Would it not be easier, Bertolt Brecht once mused, to simply dissolve the people and elect another?
German dramatists make unlikely political gurus, but Brecht’s fingerprints can be found all over Labour’s Next Majority, Marcus Roberts’ pathway to a parliamentary majority for Ed Miliband. Rather than win back the lost voters of 2010, who have uncongenial opinions on everything from welfare to finance, better to summon into existence a million new ones.
Perhaps Roberts has encountered a very different type of non-voter than I have, but, in my experience, non-voters represent the only group of people less receptive to traditional social democracy than regular voters. I remember a man I met during the 2010who told me that all three parties had their noses in the trough, that they took our money and spent it ‘on themselves, the Poles, and single mothers’. He thought that the fall of the British Empire was the greatest tragedy in modern history and that we now spent ‘a hundred and ten per cent’ of GDP on benefits. As Roberts rightly notes, the voters you target go some way to determining the type of government you get, and it seems to me that, a government based on the votes of men such as these is unlikely to be of a Labour-aligned persuasion.
That leaves us with the not-inconsiderable task of persuading the voters we have now. These are people who, when they tell us that they think that the Tories are out to line their own pockets and that the Liberal Democrats have been willing collaborators, we can’t wait to believe them. These are people who, when they say that Ed Miliband is the leader who most understands their concerns, we’d trust with anything. But these are the same people who, when they tell us they think that the Labour party is, for the most part, a political movement designed to take their money and give it to people who weren’t born here and don’t want to work here, we decide are simply too stupid to have come to that conclusion without help from Paul Dacre.
So we turn to the progressive’s favourite pastime: educating the public. This never works, but, nonetheless, we keep trying it. What I find most peculiar about this is that the part of the party that is least inclined to give its own leadership a fair hearing is the most inclined to suggest that the same leadership should expect a higher level of trust from Joe Public. I’ve long suspected Ed Miliband has a better chance of having a civil discussion with a random passer-by than he does getting a fair hearing from Owen Jones, but I never expected to hear that argument from Owen Jones. There are parts of the Labour party that can’t even hear Labour’s welfare lead use the word ‘cap’ without calling for a sacking; why do they think there’s space for a pedagogic campaign?
Even worse is this particularly strange idea doing the rounds that rebranding welfare will make people like it more. I’m all for honing a message, but I can’t think of a wheeze more ill-starred than taking a name from the United States, a country so enamoured of social democratic principles that even the whisper of socialised healthcare is enough to bring the government grinding to a halt.
Instead, what Labour should do is meet welfare sceptics head-on. They think that the welfare bill is too high? So do we. They think we shouldn’t hand out millions of pounds in housing benefit? So do we. They think that people shouldn’t have to work full time and still rely on the state? So do we. Instead of picking a fight over our differences with the voters, we should be talking up our similarities. Rachel Reeves is doing just that.
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Stephen Bush is a contributing editor to Progress, writes a weekly column for Progress, the Tuesday review, and tweets @stephenkb
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