Nine years after Labour first entered government, it is increasingly clear that the terrain on which the politics of the next decade is likely to be fought will be rather less familiar and somewhat less comfortable than that which confronted the party in 1997.
Consider, for instance, the findings of Mori’s survey of the most important issues facing Britain on the eve of Labour’s first victory in April 1997. By healthy margins, the central themes of the party’s campaign – health and education – topped the list. The economy and the connected problem of unemployment, Europe, and crime completed the list of the country’s top five concerns.
Fast forward to July of this year, and the issues concerning Britons are altogether different. Topping the list now are race relations and immigration, closely followed by crime and the interrelated issues of defence, foreign affairs and international terrorism. The first and last of these barely registered as concerns in 1997 and these figures will not reflect the full impact of the summer’s conflict in the Middle East and the airline terrorist-plot revelations. The NHS and education still feature but their salience is clearly much reduced.
To a degree, these changing priorities reflect well on Labour’s performance in government. Unemployment does not concern voters to the degree it did because so many more people are in work; the strength of the economy since 1997 means that it no longer features so highly either. While the NHS and education still evidently concern voters (and, suggests Mori’s International Social Trends Monitor, the government’s performance on the former is not nearly as well rated as the high marks it gets for the latter), Labour’s programme of reform and investment has clearly diminished some of the public’s anxieties.
But there the good news for Labour apparently ends. The party is now confronted by public concern about a bundle of issues – crime, race relations and immigration, terrorism and foreign affairs – which have traditionally been, and internationally still very much are, electorally fertile grounds for the right.
One approach to these issues – that essentially adopted by both New Labour and the New Democrats during the early 1990s – is to attempt to neutralise them and then change the topic of conversation. This rested on the notion that, by gaining the minimum level of necessary credibility on issues such as crime and defence, it was possible to take them out of the electoral calculus and move the debate swiftly on to an agenda – health and education, for instance – where it was believed the voters’ sympathies were more in-tune with the left’s values.
This may have been a necessary and useful electoral tactic in the past but it is one better suited to opposition. Governments, after all, are supposed to lead debate, not look to the opposition, whether in parliament or the press, for answers. But this strategy also rests on the idea that these issues are not really the voters’ primary concerns and that the left’s response to them should be driven by politics, not evidence or principle. More crucially, perhaps, the attempt to simply change the subject serves only to leave unchallenged the assumptions and policies of the right and, critically, its claim to be best placed to handle them.
The task for the left is thus to craft a distinctive agenda on issues that it has spent too long avoiding. But, if they show a willingness to challenge the prejudices of the right and the lazy thinking too often employed by some on the left to avoid difficult choices, this is a debate that progressives are well placed to lead.
It will mean accepting that the fear of crime is real and not a media invention but that the policy of incarcerating more and more of our fellow citizens has failed and is self-defeating. It means recognising (and energetically making the case for) the economic and societal benefits of immigration but also the fact that the costs of it – in terms of competition for jobs, housing and the effect on wages – are too often shouldered by those who are already least advantaged. It will also mean a realisation that though military means alone will not defeat the threat of radical Islamist terrorism, the danger it presents is very real and will have at times to be combated by force overseas and security measures at home that many may feel instinctively uneasy with.
It is to many of these new challenges – and indeed some older ones – that Progress’ 10th anniversary annual conference next month, and this special issue of the magazine previewing it, turns its attention. We don’t pretend to know the answers, but we do believe that it’s high time that Labour and the progressive left at least began to ask some questions.