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It would be too easy to dismiss this election campaign as dull. Yes, it lacks the obvious clarity and dynamism of 1979 or 1997. Yes, Iraq hovers over everything and particularly Tony Blair. But there is an ideological choice at stake in this election, a choice obscured as so much in politics has been obscured over the past 10 years by New Labour's mix of social radicalism and social authoritarianism, capitalist enthusiasms and apparent collectivist passions, not to mention its disastrous international adventurism.


At an election meeting recently, one speaker put it this way:"New Labour has 600 policies but just two strategies. Competition and co-operation. That can't work." There was a sharp intake of breath from the audience, partly an acknowledgement of the contradiction, partly an exhausted nod to the sheer industry of this administration over the past eight years.

Who, bar a few experts and commentators, can keep up with the enormous number of domestic initiatives unleashed by New Labour, some sustained, some quietly shelved? To name but a few: all those tax and benefit reforms that have taken two million children out of absolute poverty, the Sure Start programme that has now made way for the planned children's centres, numerous neighbourhood and community regeneration schemes, more personalised health and social care, education, education, education. And there's more to come. The Labour manifesto sets out a detailed agenda for the next few years, in stark comparison to the Conservatives' thin offering.

But the key question, and the one that many voters are still puzzling over after two terms in office, is: what does New Labour really believe in? Competition or co-operation? In 1997, Blair cleverly offered both visions to the nation: now Blair has lost the electorate's trust, Brown is being offered to the public both as a kind of co-leader and possible successor; the guarantor of Labour's more collectivist legacy and socially minded future projects.

This mix and match approach has serious flaws. Funding for education and health has been impressive but some public service reforms have created damaging hierarchies of provision. Do we really want flagship schools and hospitals if it means that other institutions suffer? Why not offer solid all-round improvement? Everyone talks admiringly of the subtle redistribution of wealth that has taken place under New Labour but why should such economic policies be hidden beneath the carpet of reforms that please the tabloid press? And despite these shifts, economic experts agree that the government has still only succeeded in "merely halting" the effects of growing income inequality.


The overall feeling is one of missed opportunities and mixed messages. The Liberal Democrats have succeeded with a simple radical message and a few costed proposals funded by higher taxes for top earners: free care for older people, an end to student tuition fees, smaller class sizes, replacement of the council tax with a fairer local income tax, scrapping the ID card to put more police on the street.

Blair apparently likes to assert, in private, that the Liberal Democrats are "part of the social democratic family". Yes, but is New Labour?
Competition with the Tories over the issue of choice has made it vulnerable to bolder rightist plans, such as topping up private spending on private education and health with public money through schemes such as its patient passports. Government heavy-handedness on asylum and immigration has also weakened its response to the depressing Tory election campaign.

The Conservative party has shown no real grasp of, nor sympathy with, the social problems in the UK. For those interested in social justice, then, it seems a choice between a government offering misguided glitz atop a set of solid slow moving reforms or a more radical, but perhaps more simplistic and certainly untested political alternative.

There's a chance that the Liberal Democrat campaign will have a beneficial effect on weary ministers. Should New Labour win a third term, it may yet borrow some of that social democratic simplicity and boldness or give more consideration to its own political roots. Does anyone remember the Labour Party, once a progressive party with historic links to trade unionism and to many important social movements? Who knows, a renewed New Labour, whoever its leader, may yet make radical history as so many of us hoped it would back in 1997.

Melissa Benn is a journalist