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1992 Redux?

Glen Newey

Nothing in Ed Miliband’s election campaign became him like losing it. For all the garment-rending since Thursday, it was a good election for Labour to flunk. Even without a formal agreement with the Scottish Nationalists, a Labour government would have been perpetually open to the charge of being ‘held to ransom’ by an SNP fraction pulling the UK ever further leftwards. The Tories, probably led by Boris Johnson and hoorayed by the press, would have been free to indulge in Europhobic braying from the opposition benches without the discipline of running an in/out referendum to make them act responsibly. Miliband would have been torn between two nationalisms: the left separatism that has obliterated it throughout Scotland, and the rightist anglonationalism of Ukip that has leeched Labour’s vote in northern England. Fleet street would have had a hoot. It would have made eating bacon sandwiches look like a picnic.

Is 2015 1992 redux? Certainly the pollsters’ egregious and consistent underestimate of the Tory vote recalls the Conservative victory 23 years ago, which may or may not be down to voters’ tendency to lie more readily about their voting intentions than about the way they voted. Black Wednesday followed less than six months later, and from then on John Major’s government, its managerial credentials shattered, fought an uphill struggle against sleaze and its own Eurosceptics. When the European referendum comes in 2017, Tory divisions will be laid bare. Even if Cameron wins, it’s likely to be his version of Major’s 1995 tactical resignation which, as a long-term gambit, proved about as successful as drilling a hole in a sinking boat to let the water out. He’ll be faced with a large and voluble rump in his own party for whom Brexit remains a thwarted dream, and have to persuade European partners to play along with renegotiating British membership. Meanwhile Cameron’s reinstalled the same hatchet-faced apparatchiks to head the Treasury, Home Office and Foreign Office. The spectacle of Theresa May and the new justice secretary Michael Gove putting aside mutual animosities to trash our human rights may provoke more odium than Cameron has bargained for. Growth will continue to slug along under the cosh of austerity. And then there’s the matter that even the hapless Major could safely ignore: Scotland.

As the past two Holyrood elections have shown, Scottish voters are happy to elect SNP governments, even if they don’t necessarily want to go the whole home-rule haggis. The Scottish revolution – no other word will do – of the past year has largely been down to Labour’s taking its North British vote for granted and failing to understand the force of left nationalism. The legacy of the referendum – shamelessly played on by Cameron afterwards, knowing that Labour would cop it in the general election – was to leave Scots thinking the other parties had ganged up to piss on their chips. In picking as its leader the Blairite revenant Jim Murphy last year, Scottish Labour chose the greatest major-party kamikaze candidate since the Tories plumped for Iain Duncan Smith in 2001. Scotland may well be gone for good – or bad, from Labour’s long-run perspective – but it can cause Cameron a lot of headaches in the meantime. In government or informal cahoots with Labour, the SNP would have had to own the policies they’d co-authored or at least failed to oppose. No such curbs apply now. Picture Cameron’s roast-beef complexion pinking up every week at PMQs to derision from the Nats on the benches opposite. The narrative’s already written: posh-boy Sassenachs try to lord it over free-born Scots. It’ll be Cameron’s Braveheart moment, dragged out over a period of years.

As people have said, Miliband failed to give Labour a narrative of its own, particularly on the pointless sadomasochism of austerity, to which it was still signed up during the election campaign. That will need a lot more political imagination than Labour has mustered recently, not least by recognising that fighting for social justice is often a guerrilla war. Its big chance lies in the fact that a lot of Tory voters are old and will die fairly soon – like sharks’ teeth, these voters need to be replaced regularly if the beast they serve is to survive. An aggressive campaign for voter registration would be a start. Labour needs to make common cause with others on the left whom it’s spurned through its narcissistic self-image as the privileged tribune of the people – a large cause of its undoing in Scotland. It also has to resonate with young voters, who by 2020 will remember nothing before Bullingdonian austerity, will face £9000 a year in fees or even more if they go into higher education, and will be receptive to the idea that the UK – what may then remain of it – has been commandeered by moneyed little Englanders bent on keeping wealth in the hands of the few, and glib, if not in outright denial, about the climate change whose gravest consequences will kick in only once they’ve gone off to the fossil-fuelled inferno.

general election 2015

Comments

  • 11 May 2015 at 3:16pm
    Bernard Porter says:
    Well, there's some comfort to be had there, I suppose: the prospect of Conservative in-fighting over Europe, Scotland, civil unrest, and - what I've not seen mentioned yet - the upcoming enquiries into historic sex-scandals, some of which may involve Tories, that May and Gove, as Home Secretary and Justice minister, won't be able to procrastinate on much longer now the election is over.

