Where's the party? Political identity after the pandemic
Conservatives are breaching the red wall and Labour is searching for a new direction: what do 'left' and 'right' mean any more?
I have been thinking for a long time about political identity. It’s becoming a commonplace that “left” and “right” are outdated terms now, helpful as a shorthand if that, and that their traditional meanings have been eroded and emended beyond recognition. The election of Donald Trump as president of the United States in 2016 was a significant milestone along this road: he won by appealing to disaffected, economically disadvantaged voters in the Rust Belt and social conservatives and evangelical Christians in the south, while Democrats piled up votes in the more affluent, liberal states and cities: California, Illinois, Massachusetts.
In the UK, a similar pattern began to emerge from the EU referendum in 2016 onwards, culminating in the Conservatives’ assault on so-called “Red Wall” seats in the North and Midlands. Again, the same pattern: a supposedly “conservative” party winning votes in the post-industrial towns which had previously been solidly Labour but which had come to feel economically and—this is crucial—culturally left behind. Meanwhile the Labour Party consolidated its base in the larger metropolitan areas, and even, at the recent local elections, began to nibble away at Conservative strongholds in rural England like Witney and Chipping Norton.
Inevitably, of course, parties shift their ideological stances in response to the circumstances of the political landscape. It was not so very long ago, after all, that the Conservative Party was firmly pro-Europe (while Labour was sceptical or outright hostile to the Common Market), and in the 1960s there was broad cross-party agreement about state intervention in the economy and full employment was a shared goal.
The onset of Thatcherism edged the Conservatives away from that economic consensus, though for some time the revolution was limited to the party leadership; it is sobering to remember how few of Thatcher’s first cabinet were “one of us”. Of her top team, only Howe, Joseph, Biffen, Nott and perhaps Maude were reliably on-side in an economic debate. But her longevity assured the success of the revolution, and by the time of her defenestration in 1990, monetarism was the new orthodoxy. With it came her late conversion to Euroscepticism, a seed that would sprout and grow with toxic consequences for the party in the 1990s.
Labour, too, moved their goalposts: the Left became increasingly powerful as the 1970s wore on, emboldened perhaps by the disappearance of Harold Wilson, and the election of Michael Foot as leader in 1980, and the crafting of a thoroughgoing socialist manifesto for the 1983 contest, which promised unilateral nuclear disarmament and withdrawal from the European Community, was both the high water mark for socialism and, in Gerald Kaufman’s famous words, “the longest suicide note in history”.
We now have a Conservative Party firmly in the ascendant in British politics, and Boris Johnson seems to have a stranglehold on the public’s affection, or at least tolerance, that no egregious behaviour can quite break. But what kind of Conservative is he? As mayor of London, he presented himself as a liberal Tory, at ease with the diversity and plurality of the capital, and won two terms on the basis that he was an amusing, attractive figurehead. It was of a part with his idolisation of Churchill, who was never really a full-blooded Tory and spent nearly 20 years as a Liberal MP and cabinet minister. As Winston, so Boris: party labels seemed too cramped, too small, too quotidian for such an outsized character with bold vision.
It is hard to classify the current government in the same way. Johnson adopted the banner of Brexit as his gonfalon for the leadership of his party and country, and it was brilliantly successful: he carried, in no small part, the Leave campaign in the referendum, beat the anaemic Jeremy Hunt to the premiership and then delivered an 80-seat majority for the Conservatives in December 2019. He did so with panache and warm words about Britain’s greatness, freedom and potential, evoking a rather foggy image of the generic past, but he has never been a details man. The electorate warmed to his theme, his sketch of once and future glories, and it was revealing of the man when he remarked that his “policy on cake was pro having it and pro eating it”.
This defiance of—stubborn refusal even to acknowledge—the normal compromises of politics has served the prime minister well. For every columnist who decries his faults and falsities, there are a dozen voters who think, with a degree of affection, “Oh, Boris”. Even now, after more than a year of a pandemic that was not handled immaculately, after shady financial dealings and sheer, glib untruths spoken and never retracted nor apologised for, Johnson remains buoyant in the opinion polls. The commentariat can beat its fists and wail that these faults matter, but the voters are disinclined to listen, and Johnson is a politician who knows that the esteem of experts is worthless and that electoral success is everything.
