The first thing to acknowledge when we talk about the centre-ground is that it shifts. It shifts with political change, economic change and it is moved through leadership as well as changing times. The second thing to recognise is that the centre-ground is in a fundamentally different place when the economy changes. For Labour to regain the centre, we need to recognise that today’s political centre is in a different place from the times of fiscal expansion during the Blair-Brown years.
Under New Labour, the core of our centrist position was how to spend the proceeds of growth in a supply side manner to improve services and enable citizens to push themselves up the income ladder. This was the politics of aspiration, of social mobility, of building an enabling state to empower citizens to achieve their best. This was about equipping Britain with the skills to move forward while the world turns fast.
The crash, the recession and the sluggish growth that followed shifted the centre-ground radically. Money doesn’t stretch as far and there’s less of it to go round, both for families and the public purse. The economic future, which once looked secure, seems volatile and uncertainty and instability are at the front of people’s minds.
The predictable response of the populist right is to tap into anxieties around immigration and the squeeze this has on jobs, incomes and services. The hard left will resort to economically incoherent calls to resist attempts to get a grip of the budget deficit. Labour will be fighting out the space in the middle with the Tories and Liberal Democrats and should adopt the following principles to capture the new centre-ground:
1. Security Matters:
The fast pace of economic change is frightening and the lack of job and thus income security for families has a knock-on effect on expenditure and the economy. Labour’s focus should be on jobs, employment and job and income security for people. We need to be the party that best understands that stable work is the best way to make people feel secure, safe, and settled.
2. Future Focused:
Politics is always about the future and for Labour to win we need to be the party that sees the state of the nation today and has the best plan for tomorrow. We need to be the party that can answer the big questions that will challenge the world in the future, like the skills our children will need for the jobs they will do, how to pay for an ageing population and how to secure Britain’s place in a challenging world.
3. National Vision:
Winning the centre-ground is more than just setting out our missions for public services. We need to set out our mission for the nation as a whole. Labour needs to set out a plan for government that is much more than just managing Whitehall. Labour needs a vision to reshape Britain, not just a manifesto for how we would tax, spend and change public services.
New Labour saw where the centre-ground was, spoke to it and led it. We left office with a legacy of a Britain, ‘more open at home and more compassionate abroad’ – a compliment from a prime minister who has a record of doing down Labour’s time in office. So the centre is different in economic times but the centre can also be set by leadership and vision. Labour’s challenge is to recognise the difficulties of the times, speak to those difficulties and lead.