The American anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon discovered the Yanomamo people, he declared this South American group to be “possibly the last large, warring, isolated tribe left on the planet”. Chagnon spoke too soon. Whenever main party politicians survey the British electorate, they behave as if they too have stumbled upon a strange and hostile populace. The feeling is mutual.
Voters staring back at Westminster see its embattled political tribes as primitive and none-too-friendly species. Chagnon, who began his study of the Yanomamos in the 1960s, hoped to tackle major questions of civilisation.
What is human nature? How do societies cohere? Where does political power lie? That spirit of investigation may also have prompted the former shadow attorney general, Emily Thornberry, to venture into the Rochester outback and tweet a picture of a house draped in the flag of St George, with a white van parked outside.
Miss Thornberry’s ill-advised foray into political anthropology has defined the stand-off between hard-pressed voters and privileged politicians. Class war is said to have erupted, with the Conservatives accusing Labour of elitism and (expensively educated) United Kingdom Independence Party (Ukip) leaders delighting in the caricatures of Tory toffs and Labour snobs. Class does provide some insights into how voters are feeling. Around the time of the last election, the strategy advisers Britain Thinks found that 71 per cent of Britons defined themselves as middle-class and 24 per cent as working-class. Asked to produce one object that symbolised their lives, middle-class voters settled on a cafetiere, while blue-collar voters brought totems of their work.
A hairdresser chose scissors, a labourer offered muddy boots and a motor mechanic a spanner. Several others placed on the table the keys to a white van. Any Labour leader should have heard the clink of metal on wood and realised what was coming next. While New Labour had focused on the cafetiere classes, blue-collar voters were already deserting the party in their droves.
Although richer people remained broadly optimistic, 36 per cent of working class people earning less than £14,000 (Dh81,041)feared for their future and 42 per cent felt isolated. The lonely hearts of Labour were seeking a soulmate and they soon found one in Nigel Farage. Ed Miliband, emerging from the worst of many bad weeks, knows that he is dealing with something graver than an outbreak of class war. His hasty sacking of Emily Thornberry, which smacked both of weakness and of fury, followed his rousing comeback speech featuring the opening line: “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.”
A few days later, he was all but dead. The killer tweet had, however, served to illustrate the scope of Labour’s difficulties. No party can hope to govern successfully unless it has a vision and a conduit for its transmission. Prime Minister David Cameron cannot offer either, but the Tories know a man who might. Modernisers who consider Cameron finished, unless he can pull off the unlikely coup of an overall majority next May, are quietly promoting the Culture Secretary, Sajid Javid, as the leader-in-waiting.
Raised in poverty as the son of a Pakistani immigrant, Javid had a glittering ascent first at Chase Manhattan Bank and then in politics. His backers believe that the flamboyant Javid would appeal both to “white van Conservatives” and, with luck, to the growing ranks of ethnic minority voters without whose support the Tories have no future.
Assuming that George Osborne’s brutal cuts have ended his chance of becoming prime minister, Javidites hope that the Chancellor of the Exchequer would back his protege. In this dream scenario, Michael Gove would counter-balance Javid’s inexperience and become his future chancellor. “Gove is the kingmaker,” says one insider. No such futurologists operate within Labour.
Much as the party may grumble about Miliband, he remains their best hope, at least for now. Several candidates are waiting in the wings should he fail in May, but the party lacks both an obvious alternative and any appetite for more upheaval. No one is crying out for fresh policies (Miliband has plenty and some are very good). Nor does anyone yearn for extra Miliband speeches, wishing instead that he would deliver fewer.
What the party needs, as Miss Thornberry inadvertently showed, is to bridge the gulf dividing it from the voters.
Expect, in the coming weeks, Miliband to spend less time in Westminster and many more days addressing civic meetings, where he is unlikely to encounter bacon sandwiches, beggars or any other image-busting catalysts. Such exercises will not dispel Labour’s demons. In one of the best recent Labour speeches, the head of election strategy, Douglas Alexander, warned that the character of 21st-century politics is defined by “identity and insecurity, rather than simply economic interests”.
Labour, he said, must look beyond headlines at the “trend-lines” of anger and disengagement. His speech, although focused on the future, bore echoes of old warnings. In 2010, Jon Cruddas, Miliband’s policy reviewer, addressed the social debris of globalisation. Calling for a language that links modernity with “English conservative culture”, he spoke of the need for “a sense of local place and belonging; a desire for home and rootedness”.
Labour, he added, should remember John Ruskin’s rallying cry: “There is no wealth but life.” Cruddas and Alexander have not always appeared natural allies. Now they are speaking as one and Miliband must listen if he wants to win. Disenchanted voters do not require politicians to be just like them. Were Miliband to acquire some tattoos, take up cage-fighting and buy a white van, they would react with the derision they showed when he proclaimed his “respect” for the flag of St George.
While they would prefer, on balance, for politicians of all parties to be less like androids, voters do not seek carbon copies of themselves. Instead of being told how miserable their lives are without being offered any vision of a better tomorrow, they want authenticity as well as hope and truth. Miliband, who has the hard task of trying to appeal to defectors scattering to Ukip, the Greens and the Scottish National Party, cannot do so by duplicity. If, for example, he persists in defending immigration while surreptitiously trying to outflank Ukip, he will end up alienating all of them. Much better to promise to train up thousands more British engineers, as he did last week, than offer hollow promises to claw back migrants’ in-work benefits.
Miliband is a careful thinker who has examined all the solutions to estrangement and whose filing system is thick with dossiers on building up communities and giving people power over their lives. The time has come to dust them off if Labour is to overcome its identity crisis. It does not understand who the voters are, and they know little of a party that hopes imminently to govern. Such tribal divisions, enthralling for anthropologists, are poison to politicians. Emily Thornberry’s apparent sneer may have branded her the Marie Antoinette of social messaging, but Ed Miliband may recall that what does not kill you makes you stronger. Far from being a disaster, her illumination of the chasm between workers and their traditional party should have given Miliband the jolt he needed.
— The Telegraph group Limited, London, 2014
