New York's first Democrat Mayor in 20 years has policies that would put New Labour in a flat spin.
07 Nov 2013
The election of Bill de Blasio, the first Democratic mayor of New York for 20 years, has gone relatively unnoticed in the British media. There has been more attention paid to the re-election of Republican New Jersey governor Chris Christie, seen as a possible 2016 presidential contender. However, De Blasio's victory is worth remarking on, not just because he won with 72% of the vote, but because he won by breaking every rule in the New Labour playbook.One of the planks of his campaign was the need to build more affordable housing. This is something even the most hardened New Labour apparatchik could give grudging agreement to.
But one of the key aspects was opposition to "stop and frisk" – New York's version of stop and search. The idea of doing this in the UK would give the average New Labour policy advisor palpitations. In New York, as in London, stop and search is popular with the middle classes but deeply unpopular with black and ethnic minority citizens. And in New York, just as in London, it affects black and minority young people disproportionately to any law and enforcement value, and poisons community relations. Yet even the black candidate in the Democratic primary chose to side with the police on stop and frisk. Presumably he was nervous about the attitudes of the New York bourgeoisie.
In contrast, De Blasio took aim at stop and frisk right from the beginning and it paid a political dividend. Married to a black woman, Chirlane McCray, De Blasio's campaign was only enhanced by a party political broadcast, starring his son Dante, which zeroed in on stop and frisk. Much of the advertisement's charm was Dante's huge afro, which became a star in its own right; "Go with the Fro" even became a campaign slogan. The advertisement's impact came from the fact that, well spoken and personable, Dante was the colour of the young men who are overwhelmingly the victims of stop and frisk.
If the idea of opposing stop and search would horrify most Labour policy advisers, the other plank of De Blasio's campaign – putting up taxes – would send them into a dead faint. But De Blasio made putting up taxes on wealthy New Yorkers one of the most important policies of his campaign. It was front and centre at all times. And it went alongside a consistent attack on spiralling inequality in New York. On his campaign website he said: "In so many ways, New York has become a tale of two cities. Nearly 400,000 millionaires call New York home, while nearly half of our neighbours live at or near the poverty line."
It goes without saying that De Blasio was not originally the candidate of the Democratic establishment. That was an extremely experienced and moderate local politician called Christine Quinn. She even had the endorsement of the New York Times, but Democratic primary voters proved to be uninterested in the safe party loyalist. So De Blasio, having won the Democratic primary, swept to victory with every demographic of voters. It turned out that New Yorkers – black, white, Hispanic middle, class or poor – were ready to hear a message about the unacceptable inequality in the city and the need for the rich to pay their share. And he won by a landslide.
Rightwing Democrats and the Republicans are already prophesying Armageddon. The platform De Blasio ran on was contrary to every piece of accepted political wisdom of both the Democratic political elite in America and its Labour equivalent on this side of the Atlantic. But the right wing of the Labour party has prided itself on learning from the Democrats, since the earliest days of Tony Blair and New Labour. Will they be so keen to learn from Bill de Blasio?
This article was first published here http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/nov/07/new-york-mayor-bill-de-blasio-new-labour
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