Time for Rabbitte to listen to Mama

IF YOU haven’t heard of Portia Simpson-Miller, that’s your loss. She was elected this week as the first female prime minister of Jamaica.

She had four things going for her. She was a woman. She came from the barrios and had huge appeal to Jamaica’s vast underclass. She promised fresh new ideas and reform. And she had the best political slogan ever, ever: “Come to Mama.”

For Pat Rabbitte, three of those four things will be tragically foreclosed to him when he sets out his wares at the Labour Party conference which opens tonight in Dublin.

He’s not a woman. Secondly, although the leader of the country’s largest left party, his image is more middle-class suave than working-class chav. Maybe it’s just me but I could never imagine Rabbitte as a “come to mama” type of guy.

But what he will be selling this weekend are the two prize possessions of any party hungry for power: new ideas and the promise of a fresh start.

It’s neatly summarised in one of its own slogans this weekend: “New candidates, new ideas.” Isn’t it quaint how the Mullingar Accord parties are morphing into one? Wasn’t Fine Gael’s catchline for its Árd Fheis not ridiculously similar - “New ideas, new faces?”.

You get the sense Labour’s slogan is incomplete. “New Candidates. New Ideas. New Labour” has a better ring to it. Oops. They don’t want us to go there.

But we will, with a bit of backfill. In the 1980s, Labour’s catchline was: “Socialism is the answer.” There was one problem. Socialism wasn’t the answer. Not then, and even less so as 1990s Ireland brought the most golden period in history since Moses persuaded God that low taxes and manna from heaven were the only way to go.

And so under Ruairi Quinn, and especially under Rabbitte, the slightly more unwieldy social democracy became the answer.

To be sure, the new candidates bit this weekend is very obvious. Like Real Madrid’s ageing Galacticos, the party’s current crop of TDs has been around for a long time and Eamon Gilmore, at the age of 51, is the nearest thing to a fresh pair of legs. This weekend the party will showcase at least 10 new candidates with biddable chances of winning seats next year. They include the likes of Dominic Hannigan in Meath, Aidan Culhane, Ivana Bacik, and Alex White in Dublin; Jed Nash in Louth; Sean Sherlock and Ciaran Lynch in Cork.

It’s in the bright new ideas department the party will struggle to set itself apart from the rest of the pack. In shifting from slightly left to slightly left of centre, it is in congested territory. The subtlety of its positions on crime, civil liberties, the economy (a chaste embrace of the market - in other words don’t scare them off by promising to raise taxes), on State ownership, is kind of lost on an electorate not preoccupied with detail.

Comparing the party to Tony Blair’s New Labour is lazy but you can see why it is made. The men who now run Britain have made the same journey from student radicalism and the far left that Rabbitte has made.

Having said that, he is no Tony Blair. He has never been a fan of Blair’s evangelical tendencies (though you occasionally wished he borrowed a little of it). For Ireland’s version, Labour Nua, what New Labour did in Britain was remodelled socialism in the manner a demolition ball remodels an old building. They prefer the cautious gradualism of the brooding Gordon Brown who, at least, hasn’t jettisoned everything he once believed in.

Rabbitte probably remains a socialist at heart, but one mugged by political reality. And so what kind of creature is his Labour Nua? It had to adapt and compromise, so much so that it is but a nuance away from Fine Gael or Fianna Fáil. Now, Sinn Féin, the Greens, and independents can outflank it in radicalism. And it is also vulnerable to Fianna Fáil’s wily triangulations - Bertie shifting ground to move in on Labour’s left-field turf. Some of these are gestural but all Comrade Bertie needs to do is nibble away at the margins.

The conference programme is brimming with ideas, many of them interesting and new. But selling them is a different proposition. The jury is still out on Rabbitte’s own sellability as a leader. The brightest boy in the class is not always the most popular. He lacks the street appeal of Bertie Ahern and Enda Kenny. A bit of youthful zest will do no harm. But Rabbitte himself needs to borrow a bit of Simpson-Miller’s oomph - a bit more “come to mama”; a bit less “daddy knows best”.