In turbulent times, putting in place a clear project for government is absolutely essential

Beyond an evening of programmes on BBC Parliament for political anoraks, the 50th anniversary last month of Harold Wilson becoming leader of the Labour party went largely unnoticed.

Wilson was a remarkable politician and a somewhat under-appreciated prime minister. He led his party for 13 years, winning four of the five general elections he fought. His governments may have been buffeted by economic storms but their legacy endures: the legalisation of homosexuality, the end to censorship, the introduction of  race relations and equal opportunities legislation, and the creation of  the Open University.

But it is perhaps his second, rather more unhappy, spell in government after he led Labour to an unexpected and narrow win over Ted Heath in February 1974 that holds the most important parallels for today.

While no two general elections are ever the same, it is possible to discern certain patterns. Some – 1945, 1979 or 1997 – are ‘sea change’ elections. On other occasions, the voters appear to give a hearty thumbs-up to the incumbent government’s performance: Wilson’s landslide re-election in 1966, that of Margaret Thatcher in 1983 or Tony Blair in 2001.

From others, the message is more difficult to detect. In February 1974, Labour returned to power with a share of the vote nearly six per cent lower than that which it achieved when Wilson was ejected from office in 1970. The party was 17 seats short of a majority, just four seats ahead of the Conservatives and actually trailed them by 0.7 per cent in the popular vote. It would be 36 years before the voters returned another hung parliament.

As Andrew Adonis suggested last summer, ‘a great mistake in politics is to extrapolate iron laws from the recent past.’ For the three decades after Thatcher came to power in 1979, British politics was remarkably stable: the Conservatives served for four successive terms, with Labour following for another three.

But the decade leading up to Thatcher’s election was very different: amid industrial chaos, high unemployment and soaring inflation Britain had three changes of government and four changes of prime minister. Economic chaos and political instability created a deep impression on the national psyche: one strong enough for the Daily Mail to attempt to evoke it in 2010. ‘Vote decisively,’ it warned its readers on the eve of the last election, recalling that the hung parliament of 1974 had produced ‘five years of political paralysis, economic meltdown and national humiliation’.

The similarities between the 1970s and today abound, not least the image of incompetence and helplessness that appears to overwhelm Cameron’s government. It is, of course, true that the electorate deals some governments a better hand than others and some of Cameron’s difficulties stem from his being yoked to a party for whom clarity of purpose has never figured highly. But his difficulties are both compounded and caused by the prime minister’s lack of a governing project. Governments with such a project – Thatcher’s determination to ‘roll back the frontiers of the state’, crush the unions and build a Tory-voting ‘property-owning democracy’ or Blair’s push for modernisation of the constitution and investment in, and reform of, public services – have a purpose which enables them to ride the waves of unpopularity, error and scandal to which all inevitably fall prey.

With the ‘big society’ cast aside and ‘vote blue, go green’ a distant memory, Cameron’s government has no such project – cutting the deficit has becoming its overriding goal. While this would have been a central purpose of any government elected in 2010, it does not provide the definition and direction a government needs. It is why so much else that the prime minister has set out to achieve has foundered.

There are both dangers and opportunities for Labour here. First, throughout their history the Conservatives have displayed an eye for the electoral main chance second to none. According to one pollster who frequently conducts focus groups, the argument that brings voters (particularly those who supported or considered backing Cameron in 2010) back to the Tory party is the notion that the government’s weaknesses and poor performance stem from the fact the Tories have been forced into coalition with the Liberal Democrats. Expect the Conservatives to deploy that argument ruthlessly as 2015 approaches.

Second, while the polls currently look good for Labour, the party is still not performing as well as it perhaps should. As Peter Kellner of YouGov has suggested, no opposition party which has not achieved a lead of 20 per cent or more at some point in the parliament has then gone on to form a government at the subsequent general election (and, indeed, Kinnock took Labour to leads of this level in 1990 and still lost two years later).

The dynamics of the coalition may, of course, make such precedents less useful. For the first time in modern times, voters will have a choice between two governing parties and one opposition party. But, equally, as Kellner sketched in a scenario in January about how the Tories might achieve a majority in 2015, big movements of centre-left voters from Nick Clegg’s party to Ed Miliband could allow the Conservatives to topple enough Liberal Democrat MPs for Cameron to reach the winning post that eluded him in 2010.

However, another indecisive election – although both in the same year, two occurred in the 1970s as well – remains a likely outcome in 2015. Research published by the Fabian Society last month, for instance, indicated that only 400,000 voters have moved from the Conservatives to Labour since the last election. And, while the party has picked up some 2.3 million former Liberal Democrat voters, these alone are unlikely to be enough to secure Miliband a majority. Indeed, his chances of doing so will, according to the Fabians’ figures, rely on the rather less reliable 1.4 million voters who did not turn out in 2010 but say they will back Labour in 2015.

The surest way to avoid a hung parliament in 2015, and Miliband’s best hope of avoiding the pitfalls that have befallen Cameron if one does emerge, is the development of that governing project which the prime minister so evidently lacks. In an important speech last month, the head of Labour’s policy review, Jon Cruddas, began to outline the broad contours and priorities which lie beneath Miliband’s nascent ‘One Nation’ project. Cautioning against any Labour ‘drift to state managerialism’, Cruddas also warned that ‘simply opposing the cuts without an alternative is no good’. Meanwhile, Miliband’s recent speech on living standards – with its eye-catching suggestion of reintroducing the 10p tax rate and its clear statement that we need, to paraphrase Barack Obama, to ‘grow the economy from the middle out’ – is a further recognition of this fact.

Wilson’s experience in February 1974 underlines the dangers of failing to develop that alternative. ‘The obvious problem was that Wilson’s ministers arrived in Downing Street without any real idea how they were going to resolve the economic crisis,’ suggests the historian Dominic Sandbrook in Seasons of the Sun. ‘To some extent this was deliberate on Harold Wilson’s part; for more than a decade, he had maintained his grip on a fractious party by practising the politics of ambiguity.’ None of this went unnoticed by the voters: three years after Wilson stepped down as prime minister in 1976, his party limped into the first of four successive general election defeats and the political wilderness from which it would not emerge for 18 years.

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Robert Philpot is director of Progress

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Photo: Adrian S Jones