This is the graphic that matters in British politics.
The figures change at the margin between polls (this is from before the election) but the overall picture remains the same.
It is not the only spectrum that matters – social attitudes and whether you recognise the need to tackle climate change are just two alternative spectrums that are really important to me and many others. But it is a useful starting point.
We know that people who describe themselves as left wing and very left wing got involved in the Labour leadership election, while the candidates of the centre-left were uninspiring and did not attract new members. As Tristram Hunt put it, people wanted an emotional response – not a technocratic one.
Me – I am a technocrat. I want to get the details of policies right. That is why I have been happy to take backroom/non-political roles because I have felt I was making a difference by ensuring that policy objectives get delivered. I really do not want to see a simple populism akin to Nigel Farage on the right, offering solutions that will not work, because even if people are persuaded and this approach wins elections, it will end in tears – and people will lose trust in politics – in particular in progressive politics. I share Rafael Behr’s concern that simplistic populism ‘washes away the permission that politicians need to say there are no simple solutions and to advocate the least-worst option because none is perfect’.
Of course there are ‘leftist’ solutions which are practical and will tackle inequality while also helping the overall economy – but if the conversation is pitched at those who already identify themselves as on the left, we are doomed to fail to persuade enough people to vote for them. Four out of five of the voters that Labour needs to persuade voted Tory at the last election. Condemning them, talking of them in snarling, abusive terms is not going to persuade them. Many of them do not see themselves as Tories and only made the decision to vote Tory at the last minute. But Labour has done little in the past four and a half months to make them regret their decision.
Yet many in the Labour party are very keen to shout down anyone expressing anything less than rapturous adoration of the new leader. They may feel that we have ‘nowhere else to go’ and for those of us with a long history with the Labour party they are right. We are not going anywhere. But for the voters who were less committed, there are choices. Historically much of the centre left and centrist vote was hoovered up by the Liberal Democrats. I doubt many will go back to them – but if the Tories position themselves in the centre-ground, they will be immovable.
That is why it is desperately important that Labour presents a broad message that appeals to these voters and gets them on the bus, if only for a couple of stops rather than committing to the final destination Jeremy Corbyn has in mind. I do not share some of his destinations. I want social enterprises and co-operatives not state-run monoliths and I don not think anyone who is anti-American is a ‘friend’. But I do think we may be able to find some common ground. This will require listening to the internal voices asking to be part of the future of the Labour party despite disagreeing with the leader, just as the left were always part of the Tony Blair and Gordon Brown governments – not dismissing these voices as Tories and telling them to leave the party or calling them bad losers because ‘their candidate’ lost the leadership election.
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Tal Michael is a former Labour police and crime commissioner candidate. He tweets @TalMichael
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Progress is certainly being ecumenical with that picture, which is of the fabulous headquarters of the Durham Miners’ Association.
With the view to engage with the public and for the sake of useful change, is it nor fundamental that politicians – who are meant to be “serving” the public also speak a common language in terms of “right” and “wrong”, and the political commentators all of colours also start to scrutinise politicians on this democratic language.
How else is there to be an well-needed and on-going improvement to the sort of Corbynomics that seems to bring public optimism to social change, while installing a fear into the hearts and minds of those born and living the life of the “privileged”, and who are more intent on protecting this status.
There are two interesting articles in The Spectator this week, when Jon Cruddas was interviewed by Isabel Hardman. In the first article from the 17th September, we have:
“He thinks the party needs a new group because ‘a lot of the old internal factions, the internal architecture, seems to belong to a different era, really, be they Progress or Compass or the Fabians’. And so his group could replace those old groups, or one of them perhaps, and take account of the way the Labour membership has changed in recent years too.”
http://tinyurl.com/qgav7ey
In the second article:
It’s a bleak picture. But when I meet Cruddas, he seems excited by what’s going on. ‘Something quite extraordinary has developed through the summer and a lot of it I find really quite positive,’ he says. Corbynmania even swept his own family: his mother, two of his brothers and sisters and his son joined Labour. ‘None of them joined when I stood for elected representation!’ he says.
‘The Blairites now can’t understand what’s going on because they are operating within a totally shrunken framework,’ he says. ‘They woke up to find a party that has totally disappeared in front of them. They don’t know what to do, and now they sound like a sect.’
Cruddas spent his summer reading Blair’s early speeches, and is struck by how different early Blairism was to what it became at the end. ‘You discover a marriage of economic and ethical Labour traditions which creates a powerful political language, and a policy agenda far richer than the collapsed project which, by the end, just fetishised some public service reforms.’ It is as if he regards Blairites as traitors to their own cause.
The collapse of Blairism created a vacuum, he says, now filled by Corbynism. ‘Labour lost that emotional power of our political project. So we became transactional, instrumentalist, remote, managerial, technocratic, blah blah blah. Then Corbyn comes in, with this ethic of principle versus power. He is allowed to put a wedge into the whole leadership thing because we’ve lost the principal ethical contribution which was, actually, the hallmark of the whole New Labour project.’
http://tinyurl.com/nn7z8ec
Reading between the lines, which of the 3 factions and their organisation does he think will be replaced by the new group? Hmmm – given the criticism, of the failures of the collapsed Blair project and the organisation to which it appears most closely aligned, does he mean Progress?
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God I hope not, we have a really active Progress party in power now the Tories.
Interestingly, ‘The Independent’ polling of 2000 voters shows Labour losing between 20% to 37% of its May voters ( Source ORB survey conducted last Wed/Thur). Moreover a majority of DE social group (67%) do not see Jeremy Corbyn as Prime Ministerial. The consequences are serious for Labour.
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