THE BIG READ: Labour's impending, uninspiring landslide won't mark an historic turning point
The official opposition is not offering a fundamental shift away from the failed policies of the global liberal consensus. The populist Right will get its chance soon enough
THE tragic premature death of Derek Draper has given us a reminder of one of the key political turning points of our lives – the landslide Labour victory of 1997.
Television obituaries were full of footage of him singing “Things Can Only Get Better” alongside inveterate party boy Neil Kinnock at Labour’s victory celebration. After four successive Tory terms the electorate had been in the mood for change. The disastrous economic experiment of membership of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism had unravelled within months of John Major’s narrow 1992 election victory and from that moment on the Conservatives were dead men walking. Despite four solid years of ensuing recovery, habitual Tories were set on punishing their party for the chaos.
But Tony Blair and Labour did not merely own the notion of “change”. They also owned “hope”. The hit song by the electro band D:Ream became Labour’s unofficial anthem and captured the spirit of optimism around Blair.
Right now we are also contemplating the demise of a four-term Tory governing project which also had its core economic credo blow up in its face in an autumnal meltdown that jacked up mortgage rates painfully for millions – the Truss/Kwarteng 2022 mini-Budget. As Mark Twain once said, history doesn’t repeat itself but it does often rhyme. And these are the prime rhyming couplets between now and then.
But the lack of optimism these days is the biggest non-rhyming line. Back in 1997 not only did the British people think Blair was well-placed to improve their lives but the liberal governing elite across the western world also assumed things really were going to get better and better for the rest of time. The 1992 book The End of History and The Last Man by the influential American political scientist Francis Fukuyama saw the dissolution of the Soviet Union as a decisive victory for liberal democracy. From that point onwards it was just obvious that countries all over the world would gravitate towards a global rules-based order, capitalist economies underpinned by welfare states, free and fair elections and all the rest of the liberal playbook. The West had won because it had the best ideas.
Though they debated vigorously in public, all three party leaders of 1997 – Blair, Major and Paddy Ashdown – subscribed to this basic world view. In private they were as matey a trio as the establishment has ever produced. Between them their three parties secured more than 90 per cent of votes in the election, indicating that the electorate was content to go along with the basic approach (though they had all been pressured into agreeing there would need to be a permissive referendum before the UK could dump the pound and join any new European single currency).
Just look at the global (dis)order now. A renegade Russia has reverted to type by invading a neighbour, China has also turned outlaw and casts avaricious eyes on Taiwan, Iran has been spreading blood-soaked chaos across the Middle East via its various proxies and mass migration from poor countries to richer ones has proved to be the biggest destabilising force of all. America is also falling apart as a governable entity, leading to growing concerns about the long-term viability of NATO.
And unlike when Blair took over in the UK, the public finances are in a huge mess, living standards are no higher than they were 15 years ago, economic productivity is becalmed and very few people can envisage things getting better rather than even worse over the next five years or so.
In these circumstances, Keir Starmer would need to be a political miracle-worker in order to own the idea of hope. And we can all agree he is not that. Indeed, the word that comes top whenever pollsters do one of those word cloud things about him is “boring”.
Starmer and Labour own the idea of change only in respect of being the team people traditionally turn to when the Tories have entertained them for too long. On foreign policy, economic policy, immigration policy, criminal justice policy and even European policy they are basically offering the same prospectus as the Tories. They will carry on the Government’s policies towards Ukraine and the Middle East, carry on with “steady as she goes” economics under “snoring, boring” Rachel Reeves, carry on with mass immigration, soft law and order, the dash to net zero and even the very gradual re-engagement with the EU prompted by Rishi Sunak’s Windsor Framework. This is where all the reverses of recent decades have left the Fukuyama Brigades of liberal intellectuals – clinging to things that haven’t really worked amid a rising tide of unhappiness among citizens. It is all desperately uninspiring stuff.
So no wonder that fertile ground is opening up for a new “populist” Right with radically different ideas across the West. America appears to be heading for a second Trump presidency, while Le Pen is now favourite to be the next President of France, the AFD is surging again in Germany, Meloni runs Italy and even ultra-liberal Canada may be about to take a sharp tilt rightwards. Of the other G7 countries, only Japan is exhibiting systemically stable politics and that may be because it never bought into the multicultural and diversity cult elements of the global liberal vision in the first place.
So what then of Britain? Even at 10 per cent in the polls, the Reform UK party is currently a pale shadow of the national populist movements elsewhere in the western world. Our first past the post electoral system makes it hugely difficult for such a movement to break through into becoming a permanent fixture of Westminster politics as the SDP, UKIP and Brexit Party insurgencies underline. And yet the same intellectual space exists here as in the rest of the developed world. And we also have a potential figurehead leader to match Trump, Le Pen and Meloni in profile and appeal.
In an article for the Sunday Telegraph this weekend, the veteran political operator James Frayne revealed that just before Christmas he had polled public attitudes towards Nigel Farage, who had recently emerged from the celebrity jungle at the time.
Frayne found that a frankly astonishing 43 per cent of those currently planning to vote Tory at the general election would be open to voting for a party led by Farage. So would a third of all voters and even a quarter of Labour voters. A Farage word cloud based on public responses to him now features the terms “intelligent” and “straightforward” at its heart, albeit it with “unpleasant” and “two-faced” coming in narrowly behind.
Frayne is surely correct to diagnose that this broadening of the Farage appeal is not just down to his enhanced reality show fame, but also because more and more people are coming to agree with him on policy, especially in regard to legal and illegal immigration levels. Frayne’s conclusion is more striking still: that far from being a wild candidate for destabilising change, Farage should now be regarded as a relatively
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