A time of politics but no policy - Illtyd Harrington talks about Labour's 1997 victory - and Now

Published: 6 May, 2010
by ILLTYD HARRINGTON

IT was a morning to remember, a large excited exultant crowd waited outside County Hall and in the words of Kipling, dawn came up like thunder on May 2, 1997. Some Londoners compared it to the exuberance and relief that they felt on VE Day. People cried with joy.
Now after three general election victories Labour look like a ragged army, its trumpets and the drums are muffled.
We hear the jaded vocabulary of right-wing economists, the chant, that I’ve known all my life: “Cut public spending, roll back the state, kick the shit out of the poor, and blame the immigrants” – that was a proposition first put forward in the wake of the Great Fire of London.
The Governor of the Bank of England, one Mervyn King, told a gobby American over a lavish lunch “the next government will have to be brutal as Bligh of the Bounty was towards his crew” and will effectively put themselves out of office for a generation. It’s time, according to King, to head for the charity shop, put on dead men’s threadbare woollies to shield us from the coming financial blizzard. We “the people” are to blame.
Not me, guv.
An unpleasant image comes to mind of Tony Blair, immaculate in white tie and tails, telling the Lord Mayor’s banquet in 1984, where the assembled banking barons and power brokers, murmured sympathetically when he confided that the unions were making life tiresome. Standing near him was a Hanbury, a descendent of the aldermen, who stabbed Wat Tyler on Blackheath, thus ending the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381.
That battling granny, Gillian Duffy, innocently set out on Tuesday to buy a loaf a bread down the Co-op, met the big bad wolf, and ended up having more than 15 minutes of fame, plus five pages in the Mail on Sunday. They had discovered a woman of great, facility, a Tory icon.
I agree with that old closet queen St Paul: it was he who wrote “without vision the people perish”. No one brought up the end of the world, cock-ups, environ­mental destruction and the melting icecaps during the campaign, and the Tories searched in vain to find a trade union bogeyman. There was one extra surrealist moment when a bronzed Blair, for some reason, had his blood pressure taken. Mine rose dangerously when I saw him.
We are in a time of politics without policy. Even the American constitution spoke of “the pursuit of happiness”.
In 1997 I was moved then to read William Wordsworth on the French Revolution 1789: “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive but to be young was very heaven.”
Now someone’s putting the lights out, but not tucking us up in bed.
• Illtyd Harrington is a former deputy leader of the GLC