    Obviously the causes of the catastrophe were many and complex, ranging from the unstoppable progress of the global capitalist juggernaut (the Marxist view, shared of course with Neoliberals) to the malign personal influence of two particular Australians, Murdoch and Crosby - the Empire strikes back - with, of course, many other factors in between. There's no need to rush to judgment, unless you're one of the commentariat and believe that's one of your functions, or a schadenfreude Blairite.

    Maybe there's no need to jettison Ed Miliband, either. As people saw more and more of him, his stock rose. To me his ideas were pretty well thought-through, he came through his insufferable right-wing Press torments well, and he's now the most experienced, well-known and I think fairly regarded of the lot. I'd be sorry to lose him. He's a martyr to the cause. Saint Ed.
    • 12 May 2015 at 11:52am
      semitone says: @ Bernard Porter
      If the comfort Glen is suggesting comes from this being a good election to lose, in that (a) the next five years are going to be tricky and (b) the British press would give a Labour government a hard time, then any and every election from now until the end of days will be a good one for Labour to lose.

      I don't agree with the "Labour wasn't left enough" argument: its vote in England actually increased from 2005 but it shed seats and failed to pick up its target marginals. In 2020 Labour will need a program that will entice marginal seats to vote for it. That's likely to be a credibility issue rather than a policy issue.
    • 12 May 2015 at 11:53am
      semitone says: @ semitone
      2005? Sheesh, talk about living in the past lane. 2010 I believe I meant.
    • 12 May 2015 at 2:44pm
      S.J says: @ semitone
      I agree with much of what Bernard porter says: I think Miliband has been ditched too quickly shallow mediathink has truly penetrated everywhere.

      I don't understand how Semitone thinks a special programme can be devised with to appeal to marginal seats only.

      The circumstances of this election were special and Miliband could not have done anything in the time remaining to prevent the effects of Cameron's capitalising on English nationalism after the referendum - Murphy was an excuse, not a reason.

      The polls led to voters thinking that they had more leeway than they thought and so could vote how they wished, rather than needing to vote tactically: Green, or that they could not risk Miliband reliant on the SNP: Lib Dems going Tory. and the rhetoric of all parties was influenced by the polls; not least Salmond's joke or boast that he would be the one writing the Budget.

      Newry may be right, but in the meantime much damage will be inflicted by this hard-right government
    • 14 May 2015 at 7:10am
      philip proust says: @ Bernard Porter
      Is the defeat of Miliband and Labour really such a mystery? No party has won an election without Murdoch's support since 1974. The virulence of the right-wing media in England outstrips even Fox in the US, according to some observers.

      All electorates are susceptible to manipulation and propaganda; and the Conservative Party is now supported by an incredibly powerful alliance of neoliberal ideologues and vested interests. Labour should probably be congratulated for polling as well as it did, such was the strength of its opposition.

      Democracy in the UK and the US is being incrementally undermined by highly determined plutocrats and their well paid proxies. In the English-speaking countries, the prognosis for progressive policies is very bleak.

