New Labour was not about making hard choices

I have now finished watching Blair & Brown – the New Labour Revolution, a 5-part series from the BBC on the Labour government of 1997 to 2010. For politicos like me it was compulsive viewing, for all its flaws. Does it say anything to us about politics now?

One criticism of the series is that it was too long. Five episodes of one hour each is indeed a lot of time, but I was hooked, as were many of the reviewers. We learnt quite a few new things, and the tension between its two principal characters gives the subject a fascinating dynamic. In fact the main problem seemed to be on how much it left out. There was no coherent commentary from the left of the party, for example, and the causes of the Global Financial Crisis were not examined. This left two critical parts of the New Labour narrative (or myth in the word’s broader sense simplified story) unchallenged – that “Old Labour” was unelectable, and that the GFC was something that happened from out of the blue from the USA that the government neither contributed to, nor could do much about. Both warrant challenge, even if emotionally I am bought into the first of those myths, while strongly disagreeing with the second. But neither is a simple question to unpick, and the argument on the GFC is probably asking too much for most political journalists to be able to handle, alas. Instead they took a whole episode to dig into the Iraq War – an editorial decision that it is hard to gainsay. The first episode covered the period before they won power, and there was episode for each of the three terms – so there was a logical structure to the whole series. Quite a bit of time was spent on pregnant pauses within the interviews (which included both main protagonists amongst many other important figures), but the overall pace was not slow.

I am struck by how deeply flawed the partnership was. The two leaders worked as a team before the 1997 election, but after that Gordon Brown jealously guarded the Treasury as his fiefdom and kept Tony Blair at arms length. I have no doubt that it was Mr Brown who was primarily at fault here. One of the most remarkable moments came when it dawned on Mr Blair that the government had to dramatically raise its spending on the NHS, to bring it into line with the average of health spending in Europe. This was a brilliant insight (which I have explained recently on one of my blogs) that very few people in the governing elite seem to understand – instead seeing the NHS as a spending black hole that needs to be contained somehow. But the only way Mr Blair could persuade Mr Brown to follow this line was by announcing it in a television interview. Mr Brown could not see the wood for the trees. It turned out to be one of New Labour’s best, and most popular, policies.

It would be tempting to characterise the partnership as Mr Blair being strong on vision, and Mr Brown being good on the detail. But Mr Blair was wrong about a lot of vision things too. He was wrong to push for joining the European currency (though at the time I was on Mr Blair’s side) – another disagreement resolved through the news media; he was wrong about joining the Americans in the Iraq war; he was wrong about trying to bring a private sector ethos into the public services, such as the NHS and schools. On all of these Mr Brown’s judgement seems to have been better, though he was and remains very unengaged on Iraq. But Mr Brown became complacent, especially with his hands-off approach to the financial sector. He put in place a tripartite system for managing national finance, between his Treasury, the Bank of England, and the Financial Services Authority (FSA). All well and good, but it was clearly his job to ensure that the system as a whole was working. He did not seem to grasp the seriousness of the situation until the collapse of Lehman in late 2008, by which time he was Prime Minister. His response then was magnificent – but more insight in 2007, when the risks were becoming obvious, would have helped. Instead he cut the rate of Income Tax, which left the country very vulnerable when the bubble burst. He was so blinkered by his success in “no more boom and bust” that he would not see the risks building up in the system.

Though it ended badly, New Labour has to be seen as a success overall, with three successive Labour general election victories, two of them landslides. Can it tell us anything about the future? The obvious parallel takes us back to Labour, which once again is back in the doldrums. The New Labour strategy was to win by courting the political middle ground and holding back on the party’s more left wing instincts; their most important insight was that the middle ground was a rather conservative place, and not the liberalism associated with centrist political parties, though it needed that too. The party needed a firm message on law and order, and a conservative stance on taxes and spending – as well as keeping union power at bay. This meant accepting that a lot of the legacy of Margaret Thatcher’s government had to stay. That itself was not enough, because John Major’s Conservatives were firmly anchored in that middle ground, and had used that strength to pull off a victory against the odds in 1992. Mr Blair and Mr Brown also had to exude confidence and competence. This was not too hard, as the Tories were beset by divisions, and their economic prestige suffered a fatal blow with the ERM fiasco in 1992, shortly after the election.

Can Labour follow the same strategy? Its leader, Sir Keir Starmer, clearly thought so after he took over in 2020, with the government floundering with its response to the covid-19 pandemic, and seemingly led by right-wing ideologues. Mr Starmer always appeared on television with the word “leadership” on his backdrop. But the Conservative leader, Boris Johnson, has a clear eye on that middle ground, which remains generally conservative. But he also understands that the middle ground has moved on – largely thanks to New Labour. Now it means a strong commitment to state-funded public services, such as the NHS. Unlike Mr Major (now Sir John), though, he has an iron grip on his party. He has recovered from his wobbles on the pandemic, and the public (or the floating voters anyway) appear to have forgiven him. Mr Johnson’s rhetoric on climate change and the environment also marks out his fight for the middle ground. He is not presenting anything like the target that Messrs Blair and Brown were able to destroy prior to 1997.

But the problem for Mr Johnson, and anybody hoping to win on the middle ground, is that it is a have-your-cake-and- eat-it sort of place. It wants well-funded public services but no more taxes; it wants action on climate change but no addition to heating or motoring costs, and so on. This is creating growing tensions within the Conservative Party. It does not create much of a direct opportunity for Labour – who are no more able to solve the contradictions of this middle ground than the Tories. But division amongst the Tories could allow Sir Keir to appear as a more competent alternative.

But a successful challenge is unlikely to look anything like New Labour. Perhaps Labour can try its own “cake” strategy by allying itself with the Lib Dems and the Greens, each of which can cement its appeal to different segments of the anti-Conservative market while leaving there contradictions unresolved. That alliance would need to be based on the promise of electoral reform. It would be a risky strategy, and it is too early to start playing the cards now. New Labour did create an informal alliance with the Lib Dems in the 1990s, as part of its strategy of leaving nothing to chance. But the Lib Dems are weaker now, while trust between the parties is low. Mr Blair was happy to hint at electoral reform then but in the end was “unpersuaded”. Something stronger would be needed now.

Britain, along with most of the rest of the world, is confronting some difficult choices. This is much more the case than in 1990s, when the opportunities for economic growth were much better. After an initial period of austerity, New Labour did not have to navigate such treacherous waters and was able to present voters with a “both/and” proposition. Alas hard choices do not make good politics – the revolution now would be to make taking those choices electorally appealing. The New Labour experience offers us no clue on how to pull off such a feat.

What is the point of the Labour Party?

People often ask what is the point of the British Liberal Democrats; the same question, for similar reasons, might be asked of the country’s Green Party. The raison d’ĂȘtre of Labour seems self-evident. But the party is failing and the question needs to be asked again.

