centrism « Labour Uncut

Posts Tagged ‘centrism’

Will the legacy of moderate Labour be a country where only the hard right or the hard left can govern?

14/01/2018, 10:08:16 PM

by George Kendall

On most issues, I agree with social democrats and I disagree with the hard left who now control the Labour party. But not on all.

Paul Wheeler recently warned of Tory moves to entrench their political position by manipulating the political system. He called it “boiling a frog”, a great analogy. The Tories are indeed putting party interest before democracy.

But are Labour moderates much better?

At the last election, the two largest parties received 82% of the vote. If they genuinely represent the preferences of all but 18% of the electorate, that might justify a political system that stops new choices emerging. However, this is clearly not true.

In 2015, the two big parties received only 67%; in 2010 it was only 60%; and many who currently vote Labour or Conservative do so for tactical reasons. This is easy to confirm. Just go on social media and suggest to someone who opposes Brexit that they vote Lib Dem or Green. You will almost certainly be told that would “let the Tories in”, and that the only way to beat the Tories is to vote Labour.

Squeezing the third party vote has been a long-standing feature of British politics. Occasionally, if a third party builds up a bandwagon, they can use it against the Conservatives or Labour. Most of the famous Lib Dem by-election victories were built on persuading supporters of one party to vote tactically, to get the other party out. However, when it matters, in general elections, the squeeze favours the big two.

With the hard left takeover of the Labour party, some moderates must now be thinking the unthinkable, that if they are deselected by Labour, their only hope of staying in Westminster would be to stand as an independent or for another party. Yet they know that the electoral system would then crucify them in a general election.

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Posted in Uncut | 25 Comments »

Never let a good crisis go to waste. Labour’s sensible centrist MPs should seize their opportunity

01/03/2016, 05:31:46 PM

by Greig Baker

They say a recession is the best time to set up in business, because if you can make it then, you know you’re onto a good thing. Smart Labour MPs should look at Jeremy Corbyn’s political downturn in the same way. It might not feel like it, but if you are a sensible centrist MP with ambitions for the top job, you now have three things in your favour…

First, you don’t have a choice. If you or someone like you doesn’t come up with a plan to make Labour electable again and soon, you face either being rejected by the voters, deselected by your party, or a decade or more of a backbench job with less power and more acrimony than you’d get as a local Councillor. You can make a successful pitch for what you believe in, or join the political dole queue.

Second, in times of crisis, merit wins through. MPs with verve are ten-a-penny in three figure majority Governments. But, like the successful entrepreneur who beats a bad market, it takes special skill and dedication to create political success out of a downhearted shambles. Even better for you (and as much as it pains me to say this given that I used to work for them), the Conservatives are divided, unloved and performing poorly – so there’s plenty to get your teeth into.

And third, if your bid to bring Labour back into the black is going to succeed, you will need to fashion the party in your image. This means forging alliances with people you like, value, respect and trust, and who will be around for long enough to help you achieve real change – so the prospect of working with a genuinely capable executive team beckons.

From an outsider’s perspective, it looks like Labour’s political contraction is already well underway. However, the right moves by the right people could stop the “recession” becoming a “depression” – in every sense of the word.

Greig Baker is Chief Executive of The GUIDE Consultancy

Posted in Uncut | 4 Comments »

Ten hard truths

14/08/2015, 06:02:56 PM

Following Tristram Hunt’s call for “a summer of hard truths” Labour Uncut is running a short series laying them out. As leadership ballot papers are despatched, here’s John Slinger with his top ten for a centre-left party that is serious about winning.

1. Elect someone capable of genuine leadership, who can speak to and for the whole country. Labour members and supporters should spurn the view that this selection process is primarily about them; it should be about the voters.

2. Appeal to people who voted Conservative and for other parties with policies which appeal beyond Labour’s declining ‘core vote’. A winning alliance elected us in 1997, 2001 and 2005. Only leadership as in point 1) can encourage a genuine conversation with all voters rather than ourselves.

3. End the constitutional link with the unions to show that Labour is above sectional interests. No party should hard-wire significant political influence for one section of society into its constitution. Unions should remain close friends, enabling relationships with other sectors to be nurtured.

4. Seek to become the party for workers and business by unashamedly building new bridges to both unions and business, the sector employing more than four in five UK workers.

5. Focus on ideas that work by following wherever evidence leads, rejecting ideology and ignoring protest group purism. That could mean a greater role for the state where markets should be more competitive or more involvement by the private sector in providing, but not owning, public services.

The party would condemn failure in public and private sectors, and encourage both sectors where they succeed. The cases of Mid Staffs, Hillsborough, Jimmy Savile and others show the dichotomy of ‘public sector good/private sector bad’ is false. Labour should incubate excellence wherever it is found.

6. Champion continued EU membership by emphasising its benefits for our economy and for our global influence. With the exception of a few leading politicians such as Pat McFadden, debate on EU membership has long lacked a positive, effective political voice, thereby offering the field to those who peddle the myth that Brexit is the panacea to complex global problems.

7. Stand up for strong defence and diplomacy because at a time of growing global instability Britain must be a confident member of Nato, a proud and trusted ally of the United States and willing to play a leading role in maintaining global security and enforcing the Responsibility to Protect doctrine where appropriate. This would help convince the public that it is a party of hard-nosed, principled government not pious protest. (more…)

Posted in Uncut | 24 Comments »

‘Blairite’ might be an insult but only his politics will get Labour back into power

03/07/2015, 09:16:55 AM

by Brian Back

The Labour party has always fought for equal treatment, and against prejudice and discrimination, but, in their desperation to steer the party in a certain direction, and get their favoured leadership candidate elected; many party members are now betraying their own ideals and values.

