Hubris, carelessness and the second death.
Depending on who you believe, Alastair Campbell had a formula concerning the life of a scandal and whether those embroiled within it could survive in their jobs. Again, depending on who you believe, Campbell decided that most could carry on if by either the tenth or fourteenth day since it was first exposed the coverage had almost disappeared. We're now a week and a day into the Abrahams funding scandal, and it shows no signs whatsoever of being about to drop off the front pages.The Brown camp must have been dreading the Sundays, where the weekly hacks had far more time than their daily counterparts to uncover further intricacies of Labour's dubious funding over the past few years. Things could have been a lot worse, one would think, even though the Mail on Sunday splashed on how Mahmoud Khayami donated to the party a whole day after he been entered on the electoral register, and Abrahams, who seems to be doing his best to be mischievous, noted that there are more senior figures within the party who knew that he was the source of the money coming from at least four different fronts. The situation has also been helped slightly by the whole Gillian Gibbons affair, although the embarrassment that David Miliband himself wasn't able to garner her early release while two Lords were able to might yet bite too. If politics hadn't become so separated in Scotland and England, the scandal which has also engulfed Wendy Alexander, the Scottish Labour leader, best summed up by Mr Eugenides, would also have hit far harder than it has south of the border.
The one thing that is still beyond belief is that Labour had the best part of two whole days to get its entire story about what happened completely straight, yet it failed comprehensively. The first they heard of what was going to be in the Mail on Sunday was on Saturday evening, and according to Patrick Wintour's Grauniad account it wasn't seen as too serious, but the involvement and resignation of Peter Watt still should have brought home just how damaging the fallout from the latest breach of party funding law was going to be. Yet even by Brown's press conference on Tuesday morning the full account of what occurred had not been constructed, nor has it even been now. To best disarm the ensuing storm, what should have been put into the public domain was a narrative of what had happened, how the party had got it wrong and how it was going to be put right. At the very best it can be said that Labour was leaving the details out so that Lord Whitty could establish them, while at worst the party was and is being blatantly dishonest, a view I more than lean towards.
For instance, how did a man such as Peter Hain just completely forget to register a donation (or indeed, most of his donations, as it now turns out) from none other than Jon Mendelsohn towards his deputy leadership campaign? The inference must be that it was a very convenient transgression. This itself distracts from the real question, which ought to by why and how some of the candidates thought it was necessary to raise such vast sums, in Hain's case £77,000, for what was an internal leadership campaign. Even more startling is that Harriet Harman, the eventual winner, was to hold
Brown's last resort to try to regain the initiative has been to dangle the carrot to the Tories of severing the link with the unions once and for all. Perhaps the only major surprise is that it has taken both this long to happen and that the unions have put up with Labour for so many years, through so many broken promises whilst still funding the party up to the hilt. The details of how the political levy will be made "transparent" in Brown's words are unclear: will this mean a limit of £50,000 a year or every member being required to OK the money donated by the union? If it's the former, it will mark the final, full transition of Labour from the party representing the ordinary worker to that of one totally funded by the same corporate, rich individuals as the Tories. This occurred long ago in policy, but the death of Labour in spirit in exchange for the dishonesty of its apparatchiks is fitting, if only as a reminder of the last ten years.
As both Dave and Chris have said, this wasn't supposed to happen, but this can't purely be blamed on the Blair era. Brown might not have known about the donations, but he did appoint Mendelsohn who will famously be known for being "concerned" about Abrahams' funding, but not enough to do anything about it prior to the story being exposed. He has completely failed to make good on his promise for "change" while the mendacity of Blair was never punctured. We do need as Chris argues the resurrection of mass politics, but who with? Labour has never been more of a busted flush. Do we help build the Greens or go somewhere else? Fact is, we simply don't know, and what's more, we won't. Being disaffected is much easier than starting again.
Labels: David Abrahams, death of Labour, funding scandal, Gordon Brown, Harriet Harman, Peter Hain, political donations, Wendy Alexander
| Permalink