A century ago Labour broke through the country’s two-party duopoly to replace the Liberal Party as one half of Britain’s two-party system. At that time the point of Labour was clear: it was to represent the interests of Britain’s working classes. The party’s founders argued that working people were ill served by the existing system, and that the Liberals in particular were letting their working class supporters down. Working people needed a more radical reworking of the political economy than the Liberals seemed capable of offering. It was an argument they won as the Liberals were riven by division and failed to offer a coherent raison d’ĂȘtre of their own. Labour then struggled to reconcile their radicalism with the practicalities of government, but eventually, in 1945, they succeeded with a radical programme of welfare reform, combined with relatively conservative economic management and foreign engagement. Ironically the two principal architects of this reconciliation were in fact Liberals: William Beveridge and Maynard Keynes. Such is politics.

Since then the function of the Labour party changed, as the nature of work in the British economy changed. The agricultural and industrial workforces were steadily replaced by bureaucrats and service industry workers. In the 1960s and 1970s trade unionism, which formed the backbone of the Labour movement, seemed out of touch with the times. They opposed more efficient industrial organisation and often entrenched conservative attitudes to race and sex. Labour struggled to adapt. It was riven by division when in government in 1964 to 1970, and failed to convincingly win power back in 1974, finally succumbing to a Conservative monopoly of power in 1979. When it retook power in 1997 it was as “New Labour” under Tony Blair. In its new form its job was simply to oppose the Conservatives by marshalling a coalition of working class and middle class voters. In this view the British political system had become a two-party institution like that in the USA. Political organisation outside the two main parties was pointless, each of the two had to be a broad coalition. The days when a political party could be based on narrow class interests were gone.

The British political establishment, from most politicians to journalists and civil servants largely accepts this idea of what the two main political parties are for. But it has a problem, evident in the USA as well as Britain, though it is resolving differently in each country. It is too tempting for an ideological clique to try and take over the machinery of one of the major parties in order to impose a programme on the country based on minority support. The ideologues may fail, but in doing so they leave the field to their opponents, and the system fails to become truly competitive. That is what has happened to Labour following its loss of power in 2010. Labour was still run by a relatively broad coalition, representing the interests of public service professionals and the “new” working class, dominated by ethnic minority workers in the big cities, but they dropped more conservative supporters.

The two-party system then fractured badly in 2015, when in Scotland as the SNP took almost all the seats. Since Labour had previously dominated there, it has ruined their chances of being truly competitive on the national stage – the party has little prospect of governing on its own, even if they deprive the Conservatives of a majority. An ideologically hollowed-out Labour Party has proved unable to challenge the SNP, and has even lost out to the Tories in Scotland. An ideologically-focused Labour Party has proved just as uncompetitive.

The Labour leadership since this disaster, Jeremy Corbyn followed by Sir Keir Starmer, has chosen to ignore it. Both clung to the possibility that the party can win enough seats in Westminster to govern on its own. Mr Corbyn sought to do this with ideological radicalism in the hope that this would motivate enough disillusioned and apathetic voters to overcome the legions of older, more conservative voters who turn out more reliably. This came closer to succeeding in 2017 than anybody expected, but led to disaster in 2019 – which of those elections was the outlier due to special circumstances remains hotly debated. Sir Keir is going back to the idea of an unideological party that can challenge the Conservatives on competence.

Sir Keir’s strategy seems to be navigating that awkward ground between success and failure. At this year’s conference he needed to show that he was in charge of its party. This he has largely done – the disunity and “chaos” described by some are in fact evidence of authority being asserted. But does Labour look like a competent government in waiting, as Mr Blair’s did before 1997? Not yet. Will it ever? Open to question. And if it can’t show evident competence, what else does it offer? Above all this looks like a strategy that depends on the Conservatives losing the election, rather than Labour winning it. For all the government’s incompetence, however, the current Tory leadership knows how to win elections by changing the subject. And remember Labour can’t just win – it has to win big.

Meanwhile there are those who think Labour should instead break the system that is now so loaded against it. This means changing the answer to the question of what Labour is for. It would cease to be one of the pillars of a two-party system, but an ideological vanguard fighting for the interests of its metropolitan voters in a multiparty system. To do this it has to work with other parties, including the SNP. Above all it needs to adopt electoral reform. That means adopting a system of proportional representation to the UK parliament – lesser reforms such as the Alternative Vote won’t do. This has two advantages. First it allows serious cooperation with the Lib Dems and the Greens, which should improve the party’s chances of winning, and of forming a successful government if it fails to win a majority. After the Lib Dem catastrophe following coalition with the Conservatives in 2015, the minor parties will seek a high price for their support and serious electoral reform must be part of it. Second, once implemented, it will pose big problems for the Conservatives, who will have much more trouble fighting off the populist right, as well as hanging onto liberal Remainers.

But this strategy brings its own problems. There is no upwelling for this sort of political reform amongst the public – support is broad but shallow. It would come under sustained attack by the Conservatives who would claim that it was throwing away the county’s cherished traditions and inviting weak governments. If they want to change the subject away from their competence to govern, this might present them with just that opportunity. This is why I was sceptical of such a strategy when I looked at Labour’s prospects last year. Back then, though, I thought that the Conservatives’ weak performance in government would make them vulnerable. I am much less confident of that now.

As it happens Labour’s conference rejected a motion in favour of electoral reform. It was backed by 80% of constituency members, but blocked by Britain’s ever-conservative unions, doubtless after nudging from the Labour leadership. There is no sign that the current leadership wants to go in that direction. Labour seems too weak to win, but strong enough to prevent any other parties than the Conservatives and the SNP from succeeding. So just what is the point?

What is the meaning of the Chesham and Amersham by election?

What is the point of the Liberal Democrats? This question has been asked often since the party bet big on reversing the Brexit referendum result and lost. Languishing in single digit poll ratings, with only a handful of MPs, a weak brand and a leader who looks like just another white male middle-aged politician, the question was asked rhetorically. It was obvious that the answer was that there wasn’t any. The party would be replaced by some combination of a newly-moderate Labour Party and the Greens. On the eve of the by-election in the safe Conservative seat of Chesham and Amersham bookmakers were still offering odds of only 13-1 that the Lib Dems would win.

But the result showed a different answer to that question. It wasn’t even close. The Conservative vote crashed by 20%; Labour’s by 10% (they only had 11%); the Lib Dems ended up with a big majority. This shows that only the Lib Dems amongst “progressive” parties have a chance of challenging the Tories in their heartlands. Labour is still paying the price for its flirtation with radicalism under Jeremy Corbyn; the Greens do not have the strength and depth of ground organisation, and many Conservative voters find their brand offputting. It is now clear that if the Conservatives’ grip on the Westminster parliament is to be broken, the Lib Dems will have to play their part.

Why did the Conservatives do so badly, when nationally their stock is still riding high? The obvious answer is that the party is focusing on consolidating its hold on its newly won voters in northern England, the Midlands and Wales – the old “red wall”; this leaves the party’s traditional heartlands feeling neglected. By itslef this explanation doesn’t work. Under Boris Johnson’s leadership the party has a sunny “Have your cake and eat it” stance: doing well by the new voters is not meant to be at the expense of the old. After all that is what “levelling up”, the stated aim of their policy, is meant to mean. Something else is annoying the heartlands.

