Introducing the government’s Levelling Up White Paper in the House of Commons on 2 February, Michael Gove declared that it ‘sets out our detailed strategy to make opportunity more equal and to shift wealth and power decisively towards working people and their families’.
Steve Baker, the Tory MP for ‘Singapore-on-Thames’, denounced the White Paper as ‘socialist’ and as a policy ‘that would not be out of place in Labour’s manifesto’ (bit.ly/3Ls1r6f).
Actually, it had already appeared in a Labour Party manifesto, that for the October 1974 general election, which ended:
‘We are a democratic socialist party and our objective is to bring about a fundamental and irreversible shift in the balance of wealth and power in favour of working people and their families.’
So Baker had a sort of point, except it is wrong to describe either Gove’s White Paper or the Labour Party as ‘socialist’. The Labour Party may stand for political democracy (though it is not organised democratically internally) but it has never been a socialist party. It used to once stand for nationalisation but that was only state capitalism. It has always talked about standing for redistributing wealth to working people but that’s reformism as it assumes the continued existence of the rich, and has never worked for long as the operation of the capitalist economy reverses any moves towards this, geared as it is to continually bring about the accumulation of wealth in the hands of a few.
Labour won the October 1974 election but, capitalism being capitalism, they were unable to deliver on that declaration. That was a year after the post-war boom had come to an end and the Labour government’s attempt to spend its way out of it led only to stagflation. Far from redistributing wealth in favour of workers the government tried to impose an incomes policy to keep wages down.
What Gove proposes is all smoke and mirrors. Shifting power to working people turns out to be giving local politicians more say in how central government money should be spent in their area, while shifting wealth to working people is not putting any money in their pocket but spending more on infrastructure, education, health and housing in the chosen areas instead of in London and the South East (whose ‘working people’ are presumably considered to already have enough wealth and power). Anyway, it’s not supposed to happen until 2030, by which time it will be only be remembered as another broken promise.
It is hard to believe that Gove, who had been a well-informed political journalist before becoming an MP, did not deliberately choose to use the phrase ‘shift wealth and power to working people and their families’. This would be to rub in the Labour Party’s face that the present Tory government had stolen their clothes. Already in an article in the Daily Telegraph on 1 January last year Johnson himself had praised the discovery of the AstraZeneca vaccine as an example of a successful collaboration between ‘state activism’ and ‘free market capitalism’. State activism is what the likes of Baker oppose (and mistakenly regard as socialism) but it’s traditionally been Labour Party policy.
As, having abandoned state capitalism as their long-term goal, Labour now accepts that the ‘commanding heights of the economy’ should remain in the hands of private corporations, it too accepts the operation of capitalist market forces. So, it really is ‘Labour, Tory, Same Old Story’. No wonder the Labour Party has nothing much else to do than criticise the Prime Minister’s personal behaviour.
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