Schooled in scandal

Iain Dale and Guido Fawkes's timely litany of New Labour's failings overemphasises the same sins that brought down the Tories.

 

With the tide of public support that once buoyed the good ship New Labour now slipping away to leave it high and dry, a new book is on the way cataloguing the cargo of woes sitting in the hold.

Iain Dale, former aide de camp to David Davis, and Guido Fawkes, Westminster gossip-monger and pseudonymous professional pain in the political posterior, are putting together The Little Red Book of New Labour Sleaze and are looking for bloggers to do the heavy lifting and write the thing.

No doubt there'll be no shortage of willing volunteers, although Guido did alienate a section of the political blogging community earlier this year with an unenlightened remark about Mark Oaten.

Still, it's an impressive litany of 100 or so scandals they've drawn up between them. They run from the salad days of 1997 (Ecclestone) to the current dog days of decline (where to begin?) While hardly an original idea (this blogger's been known to keep one or two such lists of his own), if it's done well and attracts a representative spread of contributors from the tired and disillusioned left to the irate and axe-grinding right (transpose those adjectives if you wish) it could prove a worthy capstone to the years of so much squandered promise, optimism and trust.

Strangely though, for a book being co-edited by a former Conservative parliamentary candidate (Dale), it seems to concentrate on what have been traditionally viewed as very Tory types of sleaze. But then, if there's an emphasis on New Labour's venality and (if we're honest, only occasional) priapism, the list is only reflecting what's made the headlines with such wearying regularity these last nine long years. It's to be wondered, however, if the book wouldn't be a more varied and interesting read - and more representative of this government's failings - if the editors broadened their choice of targets away from a potentially dull rundown of who enjoyed who's cash/secretary.

It depends on what one means by sleaze, but this writer, being an unreconstructed humanitarian and unworldly in the ways of pushing newspaper and book buyers' buttons, would liked to have seen more of New Labour's contempt for human life (its genesis either by design or via administrative ambivalence perceived as vindictiveness) on the list. Iraq doesn't get a look in. With the Tories backing the conflict one wonders if Dale isn't treading carefully on that issue. A mention of the treatment and deportation of the Kachepa family (picked at random from a very long list) would have adequately demonstrated this government's penchant for the bureaucratic breaking of butterflies. On that issue, however, the rightwing Dale is trapped (as is his party) by Tony Blair's triangulation of Tory policies on immigration and other issues. How to call your enemy on a fault you're guilty of yourself? That's the dilemma at the heart of David Cameron's inability to make hay from New Labour's straw men.

Memorandums of understanding with Libya, Jordan, Lebanon and (coming soon) Algeria show this government all too willing to deal with torturers in the chase for tough-on-terror headlines. Arms deals with India reveal it happy to pour weapons into potential warzones. How about the constitutional minefield of the legislative and regulatory reform bill?

Dale and Fawkes's list features many examples of New Labour's love of rich men's money but no illustration of its contempt for that of the taxpayer. The party gathers Lord Sainsbury's millions to its bosom while tossing Joe Bloggs's to the four winds. The tax credit system, the Home Office's accounting system, the Foreign Office's Prism system, Defra's farm payment system and the Department of Work and Pensions's computerised call centres are just some of the technocratic toilets down which much of our money has been flushed. And we still have ID cards to look forward to.

With Polly Toynbee once again calling for reluctant New Labour voters to don their nosepegs this Thursday (at the government's current rate of decay she'll be doling out nosegays come the general election), the timing of the book could have been slightly more apposite (it's published on May 19). That said, it's out in time for John Prescott's birthday.