The first, I think, is resentment about Brexit. To old Remain supporters, many of whom were in this consituency, this is not going well, and the arguments made about the damage it would do, dismissed by Brexit supporters like Mr Johnson as “Project Fear”, are turning into facts. Combine this with the many missteps of the government’s response to covid, and there is little love and trust in the government.

There were to more specific issues that the Lib Dems hammered on, once they found they were resonnating. The first was the government’s new planning law proposals, designed to make it easier to build on greenbelt land. Suburban voters such as those in this constituency have a fear of development spoiling their green and pleasant environment. The Lib Dems also want more houses to be built, but suggest that the government’s plans will be a developers’ charter to build poor quality housing (in terms of environmental standards at least) where it is not needed, instead of “community-led” initiatives to build more good-quality affordable and social housing. The second issue was the new HS2 railway from London to Birmingham, which is being built through the area. The Lib Dems support HS2, so once again some political finesse was required. The candidate promised to uphold constituents’ interests in opposing what is seen as a brutal juggernaut not listening to local concerns.

Doubtless Tories will feel that this is more chicanery from the Lib Dems – but it is not as if their party does not delight in chicanery itself. If the roles were reversed they would have had no hesitation in doing the same. That is politics; there are no prizes for holding the high ground. For the Lib Dems a weak brand has its disadvantages: it doesn’t rile floating voters so much and gives more room for manoeuvre. Still the party is only a threat to the Conservatives if it has a local foothold, and that is only patchy. Besides its appeal is now largely restricted to better-educated voters, and the result does not provide evidence of a broadening of their appeal. But where the party already has a foothold, it will be re-energised. The party should also get more attention in the media for a while – after the embarassment of most outlets failing to spot what was happening here, in spite of ample evidence, while giving extensive coverage to the Batley and Spen by election, due on 1 July. The party now needs to make good use of this brief window of opportunity.

For the Conservatives it is a clear sign of danger, though their politcal position remains formidable. Success in British politcs depends to some extent on taking core support for granted while reaching out to more marginal voters. But this is a dangerous exercise, as Mr Johnson’s predecessor, Theresa May, found in the 2017 election, when she tried to do just that far too blatently. The main point of worry for the government must be those planning reforms. They are going to need far more political skill on housing than they have shown hithertoo if they are to avoid further damage.

Labour’s predicament deserves a post of its own, but for them there is good and bad news. The collapse of their vote shows that their brand is now very weak – after a period when they had often done relatively well in Lib Dem strongholds. The Greens got more than twice as many votes. But there is no evidence that resurgent Lib Dems will undermine them in critical battleground seats, and it also shows that the Conservatives can be put on the defensive. An optimist might suggest that a weakening of the brand is a necessary precursor to de-toxification. The party still needs to be able to fire up its supporters, of course. Talk of a “progressive alliance” of non-Tory parties is premature, however. But Labour strategists will need to let the Lib Dems undermine the Conservative vote somehow.

For now though the Lib Dems can bask in the glory a bit. Their new MP, Sarah Green, is a strong addition to their parliamentary ranks. Remarkably, 8 of the party’s 12 MPs are now female. Quite a reversal from a party that used to be much derided for its failure to get female MPs elected.

Labour: Tony Blair is on the wrong track

I really wanted to leave Britain’s Labour Party alone for a few weeks. It gets too much media attention as it is. Part of me just wants to party to go away and die quietly. Another part thinks that most of the comment is just ritualistic diatribe from enemies and internal factions, saying the same old things regardless of reality. Then along came Tony Blair. My concern is not so much about the effect of his intervention has on Labour, but that too many people outside the party cheer him on and congratulate him on his insight. Especially ageing liberal professional-types like me.

Mr Blair’s intervention was a long article in the New Statesman. It is clever and well-written, and worth a read if you are interested in British politics. It has drawn widespread praise, for example this from Trevor Phillips in The Times. He suggests that parties of the centre-left (a dying breed, as he points out) must be both radical and sensible. Under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership Labour was radical but not sensible, but under Sir Keir Starmer’s… well you can fill in the blanks. He makes two main points. The first is that Labour is stuck in an outdated policy agenda that does not embrace the true challenges of the modern world. It supports on nationalisation and “free” university tuition, and it is without a reform agenda for public services. But the world is being rapidly changed by new technology, and many of the world’s biggest challenges, such as climate change, can only be embraced using that technology. Meanwhile the party’s central theme – a rejection of austerity, has been trumped by the current government’s “what it takes” approach to the covid crisis. Mr Blair’s second point is that Labour has surrendered the debate on social and cultural issues to the extreme left – shouting down people who question it from the likes of J K Rowling on transgender politics, and Mr Phillips on racism.

Mr Blair doesn’t really spell out what he means by the embrace of new technology, beyond more online learning and a few other examples at the fringes. On cultural issues he wants to move to a middle ground that tolerates a wider diversity of views. He seeks a remaking of Labour, and joint efforts by Labour and Lib Dem figures, alongside apolitical ones, to define the new agenda.

There is much here that I can agree with. Much of the old policy agenda promoted by Mr Corbyn’s party was nonsense, especially those favoured by big trade union bosses. The shouty and intolerant way that the left take on cultural issues alarms me too, even though I agree with much of what they say. The problem is that, for all his talk of embracing the way the world has changed, I’m not sure Mr Blair has noticed how much it really has. And in some ways the post-Blair Labour Party has adapted well to these changes, saving it from the disaster it was heading for under his leadership.

The rise of two groups in particular encapsulate this change. One is younger public service professionals. The Labour government of 1997 to 2010 greatly expanded public services, and extended university education. This has expanded a new class of people directly or indirectly employed by the public sector. But their path to middle class security is barred by high property prices. They have a stake in the public sector, hence a vitriolic reaction to austerity, have cultivated modern social attitudes at university, and are angered at the way Conservatives prioritise protecting and enhancing the property and entitlements of older people. The current Labour movement is largely made up of these people. The second group is the new working class: those with precarious jobs and drawn from a diverse range of cultural and ethnic backgrounds. This group felt badly let down by cuts to benefits and public services, are victims of routine discrimination, and feel that the government is not doing enough to enhance its physical and economic security. In 2010 the new working classes’ support for Labour was soft; Labour has turned that around.

Labour’s predicament is that while it has consolidated its hold on these two groups, it is letting go of many others, and in particular traditional white working class voters with relatively stable jobs or pensions, and ethnic minority middle classes (of which many are now holding jobs in the Conservative cabinet). It is not at all clear that there is a magic “sensible but radical” policy agenda out there which allows Labour to hold not its current core vote, while winning over many of the people who currently support the Conservatives.

I think there is a deeper problem with Mr Blair’s approach as well. It is very top-down. His “radical” ideas about embracing technological change sound a lot like he has fallen for a lot of the hype around new technology prompted by large, progressive companies (as well as the Chinese Communist Party, but I digress). He has form on this: while in government Mr Blair fell for a lot of the radical business transformation talk put about by management consultants and big business executives, and badly misjudged their applicability to the public sector. My worry is that this approach to technology transformation, and especially its enthusiasm for Artificial Intelligence, is dehumanising and creates dependencies that are vulnerable to disruption by criminals and others, which in turn leads to increasingly intrusive security.

