Chris Titley

Most 100-year-olds can vividly remember their formative days but are less sure about where they left their specs ten minutes earlier. And the same could be said of the century-old Labour Party.

Its membership recalls with much relish the triumphs and, more frequently, the disasters of Labour yesteryear. But they are not so confident about what the party did last week.

Labour supporters are naturally nostalgic for the good old days, because there were so few of them. As Tony Blair pointed out during the low-key 100th birthday party - held, rather incongru-ously for New Labour, at the Old Vic - the party has spent far longer squabb-ling in Opposition than reforming Britain in Government.

Its earliest attempts at running the country were fairly shaky affairs. Ramsay MacDonald's minority administration of 1924 lasted little longer than one of his namesakes' famous burger meals, and was only marginally more satisfactory.

But oh, we half-hearted socialists cry as we don our standard issue, claret-coloured eyewear, oh that 1945 Labour Government! If there's one thing that Denis Healey, Barbara Castle, Ken Livingstone and Mo Mowlam agree on - and there probably is no more than the one thing - it is that this triumph was Labour's finest hour. Clement Attlee stayed in office for a little over five years, but still managed to create the welfare state, the National Health Service, comprehensive education, National Parks, British Railways and British Coal.

The luminescence of these achievements does make Tony Blair's reforms to date, carried out when Britain's economy is booming, pale somewhat. In his speech at the Old Vic (a suitable stage for such a ham), Mr Blair hit the right emotional buttons by asking delegates to imagine how the first child to wear NHS spectacles would have felt, and the first person to finish an Open University course.

Unsurprisingly he declined to invite them to consider the feelings of the first student forced to pay tuition fees, or the first disabled claimant to undergo a means test.

We must not ignore New Labour's real achievements, perhaps the most impressive of which is Gordon Brown's pledge to write-off the Third World's debts to Britain. But this administration is debilitated by its lack of passion. Ministers do not have enough self-belief to force radical changes through. The Freedom of Information Act, House of Lords reform, scrapping section 28, an end to hunting with hounds; these and other policies have been damaged by backtracking, U-turns, watering down and general shilly-shallying.

The oratory of previous generations of politicians has been replaced by spin. While Mr Blair talks of the Third Way, Aneurin Bevan said: "We know what happens to people who stay in the middle of the road. They get run over."

Royal-loving Mr Blair talked of the "People's Princess". When news of the future Edward VIII's birth pushed the death of 251 Welsh miners from the headlines, Keir Hardie's was a truly socialist response. "The life of one Welsh miner is of greater commercial and moral value to the British nation than the whole royal crowd put together, from the royal great grandmama down to this puling royal great-grandchild." How that still resonates, when the papers are full of pictures of the heir to the throne prancing around in a feather head dress, and Prince Andrew's dalliance with a blonde golf fan.

Prime Minister Blair lectures his party on the need for discipline. He is right to do so. Britain's poor, disadvantaged and vulnerable were forgotten for 18 Tory years as Labour tore itself apart. A similar spasm of civil war put an end to Attlee's remarkable 1945 government.

But it is difficult to unite behind middle-of-the-road Tony. He is too busy looking both ways to give us any idea of where he is going.

If you have any comments you would like to make, contact Chris Titley directly at chris.titley@ycp.co.uk

01/03/00

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.