In the United States, an election already defined by the American right’s increasingly ludicrous attacks on the forces of reality took a turn for the worse this week, as the rightwing press and the conservative blogosphere levelled their ire against Nate Sliver, the polling expert whose great sin is to predict that Barack Obama is still the overwhelming favourite in the election next week.
Silver’s methodology is based on the controversial methodology of averaging together all of the polls taken at a national and a state level. That’s right: the GOP is now opposed to the law of averages. The Republican party is what happens if you turn ‘people who pick on you are just jealous’ into the first and last article of your political philosophy.
How has it happened? How has a once-credible party of government got to a point where it has essentially declared the Enlightenment to be a bad move? It is, in part, a conservative disease, and it’s not difficult to imagine how a defenestrated Conservative party might turn to its Anglophone cousin for inspiration after 2015, but it’s in part, a reaction to an existential crisis that is befalling Labour, too.
The financial crisis was the iPhone to the political establishment’s Nokia: it changed the limits and challenges of public policy forever, and half a decade after, neither the political class nor Nokia has a credible answer. Labour has two options: it can cling to the wreckage of an old order or it can create a new one. As the Republicans have chosen, you can be a credible party of power if you cling to the old order, if you set yourself against pollsters, policy thinkers, even science: but you can’t be an effective party of government. In Congress, the Republican-controlled House has done nothing. It has erected no institutions that stand stable. It has no policy achievements or any mission beyond an economic policy that is less the Road to Serfdom than Fifty Shades of Grey, because nothing in the ruins of a failed past can prepare you for the future.
Labour faces a similar choice. A return to government looks all-but-certain, but the shape and success of that government is still up for grabs. The temptation is to lapse into navel-gazing about what Labour’s values are and what progressives stand for. The problem is, very little of what Labour stands for is materially different to what the coalition stands for. Very few people are opposed to fairness or equality, after all. A better question is: what are the challenges that Labour will face on its return to office? And what are the aspirations of the people that it will have been elected to serve?
Together, Peter Kellner’s YouGov analysis and the Purple Papers represent the best and only significant attempts to grapple with those questions this year. Kellner’s findings show that most of what Labour thinkers have said about swing voters has been heavy on ‘Labour’, and light on ‘thinking’. These are the people that the political campaign has to be built around and targeted at. But the Purple Papers – four essays by Steve Van Riel, Graeme Cooke and Patrick Diamond – represent the beginnings of what should form Labour’s core mission in government after the next election, from the best one-line description of the progressive in an austere era yet written: ‘We have to think about what hard things we might have to ask of the people we like’, to Patrick Diamond’s fantastic description of the path to a system of social care that is universal and successful.
Facing a decaying Conservative project and a riven government, it would be very easy for Labour to cleave too closely to the 1997 model – to avoid thinking or saying anything that could jeopardise an early return to government. But in the five years after 1997, Labour could comfortably sit on a rising tide. That luxury of time won’t be available to the Labour leadership this time. They have to start thinking seriously, now, and they could start in worse places than with the Purple Papers.
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Stephen Bush writes a weekly column for Progress, the Tuesday review, and tweets @stephenkb
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