What I believe the left has to do is to engage with the public at the local level, and develop new civic institutions to create a human interface between the public and public services and the social safety net. This means working with a diversity of people, many of whom you will have political disagreements with. It also means using new technology in a distributed and empowering fashion, rather yet more “computer says no”. Some Labour people, including people in the far-left Momentum movement, understand this. There are local bright spots (Preston is often quoted), but by and large Labour as an institution, and Mr Blair is a prime exemplar, favours the seizure of power at the most senior level it can, and implementing change from there, and crushing local dissent.

So yes, Labour must be remade if it is to play a useful part in the progress of this country. But not in a way that Tony Blair has any clear conception of.

All the main parties have opportunities and challenges

We now have nearly a complete body, so the post-mortem is more convincing. What the elections show is that politics has been changed decisively by Brexit and the takeover of the Conservatives by Boris Johnson and his supporters. This new world offers challenges and opportunities for each of the five main political parties – the Conservatives, Labour, the SNP, the Lib Dems and the Greens.

One comment I am reading a lot of is how much these elections have been favourable to those in power, at least down to regional level. The Conservatives have done well in England, and in the Teesside and West Midlands mayoralties. Labour did well in Wales, Manchester and other big city mayoralties. The SNP did well in Scotland. Perhaps that is the influence of the covid-19 crisis. Perhaps that means that the winners are not as secure as some suggest. One aspect of this incumbency bonus is the naked way the Conservatives are using power in recently won seats in England to bring in local government spending. The voters have got the message, it appears, and don’t object; Labour complaints only draw attention to it.

The biggest winners are the Conservatives, who have consolidated their hold on formerly Labour areas in northern England and the Midlands, but not Wales. I have already written about this. It places the party in a formidable electoral position. The challenge has been well put by Matthew Parris in The Times. The party has been garnering support among people who see themselves as the rejected, society’s losers. Important though these people are, the policies they favour are not those that will be good for the country’s prosperity and wellbeing. They favour continuity and stability, if not pushing the clock back. Sooner or later this is going to create unbearable pressure at government level. They will either be unable to deliver on their promises to improve local conditions, in which case their voters will move on, or they succeed, in which case the politics of victimhood will play less well, and other parties will find the going easier. The two pronged attack that did for the Conservatives at the Euro elections in 2019 can do for them again – as both professionals and populists close in on either flank. For now the Prime Minister looks likely to bluff his way through this challenge, delivering cheery words but little in the way of substantive results. But the vulnerability remains. Meanwhile Labour, the Lib Dems and the Greens were all able to chip away at the Tory hold in their southern heartlands where well-led locally.

One of the rituals of election post-mortems is commentators to have a go at the Labour Party, criticising it for not listening to its core supporters. Take this piece from Janice Turner in The Times again. And yes, I often join this chorus myself. But when most of these people accuse Labour of looking down on traditional supporters, they themselves look down on Labour’s core support, especially amongst “woke” public service professionals. It needs to be taken with salt. More interesting is the variation on the theme by John Harris in the Guardian, who accuses Labour of too often ignoring local community groups, to rebuild the civic infrastructure it lost when old industries went into decline. This is something that the party seemed to understand under the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn, and certainly was important to his effective deputy, John McDonnell, but it is being abandoned by the current leadership.

Labour finds itself in a tricky position. It must extend its base beyond those public-sector professionals and the “new” urban working classes, without abandoning core ideas, like multiculturalism, that are central to its hold on that existing base. I’m sure that Mr Harris is right and that local community politics is part of the answer. But it isn’t easy, and in places they will find that the Lib Dems or Greens will have got there first. Tricky strategic decisions lie ahead, but their position is far from hopeless. The results are not as bad as many are making but, but they do show that the Tory hold on the old “Red Wall” remains tight, in England at least.

The SNP are the other big winners. The challenge for them is clear: navigating the drive towards independence for Scotland. The idea of independence is popular in Scotland, but the hard reality is likely to be less so. Perhaps the UK government’s best strategy is to move the debate onto the nitty gritty and let the SNP get bogged down; but to do that it has to concede a referendum, though not perhaps the referendum that the SNP want. See this interesting article by David Herdson on political betting.com. Losing the last referendum was the best thing to happen to the SNP; that will not be the case for another one. But if the government refuses to concede a referendum, then the SNP will continue to control the agenda.

For the Lib Dems the elections produced mixed results, but hopeful signs outweighed the discouraging ones. The party is making headway against the Conservatives where it has local strength. The Tory drive for the old Labour heartlands increases its vulnerability in its own backyard. But no earthquakes. It is not yet clear how the party breaks through into national scene. The party does not have a sharp brand; this can help in Britain’s electoral system, as a sharp brand deters as well as attracts voters. In Scotland the party held onto all its first-past-the-post seats, and challenged hard for a further one. But it won no seats on the proportional list system. This is ironic for a party that is so keen on proportional representation.

The advantages of a clear brand are shown by the Greens, who generally did well. If Labour starts to dilute its appeal to younger and environmentally conscious voters, the Greens are more likely to benefit now than the Lib Dems. The Greens easily beat the Lib Dems in London, as well as Scotland (where they contested no first-past-the post seats). Still, their claim to be the third party of national politics is overdone. Their predicament is the opposite to that of the Lib Dems – trying to turn a strong national brand into something that wins them councils and parliamentary seats.

Should the non-Tory parties work together to challenge the Conservatives, outside Scotland at least? This can only be on the basis of changes to the electoral system and perhaps other constitutional changes. This has been done in New Zealand. But for that to be viable there needs to be a broad understanding in the public that the system is broken and needs to be changed. For all the whinging I see little evidence of this. Beyond a little sotto voce staying out of each others’ way at the next general election I don’t think this idea will get anywhere.

So the landscaper has changed, but we are only beginning to see where this is leading.

Labour pays the price for internal party democracy

We don’t have a complete body yet, but the post-mortem has started. (Credit to The New Statesman’s Stephen Bush for the post-mortem without a body metaphor, which I find very appealing). The Conservative victory in the traditionally Labour seat of Hartlepool is not especially surprising, but the scale of that victory is greater than expected. Looked at in a broader, longer term perspective, though, and it is quite startling.

The scale of the result was not because the Tories did unexpectedly well (most people thought they would hoover up the Brexit Party’s substantial vote), but because Labour’s vote share sank from 38% to 29%. An independent candidate picked up nearly 10%, and that seems to be were most of the Labour loss went – though a string of other candidates picked up about 1% each. That included the Lib Dems who sank back from 4%; they had been in second place no so very long ago.