      It is true that Scotland bucks this trend; however, in the present circumstances, only a counter-force as strong and as localised as nationalism is capable of turning against the neoliberal the tide.
    • 14 May 2015 at 10:33am
      Bernard Porter says: @ philip proust
      I agree. But Labour politicians can't say it; it looks like - or can be presented by the press as being - simply socialist sour grapes.
    • 14 May 2015 at 1:27pm
      S.J says: @ Bernard Porter
      The reason the press is more virulent here is because in the States, no party really threatens the status quo.
    • 14 May 2015 at 9:01pm
      semitone says: @ philip proust
      I'm not sure it is as simple as Murdoch (plus Dacre and the Torygraph) but I don't think it's true that Scotland bucked the trend: the Scotland Sun told its readers to vote SNP.
    • 14 May 2015 at 9:06pm
      semitone says: @ S.J
      SJ I should have been clearer. I can't imagine what a special programme for marginal seats would be, and I don't advocate Labour trying to devise one. I'm suggesting that in marginal seats and among swinging voters Labour had a credibility problem just as much as a policy problem.
  • 11 May 2015 at 5:06pm
    kadinsky says:
    For five long years, Labour allowed the Tories and lib dems (and the BBC) to establish a glaringly inaccurate narrative about what had caused the gigantic deficit in Britain's public finances. It was a rewriting of the recent past as audacious as anything seen in Britain in modern times. This invented story - that the deficit had been cau
  • 11 May 2015 at 5:07pm
    Ally says:
    "The spectacle of Theresa May and the new justice secretary Michael Gove putting aside mutual animosities to trash our human rights may provoke more odium than Cameron has bargained for." An interesting article by Aileen McHarg [http://ukhumanrightsblog.com/2014/10/02/will-devolution-scupper-conservative-plans-for-a-british-bill-of-rights/] indicates that the proposed repeal of the Human Rights Act could provide an early collision with the constitutional settlement not just in Scotland but also Northern Ireland.
  • 11 May 2015 at 5:11pm
    kadinsky says:
    This invented story - that the deficit had been caused by the reckless social spending of Blair and Brown - fatally framed Labour as a party that could not be trusted with the economy.

    Labour's consistent failure to challenge this narrative has now ceded us another five years of fanatical ideological government; five years that will likely spell the end of the NHS. Nothing will baffle future scholars of this period more than Labour's self-defeating collusion in their opponents' audacious rewriting of history.
    • 12 May 2015 at 2:46pm
      S.J says: @ kadinsky
      So an 'invented' story is Labour's fault, is it?
    • 13 May 2015 at 11:25am
      kadinsky says: @ S.J
      No. But we can only surmise that leading Labour figures feared it would somehow destroy the party's electability if they challenged the myth that New Labour's social spending had caused the giant deficit and crashed the economy. This same reasoning must also account for the failure to remind people that Cameron and Osborne had pledged to match Brown's "reckless" borrowing and spending as late as Nov. 2007.
    • 13 May 2015 at 12:42pm
      Alan Benfield says: @ kadinsky
      Well, maybe it also wasn't a great PR idea (although I am sure it seemed like a wizard jape at the time) for Liam Byrne to leave his "no money left" note behind at the Treasury. I notice he has recently been apologising on the Beeb and in the Guardian.

      Bit late, Liam.

      Anyway, while I tend to agree that Labour should have relentlessly plugged away at rebutting this lie, the reality of the British press is that in most papers the big lie usually gets to be on page 1, while reporting of a rebuttal (if any) usually gets tucked away on page 25.

      But yes, it is baffling why they kept so quiet.
    • 13 May 2015 at 8:19pm
      Mat Snow says: @ Alan Benfield
      I would speculate that the reason Labour did not rebut the big lie that their government's social spending did not cause the explosion in the deficit is that the truth is more embarrassing: the ballooning debt was the consequence of the New Labour government's pathetically gung-ho gullibility about the financial sector's willingness to act responsibly of its own accord when no longer constrained by adequate regulation and effective policing. Brown and Balls were played for fools, and took the economy and taxpayer down with them come the 2008 crash. Since Balls' ego would not permit him to quit the front bench in shame as he should have done, his constituency felt obliged to hand him his arse on a plate last week. But in the five years in opposition until then, he lead the Labour line that they were never suckered by the City into bailing out the thoroughly foreseeable consequences of their greed and incompetence but nobly spent big on the people.
    • 13 May 2015 at 8:20pm
      Mat Snow says: @ Mat Snow
      Correction:

      I would speculate that the reason Labour did not rebut the big lie that their government's social spending caused the explosion in the deficit is that the truth is more embarrassing: the ballooning debt was the consequence of the New Labour government's pathetically gung-ho gullibility about the financial sector's willingness to act responsibly of its own accord when no longer constrained by adequate regulation and effective policing. Brown and Balls were played for fools, and took the economy and taxpayer down with them come the 2008 crash. Since Balls' ego would not permit him to quit the front bench in shame as he should have done, his constituency felt obliged to hand him his arse on a plate last week. But in the five years in opposition until then, he lead the Labour line that they were never suckered by the City into bailing out the thoroughly foreseeable consequences of their greed and incompetence but nobly spent big on the people.
    • 14 May 2015 at 11:55am
      kadinsky says: @ Mat Snow
      You're right, of course, Mat, that Brown and Balls were slaves to 'light-touch' neoclassical dogma and bear huge responsibility for the financial crash and subsequent bailout.

