Labour Can Show Labor The Way

by James Button - The Age

Late last year the British cabinet was arguing fiercely over whether to ban smoking in pubs. Health Secretary Patricia Hewitt was pushing hard for a ban. John Reid, then defence secretary and Hewitt's predecessor at health, was pushing as hard against.

While Hewitt fought on health reasons, the combative Reid, now Home Secretary, said smoking was one of the few pleasures poor people could count on. Rather than force them to change their habits, "we will often have to help change the circumstances in which they live."

His remarks predictably caused a fuss, but no one could say he didn't know what he was talking about. A former smoker and reformed hard drinker, Reid, 59, was born in a mining village near Glasgow, the son of a postman and a factory worker.

Reid was also a young communist who moved to the centre, rising through the Labour Party. Among Blair's ministers, his history is unusual but by no means unique. And there, perhaps, lies a lesson for federal Australian Labor in its present misery.

Tony Blair took a privileged path to power: private school, Oxford, practising lawyer. But his deputy, John Prescott, in the news lately for being caught pants down with his secretary, was a ship's steward and active trade unionist.

The new Education Secretary, Alan Johnson, was a postman. He doesn't have a degree but rose through his trade union and the party. Chancellor Gordon Brown was a politics lecturer and a journalist. Former education secretary Ruth Kelly was a reporter before working for the Bank of England; she also belongs to the right-wing Catholic movement Opus Dei. Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett - one of eight women in the cabinet of 22 - was an apprentice engineer and metallurgist. Culture Secretary Tessa Jowell was a psychiatric social worker.

There are eight lawyers, a teacher and a few ex-student politicians, such as former foreign secretary Jack Straw and former home secretary Charles Clarke. But while the young Clarke was well-to-do, Straw grew up on a council estate with his single mother (though he later went to a private school).

Though largely middle class, it is in terms of origins and experience a pretty diverse lot. Let's compare it with the ALP front bench.

Of 33 shadow ministers, 15 are former union officials. With one or perhaps two exceptions, they are not unionists in the old sense of having risen from the rank and file. Almost all of them have degrees, and were appointed to the union from outside. Some, like Simon Crean and Martin Ferguson, spent years in the movement; others did shorter time on party or faction business while awaiting a seat.

Another 13 shadow ministers - including Wayne Swan, Stephen Smith and Alan Griffin - were party officials, advisers to MPs or electorate officers: in other words, full-time political operatives.

There are six lawyers, six teachers or academics (including Kim Beazley), a diplomat (Kevin Rudd), and one automotive electrician - assistant shadow treasurer Joel Fitzgibbon, who was an electorate officer for six years before he got his seat. (Some shadow ministers have held two or more jobs.)

Where are the doctors, farmers, small-business people or journalists, let alone factory workers? The Howard cabinet, though overloaded with lawyers (nine of 17 members), at least has one of each of these first four occupations.

More than British Labour or the Coalition, the federal ALP front bench marks the rise of a professional political class.

Does that matter? It would be silly to say that to represent postal workers you need to have been a postman. Empathy will take you far in politics, as in everything else. But can a purpose-built political elite speak credibly about ordinary lives?

There is another difference between Labour and Labor. While Blair was apolitical when he was young, a striking number of his ministers have far left or activist backgrounds. Clarke and Reid were Marxists while Beckett helped lead the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.

Straw, Brown and Health Secretary Patricia Hewitt were all much further left than they are now. Blunkett was a radical who in some respects became a social conservative. Northern Ireland Secretary Peter Hain was a leading anti-apartheid activist.

Even the party's rising stars - new Environment Secretary David Miliband and his brother Ed - share this legacy. Their father, Ralph, was an influential Marxist academic. And cabinet minister Hilary Benn is the son of former Labour minister and lord of the British anti-Blairite left, Tony Benn. Although "very proud" of his father, the younger Benn, 52, is a Blair loyalist who describes himself as "a Benn but not a Bennite".

What's left of the far left would say they all sold out. Certainly, politics has moved right since the 1970s. But a more compelling explanation is they took the hard road from a romantic to a realistic world view, while trying to stay in touch with their principles and their past.

And their journey has shaped the government. It has been almost populist on crime, always a big working-class issue. It has expanded the free-market economy while entrenching a strong welfare state, an achievement that is envied by centre-leftists around the world.

Yet that journey seems to have only a weak corollary in the ALP, where the Right is dominant, the Left beaten, and anyway given to much of the same dead-end, factional intriguing as the Right.

British Labour can hardly be complacent. The Government is in bad shape. Its leaders are ageing, its membership numbers - like those of the ALP - plummeting. Its next generation of MPs is likely to be dominated by the political class. Working people find it increasingly hard to find the time or resources to go into politics, which must be a loss for democracy.

Even so, Labour still seems more rooted in the life of its country than does its Australian counterpart. Bright minds in the ALP are surely thinking about this. If they aren't, Labor's plight is even worse than it seems.


James Button is Europe correspondent.