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CHOOSING TO BE POWERLESS : THE MAINSTREAM LEFT

When the UK’s Labour Party gathered for its annual conference in Brighton in September 2005 it should have been in euphoric mood. Earlier in the year the party had won a third successive general election, a feat without precedent in its history. Instead, the atmosphere was wary and subdued. That was partly because Iraq was getting darker, in the aftermath of the 2003 invasion that the Labour prime minister, Tony Blair, had advocated with tireless passion. Another factor was the intense rivalry between Blair and his chancellor, Gordon Brown, who ached to succeed him as soon as possible.

The third factor was the political direction in which Blair was taking his party. In his speech to the conference Blair hailed globalization, its inevitability and the near-powerlessness of government. He had rarely talked about the role of the state and, when he did so in this speech, he chose to stress the limits of what it could – or should – do in the era of globalization:

Change is marching on again. Perhaps our children more readily understand this and embrace it than we do. How quickly has the iPod entered the language and the reality of our lives? With what sense of near wonder was the fax machine greeted, just a few years ago, and already overtaken?

A baby is born. The father takes a photo on his mobile. In seconds relatives around the world can see, and celebrate. A different world to the one we were born into. Faster, more exciting, yet with that come threats, too.

The pace of change can either overwhelm us, or make our lives better and our country stronger. What we can’t do is pretend it is not happening.

I hear people say we have to stop and debate globalization. You might as well debate whether autumn should follow summer. They’re not debating it in China and India. They are seizing its possibilities, in a way that will transform their lives and ours… The character of this changing world is indifferent to tradition. Unforgiving of frailty. No respecter of past reputations. It has no custom and practice.

The temptation is to use government to try to protect ourselves against the onslaught of globalization by shutting it out – to think we protect a workforce by regulation, a company by government subsidy, an industry by tariffs. It doesn’t work today.

Because the dam holding back the global economy burst years ago. The competition can’t be shut out; it can only be beaten.1

Note the personification of ‘change’ in the opening sentence of this section of his speech. ‘Change’ was on the march. ‘Change’ – and not elected politicians – was the agent to make or break voters’ lives. Blair was one of the best speech-makers in post-war UK politics. In the case of his post-election conference speech, the elegance of the prose served to highlight his determined passivity as an elected prime minister hailing globalization. Blair could not have been clearer. Change was indifferent to tradition, unforgiving of frailty, and there was little that elected leaders could, or should, do in response.

Outsiders on the right and left were to disagree about this. To those voters worried by the challenge to tradition and who felt suddenly frail, the outsiders offered hope. Blair was one of those on the centre left who had begun his political journey by acting expediently, partly in order to win. He had concluded long ago that for Labour to put the case for more government in most of its policy manifestations was a vote-loser. By 2005 he was a committed believer in the limits of the state. He stated quite explicitly from around this time that the new divide in politics was between ‘open versus closed’ and not ‘left versus right’. On this, he was closer to parts of the mainstream right.

Blair both led and was part of a wider movement on the centre left. In Germany the leader of the Social Democratic Party, Gerhard Schroeder, instigated a series of reforms as chancellor that led to a formal split in his party. In 2003 he launched Agenda 2010, a package that consisted of cuts in welfare spending and a loosening of labour regulations. In several respects he wanted government to do less. Blair and Schroeder were to work closely together, in some ways constructively, as they sought a new definition for the centre left – or what Blair sometimes called ‘the radical centre’. Both understood that globalization contained many opportunities and could not be ‘stopped’ or ‘reversed’ as if it were a government policy. But they, and others on the centre left, underestimated the degree to which change would leave some voters feeling frail and ‘left behind’.

There were many forces beyond the control of elected insiders that rendered them vulnerable and insecure as they sought to govern in the era of globalization. We shall be exploring the unavoidable fragilities in later chapters. As we do so, we shall discover the degree to which the elected insiders, and the experts who advise them, were loathed indiscriminately and unfairly. But in one significant respect, parties on the mainstream left and mainstream right were directly responsible for the rise of the outsiders. They made choices amidst tumultuous change. Partly they chose to be powerless at a point when a significant number of voters were becoming more insecure about work, housing, the quality of public services and their longer-term economic prospects. Individual governments might not be as free as they once were to act unilaterally on behalf of their voters. But they are not as impotent as the insiders chose to be, in the face of global change.