      But that damning indictment could not be convincingly levelled at Labour by the present occupants of numbers 10 and 11 Downing Street, both of whom were repeatedly demanding even lighter regulation of financial services during the noughties.

      Instead, the Tories, with the crucial aid of James Harding, concocted the myth that it was Labour's reckless social spending that caused the massive deficit. Without establishing this gargantuan lie, it would have been infinitely harder for them to force the poorest and most vulnerable people in Britain to atone for the sins of gamblers in the City.

      By rebutting that lie every time it was uttered, Labour would have been on firm ground. They might have prevented the further immiseration of the weakest in society and would certainly have boosted their own electoral prospects. That they didn't is something for which I have still to hear a convincing explanation.
    • 14 May 2015 at 1:37pm
      Mat Snow says: @ kadinsky
      The reason they didn't, I would guess, is that they would then have to explain how the deficit ballooned on their watch, which is that they fell hook, line and sinker for the fatuous idea that the financial markets were self-regulating, self-correcting and governed by public spiritedness rather than private greed.

      To admit that but claim that the Tories would have thought and acted no differently had they been in power might have been true but won't do. The only way Labour in opposition could have tried that line would have been by purging from the front bench or any sniff of power all those responsible for swallowing that bullshit, starting with Ed Balls, and apologising for ever having believed a word of it.

      Such a course of action would, of course, have been characterised by the Tory media as Labour returning to the bad old days of hostility to business, a prospect presumably too scary to be countenanced by Labour's leadership, even if the perfectly good counter-argument was there to be made that the only aspects of business they were hostile to are the same that everyone is hostile to: criminality, stupidity, recklessness and scrounging off the taxpayer.
    • 15 May 2015 at 7:42am
      Joe Morison says: @ kadinsky
      The lie was not so much that they overspent, it was that the Tories were urging anything different (though they would have blown the money on tax cuts). Keynes is clear that when the economy is doing well, reserves should be built up which can then be used to boost activity in times of recession. Both parties had fallen for the illusion of permanent boom, either that or (more likely) their only concern was ensuring that they could win the next election.
  • 11 May 2015 at 9:55pm
    Simon Wood says:
    Exactly, we have all voted Conservative by mithering on about the nasty Tories - as Peter Mandelson has boldly and bravely said - and that's it, apart from occasionally crying "Freedom!" like Ali G.

    Interesting here that we assume LRB readers all vote Labour in a classic, Guardian-reading, breathy, soul-searching, say-one-thing, do-another way.

    In fact correspondents here are still talking about narratives and store-wees. Normal, ordinary, everyday, hardworking familes might wonder whether they're on a cultural studies course at Goldsmiths or attending a nursery school, while this Labour newspaper - THIS LABOUR NEWSPAPER - is hiring taxis to scuttle round a country handing out redundancy notices to its own supporters.
    • 12 May 2015 at 11:37am
      semitone says: @ Simon Wood
      I have read this post twice now and I don't understand a word of it. Can anyone decode or explain?
    • 12 May 2015 at 11:57am
      Simon Wood says: @ semitone
      Gordon Bennett.
    • 12 May 2015 at 1:49pm
      Mat Snow says: @ semitone
      Well, semitone, Simon posted at 10.55pm, so I would guess that this is a classic post-pub comment, quite a number of which, to my shame, I have posted in recent years myself. None as silly as Simon's, of course. 'Normal, ordinary, everyday, hardworking families' is particularly cherishable.
    • 12 May 2015 at 11:38pm
      Simon Wood says: @ Mat Snow
      Sigh.

      I will unpack, deconstruct or spell this out if you like, but I thought LRB readers could read.

      Five more years of neo-Labour, Guardianish-reading-ish mush is looking to me incredibly collusive with the British establishment. It really does seem like, "Let the adults govern - we just want to be rebellious."

      Maybe the why-oh-why guff posted here is making me crazedly compact what I have to say into incomprehensibility, but I sure thought LRB readers were good at reading and getting references.

      The British establishment is a real, hell of a big bloc. Successful raids on it have been incredibly rare. Even the New Blair Project - groan, you won't get it - is now looking like part of the divisive, invisible, quasi-populist but actually oppressive poshifying of Britain.

