This boy: Alan Johnson
Alan Johnson talks to Peter Cheney about how growing up in a deprived area influenced his political outlook. Labour needs to be more confident about its achievements, he emphasises, but the deficit will limit delivery if the party wins the next election.
Kensal Town – now a fairly comfortable part of West London – is hard to imagine as an area of deprivation but the tough memories of growing up there in the 1950s still resonate in Alan Johnson’s life. The former Cabinet Minister is getting ready to speak at the Belfast Book Festival about his memoir – ‘This Boy’ – retelling the struggles faced by his mother Lily, sister Linda and him.
Their condemned terrace house, shared with other families, had no electricity, a single outside toilet and a cooker on the landing. Linda looked after him after their mum died – the book is dedicated to both of them – and with her help, he made a start in life. By the age of 18, he was a postman and married with two children.
“If you’re born into the same kind of conditions I was born into, then you worry about tackling poverty,” Johnson relates. As the son of a single mother, he resents the stigma attached to them under the previous Conservative Government and he’s also a “great believer in greater equality.”
The last point can obviously cover a wide range of issues but he remembers the Notting Hill race riots in 1958 and the “no blacks, no Irish, no dogs” signs. He also recalls the mistreatment of Alan Turing, the cryptographer who was convicted for homosexuality in 1952.
Johnson adds: “In a way, my book is trying to puncture that description of that time as if it was an age of innocence.
It wasn’t. So I’ve seen politics address that situation and I’m pleased to have played a small part in that, whether as a trade union leader or a Member of Parliament.”
His work led into a full-time job with the Union of Communication Workers in 1987. He became the union’s General Secretary in 1992 and entered Parliament in 1997, representing Kingston upon Hull West and Hessle.
Johnson’s time in the Cabinet can only be described as varied. His time as Work and Pensions Secretary (2004-2005) was followed by a year as Trade and Industry Secretary. Johnson then led the Department for Education and Skills (2006-2007) and the Department of Health (2007-2009) before being Home Secretary up to the general election.
He avoids taking personal credit for specific achievements but instead widens out his answers to cover the whole government over its whole term.
On welfare and the economy, Johnson points out that 2.6 million pensioners, mainly women aged over 80, were living in poverty when Labour came to power: “Now, the Institute for Fiscal Studies says that being old is no longer equated with being poor for the first time in recorded history.”
He contrasts the Conservatives’ drive to get people off benefits with the rise in incapacity benefit claimants during their last term in government: from 700,000 in 1979 to 2.7 million in 1997.
“As the steelworks closed, as the coalmines closed, people were shepherded on to incapacity benefit to bring down the unemployment figures and we inherited that,” he states. “The vast majority of these people wanted work so we stopped that flow into incapacity benefit and then began to reduce the numbers.”
In education, Labour set up 3,000 Sure Start children’s centres, focused on literacy and numeracy in primary schools, expanded higher education and introduced education maintenance allowance to support students on low incomes.
The NHS was “ludicrously underfunded” in 1997 at £406 per head of population but Labour increased this to £1,600 in 2010. It was also the first government in recorded history to leave office with a lower crime rate than when it came in.
“Cameron’s job is basically to say the Conservatives have changed and Labour failed,” he continues. “And sometimes our own people help in the second part of that because they take in this propaganda that somehow we were a government that didn’t do good things.”
He acknowledges that John Major started the peace process but Tony Blair had a “healthy obsession” with it, which changed Northern Ireland for the better.
That said, Johnson says that Labour should have made more progress on house-building and focused attention on manufacturers as much as it did financial services. However, heavier regulation of banking would have generated widespread opposition, including from the Tories.
“It was one of our biggest advantages vis-à-vis Frankfurt and America that we had such a strong financial services sector,” he comments. “In hindsight, we should have regulated it more tightly.”
Child poverty was reduced “enormously” but the target of eradicating the problem was not met. When it’s put to him that the target was impossible, he disagrees and points to how Scandinavian countries have tackled child poverty successfully.
OECD data for 2010 show that 10 per cent of the UK population were living in relative poverty. Norway, Denmark, Iceland and Finland had rates of 6-7 per cent while Sweden’s rate stood slightly higher at 9 per cent.
Priorities
A backbencher since 2011, he is now free to campaign on his own political priorities, which include Labour representation in Northern Ireland.
