by
Les May
IT's
déjà vu
all over again. No
sooner has Theresa May reached for the phone book and started to look
up the number of the nearest removal company, than the media
pundits
are telling us just
why
last Thursday upset all their previous predictions. Apparently
it was the ‘youth
vote’
which
overturned the apple cart even
though they had been telling us for two weeks previously that it was
we oldies who were becoming disenchanted with the Tory manifesto’s
plans for social care. Or
perhaps it
was we oldies after all and whoever coined the term ‘dementia
tax’
deserves a medal.
They
are
making
the same mistake that they
made after
last year’s Referendum: constructing
a narrative
which
suits their prejudices. Having
first
constructed
that
narrative they then came to believe it themselves
and
it would seem, convinced Theresa May to believe it was true.
After
the Referendum
it suited the media pundits to construct a narrative that it was all
Corbyn’s fault that the Remain
campaign had lost. The
story was that Corbyn had campaigned half-heartedly and that Labour
voters had turned their back on the party and voted in their droves
for Brexit.
This
suited both the pro-Brexit, anti-Labour Tory press and the plotters
within the Labour party who used it as an excuse for getting rid of
Corbyn.
But
as I pointed out on
the Northern Voices blog in July
last year this narrative did have the slight disadvantage that it
wasn’t actually true. This is what I wrote with
reference to Angela Eagle’s leadership bid:
‘According
to an analysis of media coverage by Loughborough University for the
period 6 May to 22 June, Corbyn scored 123 media appearances. Eagle
scored 15, one less than Angela Merkel who is Chancellor of Germany!
Alan Johnson who was supposed to be running the Labour party's
Referendum campaign scored slightly better with 19.’
‘… 60%
of Labour voters supported 'Remain'
and 60% of Conservative voters supported 'Leave.
Dumping the blame for Brexit on a few northern towns where Labour had
performed well in past elections and ignoring the vast swathes of the
country which were solidly Conservative in the election and solidly
for 'Leave'
in the referendum, won't wash. Check it out on the appropriate maps
if you doubt it.’
Political
journalists who promoted this narrative live in a different world to
the rest of us. Like media pundits and political nerds, they read the
party manifestos, we don’t. So they ‘simplify’ things for us
by producing catchy phrases: ‘Comrade Corbyn’, ‘Dementia
Tax’ and ‘Millionaire Pensioners’ are just three.
Even the elusive floating voters, vote on impressions. Means testing
my winter fuel allowance and my bus pass are what I expect
Tories to do. I didn’t read either manifesto. I vote Labour
because I know that in general it will favour the less well off and I
know the Tories will favour the wealthy. And increasingly the very
wealthy. Or at least that’s the impression they give.
If
as I suggest people do vote on impressions rather than a deep
knowledge of policies, Labour would do well not to feel too self
congratulatory. Yes, Labour has shown that putting ‘clear blue
water’ between it and the Tories is not a recipe for electoral
disaster.
But
it is equally true that the Tories did what I suggested could
happen in my August 2015 NV article ‘Why Burnham, Cooper and
Kendall Deserve to Lose’. They
‘fell over their own feet’.
I had seen this happen on two previous occasions; in 1964 when Harold
Wilson was the beneficiary and
in 1997 when Tony Blair was the beneficiary. Macmillan,
Major and now May looked
shambolic and generated the
wrong sort of headlines for
just long enough for it to sink into people’s consciousness.
That
Blair’s 1997 and later victories were not entirely due to him
having ‘made
the Labour party electable’
as he and
his acolytes would
like us to believe was
noted in
2015 by
Kenan Malik a contributing editor of the New York Times who wrote
‘His
election victories were as much the product of the exhaustion of the
Conservative Party after 18 years in power as they were of his
political acumen’. Essentially
his diagnosis
was
that
Labour's 1997 victory was as much to do with the internal squabbles
of the Tories as with Blair making the party 'electable'.
His
critique was
that the
Blair years failed to provide a long term solution to Labour's need
'to
find a new constituency and a new role'.
In
response
to Malik’s article in I
wrote in September 2015:
Although
Malik attributes Blair's strategy of 'triangulation',
or stealing policies from one's opponents, as being borrowed from
Clinton's 1996 re-election campaign it has a much longer and more
informative history. The 'post war' consensus which he identifies
with Keynesian policies and the use of the state as a lever for
social change was based upon 'triangulation' between a 'One Nation'
Tory party and Labour. In fact the consensus was also built around a
mixed economy, full employment, strong but not overweening trades
unions, the welfare state, decolonisation and the Atlantic alliance.
Speaking recently on the Parliament Channel
Kenneth Clark described the final two years of the Heath government
of the early 1970s as 'like a poor man's social
democracy'.
So strongly was this the case
that The Economist invented a
fictitious figure 'Mr Butskell' when a
moderate Tory, R. A. Butler (Rab), succeeded Labour's Hugh Gaitskell
as chancellor in 1951. Today the equivalent figure would be 'Mr
Camonblair', who may well turn out to be a hermaphrodite.
Butskell and Camonblair are where the two main parties
have reached a kind of equilibrium. But those equilibria are poles
apart and whether Mr Butskell and Mr Camonblair would be on speaking
terms I rather doubt, with Butskell far to the left in present day
terms and Camonblair far to the right from a post war perspective.
The emergence of Mr Camonblair may be what Malik means when he argues
that the division between social democracy and conservatism has gone.
If indeed this were the case then the Labour party has indeed
outlived its usefulness.
An alternative view is that
these two fictitious figures simply illustrate the futility of
arguing about where the centre ground in politics lies. The effect of
the Thatcher years was to shift 'the centre' far to the right around
a new equilibrium. But it was the unravelling of the post war
consensus which allowed Thatcherism to emerge. If, as argued earlier,
part of that consensus was 'strong but not overweening trades
unions', then union militancy in the late 1970s was as much a factor
as changes within the Tory party.
Before
Blair came to power in 1997 Labour still called itself a ‘left
of centre party’. By 2015 his comment on Ed Milliband’s
failure to win the election is that his policies were ‘too left
wing’.
It
is only from a perspective in which the ‘centre ground of
politics’ has been shifted grotesquely to the right during the
Blair years that Corbyn’s policies are judged as ‘extreme’
by political journalists, media pundits and the ‘Bitterite’
(John Prescott’s delightful term) faction of the Labour party.
Just
as the Labour MPs like Roy Hattersley who entered Parliament in the
1960s and John Prescott in 1970, absorbed the milieu of the
‘post war consensus’ and now look like ‘Old Labour’,
the Labour MPs who entered Parliament in the Blair years came to
believe that his ‘third way’ was the only way to win over
the electorate. In spite of the evidence no doubt some still do.
What
Corbyn has done in the past few weeks is to show that
the division between social democracy and conservatism
isn’t yet dead. It appears that a
significant fraction of the electorate is willing to vote
for a party which promises
to
implement the
sort of policies which the actor Roger Allam described as ‘our
brief social democratic blip’. Perhaps
Labour has found
that
‘new
constituency and new role'
that
Malik thought it did not have.
But
let’s not fall into the trap of inventing our own narrative.
Corbyn did wondrously well and has shown his policies can win votes,
but a Labour led government means doing even better next time. And
that may not be too far off.
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