Spirit of 45: ‘Major Attlee was charisma-free, yet Labour beat a victorious Churchill with the sheer power of its vision.’ Photograph: British Film Institute
Councils have been remarkably silent about the savagery of the cuts they have sustained. At last, the supine Sir Merrick Cockell, Conservative leader of the Local Government Association, is speaking out as a Guardian survey reveals the extent of the damage inflicted. Councils are losing one-third of their funding and, he says, so far this is only “the calm before the storm” – a storm sweeping away more Tory councils each May.
Visiting several Labour city council leaders, I found them politically conflicted: should they blast the government or boast of how well they are managing in hard times? This is odd, as the government rains down the heaviest cuts on the poorest (Labour) areas: Liverpool is the worst affected while Oliver Letwin’s Dorset is the least. I was surprised by a letter from my Labour council, Camden, boasting about freezing council tax this year and next, despite £83m of government cuts and 3,000 children caught by the benefit cap. The letter praises good things Camden does but seems to have lost the political plot. Why no rise in council tax? Because the government’s pincer ensures the council would keep only a fragment of any extra raised, not worth the opprobrium of a 1.9% tax hike, the maximum allowed. But when council tax is artificially held down, it shrinks the tax base, making the next rise worth less. Councils are snookered whichever way they turn.
This was always the Conservatives’ plan: at their conference in 2009 at a meeting on localism where Francis Maude spoke, panellists laughed as they agreed the plan was to “devolve the axe”. And that’s what they did. The most publicly visible cuts are left to councils, forced to make impossible choices and take the blame. Ministers give unctuous interviews in praise of localism, explaining why councils are best placed to choose what people need. Councils are left to cope with some benefit cuts: the social fund, council tax benefit and the homelessness caused by reduced housing benefits.
As libraries, swimming pools, sports, youth centres, arts, parks, roads, housing, school repairs and myriad other non-statutory services take a hit, a backlog of public squalor builds up – another national debt to be repaid later. The Guardian survey shows the next wave of cuts falling on statutory services: care for the old and child protection, both already threadbare and likely to suffer scandals.
Here we are in the worst crisis of our lifetime, in the depths a long slump with no end in sight – demand dead, companies hoarding cash, most cuts still to come and bound to depress future growth. The bottom half lose most as real wages fall, while rents, food and fuel prices rise. Nothing gets better as deficit and debt soar. What better time for Ken Loach’s new documentary, Spirit of 45, a patchwork of old documentaries and memories of the coming to power of the postwar Labour government, full of hope. In a breathless few years, Labour implemented its remarkably radical programme, creating the NHS, nationalising coal, steel, rail, road transport and electricity, initiating a mighty house-building programme. Loach’s film is a hymn to the Labour party manifesto of 1945 – the tone would make as good a text for 2015 as back then.
Calling for no more of the depression and slump that crippled the country after the first world war, the manifesto berates the “hard-faced men” who “controlled the banks, the mines, the big industries, largely the press and the cinema. They controlled the means by which most of the people learned about the world outside … Great economic blizzards swept the world. The interwar slumps were not acts of God or of blind forces. They were the sure and certain result of too much concentration of too much economic power in the hands of too few” who “felt no responsibility to the nation”. “The Labour party stands for freedom … but there are certain so-called freedoms that Labour will not tolerate: freedom to exploit other people, freedom to pay poor wages and push up prices for selfish profit, freedom to deprive people of the means of living full, happy, healthy lives.” To read it again is to breathe in the spirit of optimism and dispel today’s fatalism that says very little can ever change, whoever is in power. National debt then was more than 200% of GDP, dwarfing today’s 73%, yet all this was done in a ravaged nation.
Loach’s elegiac vision tells one important truth: a national crisis can be transformed into hope, and investing for growth can overcome debt. He’s a movie-maker, and his idiosyncratic suggestion of an earthly paradise until Margaret Thatcher will irritate many. If you want other truths about the austerity years, read David Kynaston’s histories drawn from diaries and Mass Observation records, which explain why the new Jersusalem didn’t last as people wearied of belt-tightening for the national good.
Don’t imagine voters in 1945 were any more malleable or prone to political enthusiasm: Kynaston shows them as a mostly disgruntled lot, with scant respect for politicians. Ben Page of Ipsos Mori cherishes a 1944 Gallup poll showing that, even as the war was being won, only 36% of the public thought politicians were acting in the country’s interest, not their own or their party’s. Political cynicism was as rife then as now. But as he wrote in Monday’s Guardian:
“The job of the politicians is as much to lead as to reflect public opinion.”The 1945 manifesto reminds us what leadership can do. Major Attlee, a Captain Mainwaring lookalike, was charisma-free, yet Labour beat a victorious Churchill with the sheer power of its vision.
These are very different days but, nonetheless, the shadow cabinet should re-read that manifesto to capture a whiff of the sheer nerve and daring of 1945.
Instead, they behave as Roy Jenkins said of Tony Blair before 1997, as if they were carrying a Ming vase across a polished floor, afraid of dropping it before election day. But they have no Ming vase, the election is not won and their caution holds them back, as too many disaffected voters reject the old parties.
Ahead lies the one decision that will define Labour: despite attacking most cuts, will the party bind itself to the government’s iron fiscal envelope, with a bit of fairer sharing within it?
If it means to strike out more boldly, the time is growing short for winning the difficult case for borrowing enough to kickstart the economy. Meanwhile, the government continues to drive by applying the brakes on the uphill slope, grinding our council services to a halt.
This article titled “Labour needs to recapture the spirit and nerve of 1945″ was written by Polly Toynbee, for The Guardian on Monday 25th March 2013 22.00 Europe/London
