The Labour Party will shortly decide who will lead it for the next few years. I cannot describe how numb with boredom I have become reading endless articles analysing the personalities and exegetically interpreting the trite SpAd-authored press releases of the contenders. Personalities distilled and hyperbolically extended by lazy journalists into asinine caricatures or, as I’ve come to see them, sitcom archetypes. Ed Miliband’s the sensitive one. David’s the handsome one. Ed Balls is the aggressive but funny one. Andy’s the pretty one with the silly accent. And Diane’s the bonkers one that sings Smelly Cat.
I’d rather look at this at a strategic level. Blairism’s greatest triumph was shifting the centre ground to the left. In the last election Cameron competed with Clegg and Brown to argue who was the most reverent protector of the NHS. The language of the Coalition centres on “progressivism”. Thatcher did not feel the same kind of need to couch her reforms in the language of the Left. We’d never have seen her cycling to work and stressing her environmentalism or play down her support for elitist institutions. The strategic landscape changed immeasurably under the last government. The challenge, then, is to provide the most authentic voice on the values now seen as most important. Transparency – a need driven by the lies around Iraq and the expenses scandal. Protecting the most vulnerable – a need that was reinvigorated conceptually by Labour’s triumph in 1997 and has only gained in importance with the worst global downturn since the Great Depression. Job creation – one hopes a temporary need, but one that is self-evident in figures showing a deficit of over a million jobs when we compare those out of work with the number of jobs available.
It is then not for me a question of personality or who looks most Prime Ministerial. When Cameron ascended to the Tory leadership he was derided for his lack of experience and his lack of gravitas. And yet he was the right person at the right time. While we were looking moribund and mendacious, he was a fresh-faced environmentalist that spoke the language of compassion more clearly and compellingly than we did. Hackneyed by years of triangulation and being mildly ashamed, in public at least, of our policies – leading to duplicitous practices such as “stealth taxes” and the most egregious examples of our apeing the Tories including failing to get tough on the causes (social housing, the postcode lottery in education and health) of public fury on immigration and asylum – the electorate warmed to his directness and seeming compassion. Not enough fell for it for them to win outright. But enough did to impose the ultimate sanction on our Party: relegation to opposition.
It is not the right place to argue if the electorate was right or wrong. I was hugely disappointed with the result despite the candidate I was working for as Head of Policy & Communications winning his seat – Hammersmith – comfortably in one of the big surprises of the night. And against a classic Cameroon Tory – a black social worker who grew up in poverty and ran a charity trying to get kids off drugs and into work. How many of those did Thatcher have?
Instead the question should be. Who can win in these times? What will be needed in five years time? Well, the economy will have most likely recovered to a large extent but in a way that has extended inequalities, damaged social cohesion and favoured large business through a wrong-headed corporate tax cuts regime without the capital investment required to support our entrepreneurial infrastructure. The NHS will most likely be misfiring on all levels. I was admitted to medical school in 1996 after two decades of Tory under-investment. The service was in an unholy mess. With the same people, the same idiotic obsession with market mechanisms (a trend I despised in our party and the single most important reason I can’t support the former Health Secretary despite his admirable understanding of regionalism and the Lancashire roots that I share), I can see the same happening over the next five years. And at the same time I cannot see any situation in which the Liberals have not seen their support eviscerated. They have made a huge tactical misstep – as a former Liberal Democrat myself I know how serious this is and that there is no way back. The Liberal Democrats as a force in British politics are over. And it is the voters that voted for them because they felt that they are to the left of us (we activists all met so many of them on the doors) that we need to regain. We win enough of those and we don’t have to worry about Tory suppression. The Liberal squeeze alone can win it. So tacking to these core concerns, we need someone with an economic policy that can rebuild societal cohesion and reduce inequalities. That is not ashamed to support, when most sensible, explicitly statist solutions for key mechanisms in social mobility and poverty reduction – education, job creation and healthcare. With the personal qualities to appeal to those that want Labour to ring true to its principles of compassion and solidarity, but can appeal to Liberals who want less government intrusion into our personal lives.
There is only one candidate that is speaking that kind of language and has the gravitas and intellect to win. That person is Ed Miliband. And that’s why in a few days’ time he will be getting my vote. I urge you to do the same.
Yours,
Imran
Originally posted at Liberal Conspiracy