Those on the left continually decry the prejudicial stereotyping of people; such as those who rely on benefits, who are universally labelled as ‘scroungers’ or cheats’. We hate the lack of opportunities available for young black men; who are labelled as criminals, gangsters, thugs and muggers, harassed by the police and discriminated against by educators, employers and politicians. We favour positive discrimination in our candidate selection procedures, as a way to address gender-bias and the under-representation of women in politics.

Equality and fairness is our rallying cry, but we are failing to practice what we preach.

We have created a negative stereotype regarding one group within our Party. We have turned them into the ‘Other’ and the unwelcome outsider, tarring them all with the same brush, failing to treat them as individuals who deserve to be judged on their own actions and merits.

The group I am talking about; is ‘Blairites’.

‘Blairite’ has now become an insult, or term of abuse.

The term ‘Blairite’, now has incredibly negative connotations attached to it, with anyone labelled as such, somehow seen as ‘not really Labour’, or even a traitor to the cause.

Blairites are castigated for the desire to take Labour onto the centre-ground, therefore supposedly abandoning left-wing values, ideals and aims. In short, Blairites are criticised for compromising; for making deals with ‘the enemy’.

Those who criticise Blairites for this are forgetting the fundamental axiom of politics: the entire point and goal of politics is compromise– to reach agreement between different factions and interests, so as to come to some kind of ‘middle-ground’ that all can accept and agree with.

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Posted in Grassroots | 24 Comments »

Reaching out to centrist voters now is good tactics. Strategy it ain’t

23/04/2015, 11:45:50 AM

by Rob Marchant

Happily, Labour has had a very good fortnight. Since my last column, Miliband’s personal ratings have jumped up and the Tory campaign has blundered from unforced error to unforced error. Bookies and polls now put him as neck and neck with Cameron as next PM, not lagging way behind as before.

The final piece of this recovery in both results and performance, last weekend, was a quite unexpected outreach programme from Labour to the centre ground, of which more later.

After the last election, the new prime minister, formerly known for his husky-cuddling and his “greenest government ever” shtick suddenly remembered his back benchers and became, for the most part, a much more traditional kind of Tory.

Nowhere has this been more evident than in his Europe policy, where he essentially caved in to the more rabid Eurosceptic elements in his own party, in the hope of stemming the flow of voters and defecting MPs to UKIP. If, as some are predicting, UKIP ends up the election having lost Thanet South and with merely a couple of MPs, he will surely look back on this decision to pander to their agenda as one of the utmost folly.

That game is not only dangerous for Britain, it is poor internal politics for Cameron: after all, his (almost universally pro-EU) big business backers can hardly be delighted at the prospect of an EU referendum. But in any event, it is not hard to paint the Tories as having lurched into a right-wing caricature of themselves.

On the other hand Miliband, for the majority of his tenure as leader, has often given the impression of being more mindful of his party at large than of the electorate outside, with the result that Labour’s policy agenda has mostly languished in its comfort zone on the soft left. There was one brief flicker of hope that Labour would once again embrace a broad church, around the time of Miliband’s 2013 “One Nation” conference speech: but in policy terms One Nation turned out, for the most part, to be a slogan, and little more.

Politics is a lot like the game of squash: those who dominate the centre of the court tend to dominate the game.

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Posted in Uncut | 6 Comments »

Will we ever see the likes of Blair again?

30/07/2014, 09:56:25 AM

by Jonathan Todd

We are now too cynical to entertain the idea of a leader who defeats all, reconciles all and ultimately encompasses all, Janan Ganesh concluded following Tony Blair’s Progress speech. We won’t see his like again. And in their absence, Ganesh observes, Labour seeks a squeaked victory on a left-wing platform, while the Tories devote all campaign resources to 40 seats that they are trying to retain and 40 more that they aspire to gain.

Given the seeming lack of traction for a Blair-like big tent, the two largest parties battle a war of attrition, both closer to their voting and ideological citadels than Blair preferred.

Is the centre ground, which Blair dominated, so drained of potency that neither of the largest parties is best served by squarely holding it?

We might attach personnel or structural explanations for neither Labour nor Tory rushing to do so.

“Tony Blair,” according to a Labour strategist quoted by George Eaton, “was doing an impression of Bill Clinton, and David Cameron was doing an awful impression of Tony Blair. Ed has no interest in doing an impression of David Cameron.” If we conclude that Cameron and Miliband lack the capacities of Blair and Clinton, we might explain their non-centrist strategies in terms of personnel.

There is, however, a British leader seeking to command the same terrain as held by Blair, Nick Clegg, which has led John Rentoul to diagnose the paradox of centrist politics. This is that elections are supposed to be won in the centre ground, but the one party that occupies precisely that territory is facing damnation – meaning to be cut by about half – in next year’s election.

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Posted in Uncut | 15 Comments »

Labour’s manifesto uncut: How to win in 2015 and why

26/09/2013, 01:50:49 PM

Launched at Labour party conference 2013, Labour Uncut’s first book, “Labour’s manifesto uncut: How to win in 2015 and why” maps out a centrist view of what the party’s electoral offer could be at the next election.

It directly answers the question of how to fund a radical Labour alternative in a time of austerity with a suite of fully costed policies that would redraw the current political dividing lines and reduce peoples’ cost of living.

The whole of this book is greater than the sum of its parts. Individually, each chapter tactically addresses a discrete area for action. Together, they paint a picture of how Labour can win the next election and change Britain for the better.

And now the book is available online.

Click here to read or download.

Posted in Unbound | 11 Comments »