Labour Party needs to come clean if it wants to survive in government

THE big question facing the Labour Party is when to stop telling lies. When to come out and tell the people that we are a small capitalist economy plugged into the international capitalist economy which gives us a high standard of living but sometimes forces us to keep commitments to international agencies, such as the EU, with whom we sometimes disagree.

For most of its history the Irish Labour Party has co-existed with this open, market economy, but has aimed to use the tax system to level the inequalities inherent in capitalism. That’s what I want the left to do. I’ve accepted that countries will trade with each other and individuals will have as much creative freedom as possible and that there should be banks who can lend money.

But I’m the sort of leftie who wants a progressive tax system redistributing aggressively to fund social services. And because I want humans to have a future on this planet I want our laws and our taxes to work aggressively against its destruction.

I wouldn’t mind living in a hut on the wages of isolationist state socialism if I had some good books and a pot of basil. But if I got sick and my paradise island couldn’t create enough wealth to afford up-to-date treatments I’d get the hell out or try to worm my way into the ruling class which always has access to everything capitalism offers in state socialist countries. That’s why state socialism doesn’t co-exist with democracy.

You can divide the left wing into those who accept they must co-exist with the international market economy and those who don’t. But no one bothered much to declare either way until global capitalism crashed in 2008 and became a toxic brand.

Under Eamon Gilmore, the Labour Party opted at this point to ignore the international market economy completely. Ireland was to let its banks crash because “we” weren’t responsible for what “they” did. Just get Labour into power and they would, according Joan Burton, “unpick” the bank guarantee, “burn” all the people who held our bonds and refuse to pay our debts to the troika which had bailed us out when no one would lend to us.

Everything would be fine. We would continue to trade with the rest of the world and we would fund superb services for our people. If we ran out of money someone would lend it to us because they’d recognise we were good fellows even if we’d just chucked a stick of dynamite into the European economy.

As the crash happened, a senior Green politician met a senior Labour politician in the Dáil canteen. Asked if he would let the banks go or “burn the bondholders” the Labour politician said: “No of course not. But you are in Government and we’re not.”

The problem for Labour is that when they went into Government, people remembered the promises. I wish they had been honest during the campaign and said, “Listen folks, it will be more of the same but we didn’t cause this problem and we will try to fix it as fairly as possible.” Most of the Labour TDs would have got into the Dáil anyway, along with more Shinners, more Fianna Fáilers and possibly a Green or two.

That would have been a more balanced Dáil. Instead Labour representation got bloated on the growth hormone of broken promises and now the far left and far right are having a field day with Labour, who have extended the bank guarantee twice and failed to “burn” any bondholders. And while just before the last general election, Joan Burton said, “Labour has been consistently opposed to the Nama project because we believed it presented unacceptably high and irreversible risk to the taxpayer”, Labour has run it as if they dreamed it up themselves and NAMA has just announced it will finish disposing of assets two years early, turning a profit.

So now Labour faces exactly the scenario sketched by then Green Minister John Gormley in 2010 when, addressing Eamon Gilmore, he spoke these eerily prescient words in the Dáil: “You will be sitting here and you will no doubt be looking up at the Sinn Fein deputies who will be criticising you non-stop and you will be saying, ‘I have no choice. I have to act in this way.’ And there is nothing worse in a democracy than when you are a politician have to say those words. Where you say, “I have to act this way because my choice are limited.” And that is the reality, Deputy Gilmore. You will be faced with that lack of choice and even more besides.”

I have always believed that Eamon Gilmore didn’t know enough about international finance to fully understand what he was going to have to do in Government. I think his perceived ineffectuality since gaining office has been born of shock. His dignified resignation this week was a credit to him. But others fully understood what they were getting into, including Ruairi Quinn who went on the airwaves the day after “Labour’s way or Frankfurt’s way” to try to contain the damage and Joan Burton who was shown the nation’s books by Brian Lenihan before the general election.

We are all sick to death of hearing Labour and Fine Gael telling us how they had to take tough decisions to save the country. The truth is that two-thirds of the budgetary “adjustment” had already been made when they got in. Many in the Labour Party have shown enormous courage in carrying out the plan for national survival which was written, not by the troika, but by the previous Government, who had lost the mandate to carry it out.

The reason Labour is getting no credit for it is that they said they would do something completely different. Their failure to come clean before the general election included populist commitments around the water charge and child benefit and headline social welfare payments. This has made them unable to focus clearly on maximising equality in a lean time. The ERSI has shown the current Coalition’s two budgets to have been “regressive” while as Fianna Fáil never tires of crowing, its crisis Budgets were “progressive”, or easiest on the less well-off. Sinn Fein’s Peadar Tobin put Labour’s failure in this regard clearly on RTÉ radio at the weekend when he said, “Labour’s job was to make sure the burden fell equally and they have singularly failed to do that.”

The commitment to introduce free GP care for all by 2016 has started with the stunt of free GP care for under sixes, which looks disgusting when a Down Syndrome child’s parents are being asked has their kid got better. It doesn’t matter that more than 90% of medical card reviews are successful — as the mother of a special needs child who has had his benefits reviewed, I know the horror of the bad news landing on the mat.

Labour’s new leader will face a stark choice: fess up to the lies told and the promises broken or continue to lie and lead the party out of Government.