“I had a friend called Paul Grace who worked with me in the union,” Johnson recalls. “He came from Derry and when he retired and left Streatham, where he was a union officer, and came back to Derry he was expelled from the Labour Party.”
Membership rights were granted in 2003 but the party headquarters has blocked efforts by local members to run for election. The line is backed by Shadow Northern Ireland Secretary Ivan Lewis, who warns that standing for election could undermine the party’s role as an ‘honest broker’ in the political process.
“Ivan’s a really good friend of me but at some stage, we’re going to have to go further,” he comments. It will “change eventually” despite the objections from party officials.
Electoral reform is another high priority.
“You might as not bother to go out and vote in certain areas of the country,” Johnson says forcefully. “Your vote’s going to be buried under a pile of votes for the opposite party, whether that’s a Conservative in Hull or a Labour candidate in Surrey. No other system in the world has this kind of elected dictatorship.”
First-past-the-post, though, is used in several countries, including Australia. The comparison, to him, doesn’t stand up as Australia has a federal system and compulsory voting. He goes on to point out that New Zealand has changed its system to proportional representation.
One of the major arguments in favour of first-past-the-post is that it delivers a straightforward result and usually a majority government. Responding on that point, Johnson cites Roy Jenkins’ commission on electoral reform, which found that the UK had some form of coalition or minority government in 100 out of the last 164 years.
Johnson is dismissive about the Liberal Democrats’ proposal – the alternative vote – which was rejected by voters in the 2011 referendum. His preference is AV-plus, which was recommended by Roy Jenkins back in 1998.
This system would allow voters to rank candidates in order of preference in their constituency and then use a small top-up list to make the overall result more proportional. Voters could either select their favourite party or candidate from the top-up list and the votes would then be allocated to represent each party’s share of the votes proportionally.
The “eradication of poverty and greater equality” are still major issues for him and, in a sense, he sees everything else as a means towards that end.
Asked how he has seen politics change since 1997, he’s philosophical.
“I suppose politicians are held in less esteem after the expenses scandal but, there again, they weren’t held in huge esteem in ’97,” he quips.
“And in a way, it’s the beauty of our system. We don’t go for [the] cult of the personality. We don’t go for photographs on the wall as you go into shops. It’s not North Korea and, in fact, people are perfectly entitled to be sceptical.”
In his view, that scepticism has not tipped over into cynicism. Opinion polls, Johnson notes, will “invariably” say that politicians in general are self-seeking but when people are asked about their constituency MP, they are happy with how they’re doing their job.
Looking ahead to the general election next May, Johnson acknowledges that Ed Miliband has a difficult job: “He’s trying to come back to power so quickly after the public rejected us.” In some ways, it’s unfair to compare him with Blair and Cameron who came to power after their parties had lost three successive elections.
The economic downturn poses a real challenge but he also wants people to remember why the bank bail-out was necessary.
“If it hadn’t been for what Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling and our government did – which is what created the fiscal deficit – people would have been standing at cash machines with no money coming out,” Johnson emphasises.
“They’d have lost their savings. Their mortgages would have gone. Of course, we had to bail out the banks. Governments were the only people with pockets big enough to do that.”
Labour’s other emergency measures included the car scrappage scheme, the temporary reduction in VAT and the Future Jobs Fund in Great Britain, all of which added to the deficit. However, this did deliver five successive quarters of growth and an annual GDP growth rate of 2.5 per cent.
The Coalition Government “didn’t inherit a recession and deliver growth” but instead “inherited growth and almost delivered a recession.”
It is put to him that the deficit still needs to be cut and he admits that this does present a problem for Labour.
“Ed Miliband and the Labour Party can’t wish this away with grease and fairy dust,” Johnson continues. The “irresponsible” approach would be to promise voters an end to austerity. However, he maintains that Labour can get rid of the ‘bedroom tax’ and the Health and Social Care Act which has introduced more competition into the NHS in England.
“We can put more focus on getting young people back into work,” Johnson states. “We can look at infrastructure projects. We can build at least 200,000 houses a year and we can look at a whole sea change in how we reward people and how we can re-attach people’s living standards to the economy.”
The economy should be “a tool of society” rather than the other way around and Miliband has “hit on something here.” Historically, economic recoveries “picked up in people’s wages” but this is not happening under the Coalition Government. Johnson would see the unlocking of that problem as a major achievement for a new Labour administration.
‘This Boy: A Memory of A Childhood’ is published by Bantam Press.