Jeremy Corbyn’s improbable four-year tenure as leader of the Labour Party has left the so-called progressive wing of politics in disarray. His nostalgic and naïf ideas of statecraft—public ownership, big government, high taxes, high spending—energised a section of the populace like little before. The far Left, particularly the younger section of it, drank the Corbynite Kool Aid to the last drop and are still unreconciled to his dismal election defeat in 2019. Many have developed a grim Dolchstoßlegende, the “stab-in-the-back” theory adopted by nationalists in Weimar Germany, and blame the media, the rest of the Labour Party, global elites and, occasionally, the Jews for their hero’s downfall. “We won the argument” was a common refrain in the aftermath of the last election, and highlights exactly the calculation Johnson made: even if it were true, and it is not, it wouldn’t matter, because it was the Conservatives who won the votes.
The Labour Party now finds itself in search of a motivating vision. Sir Keir Starmer was elected leader by a convincing margin last year, though his victory over the earnest but little-known Lisa Nandy and the inexplicable Rebecca Long-Bailey was hardly the stuff of Greek myth. But he was elected largely because he was not Jeremy Corbyn, because he looked like a man who could plausibly lead a serious political party, because he would not be as obvious a hate figure or figure of fun for the mainstream media.
At the time of his election, against the backdrop of the unfolding pandemic, Starmer spoke almost entirely of his leadership in procedural terms:
We’ve got a mountain to climb, but we will climb it, and I will do my utmost to reconnect us across the country, to re-engage with our communities and voters, to establish a coalition across our towns and our cities and our regions with all creeds and communities to speak for the whole of the country. Where that requires change, we will change. Where that requires us to rethink, we will rethink.
He had almost nothing to say on his policies or beliefs. Other than that he would not steer too far from his predecessor’s platform and would engage with all wings—factions—of the party, he was either unwilling or unable to articulate a vision of an alternative Britain, a country which he would seek to mould in his image.
Where do the parties stand now, and how do the “left” and “right” labels fit? The government is pursuing a broadly populist agenda, with nationalist elements, from championing “global Britain” to reinforcing border security and pursuing illegal immigrants with ever-greater fervour. In economic terms, the chancellor, Rishi Sunak, has been able to pose as the nation’s generous benefactor: the pandemic has suspended economic reality, at least in ministers’ minds, and the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme, the programme of subsidising business and workers, has seen nearly £62 billion of taxpayers’ money spent, and the figure is set to rise.
The government is making lavish spending promises. The Ministry of Defence has been promised an extra £16 billion (though insiders claim the department still has a ‘black hole’ in its equipment budget of some £13 billion). Last year’s budget saw the announcement of a dizzying £600 billion for capital spending on infrastructure. And, of course, the national debt is at its highest ever peaceful level, a surreal £2.14 trillion.
These are not all policies a devout Thatcherite would recognise. Nigel Lawson, chancellor of the exchequer from 1983 to 1989, defined the creed in his memoirs as “free markets, financial discipline, firm control over public expenditure, tax cuts, nationalism, ‘Victorian values’ (of the Samuel Smiles self-help variety), privatisation and a dash of populism”. The current government may tick the nationalism and populism boxes, but it is hard to see many other areas of continuity. And Boris Johnson is not a role model for the sort of Victorian values that Samuel Smiles, with his passionate belief in thrift and self-improvement, would have found familiar.
Johnson’s administration is a strange Pushmi-Pullyu. Its high spending and acceptance of unprecedented debt has more than a whiff of Keynesianism about it, while the straightforward patriotism and selective nativism looks more like the Führerprinzip-driven Trumpism of the US or the caudillos of central and eastern Europe. Is it right-wing? In some senses, obviously, yes, though it is less obviously Conservative in the tradition of its predecessors. One wonders, slightly fearfully, what the prime minister would call the party so in his thrall if he had a blank sheet of paper.
He was, remember, a liberal Tory as mayor of London. He supported the London Living Wage, appeared at Pride and endorsed ethnic minority newspapers. He banned homophobic advertising by Christian groups on buses, and publicly declared his support for Barack Obama as president of the United States. But there were some signs of authoritarianism. He banned drinking alcohol on public transport, and did so without consultation with the unions—it was significant that the only group to welcome the ban was the British Transport Police.
This knee-jerk authoritarianism has shown itself again and again. Johnson’s attempt to prorogue Parliament to curtail the debate on his Brexit deal was ruled unlawful by the Supreme Court, and even though some (myself included) who thought the court should not have been involved, no-one seriously defended the prime minister’s democratic credentials. His relationship with the media has also been one of control: during the campaign for the Conservative leadership in 2019, he largely avoided interviews and questions, his team calculating, rightly, that there was more damage to be done by a careless word or phrase from Candidate Johnson than there was by seeming to shy away from scrutiny. And so the relationship continues: Downing Street is firmly in transmit mode, though the message often lacks clarity, detail and basic veracity. Johnson seems to have enjoyed the de haut en bas style of the crisis press conferences of the pandemic, and there were plans to retain them on a permanent basis, helmed by a professional spokesman (the able but miscast Allegra Stratton).
