If you want an insight into how the 2015 election might play out, don’t look at the results of the local elections. Look at the new five-pound note.
When Winston Churchill replaces Elizabeth Fry on the back of the fiver, notes in England and Wales will celebrate a statesman, an inventor, a scientist and a composer, but not one woman. Predictably enough, there is a petition with a little over twenty thousand signatures demanding that a woman be restored to the face of the currency. Equally predictably, it will fail.
You might very well think that in however many centuries of history, there should be, at any given time, at least one British woman who we think is worth celebrating enough to put on the currency, and you’d be right. But you can’t fight owt with nowt, and you can’t beat Winston Churchill with an unnamed woman.
Yes, there is an important progressive value that goes beyond any specific woman that is worth fighting for, but arguments based on values alone convince only the committed. Churchill versus ‘a woman’ is a fight with only one outcome; Churchill versus Jane Austen is a battle that we might actually win.
A micro issue? Perhaps, but one that speaks to the left’s macro problem: it has forgotten that it isn’t enough to be against things. It is simplicity itself to describe Labour’s values; it is rather more difficult to work out what those values mean in practice.
I have a similar relationship to the Conservative party as I do to Tottenham Hotspur: it feels good when they lose, even if they don’t actually lose to my team. As a result, I had a pretty good night last night, for fairly obvious reasons. But I’m not convinced that this is a sign of an unstoppable march back to Downing Street in 2015. The election cycle it most reminds me of is not 1994-7 or even 1990-2, but 2003-5. Labour endured a series of heavy losses to a party that outflanked it on the left, that was light on policy and heavy on protest; but it won the 2005 election anyway.
A vote for UKIP may be many things, but it is something of a stretch to see it as a call for full socialism. Even a depleted Labour party was able to squeeze the Liberal vote in 2010; why wouldn’t a Crosby-powered Conservative party be able to pick off a few UKIPers in 2015? Beneath the comforting headline figures, Labour’s poll lead is still troublingly soft, and while Labour remains a blank slate on economic policy, it will remain so
It’s not accurate to say that the Labour leadership is policy-free; Ed Miliband has more policy at an equivalent stage than the successful oppositions of 1964, 1970 or 2010. The comparison with 1997 is not really fair to him, because Tony Blair had the best parts of two decades of frustrated policymaking to pick from. But neither of Wilson or Heath were elected in the teeth of the longest economic slump in history; and when Cameron was elected, it appeared as if the worst was over. It seems alien now, but at the time, Cameron’s ‘steady as she goes, with tax cuts if weather continues fair’ actually did appear to be the answer to the pressing questions of the time at one point. But beyond a series of taxes on nouns it doesn’t like, Labour has not yet come up with an answer to any of the pressing questions of the time.
We’re now less than three months away from the July spending review; the point when government spending stops being a conversation about a present Labour cannot control and becomes an argument about a future it seeks to shape. Whether or not Labour should accept those spending limits is an open question, but regardless of where you think the Labour leadership should end up, it should trouble you that we don’t yet know – we can’t even make a decent guess – where the leadership will end up. Strengthened by local victories and with the advantage of a fractious and traumatised Conservative party, now is the time for Ed Miliband to set out his course; or else find his future, like that new five-pound note, dominated by a triumphant Conservative.
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Stephen Bush writes a weekly column for Progress, the Tuesday review, and tweets @stephenkb
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Photo: PhatController