Establishment parties vacated large sections of the political stage and chose to huddle together in a consensus around economic policy-making, the role of government and how best to cope with rapidly changing circumstances. There was no neat symmetry in the move towards a mythical centre. The mainstream left moved towards what they considered to be the vote-winning centre ground, largely defined by the right – only to become trapped as the orthodoxies they embraced became outdated. Significant parts of the electorate had moved on, crying out for help from government. But much of the mainstream failed to notice.

This does not mean there were no differences between a mainstream left government and one led by the mainstream right. In spite of the nervy dance around the ‘liberal centre’, there remained major contrasts. They were not all the ‘bloody same’ – a cliché applied dangerously and thoughtlessly across the democratic world. But those differences were sometimes wilfully hidden, because leaders from both sides of the narrowing divide worked on the assumption that being part of a ‘centre-ground’ consensus would help propel them to government and retain power, once they got there.

For several decades being part of a social and economic liberal consensus seemed to be the safest and most direct route to power. Indeed, from the 1980s until 2008 the consensus seemed to be the only available route to electoral success. The emphasis was on smallish government, hailing the gods in the financial sector, and with a focus on how voters should be ‘free’ to help themselves. Only after the financial crash in 2008 did this consensus – this formal or informal alliance between two parties supposedly at different parts of the spectrum – become a form of incarceration. Even then many of the mainstream leaders failed to realize they were in a trap. They misread the historic significance of the crash and how it was bound to change the dynamics of politics. They saw the nerve-shredding dangers, as banks headed towards bankruptcy and economies sped towards the edge of a cliff. In most cases they did not see that the crash was an epoch-changing event. Indeed, they were surprised and reassured at how quickly all appeared to return to the comforting turbulence of the pre-crash era. As Mervyn King noted prematurely, there did not seem to be an anger that would change politics.

As often happens after a traumatic crisis, the mainstream rulers sought a return to the recent past, when banks flourished and people borrowed recklessly. It was the past they knew, the past of the liberal consensus. Like characters in a ‘film noir’, they chose to move towards their doom, even though they had already been exposed to the dangers of doing so. The sequence was the same in the UK during the turbulent 1970s. Policies to control prices and wages led to the fall of the prime minister, Ted Heath, in 1974. How did the Labour government act in response? It introduced policies to control wages and prices.

The coming together of the mainstream left and right intensified in the early 1990s, specifically in the United States and the UK, with others following soon afterwards. The ideological consensus was formed for defensive reasons and began with the parties on the left making the first moves. Leading Democrats in the United States and the Labour Party in the UK had reached the conclusion that they could not win elections by putting overt left-of-centre arguments on the economy. Redistribution and higher public spending through significant tax increases were propositions that lost elections. In fairness to them, they had plenty of evidence to reach that judgement. The Democrats had struggled against President Reagan in the 1980s, with his so-called ‘Reaganomics’ – light-touch regulatory mechanisms and tax cuts for the wealthy – policies embraced with such noisy, resolute enthusiasm by Margaret Thatcher in the United Kingdom.

Both were electorally invincible. Reagan won two major victories in the United States; Margaret Thatcher won three elections in the UK, including two landslides. In their very different ways, both were teachers, communicators making sense of what they were doing, even when what they were doing made little sense. As if by instinct, untutored by today’s ubiquitous spin doctors, both deployed populist anti-government language, which their opponents struggled to challenge. They were setting the people free. They did not want government to take more of the people’s hard-earned money than was necessary.

