Both sides claim it, but centre ground has been deserted
FOR those of us of a certain vintage the world can appear to have been turned on its head. Little boys can now go to school in skirts. The Labour Party conference is a stagemanaged adoration of the leader. Forget the Blair-Brown battles of yesteryear, now it’s the Tories who have a plain-speaking Scot taking on an English posh boy. Not like it was in our day. Politicians are a lot like clichés. They start off appearing to be an attractive insightful truth but through overuse end up sounding like a hackneyed lack of imagination. Take one – ‘It was not me who left the party, the party left me.’
There is a certain irony here. Tony Blair took the old Labour Party, stuck to its founding principles but rebranded it ‘new’. Jeremy Corbyn, helped by Ed Miliband’s decision to allow Left-wing enemies of Labour to join it for the price of a pint of shandy, has created a completely new party he demands is ‘traditional’.
That his retro 70s policy agenda, played to a Venezuelan beat, is leading in the polls causes consternation for the Tories as they meet in Manchester this week and for those who loved the rational Labour Party. The party of Smith now belongs to Wolfie, not John.
IN turn, that has led to a huge amount of handwringing from political ‘thinkers’ who have never got their hands dirty. The hallowed ‘centre ground’ of politics appears abandoned. The ‘hard-working families’ of Britain cannot be appealed to and now, deaf to reason, seem to be divided into two tribes of savages.
Those who once voted for the ‘neo-liberalism’ of Tony Blair will now apparently vote either for the ‘neo-Marxism’ of Mr Corbyn or the ‘neo-nationalism’ of Brexiteers.
Respectfully, that analysis of despair is tosh.
To rework a cliché, the people of Britain have not abandoned the centre ground, it is the centre ground that has abandoned them.
The defining issue of this generation has been the banking crash. Since then, most people of this country have seen their living standards fall. Ambitions have wilted. Dreams died. Nothing seems to have improved or to be capable of improvement.
The response of ‘centre ground’ politicians has been that we need to grin and bear it. There is no alternative and you will pay for the bankers’ excesses while they enjoy their riches and none will go to jail.
People have had enough and gone on a predictable journey. Without a philosophy to believe in, the need for belief makes people search for certainties. You can’t take away people’s identity, so they turn to nationalism. That has risen in Scotland since the crash and, south of the Border, expressed itself in Brexit.
Nationalism’s limits are now being fumbled with, but the thirst for change is still rightly rising.
No one can explain why nationalising the railways will make them better off or improve the service, but while people struggle, if something is ripped from a millionaire like Richard Branson as he dips in his Caribbean pool it seems at least a nod to the fairness people crave.
Often, people who are politically obsessed – like me – forget what normal, decent people think about politics. They don’t want to think about it. They want their politicians to be like a good referee in a football match – they just let the game, and their lives, flow and if you do see them it is to dispense justice.
The two most successful politicians of modern times are Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair. While their agendas were profoundly different, their approach was very similar.
WHATEVER you thought of them, both had a robust philosophical vision of a nation they wished to create. Both sold it with a concrete offer people could vote for. Theresa May failed to do that at the last election. There was no offer to make our lives better, just an austere reassertion of pilgrim rectitude. She decided her unique selling point was a negative – she wasn’t Jeremy Corbyn. It failed.
Now Mr Corbyn has turned that on its head and to his advantage. His USP is that he is not Theresa May and that is popular. It would not take much for it to fail too. Last week, Mrs May defended the capitalist system that Mr Corbyn derides and people are losing faith in. While I would defend it too, she appeared to take ownership of people’s poverty.
She fell into a trap that Scottish Nationalists try to put Labour unionists in. The Nats complain about Tory policy at Westminster and try to get Labour politicians to defend it in the name of the Union.
There needs to be a new philosophy and a new offer.
It is said at Westminster that an empty limousine drew up and Mrs May got out. With time limited, she has a choice. Either to grab at the mist of an ethereal popularity she never had or to do the right thing.
Ruth Davidson is not trying to defend capitalism but arguing for a new form to meet people’s needs. That is preferable to Boris Johnson’s attempt to reinvent British imperialism.
People have not abandoned the centre ground – the centre ground has fallen silent. The challenge for the Tories this week is not to listen to each other, but to give it voice.