First, Lord Ashcroft’s latest polling and advice to the Tory party is all about how the Tories need to reach into the centre-ground to win a majority next time, ie they are not there yet. Secondly, pollster Deborah Mattinson told the conference that voters are disillusioned with all the parties. I see this because none of us is currently offering Middle England a package they feel enthusiastic about voting for.
Cameron did try to do a mirror image of New Labour’s triangulation back in the first couple of years that he was opposition leader: hug a hoodie, hug a husky, and support for the NHS.
This was all pushed into the background when the financial crisis came. The shrill Thatcherite emphasis on cuts to reduce the deficit may be winning the argument so far, but centrist or reshaping the centre it ain’t.
Cameron’s second attempt to detoxify the Tories was forced on him by his failure to win a majority. Formation of a coalition with the Lib Dems gave him a chance to use an external lever to move the party into the centre, having bottled the Blair strategy of dragging his party kicking and screaming there (there was never a New Conservative Party, the precondition for them to establish their version of a New Britain).
But this has failed. The Tories haven’t moved onto the centre-ground or increased their vote share. All that has happened is they have made their coalition partners, the Lib Dems, toxic, perhaps fatally so.
The Tory failure to move onto the centre-ground means they are stuck on 36 per cent politically. The people who voted for cuts and austerity are happy with it, but it attracts no one else. It’s above their 30 per cent bedrock vote but not the 40 per cent plus Thatcher was able to secure, and even that was low by the standards of Tory history. And Thatcher had to contend with a strong centre party vote for the Alliance, whereas the Tory 36 per cent plus is despite the Lib Dems having shrunk to just 10 per cent.
The Tories’ current policy stances are not centrist and therein lies the potential for Labour to recapture the centre-ground:
- They are to the left of the public on crime and justice.
- They are ceding their reputation on defence through the SDSR cuts.
- They are pushing extreme and unnecessary reform of the NHS.
- While they appeared to win the argument on the basic stance of deficit reduction, the policy corollary of pushing the logic of this strategy to its extreme has been cuts that have removed any ability for them to portray themselves as aligned with voters’ instincts on fairness, economic growth or decent public services.
Labour hasn’t recaptured the centre-ground yet, but on a consistent 40 per cent in the polls, and having avoided our tradition of lurching to the left after election defeats, we are not badly placed to get there by the end of the parliament – though we need to be on our guard that the Tories may present themselves in a more centrist light in 2014-15 once the heavy-lifting has been done on deficit reduction.
The political centre is not inhabited by one homogenous lump of voters. In literal Middle England, the Midlands, we have already won it back in places like the suburbs of Nottingham, as the local elections showed. Ditto in the classic marginal areas of the northwest such as Bury, Bolton and Blackpool. But we have a cultural problem getting resonance with southern centrist voters. And the situation is complicated because in the mix with the skilled workers in manufacturing in the Midlands, and White Van Man and commuters in Kent and Essex, none of whom are known for being progressive or liberal, are more liberal and green thinking voters in places like Brighton, Norwich and Stroud. We need not just macro strategic positioning but micro tactical policy targeting to win back these disparate groups of voters. Ed Miliband has started to articulate the positioning, with ideas around community, the promise to the next generation and the squeeze on living standards that are clearly aimed at appealing to the centre ground as well as our core vote. The policy review needs to supply some of the early tactical ammunition to do the micro targeting.
I would suggest there are some concerns that almost all voters, but particularly swing voters, want addressed and where they felt Labour lost touch towards the end of our time in power: they want us to be serious about welfare reform and money they feel should be supporting hard work rather than supporting idleness, they want us to be serious about immigration and its economic impact on them, they want us to be serious about tackling crime and antisocial behaviour and they want us to be serious about creating an economy and tax system that gives them the chance to achieve their aspirations through hard work.
One key point is that when considering the political centre it is oversimplistic to think of a simple line from left to right on policy with switchers sat in the middle. A model of politics based on that would see the two main parties as like two ice cream vans at opposite ends of a beach, trying to move to the middle of it to maximise their market share. But that ignores the presence of other ice-cream sellers on the UK political beach: Lib Dems, SNP, Greens, who have an inconvenient habit of driving in behind you or to one side of you to nick your least proximate customers. Such a model also ignores determinants of voting behaviour unconnected to the left-right spectrum: trust, competence/performance in government, the popularity of the leaders in a semi-presidential system, cultural affinity with a party. The uncomfortable fact is that even if we had crafted a manifesto in 2010 that addressed every policy concern of swing voters and perfectly calibrated where the electoral centre was, we might still have lost because of these other factors.