Thatcher explained that her father never spent more than he earned, when he ran his grocer’s shop in her home town of Grantham. The government should follow the same path. In reality, Reagan’s administrations spent vastly more than they earned, and so did hers, at various phases of her long rule. It did not matter. They had hit upon a language, and enough emblematic policies, to excite sufficient of the electorate to keep them in power. Public services declined, diminishing the quality of life of voters, including affluent ones. The decline had a terrible impact on the economy, with business leaders in both countries pleading for more investment in the creaking infrastructure. But their left-of-centre opponents could not frame vote-winning arguments around a more active state. In the end, they gave up trying.

Bill Clinton was the first to reframe successfully a left-of-centre argument, by endorsing policies that were unthreatening to those middle-class voters who had been brought up on ‘Reaganomics’ in the 1980s.

Shortly before Clinton’s victory, and before the Conservatives’ fourth successive win in the UK in April 1992, the former UK chancellor, Nigel Lawson, made an insightful prediction. Speaking in 1991, when the Labour party was well ahead in the polls, Lawson declared that the Conservatives would win the forthcoming election because it was winning the battle of ideas. Lawson added that the party winning the battle of ideas would always be victorious at elections, even if it faced crises en route.

Lawson was right, in relation to the UK. The Conservatives won easily in 1992, albeit under the leadership of the more pragmatic John Major rather than the tonal evangelism of Thatcher. In the US, Bill Clinton was the victor by turning the battle of ideas on its head. He stole from the Republicans the language of economic competence. Above all, he ruthlessly mocked President Bush’s pledge at the previous election not to raise taxes. ‘Read my lips… no new taxes,’ Bush had declared, before he sensibly raised taxes during his subsequent four years in office.2 Clinton’s onslaught was counter-intuitive and successful. Instead of trying to win the battle of ideas by putting a centre-left case for tax and higher spending on its own, he attacked his Republican opponent for raising taxes and, in doing so, raised questions about Bush’s integrity, too. This gave Clinton space to be the reassuring candidate – the one who could be trusted, in all senses of the term, to run the economy.

Clinton’s campaign was elegantly judged to maximize support. He claimed to be fighting for the ‘forgotten middle class’. In his campaign manifesto his pitch was relentlessly focused on a class that happened to comprise most voters, separating off only the very wealthiest:

For more than a decade our government has been rigged in favour of the rich… While the wealthiest Americans get rich, middle class Americans work harder and earn less while paying higher taxes to a government that fails to produce what we need: good jobs in a growing economy, world class education, affordable health care, safe streets and neighbourhoods…3

The juxtaposition worked triumphantly. Clinton spoke for the many and not for the few – as the UK Labour Party was to put it, equally triumphantly, in the 1997 election.

After the Conservatives won the UK election in the spring of 1992, with their fourth successive victory, there was a widespread assumption that Labour would never form a government again. Its leader, Neil Kinnock, had changed his party with heroic determination over nine turbulent years. By 1992 Labour had different positions on Europe, public spending, taxes, nationalization and unilateral nuclear disarmament from those it held when Kinnock became leader in 1983. Kinnock had worked tirelessly on internal reforms and on the way the party was projected to the media. But Labour was still slaughtered, in terms of votes cast, even if the result was much closer in relation to the number of seats each party won.

Understandably and unsurprisingly, two ambitious younger MPs who were prominent in the Labour Party, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, visited Washington and assiduously followed the Clinton technique. Clinton had won. Labour had lost, again. New Labour was an almost precise lifting of the Clinton strategy. Blair and Brown focused relentlessly, and counter-intuitively, on the ‘Tory tax rises’, just as Clinton had done in relation to Bush. They stood for the ‘many and not the few’.4 They espoused economic stability and prudence, working with business and the financial sector on ways in which they could move forward together. They pledged to stick to the Conservatives’ spending plans for two years and not to change income-tax rates for an entire parliament.

And yet, as is so often the case in politics, as they made their cautious defensive, expedient steps towards what they rightly believed would be fertile electoral terrain, they were also moving in some respects towards their doom. In their determined pragmatism – their search for what Blair regarded as a ‘Third Way’ – they were responding to the politics of the 1980s and early 1990s, while failing to notice that the demands of political leadership were changing. Their cautious moves led their party to three election victories, but as they looked back, to avoid the vote-losing traps of the past, they failed to see the seismic scale of the new challenges ahead.

