Simply portraying the Tories as rabid rightwingers will not work. Labour needs a strategy to counter the Conservatives, but it has to emerge from a real understanding of voters’ concerns, argues Peter Watt

I am thinking of opening a free school. No, really. I am going to set it up to teach real people how to speak ‘progressive left’. My theory is that if we can teach a couple of hundred young people and they teach a couple of hundred and so on, then in 20 years or so there might be enough people who can understand a word of what most people within the Labour party are actually talking about. At that point, assuming that we have the right policies, we might just win again. I am going to base the curriculum in my free school on Shaun Woodward’s summer note to the shadow cabinet, the so-called ‘Guns of August’ memo. You may remember it: he set out his view that the Tories were lurching to the right and outlined the progressive opportunity that this apparently offered Labour.

It is worth recapping on exactly what the advice was in the shadow Northern Ireland secretary’s memo. Essentially, he advised that the Tories under David Cameron had undergone the pretence of a transformation prior to the election so that they appeared more ‘progressive’. This has been followed since the election by a shift back to their true ‘rightwing’ selves. Before the election they talked about gay rights and the NHS and now they talk about deficit reduction, less government regulation, welfare reform and capping immigration. As further examples Woodward cites increasing euroscepticism and the prime minister’s call for the use of baton rounds and water cannon in response to the riots. Woodward argued: ‘The Tories have become far less worried about inhabiting the centre-ground they once cultivated and more worried about any perception of appearing weak. They do not appear to be seeking long-term solutions to Britain’s real challenges and problems and Cameron himself now appears to be a recognisably rightwing prime minister.’ And he set out the strategic opportunities that he saw this shift offering Labour: ‘Cameron’s new position affords him very little to say either about widening opportunity or realising the aspirations of most families in Britain for their children and for themselves.’

So, in summary, the advice seems to be that voters are generally becoming more progressive. They are pro-public service investment, support a green agenda, think that the government should intervene more and have increasingly liberal social attitudes. The Tories recognised this and so pretended that they had changed. And now that, in government, it is clear that in fact they have not, Labour should start exposing the true rightwing nature of the prime minister. Expose that he is in fact cutting investment in public services, does not care about the environment and thinks the government should be less interventionist. And, of course, far from being socially liberal, that he actually wants to get tough on criminals.

I have to be honest here. I think that there will be a very small number of people indeed who will actually think that this advice is credible or in any way offers a strategic route map to electoral success for the Labour party. The problem for Labour is that a large percentage of these will be party members and the very real risk is that the advice will be taken seriously precisely because it resonates with their views. And that it resonates is not surprising. People who join the Labour party do so because they believe in fairness and want to make the world a better place. They also generally believe that their ‘progressive’ view of the world is mainstream and superior to everyone else’s. Winning elections, according to this view, therefore requires us to educate people as to just how right we are (no pun intended). You can see this again in Woodward’s memo: ‘While the Tories made changes before the election – intended to convince the public they were compassionate – since the election (and especially in the last few months) the Tories have taken major strides back towards their ideological roots. Buffeted by events, there is a growing incoherence between ‘liberal Conservatism’ and the increasingly shrill language the Tories are using as they vacate the centre-ground.’

You see? In the language of the ‘progressive left’ only we are really ‘compassionate’. Tories are not, and are only pretending. This is, of course, nonsense. For instance, you might not agree with everything Iain Duncan Smith is doing on welfare reform but you surely cannot doubt his intentions to better the lives of some of the poorest in society? Or what about the government’s impressive approach to international development? Its reaction to the recent crisis in the Horn of Africa is surely a source of national pride. But the bigger problem here is that Woodward’s memo highlights an uncomfortable truth for Labour, a truth that the architects of New Labour understood. The centre-ground in British politics is not one where people think like people who attend Labour party meetings. That is not the real world – that is the language of the ‘progressive left’.

In the real world, the centre-ground is not making sure that those on welfare payments are protected from the economic downturn when those not on welfare payments are not. It certainly is not going soft on the thugs who have just smashed their way through our cities. In the centre-ground people might or might not worry about global warming but they do not think it is fair that their fuel prices have gone through the roof. In the centre-ground ‘the government’ is seen as being too big, too interfering, and certainly imposes too much tax. In the centre-ground people are worried about the rate of immigration and the impact that this has had on local employment and housing. And most of all, in the centre-ground people think that Labour overspent and that taxpayers now are paying a heavy price.

And this centre-ground view is clearly not an extreme view – far from it. It is just that we on the ‘progressive left’ struggle to accept that others might not agree with us. And if they do disagree then all too often we assume that they must be lacking in compassion, be riddled with self-interest or are perhaps just stupid or unpleasant. But you cannot build a winning coalition by branding a large chunk of your support as extremists, deluded or both.

Winning elections is all about compromise, understanding where voters actually are, not just where we are. It is how we won in 1997, 2001 and 2005. But at the last election, and if we are not careful at the next as well, we tended to be offering the electorate exactly what party members wanted. We told a story about the world as seen through the eyes of the minority – those who attend party conference or the National Policy Forum. In short, we stopped speaking for the majority. The majority who do, or want to, work; who do take responsibility for their families and who believe in law and order, rights and responsibilities and respect. So for electoral success we need to either relearn the art of building electoral winning coalitions based around the actual centre-ground of politics, or we start opening free schools that teach people how to speak ‘progressive left’ using the ‘Guns of August’ memo as a curriculum.

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Peter Watt is a former general secretary of the Labour party

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Photo: The Prime Minister’s Office