The first thing to say about this is that the Brexit referendum of 2016 has proved an astonishing political success for the Conservatives, if an unintended one. It has fractured the Labour Party. At first many of their voters went to Ukip and then the Brexit Party. The Tories then undermined and demolished these insurgent parties and scooped up the bulk of their votes. The party has been brutal to its own Remainer supporters, but has managed to keep many of these in tow – though as Hartlepool as on one of the most Leave-supporting areas of the country, the by-election itself does not provide much evidence of Remain-supporting Tories staying with the party. Now that the country has left the EU, the politics of Brexit are much easier for the Tories to navigate. Remainers can still be painted as bad losers, unpatriotic and metropolitans sneering at the working classes, while Remain supporting politicians have no convincing policies to rally around.

But Labour’s failure has deeper roots than Brexit. It is often attributed to the party’s estrangement from its working class base. It certainly seems to be true that what might be called “traditional” working class voters have been deserting the party for some time. These may be characterised as white, less educated and less physically or socially mobile people, often living in towns rather than big cities. And yet this is a shrinking demographic, and Labour’s hold on the more modern version of the working class voter (living in big cities, insecure job, rented accommodation, often with an ethnic minority background) looks as strong as ever. Labour is also missing out on a substantial non-metropolitan middle class vote, which is well represented in places like Hartlepool. Back in the 1990s these voters used to be called “Middle England”, and were the particular focus of Labour leader Tony Blair. Mr Blair proved very successful at this, but his success was denounced as treachery by many Labour activists. In the end Mr Blair, a consummate Metropolitan if ever there was one, was losing this demographic, especially because of his liberal approach to immigration.

But Labour’s rot turned toxic after 2010, after they lost power, and with the selection of Ed Miliband as its leader. This was about the time that I started this blog, and there was still some engagement on social media between Labour and Lib Dem supporters, before we fractured and disappeared into our separate bubbles. Those Labour supporters proved right about the Lib Dems, and how long-term the damage the Coalition would be to the party. But we proved right about them, when we suggested that Labour neglected Middle England at its peril. This was denied furiously. Labour supporters were convinced that their route to victory would come by consolidating their support amongst “progressives’, including people who had been too disillusioned to vote previously. They did not need to convince people who had voted Tory to change their minds; the collapse in the Lib Dem vote would be to their benefit. Tory and Lib Dem hating became a signature theme, along with increasingly shrill condemnations of “austerity”.

In fact at the next election in 2015 Labour succeeded in winning the Conservatives a majority in their own right, by scaring many Lib Dem voters into their arms, and by undermining the Lib Dems in Tory facing seats. That, of course, is not how Labour activists saw it, and they doubled down by selecting Jeremy Corbyn as their new leader. The relatively strong Labour performance in 2017 seemed to vindicate this. But Labour success was as much due to mistakes made by Tory leader Theresa May as the ability of Mr Corbyn to mobilise new voters. Mrs May still made headway with her strategy of pressuring Labour in their heartlands. There followed a further two years when the party hollowed itself out, ending in the disaster of the 2019 election. Hartlepool has shown that the Tory victory then was no flash in the pan.

A lot of the responsibility for this disaster rests with the two leaders, Ed Miliband and Jeremy Corbyn. But both were elected by the party membership and the membership placed them under particular pressure, though party processes on policy. These processes are usually referred to as “democracy”, which the party prides itself on. The Lib Dems, and I assume the Greens, are just the same, and indeed often criticise Labour for not being “democratic” enough. As you will notice, I am extremely reluctant to use the word “democracy” in connection with the processes by which members of a political party exercise their rights. Political parties are self-selecting groups of people, who can leave at any point, and who may be expelled if they annoy other members too much. Democracy is about broader society and the inclusion of people who don’t have a choice about whether they belong. This is one of the paradoxes of our political system: political parties are an important and necessary part of the democratic system, but they themselves are fundamentally not democratic. The Conservatives are so successful because their members have the least influence over leadership and policy out of all the main parties.

The Lib Dems and Greens have little choice but to give their members a strong say over what their party does and who leads it. They are insurgent parties that need to offer reasons for members of the public to join and stay with the party. For Labour it is different. They aspire to be a national political institution: part of a two-party system which shares nearly all the important political power. The party has an institutional assumption that political parties other than themselves or the Conservatives are a damaging distraction that no politically responsible person should support. But a successful institution of that nature can’t be over-fussy about about political values – it constantly needs to be thinking about recruiting support from any group of voters it can. That’s an exaggeration; the two big parties do have core values running through them. But whereas the Tory Party can dump a large part of its core support (in the case of the Remain supporting political elite) in a drive to recruit Middle England voters, Labour has been unable to pull off a similar feat since the days of Mr Blair. The membership naturally wants the party to focus on people like them; they cannot be counted on to take a cold hard look at the facts. It was the Labour membership, not the leadership, that fought tooth and nail against Brexit. That was seen as betrayal in Brexit-supporting parts of the country, though it did help Labour drive back a real Lib Dem threat in places like London. Mr Corbyn then compounded the trouble by appearing incompetent and unpatriotic – and yet the membership enthusiastically backed him as their mascot, preventing MPs from removing him when they could see all too clearly the damage he was doing.

That membership may now be chastened, and more accepting of compromise. Labour’s position is far from hopeless. They can still win the next election. They have a secure base among the metropolitan middle class and the “new” working class. They have strong support among younger voters, and escalating property values are creating a growing class of people excluded from the Tory dream. The Conservatives are not widely trusted. But in order to win Labour must go after groups of people who normally vote Conservative, and pressure Tories in areas where they had previously felt secure. That will mean taking Labour into places that it is not comfortable about. To date I have not seen any sign that anybody in in Labour’s higher echelons understands that. Perhaps the shock of these elections will jolt them into decisive action.

Sir Keir Starmer must take tough decisions on personnel and policy

Recently I wrote that Boris Johnson is in a strong position politically, notwithstanding all his ms-steps on Covid-19. This was based on British success on the vaccine, and that, for most people, Brexit is not proving to be a disaster. This now seems to be accepted political wisdom. I didn’t talk about another reason he is in a strong position: the disarray of the opposition parties in his English heartlands.

This weekend’s papers are full of despair over Labour’s new leader, Sir Keir Starmer; his honeymoon is well and truly over. It is even worse for the Lib Dem leader, Sir Ed Davey, who never had a honeymoon. Journalists want to see opposition led by charismatic leaders, and neither fit the bill. But I have a huge respect for both men: the main problem with each of them is the weakness their parties.

Ever since the 2010 General Election, Labour have been chasing a chimera: the “progressive majority”. This is the idea that most voters do not want to see a Conservative government. At first the idea was used to push cooperation between Labour and the Lib Dems. But under Ed Miliband, who took over in 2010, the idea was that Labour should harness this majority on its own, by crushing the Lib Dems and Greens; there was no need to chase marginal Conservative voters and so compromise “progressive” values. This strategy was carried forward by his successor, Jeremy Corbyn. They both managed to crush the Lib Dems and Greens, but this turned out to help the Conservatives more than their own party.

