by Kevin Meagher

For all the talk about the font size and just how luminescent our mea culpa on the deficit should be, there is a bigger question stalking the Labour party: where does political idealism end and pragmatism begin? How is the balance to be struck between what Labour wants to do and what it has to do?

On this wheel the party always breaks. It’s been the same since Ramsay McDonald’s great betrayal of 1931, when he led breakaway Labour MPs into the national government to enforce Sir George May’s disastrous austerity package during the depression.

The same drama played itself out under Clement Attlee, when rearmament costs saw charges imposed for false teeth and spectacles, besmirching Aneurin Bevan’s idealistic vision of a free NHS. He promptly resigned from the cabinet, beginning a decade-long cold war with his arch-pragmatist rival, Hugh Gaitskell.

Most damagingly, the IMF-inspired austerity package, that James Callaghan’s government was forced to swallow during the financial crisis of the mid-seventies, saw Labour’s entire programme junked; precipitating the internal war that would rip the party to pieces during the early 1980s.

How to balance idealism and hard reality?

To understand why this same, age-old dilemma for the centre-left is playing itself out right now, we have to go back to the general election defeat in 2010. The drubbing many had predicted did not occur. Yes, the party’s share of the vote was dreadful; but the net result was a Tory opposition with every conceivable advantage at its disposal – from hard cash to newness – still failed to win an overall majority.

The result gave pause for hope that Labour could be a sabbatical away from office, rather than a generation in the wilderness. This was compounded by a widespread belief that the coalition was an unstable and unholy alliance that would fall apart long before 2015. It seems crazy now, but it was a commonly held view there would be a second general election in 2010.

So what followed was a good natured, if uninspiring, leadership contest where no candidate asked difficult questions about Labour’s record or future purpose. Why bother, when most members remained essentially optimistic about the future?

But this sense of unity was illusory. No-one was willing to delve too deeply into how a social democratic party would in future do social democratic things against a backdrop of years of biting austerity – the very question Ed Miliband set out to answer this week. As a result, the period of introspection, the trawling of the party’s soul that should have followed defeat – was postponed.

Then came 2011. Black dog began to stir. Despite winning 800 new councillors back in May’s local elections, more had been expected. By-elections came and went. Labour did well enough, but these were phony victories in Labour-held seats. Opinion poll leads were consistent, but uneven.

Yes, in a straight choice voters opted for Labour over the Tories. But when asked about leadership qualities, or who was best placed to manage the economy, the picture was less sanguine. The coalition had shaky moments, but it survived. Winning in 2015 was no longer a certainty.

And so the hard questions finally begin to emerge about how Labour will rebuild its reputation for economic competence.

But four years of being told that the financial crisis was solely Gordon Brown’s fault has taken a devastating toll. It is now a hard-wired assumption among voters that deficit reduction must be the number one priority for the economy. Thus the social democratic seed falls on stony ground.

So this year will prove pivotal; the mid-way point of this parliament. By 2014 voters attitudes will have hardened irrevocably. For Ed Miliband’s critics, two years in the job is long enough for him to have made a mark, yet not too late to start all over again with someone else if he fails to offer a compelling account of how idealism and pragmatism are to be resolved.

But his critics demand too much of him. This dilemma is not his alone to resolve.

Renewal does not come at the flick of a switch; you cannot just reboot political parties. Labour lost an election after 13 years in power. That is a lot of record to have to account for, and a lot of intellectual u-turns that need performing. There was always going to be a period where the electorate would not listen to Labour’s analysis on the economy; about the same length of time they give a new government the benefit if the doubt.

The significance of this week’s speech is that Ed is now doing the heavy lifting that all candidates, including himself (perhaps especially so) avoided doing during the leadership election. What is Labour for? What can it credibly offer that is close enough to the realpolitik of the hour, while providing an alternative worth voting for? The party needs to be carefully managed through this period of intense self-reflection and reinvention.

The risk in not being bold and revisionist is that the party approaches 2015 unreformed, unrealistic – and unelectable. By the same token members cannot – and will not – be bounced into abandoning the party’s social democratic raison d’être.

Some within the party – not many – may indeed be “flat earthers”, denying the scale of the fiscal challenge. By the same token some ultra pragmatists seem to be “scorched earthers” – ignoring the centrality of social spending in achieving Labour’s goals. Difficult though the current economic circumstances are, Labour managed to create the welfare state and NHS in far worse. On the basis of some current thinking, we would not even have tried.

What his critics fail to accept is that there is remarkably little distance between Ed Miliband and any of his senior colleagues. The Labour party is now firmly in the hands of a generation of genuine social democrats.

Yvette Cooper, Ed Balls, Andy Burnham or indeed David Miliband; whether starting off as Blairites or Brownites, they share the same instinctive belief in activist government, incremental reform and making “fairness” more than a rhetorical blandishment. Furthermore, the broader Labour tribe is basically united on the big questions of economic and foreign policy – the twin poles that have led to each of Labour’s previous breakdowns.

In Ed Miliband’s place each of his senior colleagues would also grapple with the tortuous dilemma of deciding what accommodations the party must make with its principles and where it should stand its ground. They would each find it difficult to strike the balance.

While short term performance and party management issues are his alone to address, the longer term challenge of working out what the party stands for in such an uncertain and unpropitious time for progressive politics is something that the whole party has to engage in.

Striking the right balance between idealism and hard-headed realism must be achieved – but let’s not pretend it’s easier than it is.

Kevin Meagher is associate editor of Labour Uncut.

Tags: by-elections, Kevin Meagher, leadership contest, second general election

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