New Labour- rebuilding the coalition
5: The political challenge
Our current problems are neither inevitable nor irreversible. Indeed, we are confident that Labour’s values still hold the best answers to the challenges facing Britain. But it will take more than a few individual policy changes to regain the trust and leadership that New Labour enjoyed.
We recognise that the challenge is greater than it was ten years ago. We have been in power for a long time; many younger voters will remember little if anything of life before Labour. We have not yet managed to foster a culture of deeper political engagement. The public remain concerned about ‘political’ issues, but it is becoming increasingly difficult for any political party to suggest that ‘politics’ is the answer to current problems. It becomes difficult even to begin a conversation about ‘politics’ with many voters.
Our society has become more individualised and, to some extent, more self-interested. What were once understood as ‘collective’ or public issues are now more likely to be seen through individual eyes. People judge policies to an increasing extent on their impact on themselves and their families and are inclined to give less weight to whether any measure is in the ‘broader public good’.
Over the past ten years, the lives and experience of the coalition that voted in New Labour has become even more diverse. This is creating an enormously fragmented group of personal expectations for any political party to try to satisfy. And from it comes some clear choices for Labour’s strategy.
One response might be to try to fragment our own message; to identify policies for individual interests and to target them through the niche marketing techniques which are becoming commonplace in the retail market.
A second approach would be to concentrate our attention on the relatively small group of ‘centre ground’ voters who hold the key in marginal constituencies; target them successfully and sufficient of the remaining voters will remain loyal to see us through.
But both these approaches rely on minimising the expectations of voters about broader progressive social change. They reduce politics to a narrow calculation of personal interest. These narrow approaches cannot produce the strong coalition on which the next phase of progressive politics can be built. They might deliver another few years in power, but it would be power without any purpose or mandate for change.
The only effective approach for Labour is to restate our belief that a common, collective, response to Britain’s challenges is the politics that can deliver. By pursuing ‘the public good’ we can offer the best chance of opportunity and security for individuals and their families. By doing so we would be restating Labour’s belief in the progressive possibilities of politics to work both for individuals and for the common good. By doing so we would provide the only effective way of combating climate change.
If we want a Labour Government to make progressive changes over the next ten years, as we have over the past, we need to bring a large part of the electorate together again around a convincing description of the problems our country currently faces and the shape of the answers to them.
We’ve tried to outline some of the issues that we will need to address. The examples we have given are not exhaustive, and they are included to underline the importance of being able to relate individual policy discussions to a clear strategic framework. We set out below how Labour might describe our role and ambitions in 2006 and for the years ahead. We believe that this story would ring true to voters as a description of Britain and its problems, and provide a reason why Labour offers the best answers.