|
 |
Home  Media2012 |
 
|
|
| Britain could point way for Labor recovery, 17 October 2012 |
| By Dennis Glover, Per Capita Research Fellow | |
This being the last month of a US presidential election, the eyes of the political class are on America; but perhaps they should be on Britain.
At the Labour annual conference, the young left-wing Labour leader, Ed Miliband, walked the stage for more than an hour delivering a brilliantly conceived and executed "off-the-cuff" address to party delegates.
Such speeches are a major event on the British political calendar. But this year Miliband delivered something out of the ordinary: the potential makings of a new philosophy for his party as it seeks to get back into office within a single term.
And in doing so he provided the Gillard government with something to ponder: maybe, just maybe, the road to electoral recovery leads to the Left.
Miliband's theme was that Labour's aim should be the creation of a "one nation" society and economy. In Australia "one nation" conjures Pauline Hanson, but in Britain it invokes 19th-century Tory prime minister Benjamin Disraeli's dream of narrowing the gap between rich and poor which, he said, constituted "two nations between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy".
Miliband's promise is to emulate the Attlee government after World War II, and lift Britain out of recession by redistributing wealth and opportunities from those at the top who have escaped social accountability for too long to the rest of British society. He wants Labour to become the party of patriotism, by promising to build a nation that rewards all who love it and serve it.
Miliband's speech builds on the patriotic spirit generated by the recent successful and unifying London Olympics, and has been strongly influenced by the academic work on progressive patriotism of Australian political philosopher (and my colleague at the Per Capita think tank) Tim Soutphommasane.
"I didn't become leader of the Labour Party to reinvent the world of Disraeli or Attlee," Miliband said, "but I do believe in that spirit, that spirit of one nation. One nation: a country where everyone has a stake. One nation: a country where prosperity is fairly shared. One nation: where we have a shared destiny, a sense of shared endeavour and a common life that we lead together. That is the Britain we must become."
Why should we in Australia take note? I can think of three good reasons.
The first reason is the utility of the message itself. If the boom is finally ending and tougher times coming, the ALP could do worse than play to its strength as the party of the whole nation, ensuring the pain is shared and the fruits of the recovery enjoyed by all. Wayne Swan's attack on the selfishness and unaccountability of Australia's aggressive right-wing billionaires and their links to the Coalition has put his party on the same track.
If it has resonance when times are good, it just may work when times are bad, but only if the message is loud and consistent across the government.
The second reason lies in the way British Labour has gone about constructing this new message. It gets the process of getting back into power in the correct order: philosophy first, tactics second. Too often this process is inverted and captured by technical specialists and media advisers.
If social-democratic parties around the world today are in crisis, it's largely because they lack the sort of intellectual framework that makes obvious moral sense to their members and supporters.
If parties of the Left are to rebuild their following they have to better reflect the broad egalitarian beliefs of their base. Miliband's speech is the product of a major effort by British Labour, led by the head of its policy review, Jon Cruddas, to do just this - by building a consensus about the party's sustaining purpose and how that purpose should shape Labour's response to the post-GFC crisis Britain now finds itself in. The role of the policy wonks, the pollsters and media advisers is to serve this philosophical purpose, not head it off at the pass.
The third reason is that it makes good electoral sense. The purpose of Miliband's message of left-wing patriotism is to capture the electoral middle ground without narrowing the distinctions between the two major parties.
There is a tendency in Australia to regard the middle ground as some sort of psychologically neutral territory, best won over by turning your candidates into management consultants called tweedledum and tweedledee, armed with assorted bribes and technocratic answers to what are in reality highly charged moral problems. But the middle ground isn't ideologically neutral territory; it is a space where values relating to fairness, justice and responsibility have to be toughly contested.
Believing this, Cruddas, who is a keen student of Australian politics, has been warning his party explicitly against adopting a version of the ALP's much criticised small-target strategy of 1998 to 2001, which failed to offer a disgruntled middle ground a compelling reason to vote Labor. As a result, John Howard easily won it with a values-based appeal during the Tampa crisis.
Cruddas's fear is that his colleagues, so close to power they can almost touch it, will be tempted to go negative and try to surf back into government on a wave of economic discontent, so they can restart in government where they left off at the end of the Blair-Brown era. Ominously, some pro-Labour commentators are already mouthing the small-target strategist's favourite mantra, "cost of living".
As we have seen in Australia, as elections approach and decision time comes, voters want parties to stand for something, especially in tougher economic times. Making hollow promises to ease the squeeze on consumers usually only makes a party look weak. It seldom works. How much stronger, therefore, to craft a unifying national message that reflects the deepest egalitarian beliefs of your political base?
This, not Barack Obama's debating tricks and slick messaging, is where Australian Labor's attention should be focused. It will satisfy the party and the electorate - Labor needs to do both.
|
| | |
|
|
|
|