      God, you're right, I'm beginning to sound like John Otway shambling round the House of Lords at night, having broken in, thinking he was in Buckingham Palace and might share a bedside fag with the Queen, ranting alone to the deathwatch beetles as they stare stonily into their mobile phones.
    • 13 May 2015 at 12:05pm
      Alan Benfield says: @ Simon Wood
      You mean, it wasn't a post-pub comment?

      Dear, oh, dear. (© S. Wood, 2015)
    • 13 May 2015 at 12:20pm
      Alan Benfield says: @ Simon Wood
      P.S. there's a good reason why "the New Blair Project... ...is now looking like part of the divisive, invisible, quasi-populist but actually oppressive poshifying of Britain." - it always was.

      After Tony Blair's election as Labour Party leader in 1994, Thatcher praised Blair in an interview as "probably the most formidable Labour leader since Hugh Gaitskell. I see a lot of socialism behind their front bench, but not in Mr Blair. I think he genuinely has moved". (source: Wikipedia)

      Unfortunately, she was absolutely right: Blair was the heir to Thatcher, not John Major.
  • 12 May 2015 at 9:25am
    rupert moloch says:
    What confounds me most is the realisation that the UK polling system can deliver majority government with only 37% of the vote (and 24% of the constituency).

    That is a rather eccentric notion of democracy, and just as perverse had Labour won with that level of support.
  • 12 May 2015 at 10:41am
    cufflink says:
    I have emailed Ed Miliband and thanked him sincerely for a careful and dogged campaign in shaping the Labour Party once again into a Party of Governance with only limited campaign recources, and surrogate desertion by his erstwhile friends of New Labour, especially Blair and Mandelson. The Labour London campaign was successful with North Enfield and Ealing and Brent retaken because of local NHS worries. Chester too. The bell weather of remorse must look at Ed Balls' defeat and see that austerity will have to continue, but for whom? Glen Newey is my darling, but why not clever dick, give us a new programme that will secure ENGLAND's future? Yes austerity but for whom - there's the fight from now on.
    • 12 May 2015 at 11:33am
      Simon Wood says: @ cufflink
      Dear, oh, dear.
    • 13 May 2015 at 5:58am
      cufflink says: @ Simon Wood
      May I mention to Simon Wood that the LRB blog as I take it, is not Facebook but deems it's published comments to be informative. Back of the room avuncular quips from mobiles (?)on a circadian basis lowers the tone. I cannot find on archive a contribution by SW of more than six words. Do you smoke a pipe and are a posthumous friend of Clem Atlee?
    • 13 May 2015 at 10:26am
      Simon Wood says: @ cufflink
      My good man, I mean no ill. It's just that the general tenour of this conversation is that Labour actually won the election on niceness of tone alone - "Ah, the poor foreigner, ah, the poor poor!" - and that maybe we should think of outsourcing the new Labour government to the Tony Blair Foundation, the rich man's Serco.

      They could surely achieve maximum value out of the new, gushy, windy buzzword, "aspiration". Horny-handed builders could be shamed into aspiring to be architects.

      Please be reassured that I am so excercised by the failure of Labour to gain the popular imagination of the ghastly people that I expect the men in white coats any day.
    • 13 May 2015 at 9:58pm
      Simon Wood says: @ Simon Wood
      [I think think we should wrap this one up, don't you?]
    • 14 May 2015 at 10:49am
      Bernard Porter says: @ Simon Wood
      Yes, for pity's sake, please let's wrap this particular exchange up. But before we do can I suggest to 'Simon Wood' that if he wants to be taken seriously he should write more clearly? I genuinely have not understood at all what he was getting at. And yes, I can read (and write)!
    • 14 May 2015 at 1:28pm
      S.J says: @ Simon Wood
      Was it really worth the effort of typing even that?
    • 14 May 2015 at 1:29pm
      S.J says: @ cufflink
      The irony is that Ed Miliband ir now probably the best candidate to lead Labour.
  • 15 May 2015 at 5:01pm
    Bernard Porter says:
    A footnote. in my original comment I predicted the emergence of historic Tory sex scandals (though obviously not only Tory) after the election. It has started: http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/may/15/tory-mp-victor-montagu-escaped-child-sex-abuse-trial-in-1970s.
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