A member of my local party, a pensioner, came up to me at a recent community festival, fuming. He was, and still is, extremely angry at the failure of the Labour party to regain power this year. His anger was not of the type I have seen much in the party. It was deeply personal because Labour’s loss may affect him directly in the way it will not many other members. He never fails to sing the praises of the Labour party’s 13 years in government because of the way it looked after people like him; he himself has little to fall back on by way of either income and assets.
He reserved particular scorn for what he regarded as Ed Miliband’s five-year object lesson in self-indulgence. But the more substantive point is that I have met too few party members who feel personally invested in whether Labour is in power or not. This man is positively fraught with worry that there is no Labour government to shield him from Tory decisions.
At the end of an Ashes summer it is worth remembering that England off-spin bowler Jim Laker once said that the reason that the England cricket team exists is to beat the Australians. To many, including people like this local member, it is simply self-evident that the Labour party exists to beat the Conservative party. Our supporters and potential supporters want to see a Labour party back on the field, and they want to see the Tories defeated by an innings and then some.
The critics of those who dare suggest Labour should try to regain power opine that this means ‘becoming like Tories’. But they misunderstand the rules of the game. Under Miliband Labour shifted right on immigration, and this took us backwards. Saying what you think people want to hear does not work. Being a rightwing Labour party does not work. You do not win by inching along a left-right axis.
Instead, the centre-ground is built on two planks: competence and compassion. The second sits on top of the first. Being a Labour party that people believe to be equally competent and compassionate beats the Tories every time because we are sometimes able to stand on these twin planks; the Tories, in contrast, are never able to convince the public that they are compassionate as well as competent – they are Tories, after all – they are smart, but mean. Though David Cameron has evidently set about to overturn this assumption, and thereby keep Labour out of power for good.
To prevent this, Labour must build that platform and stand on it; show the world that the point of Labour in power is to help people stand on their own two feet, which in turn ensures communities are strong and that the country is strong. That way Labour wins, and fulfils its historic mission: ‘Socialism is not help from the outside in the form of state help. It is the people themselves acting through their organisations, regulating their own affairs’, said Keir Hardie.
Labour must then contrast this with how Tories expect everyone to clamber up on their own. Tories delight in the people who ‘make it’; as Labour we lament the wasted opportunity of those not able to stand as tall, and the fate of the powerless who get trampled underfoot. It is bad for the individuals, bad for our communities, bad for our country, bad for the world. Our job is to hold out that hand to let people stand on their own two feet. But we can only do so from the heights of power, not the trenches of opposition. This is why power must be a founding principle for Labour; it is why purpose and power are one and the same.
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Adam Harrison is deputy editor of Progress. He tweets @adamdkharrison
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This is absolutely ridiculous. The Labour Party is a means to an end, not an end in itself. Gaining national power (for all four of our nations, not just England) is an essential part of the process of achieving our aims. It is not the aim.
Jim Laker was wrong. The reason that the England cricket team exists is to play cricket as well as it possibly can. Beating Australians doesn’t have to involve cricket, and I suspect he didn’t mean beating in any other than cricket terms. And although I’m no expert, I’d imagine that beating the Australians using anything other than really good cricket (ie using unsporting or illegal means) would be frowned upon by England supporters. I suspect Jim Laker’s quote does not advance the cause of English cricket a single millimetre.
Cricket and politics are apples and oranges. There is not one set of rules for the game – in fact it’s not a game at all, and anyone who suggests otherwise demeans it. The Labour Party that Adam is defining is HIS vision of the Labour Party, not OURS: for it to be ours, he has to ask us first, and over the past few years Labour’s got quite bad at doing that. His definition of the Tory Party, equally, is just one man’s opinion, no more.
And in between the two definitions are the people who truly defy definition, the People themselves, about which we know very little other than more of them voted to our right south of the border, and more to our left north of the border. We have spent and will continue to spend loads of time agonising over why they did that, and given 3 or 4 years we might build up a picture that we can all agree on. In the meantime the People will have moved on and their needs and aspirations, which are already too varied for a generalised definition to have any meaning, will have moved on too. Back in 1996 TB exemplified Mondeo Man as the person we had to convert: by 2003 BMW Man looked at Mondeo Man as some kind of throwback, while we were still glorying in his conversion.
There’s no shame in being of the Right. There’s nothing wrong with trying to convert people to your cause. There is plenty of shame in arguing a case without foundations, particularly if it’s on shifting sands, and in starting with assumptions which are blinkered, and in using poor examples from areas of human activity that don’t equate in any way with what you’re talking about. It just makes you look pompous and annoys people you should be trying to attract to your side.
It is worth reflecting that England won the Ashes with a united team clearly focused on winning with a sensible and experienced captain.
On the same basis it’s worth reflecting that as well as achieving 3 spectacular wins England also achieved 2 spectacular losses: that tends to suggest a lack of consistency, huge talent linked to immense profligacy, rather than a clear focus. Luckily politics is nothing like cricket.
Quite right Nick. England won three when it got its act together and lost two when it didn’t. Politics couldn’t be like that, could it?
Clever! I like it! But no, it couldn’t. Politics is never completely right or completely wrong. In 1997 we nicked a lot of the Tory policies which were quite sensible, and right now Cameron’s nicking whole rafts of even more sensible Miliband policies. Without rose-tinted spectacles it’s pretty easy to see the seeds of ultimate destruction that the Blair government planted for itself almost as soon as it had started. That doesn’t make Blair a bad prime minister, it’s just the way things are. Nor does it make Miliband wrong for losing, although the 35% policy was clearly adrift.
If you want to continue the cricket analogy, the one thing any team can’t control is the weather. The People are much harder to control even than that, although that hasn’t stopped some of the more notorious regimes in human history from trying. My original post mentioned shifting sands, and that, not the cricket bit, was the point of it. Mind you, playing cricket on shifting sands – that would be a challenge!