Bernard Ingham: Westminster’s abject political poverty

The Prime Minister, fresh from ordering a “pause, listen and engage” period on NHS reforms, goes to Pakistan bearing £650m worth of gifts for schools when we are broke and can’t educate our own children.

Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg gives another ill-advised interview after trying, in the name of increased social mobility, to stop the ambitious from using their connections to secure work experience for their children.

Vince Cable threatens universities with all sorts of dire penalties if they charge students the £9,000 a year he has sanctioned by legislation.

And Oliver Letwin, with that barmy elitist arrogance I have personally experienced, tells Boris Johnson, Mayor of London, in an argument over new airports: “We don’t want more people from Sheffield flying out on cheap holidays”.

This is more like a ship of fools than a Government. And thereby hangs a tale. What does it say about HM Loyal Opposition? What, indeed? Are we suffering from the most abject political poverty Westminster has known? It feels like it.

While the Coalition behaves like an indisciplined, unco-ordinated rabble, the best the opposition can manage is Shadow Chancellor Ed Balls telling David Cameron to be sparing with any help for bankrupt Portugal when Labour tied us into financing EU bail-outs.

Ye Gods! If the Coalition is in crisis, then Labour, it seems, has succumbed.

Which brings us to the question of the hour: is there anything that Ed Miliband can salvage from the wreckage?

The honest answer is: “Not a lot until Labour gets real about debt – its debts”. There is no point in their denying that a year ago they – or more accurately that walking, growling disaster, Gordon Brown – left behind a gargantuan budget deficit of around £150bn.

According to the Centre for Policy Studies, the bill for his 13 years in charge of our finances is much worse. Public debt totals £3.6 trillion if you count in liability for public pensions, the ruinous Private Finance Initiative and Network Rail.

This is not just a millstone round Britain’s neck. It is the entire mill, chimney and all. And who was advising Brown? Why, the blessed Balls. It is bad enough that Miliband was also part of the Brown entourage. But I simply cannot see how he or his party can carry any economic conviction so long as Balls is Shadow Chancellor.

It may be that Balls has forgotten more than I will ever know – or wish to know – about endogenous growth theory. But he has absolutely no idea how to run a solvent ship. He must go. Alistair Darling would have far more credibility.

Miliband must then stop pretending there is any real alternative to the Coalition’s five-year deficit-slashing programme when Labour would have been forced to go along with most of it. To do otherwise simply advertises its financial recklessness.

Until Labour demonstrates it has seen the light, it has not reached first base on its comeback trail. Its likely gains at the local elections will be meaningless since it is a mere vehicle for protest now that the Liberal Democrats are in government.

But that is not the end of Miliband Junior’s quest for conviction. Somehow he has also seriously to distance himself from the trade union movement that installed him as party leader.

The unions may be the only thing keeping Labour financially afloat, but they have not had a new idea since Margaret Thatcher cut them down to size.

Indeed, their Neanderthal tendency has latterly been reinforced by the election of Len McCluskey as Unite’s general secretary.

Worse still, the unions now mainly represent public sector privilege. They are agents for spending ever more taxpayers’ money. They reinforce the stink of financial incontinence surrounding Balls.

After all that, Miliband cannot just rely on the fading public memory of Labour’s sheer financial irresponsibility or the Coalition’s increasingly cackhanded way of government.

He has also to stand for something instead of nothing. This is where he has to break free of the ridiculous egalitarian and bleeding-heart dogma that blights education, the welfare state and the criminal justice system.

Until he demonstrates he is wholeheartedly bent on securing a disciplined, motivated, go-getting Britain, he can forget it – unless, of course, the Con-Dems, whether in coalition or separately, run away from building that kind of nation, too.