Why Labour must heed the call for change.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/anatole_kaletsky/article6846599.ece
My attention was drawn to this article by Anatole Kaletsky of the The Times, and I found myself agreeing with several of the key points made in it. We are probably seven or eight months away from a general election and Labour have been on the backfoot in the opinion polls for sometime now. I hear many Labour activists saying that all we need to do is be bolder about stating what we as a government have achieved over the last 12 years. Remind people about the minimum wage, Sure Start, building more schools and hospitals etc and tell them that a Tory government will put all this at risk.
If this line of thinking is going to form Labour’s electoral strategy, then I really do fear for the party. There are several things that Labour needs to realise. Firstly, human beings take things for granted all the time: our health, our job, our family, our friends. Labour cannot rely on swing voters rewarding it for the achievements over the past 12 years. The Labour government has indisputably made Britain a better place to live. However, people have become so used to policies such as the minimum wage that they take these things for granted. Britain has had a minimum wage for the entirety of my working life and even I struggle to remember what working life was like without one. Voters want to know what Labour will do for them tomorrow, not what Labour did for them last week or even yesterday. The more people get, the more people want. Similarly, after three terms in government, Labour cannot play the history card again. The spectres of Thatcher and Major were the aces in the pack for three successive general elections, but that strategy will not work again. The recessions, the Miners Strike, the Poll Tax, all these things progressively become less emotive for many people. Also, it is important to remember that anyone voting for the first time in 2010 will struggle to remember anything other than a Labour government.
Secondly, the recession has damaged Labour’s reputation as being steady hand on the nation’s tiller. It is true that the current economic difficulties are nowhere near as bad as they were in the early 1980s or early 1990s. We have experienced a global recession and Labour has acted wisely by investing to keep people in work and to keep economic activity higher than it otherwise would have been without state intervention. The Tories opposed this state intervention throughout. However, Anatole Kaletsky rightly points out that most voters are going to compare the current economic storm to the sunny days that we enjoyed throughout most of the last decade. This is a basic human train of thought: we get used to the good times, and perhaps don’t appreciate them as we should, so the bad times feel worse. Also, no-one is going to say ‘I’ve lost my job, me and my wife are struggling to look for work and the bills are piling up. But thank God for the minimum wage!’ It’s rather like asking the passengers of the Titanic to admire the beautiful parquet floor in the ship’s dining room as they sink to the bottom of the Atlantic. The economic recovery will have begun by May 2010, and the Brown government should be able to argue, with considerable credence, that the recovery would not have been happened so soon under a Tory government. However, this will not sway many voters, who will compare the present economic situation to that of five years ago and blame the government.
Finally, Labour must realise that the British people want change. At a time when the country is trying to navigate its way through stormy economic waters, the worst thing any government can say is ‘Maintain course, full steam ahead!’ In 1979, Callaghan made the fatal mistake of believing that he could persuade people to stick with Labour out of fear of what Margaret Thatcher’s Conservatives were offering. At a time of rising unemployment and industrial unrest, the worst thing you can do is defend the status quo. The 1979 election was not an endorsement of free-market liberalism. It was not particularly clear what a future Thatcher government was going to do. But the Tories represented change and an antidote to the status quo. And so the British people boarded a train that they did not know the destination of, simply because they wanted to go somewhere different.
This is precisely what I fear may happen again at the next election. Trying to find a Tory policy is like hunting for the Holy Grail. But the Tories will appear as an alternative in a time of difficulty. Gordon Brown can do what Callaghan did in 1979 and argue that the Tories are too big a gamble for the country to take. But during hard times, gambling is what precisely what a lot of people are driven to doing.
So, what is the solution? Labour has to realise that people want some kind of change. The party must go to the electorate with a bold vision of a new Britain. As the Attlee government sought to rebuild a fairer Britain from the ruins of war, Gordon Brown must press ahead with a vision to build the new Jerusalem. Raising tax credits here and there won’t do it. The next Labour manifesto has to be bold and radical. Otherwise the British people will put their chips on the Tories.
