To win a general election in the UK you must win support of the centre-ground or median voters. These mythical median voters have many names, “Mondeo man”, “eight people sipping wine in Kettering” and I have heard recently of “Holby City woman”. These people are those who are doing average in society but aspire for more. They neatly fit into the middle of the upside down bucket shaped curve which represents the graph of voters against income (if you ignore the extremely wealthy who skew your mean average income data and if you assume all well-being is based on income).
The New Labour project realised that the working class were voting for them anyway. To gain power to help those people, concessions such as clause IV were required to detoxify the party and make it the holder of the centre ground. More recently Labour has had less income, energy, ideas and “umpff” to maintain the coalition of the centre and the left. The working class, especially the white, feel left out, partly due to poor communication with them on Labour’s achievements, prejudice and due to a perception that everything is for the middle class. Abolition of the 10p base rate tax did not help. The middle class are more attracted to Cameron’s Conservatives who promise them the same ends but through different means. This is all a part of the Progressive Conservative Project in which former SDP man, Greg Clark MP takes a leading role. I must say I find the project intellectually terrifying for the Labour party.
The battle between left and centre has waged in the guise of supporters of the Brown and Blair camps, though not necessarily between the men themselves. In recent months how many times have we heard in CLP or branch meetings how the party must reengage with the left, find its soul and become more like the party of yesteryear? And how many times have we heard the party’s leading lights talk of how we must reengage with the middle class vote, tell them of the perils of being tempted by Cameron and ensure they continue to vote Labour as they have done since their defection in ’97? The sad thing is they are both right but we do not currently have the human resources or the vigour to do both.
The Labour party has been losing working class support in Scotland to the SNP, to Plaid in Wales, the BNP in the north and I am sad to say Conservatives in the South (there was a time after the initial stages of the recent Iraq war when Labour were losing support to the Lib Dems, but evidence suggests the majority of these voters have come back or switched elsewhere). The rise of these parties is due to the poor management of maintaining this coalition and a natural effect of being in power for a long period of time.
In the political lexicon that has existed post-Thatcher, Cameron has realised he can re-create the New Labour project but on the right. The blue-rinse will vote for the Conservatives anyway and therefore he has undergone a process of detoxifying the Conservative party through his own clause IV moments. Therefore it is safe to suggest that the trouble Labour is finding itself in will exist for Cameron. As the New Labour project can arguably be traced back to the beginning of Kinnock’s leadership, so we can also suggest that the Conservatives have been working from the master’s rule book and have been carrying out their process at greater speed since the beginning of Michael Howard’s leadership. It can be assumed that just as Labour has lost ground to the SNP, Plaid and the BNP in its heartlands, so therefore the Conservatives will lose support at a faster rate in the not too distant future in their heartlands of the South and South East. The Blair-Brown supporter’s battle of the Conservative party is articulated over Europe and the Lisbon Treaty. Therefore I think the Conservatives will have a growing number of supporter defections to UKIP and maybe other political forces we do not know about or are not aware of.
Though I find this history repeating itself fascinating, and it can be argued that politics in the UK is going through a great flux (as it does every generation or so), it is interesting that the main parties, including the Lib Dems, stick to certain political orthodoxies of the post-Thatcher era that the public are beginning to reject. Chris Huhne of the Lib Dems calls this, sat-nav politics; the “do this to go right” and the “do this to go left”. It is hollow.
I do not think the public want to see progressive ends by conservative, as opposed to social democratic, means. I think the public want a new politics altogether. Let us end the Thatcher era by constructing a new political infrastructure that benefits the left, before circumstances create one for us that is detrimental to that and those Labour holds dear.