The government takes its lead from the chief executive. It does not like scrutiny or having to explain. It reaches over the heads of parliament and the commentariat to speak directly to the electorate, and its formula of optimism, free spending and the Union Flag seems still to be a winning one. Its intolerance of challenge can make it heavy-handed, though it is interesting that there is very little social conservatism in the Johnsonian platform: that is left to the backbench ginger groups like Cornerstone and the Common Sense Group.
Little, that is, except for the fight against ‘wokeism’. The government has laid out battle lines for the so-called culture wars, and the disputed territories are obvious: the BBC, identity politics, academic freedom of speech, the presentation and consideration of history. This is where the red wall comes in: the Conservative Party believes, with some justification, that these are areas in which Labour has lost touch with its traditional supporters, that they represent the wedge it is driving between the opposition and the voters.
Nationalist and populist: the government certainly fits those monikers. And it professes individualism too. People are not, say Tories, to be regarded merely as representatives of their identity group, whether it be ethnic, social, economic or sexual. They are individuals who may be corralled in temporary coalitions but the government is aware—the prime minister is acutely aware—that its future depends on delivering credibly for the electorate and on people feeling that they are better off, happier, safer and otherwise more fulfilled than they would be in an alternative world.
I am a Conservative, tribally and by habit. I have never voted anything else, though my enthusiasm has waxed and waned. I find it impossible to imagine myself putting an X next to the candidate for another party, let alone being a member of a party. Though profoundly Eurosceptic, I was never tempted by UKIP or the Brexit Party (and I am old enough even to remember the Anti-Federalist League). But I have come to wonder what that means, given that the Conservative Party itself has roamed the political spectrum over the past 40 years.
I tend to avoid the kind of internet quizzes which reveal your innermost beliefs on a simple-to-understand graph. I have seen some of the results and they are sufficiently random to make me wary. I’m not sure, in any event, how useful it is to reduce ideology to a pair of axes, not least because it represents beliefs as essentially oppositional: big state vs limited government, libertarian vs authoritarian.
My general belief is that the government should generally keep out of people’s lives, except for those occasions where it is the most effective or sometimes the only way of delivering services or providing protection. Governments tend to be the least efficient system for carrying out policy and I have a bias towards the private sector, but I don’t suggest that we should privatise the police force or dismantle the welfare state. I used to think perhaps I was a neoconservative, and in many ways I am: Irving Kristol defined neoconservatives as those whose liberal heritage made them forward-looking and who wanted different reforms rather than stasis, and for whom ideas were important.
But neoconservatism has been tainted by George W. Bush and the invasion of Iraq. It is seen now as a Manichaean world view, ready to rush in with force rather than pursue diplomacy and persuasion. In short, it has become a crude caricature of American exceptionalism and hegemony. As a Briton, a Scot and a unionist, that holds no appeal for me. (As it happens I supported the toppling of Saddam Hussein and will still argue that it was a good outcome among other, bad outcomes.)
I do believe in the free market and in capitalism as an essential engine for economic growth. But I think I agree with Douglas Murray when he says that “the economy only makes up part of our lives, it must not be allowed to take over and entirely dictate to our society”. Tradition matters to people, and to me. Enoch Powell, the great unquotable, said 35 years ago that “a Tory is someone who believes that institutions are wiser than those that operate them”, and I think there is a lot of truth in it. Change, yes: but it must always make its case.
What does that make me? The old humbug of “socially liberal and fiscally conservative”? Or is that merely declaring, as one blogger put it, “I care about people but not enough to see them cared for on a systemic level”? I think I fall outside most interpretations of the Overton Window, so maybe I am a radical, though I do not always think like one.
What all of this says about me is largely irrelevant: but I think it shines a light on how voters are now approaching political parties. Tribalism is still there, on the Left and the Right. It finds a particularly loathsome expression in the sneering horror of the “Never kissed a Tory” reflex of far-left voters. A calmer and less vitriolic but equally firm feeling exists towards the Labour Party in parts of the Home Counties and the suburbs of our cities.
We live in interesting times. Boris Johnson is making the Conservative Party anew, and there is currently no-one powerful enough to challenge him or offer a viable alternative: at least, no-one in parliament. The Labour Party is almost by default policy-free: the appropriate section of its website send you to its “policy forum” which merely sets out how issues will be discussed. The post-Covid world will ask big questions, about the economy, working life, the global financial system, culture and society, and it is not at all clear how the Labour Party will even begin to answer these. But there is going to come a time, and soon, when “pass” is not a viable response.