Sir Keir now accepts that he has to hone his party’s appeal to conservative voters. But after a decade of the party polishing its “progressive” credentials, it is far from clear that he is taking his party with him, or that he knows how to build the trust of these voters. His early strategy was to show that he is more competent and a stronger leader than the Prime Minister, Boris Johnson. He may have succeeded, but it clearly isn’t enough. The commonplace complaints are that he lacks vision, and that his team is weak. Of these criticisms, the second is probably the most important for now. None of his front-bench colleagues has made much impression, either because they aren’t really up to it, or because Sir Keir isn’t giving them enough scope. The Conservatives have their weakest front bench for some time, but even they are doing better than Labour. They have Rishi Sunak, Michael Gove and even the Health Secretary Matt Hancock is showing some grit. Priti Patel, the Home Secretary, seems to be completely useless to professional types like me, but it would be dangerous to underestimate her appeal to conservative voters.

Sir Keir needs to take some decisive action on his team. But he also needs to set out some kind of a story on policy. Many are urging him to adopt reform to the British constitution (with an eye on the Scots), but this looks like a dead letter to me. The English grumble about this, but have no real appetite for change. Whatever he does has to be both conservative and painful. The pain – by which I mean upsetting a lot of his activists – is necessary, otherwise the public will not believe that anything has changed. The model for this is the way Tony Blair engineered a fight over Clause 4 to the Labour constitution in the 1990s. Accepting Brexit is not enough. A tough stand on immigration and jobs for working class Britons looks like one promising angle. He will probably have to shadow Tory policy on tax and spend too even if they privately think it’s nonsense. Complaints about “austerity” will have to be struct from the Labour lexicon.

What of the Lib Dems? Going into coalition with the Conservatives in 2010 exposed fatal weakness in the party’s core support, and both the other parties took advantage (roughly speaking, Labour took the votes and the Tories took the parliamentary seats). They then went all out to stop Brexit, which brought about a revival, but failure leaves them bereft. Many of their former supporters see no compelling reason to support the party rather than Sir Keir’s Labour. Alas the party will have to learn patience. They will only advance on the national scene if the other parties give them the space. If Labour follows my advice and takes a sharp turn to the right, something like the gap that the Lib Dems exploited in the 2000s will open up. Until they do, the party has to concentrate on local government to secure its political base.

There is an obvious further point to make. If both parties are weak, then it makes sense for them to work together. A formal pact is almost certainly a bad idea, but some kind of informal carve-up of seats (as per the 1997 general election) may have something going for it. If Labour adopt a more conservative policy stance, and the Lib Dems present themselves as a more progressive junior partner, they may just be able to get the best of both worlds. The Greens might be brought in to try and scoop up hard left votes.

But if Sir Keir continues to dodge tough questions on personnel and policy, he will do enough to keep the Lib Dems and Greens on the floor, but will be quite unable to challenge the Conservatives for power. Mr Johnson has some big difficulties ahead, not least Scotland and Northern Ireland, but England looks his for now.

Boris Johnson should be very worried by Keir Starmer

In the middle of a pandemic, Sir Keir Starmer’s start as leader of the British Labour Party has been inevitably muted. The news is dominated by the epidemic and the government’s response. There isn’t much time for any opposition party. But in these early days the portents look very good for Labour. Its members have made a very good choice.

Most of the attention has been drawn to Sir Keir’s performance at the weekly ritual of Prime Minister’s Questions (PMQs). In the first two weeks the Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, was ill and could not attend. But instead of handing over to his deputy, as previous leaders have done, Sir Kier took it on himself. This was an interesting side-stepping of the usual parliamentary protocol games. And then when Mr Johnson did become available, he easily overwhelmed the prime minister. His style was quiet but focused. “Forensic” was the description universally used, referencing Sir Keir’s former job as QC and Director of Public Prosecutions. It is a style to which a bluffer like Mr Johnson partially ill-matched.

How much does PMQs matter in the great scheme of things? The public barely notices. But it damages the morale of Conservative backbenchers, and the pressure on an immature government team could lead to it to make silly errors. The idea floated by the government that all MPs should return to Westminster, so that the boisterous atmosphere of PMQs might be restored, and so make things look a bit less bad, looks to be just such a silly error.

A second portent comes from Sir Keir’s cleaning out of the front bench team. His predecessor, Jeremy Corbyn, valued loyalty over competence and the front bench was full of weak performers. Sir Keir’s team looks much stronger, though the parliamentary Labour Party is not as strong as it once was, so choice is constrained. But Mr Johnson is also a loyalty over competence operator, and his own front bench looks particularly weak. Which for a “no-details” style of leadership is a big problem. Sir Keir’s aim is to challenge the government’s competence by contrasting it with his own.

A third, and highly significant portent comes from Sir Keir’s refusal to challenge the government on the Brexit transition. Many are saying that the transition period should be extended, not least because of the virus, as there is not enough time to negotiate a trade deal by the end of the year. It’s a fair line of attack, but Sir Keir’s failure to take it up shows that he is the first Labour leader since Tony Blair to have a clear sense of political strategy.

As opposition leader, Mr Blair was very careful to pick his fights with John Major’s Conservative government only on a very limited range of issues. His aim was to take the fight to the Conservatives and win over their former supporters. To that end he projected similar policies but superiority in style and competence. The next Labour opposition leaders were Ed Miliband and Mr Corbyn. Neither were prepared to take the challenge to the Tories. Instead they hoped to win by rounding up a “progressive majority” from Lib Dem and Green voters, and from people who had previously not voted. Anybody who supported the Tories was suspect, and the party did not want to make the compromises needed to win them over. Instead they challenged the government on a very broad front, portraying them as something close to evil. This motivated the activists. They succeeded in winning over many Lib Dems and Greens, and even (especially in 2017) bringing out previous non voters. But these were neutralised by people put off by their perceived extremism, who moved over to the Tories.

By showing restraint in his attacks on the Conservatives, on Brexit, and indeed on the Coronavirus crisis, Sir Keir shows that he has grasped this. The priority is to win power, and this can only be done by persuading former Conservative voters to come over. And it is particularly important not to put off people who support Brexit.

Let’s look ahead to see how this strategy might play out. The most likely scenario is that Mr Johnson’s government will muddle through the crisis, and intervene enough to limit the damage to the economy. In this event Sir Keir’s message will be “the same, only different”. He will pursue the government on issues of competence rather than policy. Mr Johnson looks very vulnerable here, and with a little luck his government could go into free fall like Mr Major’s, and never recover.

A second possibility is that the Conservatives will lurch to the right. After a hard Brexit, the government tries to roll back the extension to government seen as the crisis has developed, in the hope of creative destruction from which a leaner, healthier economy emerges in time for the next election. There are undoubtedly some Conservatives who want to go down this route. But it would be highly unpopular in the country at large. If this develops, then Sir Keir will broaden his attack to favour stronger public services as well as competence.

A third possibility is that the stress of the Coronavirus crisis causes the government to completely unravel, leading to a Conservative rebellion which results in a National Unity government involving Labour. This is after all what happened in both the world wars in the last century, when the prime minister (Asquith then Chamberlain) was perceived to be out of his depth. There is no Lloyd George or Churchill in the wings, though, so this does look rather unlikely. If this happens it will provide Sir Keir an opportunity to demonstrate fitness for government, while doubtless the Conservatives would tear themselves apart.

