doing me the honour of presiding tonight and my Right Hon. Friend the Leader of the House and her distinguished shadow, the Right Hon. member for Hampshire North West, both respected colleagues over many years, for their presence tonight.

  Mr Speaker, I depart with mixed feelings. I have heard it said that most MPs stay one parliament too long. I thought it better to go one too early, while people are still asking, ‘Why?’ rather than, ‘When?’ There will be withdrawal symptoms. Leaving now is either the best thing I have ever done or the biggest mistake of my life. At this point, I have no idea which. I do know this, however: I count it a privilege to have been born in a democracy and to have served in this place. The great thing about democracy is that, although harsh things are sometimes said, we are not actually trying to kill each other. Differences are ultimately resolved at the ballot box. One side wins, one side loses and the loser lives to fight another day.