John Harris says that if the Labour Government wants to save its skin, it needs to build a new narrative
THE Italian political vocabulary contains the illuminating word “Qualunquismo”. It translates as “Whateverism” and it denotes a kind of desperate, directionless populism.
It probably hasn’t been uttered in Downing Street lately, but Gordon Brown and his Government are proving to be skilled practitioners of this miserable art. From the mystifying decision to abolish the 10p rate as part of a quest to grab headlines via a tax cut, through such embarrassments as housing minister Caroline Flint’s bizarre suggestion that the workshy might be made homeless and Home Secretary Jacqui Smith’s claims that the police should be in the habit of “harassing” troublesome young people, the depressing belief seems to be that Labour’s prospects might be revived through the crassest and most muddled of politics. By way of taking that approach into the realms of the absurd, we learned this month that the Department for Work and Pensions is set to push the workless into employment with the aid of ITV’s The Jeremy Kyle Show.
And so the confusion continues. Look at the Government’s recent proposals for dealing with Britain’s housing problems. They take some untangling, to say the least. Stamp duty is suspended – at least partly because it looks like a reduction in taxes – but the idea essentially amounts to a cynical attempt to entice first-time buyers into a housing market in freefall. If the plan works – which is unlikely – property prices would presumably stop falling. But that, in turn, would surely bump up against the fact that millions of people actually need homes that are more affordable. Whateverism strikes again.
Trying to shed light on the Government’s predicament, I recently – and belatedly – got round to reading a book whose popularity among the political class peaked last summer. The Political Brain is the work of American psychologist Drew Westen, who spent countless years as an exasperated supporter of the Democrats, despairing at the fact that whereas the Republicans always had a clear, emotional, and human story to tell the American electorate, their opponents never really got close. For fear of offending swing voters or sounding unstatesmanlike, they tended to sound hesitant, distant and simply lost.
In a British context, two things in Westen’s book stick out. One is a description of the kind of people he reckons are ill-suited to being successful political leaders: those with what he calls an “obsessional personality style”, which is characterised by “tone-deafness to emotion, a hard-driving attitude towards work, a tendency to be controlling and a habit of focusing on details that often leads the person to lose the forest for the trees.”
In retrospect, it was perhaps a shame that Labour MPs took the book on holiday with them last August, by which time the leadership die had been cast; one would imagine that in the vicinity of Tuscan swimming pools, more than a few people felt a sudden pang of unease.
That aside, what’s truly fascinating about The Political Brain is its lengthy explanation of what a compelling political narrative should look like. As Westen sees it: “It should be able to be readily understood, told and retold; it should have a clear moral; it should be vivid and memorable; it should be moving; and it should take elements of the opposition’s story and recast them as its own.”
But this, I think, is the most important part. Westen says that “a successful political story should have protagonists and antagonists, defining both what the party or candidate stands for and what the party or candidate cannot stand – and, most centrally, what the antagonists represent.”
Clearly, this isn’t rocket science. Looking at recent British history, it’s obvious that Margaret Thatcher grasped this way of thinking as a matter of instinct, picking out enemies whenever the need arose. By contrast, Labour ministers remains in thrall to the delusional philosophy of the big tent, seen lately in the Prime Minister’s faintly absurd quest to build a “government of all the talents” and crystallised long ago by the hubristic claim that “new” Labour could somehow be “the political arm of the British people as a whole”. In tandem with Tony Blair and Gordon Brown’s bedazzlement by big business, it has made for a politics at constant risk of looking either meaningless or nasty. Labour’s default setting has been to either attack its own side or to only go after such soft targets as illegal immigrants, “yobs” and benefit cheats.
In the current political and economic climate, this is no longer sustainable. If Labour is to restore a moral clarity and sense of purpose to its politics, it will have to identify a few of the convincing antagonists Drew Westen talks about.
A few examples spring to mind. In the past couple of years, I’ve written frequently about the finance companies which trade on Britain’s massive levels of personal debt and seduce people into a predicament that ruins thousands of lives – and then watched while Labour has remained largely silent on the issue, while such Tories as Alan Duncan and George Osborne have made all the running.
Away from Westminster, there is a snowballing anger about the alcohol industry and the fact that billions of pounds of public money is spent cleaning up after a huge business that is pretty much a law unto itself.
Unease about City bonuses and the unchecked excesses of high finance is now an in-built part of the Middle English milieu represented by the Daily Mail. Then there is the fact that energy companies are giving their shareholders hugely increased dividends and making inflated profits at exactly the point when basic warmth threatens to slip beyond the means of some of our most vulnerable people – which surely makes the argument for a one-off windfall tax unanswerable.
All that could feed into a story that would resonate with millions of people. Founded on an idea of fairness rooted in Labour’s attachment to equality – and a return to the kind of moral certainty briefly glimpsed in Brown’s scrapping of the Manchester super-casino – the essential part of the script would go something like this. Labour is a party of economic success and it encourages entrepreneurial flair, but it also recognises what Edward Heath called “the unacceptable face of capitalism” and sets itself against corporate irresponsibility and excess, and wringing profits out of things that wreck lives. Moreover, it won’t allow the country to go through difficult economic times with the burden of sacrifice being placed on working people, while those who can genuinely afford to tighten their belts claim to be somehow untouchable.
To some people, this will sound like so much dangerous left-wing nonsense, which prompts a few questions. If any move against the super-rich – a clampdown on tax avoidance and a new top rate, for instance – would be as ill-advised as some leading Labour figures suggest, why is their position now a matter of worry for the Governor of The Bank Of England, while such centre-right European politicians as Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy express their own unease? If the future inevitably belongs to those interests who would subject just about everything to the logic of profit and loss and cream in the rewards, why are post office closures such a huge issue? With the boom years now behind us, and no end of financial chicanery and excess exposed by the downturn, do we not think that talking about inequality, insecurity and the case for the state might resonate in Reading just as much as in Rotherham?
Alistair Darling’s unexpected criticism of excessive and unmerited bonuses at this year’s TUC gathering pointed in roughly the right direction, although it would be naive to expect his words to feed into any hardened policy. But they ought to. Some of us might be getting a little tired of making the point, but it needs repeating again and again: Labour is in an utterly perilous place. If it doesn’t change direction and re-discover, not just a convincing political story but its very soul, it faces not just the loss of office, but a generation in the wilderness.
John Harris is an author and columnist for The Guardian
