Blimpish || a Tory

This Tom Harris discussion, thinking about if Labour win next time, is interesting but, as many commenters point out, horrifically misguided about the current mood among Tories.  I don’t think there is any arrogant assumption about winning for most of us; if it had arisen, the Brown bounce quelled it a bit, and the knowledge that constituency boundaries and our inability to gain significant traction in Scotland and Wales both leave no small amount of nerves.  There’s an old Woy Jenkins line about Blair having been given a precious vase and just having to carry it without dropping it; but these times are nothing like that.

For one thing, and this is a bugbear of mine, the Tories aren’t Labour and 2010 (or 2009) is not 1997.  So when people point out the limited popular enthusiasm for a Tory government, they are missing the different relationships the parties have with the electorate.  The Labour Party is historically the one that has an emotional tie to a broad part of the electorate – their election-winning offer is traditionally one of values.  The Tory Party is different; its offer is traditionally one of competent governance.  The consequence is that Labour (and before them the Liberals) sometimes get elected from Opposition with an enthusiastic landslide; the Tories with a cautious victory which, if successful becomes a landslide.

The Labour offer works best in happy times; the Tory one in troubled times.  That doesn’t mean either side can’t govern successfully and be re-elected successfully in the other times, but their respective offers are likely to be most attractive as an alternative government in different climates.  In 1997, there was little the Tories offered that Labour couldn’t match; and Labour had a whole language with which to describe a future which could use the new prosperity – the Tories didn’t.  In tougher times, a party which is devoted to positive social change (as Labour is) can’t make its promises credible (there’s no money to finance them) or meaningful (sure, poverty’s all bad and stuff – but can I keep my job first?); a party with perhaps more modest ambitions seems more focused on public priorities.

1979 was like that.  Thatcher’s latter-day hero-worshippers may believe the British people enthusiastically embraced the full-blooded Thatcherite agenda of sound money, free markets, union-busting, etc.  But it wasn’t the case; leaving aside that what became ‘Thatcherism’ didn’t really exist in 1979, inasmuch as it was articulated, people were generally sceptical – after all, Heath, Wilson and Callaghan had all promised to quell the unions and kill inflation.  A majority of 43 was the result; a solid outcome – the first really decisive one since 1970 – but no more than that; it wasn’t until 1983 that Thatcher won her landslide.

1970 was like that, too – it’s just that Heath screwed it up and didn’t get his landslide; but see that, amidst the crisis, the Labour Party did not find its way back into meaningful, big majority power, before the Tories remade their offer and lived up to it.  1951 was another one; Churchill’s Tories scraped in with a razor thin majority, before 1955 saw them come good; all the way back into the 1920s, 1922 and 1923 were stuttering moves between Tory and Labour, before decisively swinging behind Baldwin’s Tories at the end of 1924.

There are always historical vagaries and contingencies, so the theory isn’t watertight – but it provides a good guide.  A good example is 1992.  The Tories should have lost; 13 years in office and a deep recession with negative equity should’ve done it…  But the man (Kinnock) and the message (Labour policy at the time) just didn’t seem right for the times – all very nice to splash money around on worthy social initiatives, but there’s a recession on, y’know.  The voters stuck, decisively in raw numbers (if not parliamentary seats), with nurse.

Harris is also talking rubbish in his analysis of the Cameron leadership.  His suggestion that Cameron is pure presentation, a pleasant face to front up a hideous Right-wing gang itching to close all the hospitals, shut down the schools (see more from Harris here), and drastically curtail civil liberties (already done), is rubbish.  It’s not that there aren’t tensions in the party, or that Cameron doesn’t put his best face on (he is a politician, after all); but the attack is no more true than Demon Eyes was of Blair in ‘97.*  Most of us Tories thought that was very clever at the time; but it was ridiculous – and those not into politics saw it for all that.  Seems like Harris and his colleagues are stuck in the same trap; and in that sense, it’s not the Tories’ arrogant presumptions of election-winning which he should worry most about – it’s Labour members’ presumptions that because the Tories haven’t been competitive in a national election since ‘92, that they never can be.

But anyway, to Harris’ main point – the thought experiment about Labour winning in 2010.  Harris’ main consideration is what would happen to Cameron and where the party would go, especially if only a majority of one or two seats.

Well, let me say what I think about the Tory Party in that circumstance first, and then move on to Labour.

In those circumstances (a wafer-thin Labour majority), it’s likely that the Tories’ support was heavily concentrated in the South, squeezing out the Lib Dems.  In that case, we can envisage the Tories having gained quite a few more seats, and probably a significant majority of English parliamentary representation.  Bearing in mind Labour’s low popular vote last time, it seems entirely possible that the Tories will have lost with a greater (if not 40%+) popular vote; the Lib Dems having picked up peeling-off Labour voters in northern constituencies, but not sufficiently concentrated to break through into seats.