Should Labour leftists feel betrayal? Certainly they will see their wilder causes sidelined or squashed. Sir Keir has signalled a tough line on antisemitism; this covers those who criticise Israel obsessively while taking an indulgent approach to countries like Russia and Venezuela. But they should stay calm. Once in power it will be quite easy to tilt policy in a socialist direction in the aftermath of this crisis. Getting power is the main thing, and then consolidating it. Mr Blair and Gordon Brown showed the way. It is not widely appreciated on the left just how far Mr Brown in particular advanced the boundaries of the state and the cause of practical socialism.

How should Lib Dems react? it is commonplace to hear the thought that the party flourishes if Labour leadership is moderate, after the party failed to make much impression when Mr Corbyn was in charge. This is clutching at straws. If Sir Kei8r’s leadership develops as I expect, the Lib Dems’ only chance is if Sir Keir is indulgent towards the party because he thinks it could be useful. He might if he thinks that it could keep the Conservatives out of 20 or more seats that Labour would struggle to win themselves. He would certainly much rather deal with the party in a hung parliament than the Scottish Nationalists. The Lib Dems might get some political space around immigration, since Sir Keir will not want to open up too big a gap the Tories there. Brexit will be a more troublesome issue for the Lib Dems. Otherwise there will be little open space.

What you will not see is Sir Keir taking up electoral reform. He might duck and weave, as Mr Blair did, or he might rule it out. He will not want to distract attention from his core message that the Tories are not fit to govern.

Of course, in the early days of a new leader it is very easy to project your expectations onto him or her. Perhaps that is what I am doing here. But this is my working hypothesis, and Mr Johnson should be very afraid.

Strategy and tactics in British politics

In any longer term competitive activity it is useful to distinguish between strategy and tactics. This as true of politics as it is of anything else. It is surprising how few British political activists grasp the difference.

The current usage of the two words derives from the development of military theory in the 19th Century. Strategy focuses on long-term aims and how to achieve them. Tactics focuses on the here and now. Strategy guides your choice of which battles to fight; tactics help you win those battles. In politics strategy is mainly about identifying the coalition of voters you need to win and retain power. You then develop tactics to secure that coalition.

In British politics it is the Conservatives that grasp the usefulness of the distinction best. After 2005, its leader put into action a new strategy, which was to woo liberal-minded middle class voters to join the party’s existing base of conservative suburban and rural middle classes. This allowed it to form a coalition with the Liberal Democrats in 2010, and then to win an outright majority by crushing that party in 2015, completely outmanoeuvring Labour. But to hold this shaky coalition together he had to promise a referendum on EU membership, which he lost, causing the collapse of his strategy. He sensibly bowed out. After Brexit the Conservatives, led by Theresa May, developed a new strategy. This was to bolster the rural and suburban core vote with Brexit-supporting lower middle-class and working class voters in the North, Midlands and Wales. The metropolitan middle classes would then be bullied into voting Tory by fear of Labour. This strategy seemed to be working in 2017, but Mrs May’s lousy tactical handling of the election in 2017 ended in failure. This election was a very good demonstration of the difference between strategy and tactics. Sound strategy was let down by bad tactics. When Boris Johnson took over from Mrs May last year, he retained her political strategy, but added much sharper tactical management to it. Aided by Labour’s strategic ineptitude, he was rewarded with a landslide last December.

Labour’s Tony Blair grasped the need for strategy very well. His strategy for Labour was to appeal to middle class voters while retaining its working class base. When he left the leadership in 2007, this strategy was getting stale, but his successor, Gordon Brown, had no clear alternative. Labour leaked metropolitan middle class votes both to the Tories and Lib Dems and lost. Since then Labour has shown little grasp of strategy and has preferred to focus on tactics instead. Ed Miliband’s strategy, inasmuch as there was one, seems to have been based on the idea of a “progressive majority”. The collapse of the Lib Dem vote, he reasoned, would be enough secure a winning coalition without the need to chase more conservative voters, as Mr Blair had. But the Lib Dem collapse favoured the Tories, not Labour, while in Scotland Labour was helpless facing the rise of the SNP. Under Jeremy Corbyn the party’s strategy was based more on hope than evidence; he assumed most voters were fed up with Tory austerity and angry about the way the rich seemed to be getting away with so much. There was also a hope that the party could bring in people who hadn’t voted before, especially younger voters. Alas for them they interpreted the relatively good result in 2017 as evidence of sound strategy. Labour instead strategised on what they would do if they won power – an area where Mr Blair was weak, as indeed have been most Conservative leaders. Political strategy and government strategy are different things.

Just how bad things are in Labour was illustrated by a remark of leadership candidate Rebecca Long-Bailey. In her defence of Mr Corbyn’s record she said that the loss of the 2019 election was due to poor strategy. That’s a bit like saying that the result was down to weak leadership, and not the leader. Actually it is clear she actually meant “tactics” rather than “strategy”. Party activists, even senior officials, muddle the two up. It doesn’t help that most advisers on political tactics call themselves “strategists”.

The Lib Dems are no better than Labour on this. Nick Clegg, its leader in the 2010 election did seem to have some sort of strategy, which was to appeal to liberal-minded voters, and use coalition government to establish the party’s credentials as a serious political force, and so expand its voter base. This strategy collapsed on contact with reality after 2010, though poor tactical handling of the early coalition government didn’t help. By the 2015 election, the Lib Dems were reduced to fighting 30 seats as if they were by elections, so empty was their strategic appeal. Since then the party has remained consumed by tactical rather than strategic thinking, in particular with its focus on Brexit. But as the third party in a winner-takes-all electoral system, the party starts from a point of strategic weakness, so perhaps this is understandable.

A wider point needs to be made. The way I write about it suggests that political strategy is a matter of clever choices by senior party leaders, allowing them to lead a willing “army” to victory, rather as military strategy is a lot of the time. But political strategy involves compromises and pain. It is about identifying disparate coalitions of voters – but what you promise one part of the coalition will displease other parts. Mr Blair’s strategy so annoyed core metropolitan Labour support that he remains regarded as a traitor within the party. Mr Cameron’s coalition required the EU referendum to satisfy its core supporters, which came at a huge political cost. Tension within the new Tory coalition is obvious, especially over such matters as immigration policy.

The problem for Labour is that it has been, and probably still is, unable to face up to the compromises required to secure a winning coalition. Nothing very clear is coming from the leadership candidates. Lisa Nandy is best at articulating the problems, but is less clear on the painful choices Labour will need to make. Ms Long-Bailey still seems to hope that all Labour needs is sharper tactics. Kier Starmer says as little as he can about what he would actually do.

And the Lib Dems? What they do in large measure depends on the choices that the new Labour leadership does or does not make. Such is the lot of a third party.

Why is the left losing the argument in the country at large?

Nothing illustrates Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn’s failings more than his assertion that, at the last general election, his party “won the argument”. The party’s vote went down by 2.6 million. Any sense in which the party won an argument is so abstract as to be worse than useless. But not enough people on the left realise just how much trouble they are in.

