As the election results came in, I was surprised as anyone that the Tories looked likely to win. I was even more surprised when the results began to suggest a majority was a possibility. And when that possibility came to pass, it seemed impossible.
I have never made a secret of my admiration for David Cameron, even if I don’t like the Conservative Party as a whole. I mean, Theresa May is going to continue being an authoritarian witch bent on culling civil liberties like badgers and Ian Duncan Smith is basically just Mr Burns incarnate at this point. But Cameron himself is slick, cunning and possibly the most able politician since Tony Blair or Thatcher. He himself appears to be broadly centre right in his values, even if the rest of the party is moving away from them, but still that gives the party an air of modernity. He played all of his opponents perfectly, with 3 of them given referenda: eurosceptics, the Scottish and the Lib Dems, and in the latter two cases he got the desired result. And after the independence referendum, he threw Labour into a fight it didn’t want by proposing English votes for English laws. Labour disagreed, but that forced them to into a horribly compromised solution that further damaged the trust of the Scottish electorate for the party. So when the election came around, Eurosceptics knew they were getting a referendum, the Scottish hated Labour, and the Lib Dems had no reforms to show for five years in government. For each of these decisions, including the coalition in the first place, Cameron was initially given trouble by one part of his party or another, and he headed each one off successfully, taking only minor, if any, damage from each one. I may not admire the mans policies, but he is a consummate politician.
Even with all that Labour still should have had some traction against the Tories austerity package, surely? There were widespread protests, celebrities who vocally disagreed and strike action by Unions every year. But it’s pretty clear that Labour couldn’t convince people that it was actually any different from the Tories. Cameron and the Tories were driving them into their fights, ones about the deficit and debt reduction. They had the option to sound like an alternative, instead they just sounded like they were “Tory-lite”, wanting to both cut and tax to get through the deficit. And while that might sound like a balanced option, that effectively means everyone has something to lose in a Labour government. If they’d consistently stated they wanted to increase taxes on the rich and corporations (something that did not appear on Ed Millibands stone, but badly needed to) and stated outright that they would cut significantly less (not just slower, which was Ed Balls favourite way of attacking the Tories) then they would have forced the Tories onto difficult ground. Instead they stayed on Conservative home soil, without realising that it was an increasingly toxic place to be for their party.
However much the traditional left may dislike New Labour for focussing too much on wealth creation rather than distribution, it worked. Had Labour not gone to war in Iraq, trust in the party is likely to have been relatively high even after the financial crash. New Labour was not something the party needed to abandon, that would be to entirely misread the issues that made Labour easily beatable in the eighties and later surprisingly beatable in 1992. It was genuinely surprisingly to hear Douglas Carswell, a member of UKIP sounding as though he understood these issues better than the higher ranking members of the Labour party on the Andrew Marr Show. People do not dislike capitalism, they dislike the way in which capitalism is being used as a funnel by both the government and businesses to increase wealth unfairly. Capitalism can, as has been proved in Germany, be a massive boon to all areas and classes of the public. But to hear some Labour supporters demanding a return to the left wing is insanity. There is clearly no desire to return to the days of Callaghan, the last truly left wing government, nor is there any love for the unions, effectively crushed under media derision and continued undemocratic strike action. Labour cannot write another suicide note as it did under Micheal Foot, it needs a strong leader, with a strong and consistent message that begins to show how dangerous continued slash and burn austerity is while providing an alternative. New Labour was an alternative to Thatcherism, not just Thatcherism-lite (as many on the left may want to call it) and the thirteen years they were in power were relatively good ones, something that was never really defended under either Brown or Miliband, again a result of fighting the battles where Conservatives had the home advantage.
The leadership choices show up this problem in stark detail. Newer members are fighting against the old guard, many of whom are supported by unions. Andy Burnham is the leading contender, but while he will almost certainly be an improvement on Miliband (very little wouldn’t be) he would not provide the message Labour needs to send out. Chuka Umunna is slick, Peter Mandelson was sat next to him on the Andrew Marr show and it’s pretty clear he’s something of a protege. If that is the case then Umunna is a better choice than Burnham, as he will be exceptionally presentable to most of the electorate, the first ethnic minority leader of a party, and broadly centrist. Tristram Hunt is perhaps less suitable, but still a better option than Burnham. Liz Kendall is also an option, but she is not quite as presentable as Umunna or Hunt, partly because of her idea of “moving on” from the Blair-Brown era (something Millibands Labour was stupidly obsessed with making a point about) and partly because she seems to lack strong support within her own party. She may well be popular enough to be a candidate, but I doubt she is popular enough to lead and keep the party together.
If I was ever going to support the Labour party, something I have never even considered doing since being old enough to vote, they would need to fight battles they could win on the centre ground. They would need to choose a leader that is presentable to the media, that can communicate with both businesses and the electorate as a whole and someone who brings a message of genuine change. Miliband provided none of these three things and never did, which is why his selection over his brother was the first movement towards failure at this election. There is also a gaping whole where support for modern civil liberties can be wrested from the Liberal Democrats, their demise opening up easy policies that have little impact on Labours overall ideology while providing obvious comparisons to the Tories, including electoral reform, nuclear disarmament, defence of civil liberties and European support. New Labour was a recognition that Labour needed to adapt, not to switch ideology entirely. Now Labour needs to adapt again, but the last five years gave them ample opportunity and they squandered it by trying to kill off the Blairite side of the party, the most adaptable members.
Personally, as you can probably tell already, I’d pick either Hunt or Umunna, probably Umunna overall. But that’s unlikely to go down well with the left of the party. But If you’re thinking “You’re a previous Tory voter, of course you’d vote for him” then you’ve proven my pointmaybe, like the Tories in the late nineties with it’s Eurosceptic elements, Labour needs to cut itself off from the more radical members of its left wing and allow them to find new ground else ware. If the left is truly to rise again it cannot do so under the banner of the Labour party, just as the Eurosceptic right is now rising under UKIP.
And if you’re thinking “You’re an ex-Tory voter, of course Umunna appeals to you” then you’re somewhat proving my point. There are currently enough Tory voters in the UK that they managed to get a majority, and sometimes the electorate needs a Cameron, Blair or Thatcher, someone for whom image is not an issue. Ed Milliband could not stop his image from being a constant problem, but Umunna is unlikely to have the same troubles while still providing a solid platform for the rest of the party.
Two Sides of One Coin 