If that’s the case, we’re into near-hung parliament terrain, especially given the number of rebellious Labour MPs there already are who’ve grown tired of supporting a Government which keeps them starved of their red meat.  The smaller parties will mostly be against Labour (SNP, PC obviously – DUP make odd bedfellows, to say the least); and the remaining Lib Dems will be northern, more Left-wing but also more opposed to Labour as such (as their electoral enemy).  In these circumstances, the prevailing feeling would be that the Government would not last long – it would either lose confidence or seek a stronger mandate within a few years – and so my guess is that Cameron could probably hold on.

Cameron would also have greater options; having taken his newly brand-disinfected Tories through an election, the spectres of Right-wingery past will have been lost to the public mind, and so he can afford to make stronger noises on fertile territory (crime, immigration) which he has so far had to leave to Labour to make loud noises about.

And that brings us to Labour.  If I were a Labour man (I’m not, obviously), I’m not sure I’d want to win in 2010.  I say this as a Tory who fought 1997 and has to admit now we didn’t deserve to win that time.  But a win in 2010 could be even worse for Labour’s long-term health.  Here’s why…

Labour hasn’t decisively won an election since 2001; 2005 was victory by default, but with less enthusiasm than any British government in modern times.  They won with just 35.3% of the popular vote.  Since that time, Labour has only rarely polled above 40%.  You might say that, until recently, neither had the Tories – but this misses the point.  We Tories knew we were unpopular and had to change in 2005, 2006 and 2007 – so that when our ratings started to bump above 40% at the end of that period, we had won our prize.  But Labour saw no such need to change; after all, the election had been ‘won’.

Here’s the thing then – where’s the coalition Labour is defending?  Back in 1997, we Tories made great play of the fact that Major had won in 1992 with a record number of individual votes (which still stands); our argument was that it would take a lot for Labour to peel off all of those votes to abstentions or to change sides.  As it turned out, the total fell by over four million.  But Labour has already lost a similar number of votes from 1997 to 2005; if they had been allocated more purposefully in 2005, it would’ve easily lost the election (to a hung parliament).

Now, I don’t think many Labour people are envisaging winning over great new constituencies this time around; I assume the hope is that some of those voters who have deserted the party since 1997 will come home.  That’s a big hope (although the Iraq war’s disappearing relevance makes it more tenable), and one that seems primarily to depend on voters sharing two, linked, goals – keeping the Tories out and staying loyal to Labour.  The first isn’t a major issue for most people (aside from the minority of committed centre-Left and Left political enthusiasts – 15%? – nobody really cares what Thatcher did or didn’t do), while the second seems to be essentially “we’ll come through for you if you vote for us one more time.”

So, Harris is hoping that enough of them will turn out to squeak Labour through – as I say, probably with an even more jaded mandate than in 2005, with no popular vote plurality or parliamentary majority in England, and possibly not even a popular vote plurality in the UK as a whole.  The votes it did get were gathered by appeals to “stick with us”, rather than much of a fresh, popular programme; it probably has no new voters across huge (and often growing) tracts of the country, and no advocates, in the workplace, the pub or wherever.

Brown is returned to office – in the middle of a recession, which may last for years, even if by then the fall in GDP has probably come to its end; there’s lots of reason to think, because of debt overhang, that it could take years to start growing again.  Labour won (somehow) by fighting an election against Tory cuts, but coming through the worst of the recession means bringing the budget into at least the prospect of balance – so that means big tax hikes or big spending cuts; probably both.  Every spending cut means annoying a constituency, and proving that what the Tories said last time was right.  Every tax hike just brings back all the old saws about Labour not being trustworthy with your money.

By the time 2013, 2014 or 2015 comes along – whenever it would be – Labour wouldn’t stand a chance.  And probably not for two elections after that.  I think (for reasons of political sociology) that, as things stand now, if Cameron wins in 2010 Labour will find it difficult to come back much before 2020, unless the Tories do a Heath; but if they cling on to the last – a government that probably outlived its usefulness when its only real leader left in 2007, and certainly had outlived its public trust – then the voters will turn their back on them.  We might actually see that overdue realignment take place.

So yeah, hope for Labour to win in 2010 – because Labour as we know it might never win again thereafter.

* In fact, the comparison is very apt, and so it would be with Thatcher in ‘79, and in the US with Reagan in ‘80, Clinton in ‘92, Bush in ‘00 and probably Obama in ‘08.  In each case, a leader and their relatively small cabal took the reins of a party and, with the acquiescence but not always enthusiastic support of its members, took them into election-winning territory.  The age of mass politics, with vibrant member movements is over – this is a consumerised model for consumerised times.  The interesting point is that only some of those above definitively changed the minds of their membership – Thatcher and Reagan, yes; Clinton and Blair, no; Bush, ultimately perhaps broke the party; Obama – well, like Cameron, it’s too early to say.