While some on the left show shocking complacency, others exhibit a level of despair similar to that in 1992, after the Conservatives won their fourth successive victory (and proper victories, unlike 2010 and 2017) when voters fled from Labour and the Lib Dems at the last minute. If the Tories could win then, in such an unpromising election for them, it seemed to presage them winning forever. The journalist Will Hutton caught the mood with a political bestseller The State We’re In. In it he suggested that the Tories had so deeply penetrated civil society that they were unbeatable. He also decried Tory (and American) economic policies, while praising those of Germany and Japan. Only a few years later Labour won their biggest ever election victory and the Tories were knocked so far away from power that people dared to think they would never regain it. Meanwhile Germany and Japan plunged into an economic crisis from which, seemingly, only Anglo-Saxon economic policies could lift them. It is surprising that Mr Hutton dared to show his face in public again, but newspaper comment by him still pops up quite regularly.

The Labour and Lib Dem revival was evident in the elections of 1997, 2001 and 2005. This led to complacency on the centre-left, and the idea of a “progressive majority” that was floated back in 1992. It was observed that if you added the Labour and Lib Dem votes (and perhaps the Greens too) there was a clear majority of the popular vote: 55-60%. This was advanced as a reason to embrace proportional representation, which would confine the Tories to a prison. But as politics poisoned after the MPs expenses scandals, and the financial crash, the weakness in this line of argument became plain. Ukip rose as a fourth, emphatically non-progressive force. The Tories revived in the 2010 election, and Labour and the Lib Dems were unable to form a parliamentary majority, though they had 52% of the vote between them. The Lib Dems entered coalition with the Conservatives instead.

The Lib Dem vote promptly collapsed, but the idea of a progressive majority persisted. Labour reckoned they could win on their own simply by picking up disillusioned Lib Dem voters, without trying to convert any Tories. This suited the Labour left, and its increasingly vocal socialist element, which had been marginalised in Labour’s government years, and which was energised by opposition to the coalition’s austerity policies. But, alas, this simply drove more Lib Dem supporters into the arms of the Conservatives, who formed an outright majority in 2015 (with a combined Labour and Lib Dem vote of just 38%), mainly by picking up Lib Dem seats. By now the “progressive majority” was shown to be a clear fiction: adding Ukip and Conservative vote share took you to more than 50%. Proportional representation would not have saved the “progressives”. And that is more or less where things have stuck since. In 2019 Labour and the Lib Dems mustered just 44% between them, down from 47% in 2017. That leaves the left with an uncomfortable truth: they will not win majority support unless they win over substantial numbers of Conservative voters: that they “win the argument”, in other words. And they haven’t done that since the great financial crisis of 2007/08, unless you count that narrow majority of votes in 2010.

Much has been written about this, but most of the thinking has been done by people on the right of politics. Their analysis focuses on values, and the way many voters crave a sense of belonging, undermined by a rootless liberal elite, or left-wingers impassioned by foreign causes. This is fine as far as it goes, but thinkers on the left have a long tradition (starting with Marx and Engels) of looking at economic interests, which they assume lie behind people’s values. This has often been taken too far, but right now there is not enough of it. The narrative of the left is that it is on the side of the “many”, often quantified as 95% or even 99% of the population, against an economy “rigged” by “the few”. This clearly isn’t working.

There are two things to observe about the strength of the right. First is that it is based on older people, as it wins over increasing numbers of the baby-boomer generation. The second, heavily overlapping, point is that they appeal to people who own property, or who have an inheritable interest in property. They are especially making progress in “left-behind” areas where property values are sinking, creating a sense of grievance.

For the most part Conservatives have been very sensitive to the needs of these groups. I remember seeing an analysis by the Institute for Fiscal Studies showing that austerity policies after 2010 largely bypassed older voters, whose lot improved overall. Old age pensions were improved and tax allowances raised. Interestingly these policies were driven forward enthusiastically by the Conservatives’ coalition partners, the Lib Dems, for whom the “triple lock” on state pensions was a cornerstone policy. A Lib Dem minister, Steve Webb, skilfully piloted pension reform that postponed pensions for many with minimal political damage. It is no accident that the left’s biggest moment of opportunity since 2010, the 2017 election which saw a surge in Labour support, came when the Conservatives dropped the ball on looking after older voters, with their proposals on social care. There was no chance of them repeating that mistake.

Property ownership, meanwhile, is becoming the critical economic dividing line in British society. Ownership is steadily sinking as housing becomes less affordable, but it still remains high, at over 60%. This does not fit the narrative of “the many” versus “the few”. By and large, property owners and older voters are not so exercised about austerity policies, and are less concerned about changing working practices, such as zero hours contracts. They are distrustful of the radicalism that the left trumpets so loudly. This may not be wholly rational. If austerity has caused economic growth to sag, then this affects the property market. But the left is more comfortable stoking up a sense of outrage amongst people who rent their homes, or have a dependency on the types of benefits that have been cut, than they are in making more nuanced claims for the benefit of Britain’s top three quintiles of income.

Won’t time shift these factors in the left’s favour? The older voters are dying, while more younger ones enter the electorate. We often heard that argument in the context of the Brexit referendum. But people’s political perspective changes as they age, and the left seems to be losing its grip on voters in the middle of the age range. The proportion of older voters is likely to go up, demographers tell us. Things are more promising from that perspective on property ownership, which has been falling steadily. But the change is slow and the Conservatives are acutely sensitive to this, doing what they can to make sure new homes are built, and that people can get themselves onto the property ladder.

So what should the left do? It can hardly ditch its core support among younger voters and those renting homes in order to win over Conservatives and Brexit Party supporters. Some of the policies needed to address the needs poorer and more disadvantaged voters will hurt property owners (e.g. more social housing undermining property prices) and older people (e.g. higher taxes on investments). In my previous post on Labour I suggested three things; radicalism (less of it), pluralism (more) and competence (also more).

The one party that has made some headway in attracting former Conservative voters is the Lib Dems. It has done this by being only marginally on the left (many Lib Dems, myself included, hesitate to call ourselves of the left at all). But it still signs up to many signature left wing priorities: better public services and stronger action on the environment in particular. The party is still vilified by many on the far left, who call them “Yellow Tories”. In the last election Labour sent its activists into seats like Carshalton, Wimbledon and Finchley because they preferred the Conservatives to win these than let the Lib Dems gain traction. But unless the Lib Dems are allowed to gather up Conservative votes, even as they gather Labour ones too, the left as a whole will not succeed.

There is another way forward, as suggested by the coalition of 2010. That is for parts of the left to team up with Conservatives in order to make headway on critical priorities. This has happened in Germany with its grand coalition, and now a Green-Christian Democrat alliance being mooted. The Greens and the conservatives have formed a coalition in Austria. The Lib Dems experience in the 2010 coalition was unhappy, in that its support collapsed, though it can point to achievements. The German SPD’s experience is hardly better. The Lib Dems will not be tempted to go down that route again. But if Labour continues on the road mapped out by Mr Corbyn, that may be the only option for the left to have a serious influence on government.