by Kevin Meagher
Ed Miliband was probably right to junk his “One Nation” theme from his last Labour conference speech. We aren’t one nation in any meaningful sense. The disintegrative effects of devolution over the past 15 years – most recently the near miss in the Scottish referendum – have massive implications for British politics, which we’re only just beginning to process.
Most obviously, these include the declining share of the vote for the two big parties and the rise of UKIP, the Greens and the SNP. Indeed, as people begin to articulate differing – and sometimes contradictory – demands, the established parties struggle to provide a wrap-around offer that pleases everyone.
In this Brave New World, the elasticity of our two main parties is being sorely tested. It’s right there under our noses. Scottish Labour is looking left to reconnect with lost voters, with Jim Murphy promising to reinstate a 50p top tax rate. In stark contrast, the London party is moving right as MPs like Tessa Jowell – hoping to be Labour’s candidate for London Mayor – refuse to back the Mansion Tax, in case it sends the wrong message to aspirational voters.
Then there’s the problem with the base. How does Labour stop its heartlands falling to UKIP? As Michael Merrick argued the other day, “in all too many places it [Labour] has failed to hold its voice at the heart of the communities from which it originally sprung”. He concludes the party is in “no position” to fight UKIP in many of its seats, or even “to speak with authenticity to that social and cultural angst from which UKIP is siphoning support.”
His solution is for Ed Miliband to embrace the Blue Labour agenda, or at least to find space for it in the overall approach. After all, it speaks to a broad constituency of both working-class and middle -voters who cleave to a small ‘c’ conservatism that the liberal-left doesn’t really understand, less still, want to engage with. It’s a politics that values tradition, respect, family, reciprocity, community and has a powerful sense of place.
In his ‘relaunch speech’ the other week, Ed Miliband hit a bum note by scorning UKIP for appealing to precisely these people. Indeed, for many young, liberal-left professionals – rootless, urban modernists with no children – this is all a bit puzzling, backward even.