If you had listened very carefully last Tuesday you would have heard the unmistakeable sound of a politician clambering on to a bandwagon. You would have had to listen very carefully as the screeching sound of a Prime Minister and his embattled Chancellor performing a spectacular u-turn could be heard at the same time. But this Minister clung on to the bandwagon, not being at all aware of what the bandwagon was or where it is going. Last Tuesday , Hazel Blears tried to attach herself to the ‘new politics’. In doing so, she displayed the fundamental lack of understanding amongst our political rivals of what new politics is and what it represents. Miss Blears substitution of gimmickry and old style bureaucracy for new ideas shows how far detached New Labour are to the genuine spirit of the new politics.
The new politics is not about using the crude language of class war in election campaigns. It is not about taxing the poor to pay for a crude tax cut for the middle classes. Nor is it about resurrecting memories of the 1970s with emergency budgets and enfeebled Prime Ministers. So the new politics is pretty much the diametric opposite of what Gordon Brown’s Government has done. Nor is it really related to what Hazel Blears defined the new politics as last week. Her speech was composed of a succession of gimmicks; potential new layers of bureaucracy but no real new ideas beyond the well meaning rhetoric.
What the new politics does stand for is a serious attempt to reengage citizens in the political process. It stands above petty partisan spats or oppositional mentalities for the sake of it (witness Conservative support for Tony Blair’s health and education reforms). The new politics is driven by a trust of people rather than bureaucrats and a belief that old style bureaucratic solutions are neither right nor relevant in a globalised world. Voluntary and community groups are encouraged to work with the state to tackle social problems. The new politics believes that power should be devolved to the nearest level to the people, rather than concentrated in the hands of a few Whitehall bureaucrats. The new politics views a cohesive society and a strong economy as equal priorities. In other words, the new politics is not the low level gimmickry of Hazel’s attempt last week. It is bottom up, people focused and articulated in the agendas of David Cameron and, to an extent, Barack Obama on the opposite sides of the Atlantic.