There are two ways the centre-left can win elections, either by seeking votes from the centre-right or coalescing the votes already on the centre-left. The path chosen doesn’t just determine whether you win, but how you govern.
Any opportunity to remove the right from office, when it is always in power via its hegemonic sweep of ideology, institutions and forces, is necessary but insufficient. It’s winning on different terms that is essential to being in office and kickstarting the path to real power.
Labour has obviously decided to win from the right. This means providing overwhelming evidence to rightwing voters, the media and big business that nothing of any substance will really change if they win. The circle is squared with enough of the left, or rather the sticking plaster is applied, by betting the ranch on growth. What happens if GDP remains stuck is a worry for another day.
It also means relentlessly attacking the left to ensure the people who need to be placated really do get the message. The embrace of rightwing Tories such as Natalie Elphicke, contrasted with the humiliation of Diane Abbott and Faiza Shaheen, illustrates the determination to drive that home.
This strategy is motivated by the belief that anything more radical is either not desirable, or not feasible. Some in Labour have made a virtue of a necessity and persuaded themselves that free markets with a human face define the limits of the good society. Others pragmatically resign themselves to a lesser-of-two evils fate.
The hope of the rest of us is that, once Labour wins, then it can build from office. Let’s hope that’s true. There will be more wriggle room to tax and spend than it now feels safe to admit. But when you promise little then you’re likely to end up delivering even less. For surely the danger is that, in its caution, it has penned itself into an intellectual, organisational and electoral corner? After the flip from Corbynism, it will have won as New Starmer and will feel compelled to govern as New Starmer.
Underpinning this approach is a view enshrined from the formative years of New Labour, that this is, at best, a small-c conservative country and office can only be secured on the most timid terms. This view must now be contested by the second strategy, not just to win but govern with the ability to transform the country. This is the progressive-majority strategy.
Underpinning it is the hard evidence that, in most elections, there has been a progressive majority, in that the centre-left vote has been bigger then the right vote. Only 2015 bucked the trend. Mrs Thatcher wouldn’t have won in 1979 if the centre-left had worked together.
Data from ParlGov shows that, on a matrix of four key measures, UK voters favour the left over the right. Over 40 years and 11 elections, voters have cast on average 57% of votes for parties deemed to be on the left, making the UK the most progressive of the 15 nations in a sample including Sweden, Norway, Finland and Germany. And yet, because of our first-past-the-post voting system, we end up with the most rightwing governments.
This latent progressive majority can’t just be summoned into reality. It must be politically constructed through arguments and offers that bring the centre-left together. The key issue here is proportional representation, which, if offered by Labour, would secure the backing of Liberal Democrats, Greens and radicals of all stripes.
Compass, the organisation I’m part of, is working with activists from all parties to elect candidates who back proportional representation so that the radical potential of the electorate can be realised.
Crucially, the progressive-majority strategy enables the centre-left to win on a centre-left mandate. It provides a springboard for gradually more transformative government.
Of course, we know the mantra “lose, lose, lose, Blair, Blair, Blair, lose, lose, lose”. But you could just as well replace that with “right, right, right, rightish, rightish, rightish, right, right, right”! Any Labour government is better than any Tory government, but if it’s not better enough then the drift to the right continues.
Labour always mistakes an electoral mandate for a governing mandate. The right never does, and will relentlessly attack the new government as soon as it wins. Will Labour have intellectual, cultural and organisational resources to draw upon? Or will it be beholden to established vested interests, and thus have no real ability to alleviate poverty, invest in public services and mass public housing and most of all, drive a green transition.
This country isn’t conservative, it is chronically insecure, rampantly volatile and open to the lure of national populism if any new government doesn’t succeed. Look to France, where centrist politics is crumbling, and national populism is ascendant. Belatedly, the centre-left has formed a Popular Front to combat the shift to the right. Let’s hope it’s not too late there or here.
Labour isn’t going to win big because it’s refused to say anything. It will win big because it’s time for change. If enough doesn’t change, then people will jump just as quickly and as big to something else. As the line at the end of Terminator goes, “There is a storm coming.” We can head it off.
Neal Lawson is director of the cross-party campaign organisation Compass
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