As John Major’s government entered its death-throes in the mid-1990s, those Thatcherites who had never accepted either the overthrow of their heroine or the somewhat softer-edged conservatism that her successor had initially attempted to introduce, offered two prescriptions to cure the Tories’ malady.
The party should, they suggested, change the leader and move to the right, reopening some ‘clear blue water’ between itself and New Labour. Failing this, they suggested, the Conservative party should accept that a spell in opposition, when the party would have the opportunity to recharge its ideological batteries as Labour once again reminded the British people of its inability to govern, might not be an altogether unattractive option.
Ten years later, and those arguments are finding an echo in the Labour party as it encounters its first real spell of protracted unpopularity since coming to power. Tony Woodley, general secretary of the T&G, calls for a return to ‘classic Labour’; Neal Lawson, chair of Compass, swallows Cameron’s rhetoric and argues that the Tories’ move to the centre opens up space for Labour to move to the left; while the former New Statesman editor, Peter Wilby, sings the praises of a brief spell in opposition for Labour.
The parallels are, of course, not exact. That Labour’s third term would be dominated by talk about Tony Blair’s leadership was perhaps the inevitable consequence of the prime minister’s decision two years ago to announce that he would not stand for a fourth term if Labour were re-elected.
Nonetheless, as in the case of the Tory party in the mid-1990s, the desire to force out the prime minister as soon as possible is accompanied, in many instances, by a strong desire to push for a radical change of political direction.
It is a flawed, foolhardy and, ultimately, self-defeating strategy.
Blind to both political and electoral realities, it ignores not only the lessons of last year’s general election and this year’s local elections, but also the calamitous experience of governing parties which have appeared to abandon the centre ground, and, of course, the New Labour record of Blair’s most likely successor, Gordon Brown.
Enoch Powell once said of the Tory party that it had ‘a grand sense of where the votes are’.
It is precisely this instinct which the Conservatives are beginning to rediscover under David Cameron and it is why the Tory leader now attempts to ape much of New Labour’s agenda: economic stability and investment before tax cuts; reformed public services which place power in the hands of individual citizens and local communities; a promise to fight poverty at home and abroad; and a renewed emphasis on raising educational standards and attainment.
Labour’s task is not to slope off into the electoral cul-de-sac offered by a return to the days of ‘tax and spend’, a defence of monolithic public services, and the philosophy that ‘Whitehall knows best’. Instead, the party must demonstrate why its vision of an active government which empowers citizens and communities is more likely to keep the economy strong, improve public services, and tackle social exclusion, than Cameron’s belief that the state simply has to get out of the way in order for these ends to be met.
Cameron’s apparent shift to the centre is, moreover, beginning to bear fruit.
The Tories have now led in 24 consecutive published opinion polls, the longest such sequence since the late 1980s. Labour’s support in London and the south is especially weak, according to the Guardian’s latest ICM poll, which bears out both the results of this year’s local elections and of last year’s general election. The Conservatives’ recovery in London and the south preceded Cameron’s election as Tory leader and it is the continuing defection of those new converts to Labour in 1997 which most threatens the party’s hold on power.
The lesson of Labour’s eighteen years in opposition is that shut out of London and the south, and pushed back to its traditional heartland constituencies, the party would find it virtually impossible to win enough seats to form a government.
Labour does not need to surmise what might happen if it allows Cameron’s progress to go unimpeded or, indeed, speeds it by turning to the left. In the 2000 US presidential election, George Bush’s bid for the centre ground – difficult to remember now but apparently enough to persuade a large number of floating American voters at the time – allowed some to convince Vice President Al Gore that he should, rhetorically at least, abandon the beliefs of a lifetime, and the record of the administration of which he had played a central role, and campaign from the populist left. It was a fatal error of which Gordon Brown, a keen student of American politics, will no doubt be very aware.