Maybe you are wondering how the present bunch of Labour politicians is managing to make such a hash of this election campaign. Then again, perhaps you are just enjoying the show, which has, after all, become hugely entertaining. But amid the hilarity, the question becomes ever more unavoidable: What are they thinking? Considering that they have had a guaranteed five-year parliament, in which, to anticipate this election, could they really be so unprepared for even the most basic questions about their economic policy, so utterly shambolic in their response to obvious challenges on their handling of the National Health Service (NHS), so comically at sea over their relationship with business? Well, apparently, they could.
I would like to suggest that there is, in fact, a rational explanation for this bizarre phenomenon. While it may be tempting to assume, from their predilection for tripping over their own (and each other’s) rhetorical feet, that the Ed Miliband team does not know enough about politics, the truth is quite the opposite. They know too much about politics. They are steeped in it, having lived, eaten and breathed it for their entire adult lives. (Indeed, in Miliband’s case, having been immersed in it from infancy.) Oh yes, they certainly know a great deal about politics. It is life they know nothing about — which is to say, life as it is lived by people who do not spend all their time thinking about politics. What Miliband and his hapless companion, Ed Balls, are trying to do is fight this election campaign on the kind of abstract, ideological issues that are the stuff of Left-wing revivalism: social inequality, disparities of wealth and the evil intentions of Big Business. That is to say, on the stuff of pure, unalloyed politics. They take note of opinion polls that show, as a recent YouGov one did, that a majority of people (three fifths of them, in fact) believe that government should be “tougher on big business”.
Ergo, they conclude, most voters have the same concerns and priorities as they do, and will reward a party that seems not to be friendly to business. But they fail to ask themselves what the usefulness of such a question might be. Who would be likely to say, without further qualifications and caveats, that government ought to be softer on big business? Not only is this an example of the are-you-a-nice-person sort of question that politicians should learn to treat with caution, but it is also no measure at all of how relevant this matter is to people’s voting intentions. Many, even most, voters may believe that — on general principle — government ought to keep a firmer hand on powerful corporate interests, but in the current circumstances they are not going to vote on general principles. They are going to elect a government on the hard reality of their daily lives. This is the nub of it: there are historical moments in which electorates have the mental leisure to ponder abstract ideas.
The election of 1997 was one of those. Feeling pretty much as secure, prosperous and unworried as a population ever does, the British people decided that the Blair message of “social fairness” was worthy of a try, especially as it promised to achieve this equitable new social order without destroying the market economy that had delivered so much prosperity. Voters, especially middle-class ones, felt well-off and guilty about it. This was the era, you may recall, when a majority of people were telling opinion polls that they would be willing to pay more tax in order to help the disadvantaged. And, of course, everybody thought that the good times would never end. So they voted on general principle: On a vague, idealised sense that it might be nice if social concern replaced the rampant individualism of the Thatcher era.
That vague sense managed to survive until 2008, when the prosperity and the security went bang — and ever since, the voters have been sitting at their kitchen tables doing hard sums. They have become far less indulgent towards those they believe to be getting a free ride (hence the enormous popularity of Iain Duncan Smith’s welfare reforms) and much more likely to understand that government spending cannot be limitless. What they want to hear now is not generalised ideas about equality, but hard-headed realism about how security and prosperity might be restored. Their anxieties about their own future have made their politics more concrete and urgent. So they do not want well-intentioned platitudes about an ideal world of “social fairness”; they want detail and confident practical judgement. And they are really, really paying attention.
So it is very important in this connection that concrete policies prove to be sound: Labour’s “energy price freeze” proposal, which immediately preceded a fall in the wholesale price of energy, was a catastrophic mistake that may have damaged its reputation for financial decision-making beyond repair. The question of whether voters are, on the whole, ever actually interested in political ideas, or what might be called “ideology”, is a matter of lively debate among the sort of people who are professionally concerned with these things. Perhaps the only plausible answer is: Off and on. And then only when the ideas have a clear relevance to life as it is lived.
Very occasionally, an election can quite neatly incorporate both abstract and urgent practical issues. This week is the 40th anniversary of Margaret Thatcher taking the Conservative leadership. So it is appropriate to note that the first Thatcher victory in 1979 was very much like this. Her leadership was, quite uncharacteristically for the Tories, determinedly intellectual and theoretical in its understanding of the relationship between politics and economics.
Her great mentor, Keith Joseph, famously handed out copies of Friedrich Hayek’s Road to Serfdom to the members of her shadow cabinet. She may have been elected out of a very immediate popular need to make the country governable and to get the trades unions under the control of law, but the capacity to make the conceptual case against socialism gave weight and conviction to her arguments. It was an unusual confluence of principle and practicality, which hit exactly the right note for the times. In her next election contest, she came up against Michael Foot, who tried, as Miliband does now, to campaign on purely philosophical grounds — and the rest really is history. Just in case you think my critique of Labour’s leadership is horridly Right-wing and unfair, it is worth noting that even one of Gordon Brown’s chief advisers, Lord Glasman, observed last week that Miliband was “talking in abstract and general terms” and thus failing to connect with “the realities of the values of people within their everyday lives”. I’m not quite sure I follow the last part of that (“the realities of the values”?) but I’m pretty sure I know what he was driving at.
In fact, the only times when the Miliband leadership has seemed remotely comfortable is when he has talked in purely theoretical or moral terms. It is when he tries (or does not try hard enough?) to give those idealistic precepts some application — to put them in down-to-earth specific form — that he hits the wall. So the voters, who have their heads screwed on, are inclined to say: Well, yes, it’s probably right to be tougher on big business but mightn’t that reduce the amount of wealth that the state has to spend on beneficent programmes?
Or, yes it would be a good thing if fewer people were living in relative poverty, but if we pay them to be poor, are not they more likely to stay that way? They may approve, at first glance, of your fine-sounding idea — but when they come to vote, it will be the “but” that will be on their minds.
— The Telegraph Group Limited, London, 2015
