Consensus and atrophy – or why Labour has two comfort zones
By Emma.
As I’ve said before, Labour needs to move on from Blair. Not because New Labour was an intrinsically wrong approach to the issues Labour and the country faced in 1994, but because Continuity New Labour is the intrinsically wrong approach to the issues Labour and the country are faced with in 2013. Mark Ferguson is quite right that the old fashioned and out of touch nature of Blair’s calls for a bloodless, pre-social media, message managed approach that simply has no place in modern politics.
New Labour was born from terrible beginnings. The architects were right that Labour had become an electoral disaster stuck in a comfort mode of simply opposing and not offering a fully coherent and attractive alternative government. Labour cannot and must not fall into the trap of just being oppositional. But this is not a binary choice. We don’t have to choose between highlighting the cruelties and failures of the Tory approach and offering our own alternatives. A good opposition must do both.
I get that the result of the 1992 election scarred a lot of people in the Labour Party. But we need to move on from that too. Because the 1997 – 2007 way of doing things has become just as much of a comfort blanket to some Labour members as has the 1980 – 1987 approach.
There seems to have settled in some less imaginative members of the Labour Party an idea that there are only two ways of being Labour – new and old. If you aren’t one, you simply must be the other. But to those of us who are neither it’s deeply insulting. We’ve moved beyond both. Which is good because neither have the answers we need now. This is not about the battles of the past – be they Foot Vs Thatcher or Brown Vs Blair. It’s about the battles of the present and the battle for the future.
Just as Thatcher set the tone from the 80s for those who would follow her from Labour, so too did Blair set the tone for those who would follow him from the Conservatives. That’s why Lance Price is so wrong to argue that Ed Miliband is in trouble if the Tories agree with Blair’s analysis. The truth is quite the opposite. If Ed Miliband really is determined to be a politician who changes the consensus – as I believe he is – then surprising your opponents is essential. Cameron and Osborne are dealing with their own comfort zones too. Between their Thatcherite policy making and sub-Blairite politicking they show little attempt at truly being a Government that can change the political consensus. Cameron and Osborne agree with Blair simply becuase they lazily took on his approach to political analysis and communication rather than ever trying to define and carve out their own space and define their own style.
Ed isn’t doing that. Ed has his own analysis, and his own approach. That’s quite right but it’s also quite unsettling for those whose approach he is moving away from. But that’s why it is a million miles from either of Labour’s stifling comfort zones.
Tags: Ed Miliband, Lance Price, New Labour, Old Labour, Tony Blair
