When the alternative is impossible, what’s left?

The Herald : Features: Ian Bell: "All governments fail and all governments behave badly, sooner or later. New Labour's problems are deeper and, in the horrible word, institutional. They have less to do with moral and intellectual exhaustion after a decade in office than with ideology's answer to original sin. Nothing complicated: as it turned out, they didn't believe in anything much. It shows.

The "project" as devised by Blair, Brown, Mandelson and those who went along for the ride was, remains, an empty thing, dead and deadly. Though they claim otherwise with a kind of desperation, the motives behind New Labour were never animated by a guiding principle. The ideals they did hold dear were tawdry things. And they never could, even in opposition, distinguish between means and ends. That has consequences.

You want a true scandal, an authentic example of how New Labour's appetites have eradicated the remnants of a political movement? It didn't make the front pages. Nevertheless, the Commons public accounts committee has at last obliged the Treasury - Gordon Brown's Treasury, until recently - to admit the actual cost of PFI schemes, Gordon Brown's PFI schemes, to the taxpayer. Over the next 25 years we will pay out £170bn for deals generating huge profits while services decline and the pretence of competitive tendering evaporates. The Labour Party did that.

Blair gave us wars and "reform", the surrender of public services to private ends and means. Brown gave us targets and managerialism, the unchecked growth in inequality and the PFI scam. A government dedicated to the attitudes and aspirations of the right, in other words, and a government freely elected. But what does Labour do, what does Labour become, after the "new" party comes finally to grief? What's left?

Who could name the leader likely to follow Brown, or say what he or she might stand for? Who still counts on the Liberals as a social-democratic alternative? Scots inclined to exempt the SNP from the rightward drift of these islands should read a recent interview with Alex Salmond in the Spectator: tax-cutting and Tory nationalism are prominent in the discussion.

There is nothing ordained about a "left alternative". Even the phrase can be made to sound quaint, these days. But Blair and Brown did more than talk. They did their very best to make sure that alternatives would seem forever impossible. Now nothing remains, save shabby means disguised as hypocritical ends"