Clinton, Blair, Brown and many other European leaders on the centre left sought to work with the booming financial sector, recognizing the revenue-raising capacity of one part of their economies that was expanding reliably. They encouraged this sector to be entrepreneurial and risk-taking and to secure the massive rewards for such seemingly hazardous activities.

In doing so, they were moving inadvertently towards the 2008 financial crash, the tumultuous event that perversely became as great a challenge for the left of centre as it did for the centre right. Many left-of-centre governments were in power when the music stopped. They were in no position to blame light-touch capitalism, when they were the ones who had chosen to step back.

This is explanation, and not condemnation. Without knowing what was to happen next, left-of-centre leaders raised money for public services without making vote-losing tax rises. Here was a way in which the centre left could burnish its credentials by associating itself with the successful money-makers, much admired in the media and beyond. The centre left no longer comprised the money-takers, the mean-spirited politicians who stifled wealth-creating innovation. It was at one with the innovators. It was responding brilliantly to the politics of the 1980s, but was doing so in the 1990s. In its analysis of how to win elections, it was forensically triumphant. In seeking a guide as to how to govern, it was a decade late.

In terms of proposing an ideological explanation for the financial crash, and outlining alternative routes that would lead to a future where such crashes became impossible, the centre left should have been in a powerful position. Instead, in many cases it was as culpable as the centre right. It had chosen to worship at the altar of the bankers, on the assumption that such uncritical homage would reap electoral and economic dividends.

The centre left could not see what was happening in front of its eyes, because it was busy looking back. The consequences of globalization were making new demands. The centre left was scared to seem too interventionist. The people were enjoying easy borrowing; was it going to be the spoilsport? Economies were booming; was it going to regulate in ways that might curtail that boom?

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In the United States during the 1990s it was President Clinton who lifted the protective barrier that had divided the banks’ so-called ‘casino banking’ divisions from the more pedestrian high-street banking departments. Clinton’s move, which came after a fierce lobby from bankers, heralded the birth of so-called ‘superbanks’; and those banks flourished in the same way in much of Europe, with no formal division between so-called casino banking and high-street banking.

With a similar flourish, Clinton also signed the Commodities Futures Modernization Act, a move that lightened regulation further in the financial markets – an area that had already enjoyed much freedom under President Reagan. Around the same time, he also beefed up President Carter’s much earlier Community Reinvestment Act. This was an Act that forced lenders to take a more sympathetic approach to poor borrowers who were trying to get on the housing ladder.

Like Carter, Clinton acted with noble objectives in mind. There are no elected political villains in this narrative. This is far more complicated and subtly interesting than a story about malevolent or insanely incompetent leaders. It is about left-of-centre leaders trapped by their vote-losing pasts, trying and succeeding in moving on, only to become incarcerated by the ways in which they moved on, failing to recognize that there was new political space that required far more moving on.

Clinton acted in the way he did partly because he wanted the poor to own homes, and few people complained at the time, as loans became available for those without the means to pay them back. Clinton was being defensively expedient, as well as seeking to help the poor for altruistic reasons. He felt he needed to show that a Democrat could work as constructively with the financial sector as any Reaganite Republican. In seeking to reassure voters that he could be trusted with the economy, by working with the biggest agents of free-market capitalism, he paved the way for the likes of Bernie Sanders to make their case two decades later with such passion.

The same nuanced combination of motives trapped the UK Labour government, which had so closely followed Clinton’s route towards power. In turn, centre-left parties in the rest of Europe became influenced by New Labour’s electoral victories – especially Blair’s landslide win in 1997 and his continued popularity in government for the first few years. Instead of noticing how globalization was making new demands on their ideological ingenuity, they all hailed ways of winning that were rooted in the context of the early 1990s.

After Labour had lost the 1992 election, Blair and Brown were among those who attended the post-mortem at the party’s governing National Executive Committee. During the funereal meeting, its main polling and focus-group guru, Philip Gould, told them brutally that Labour had lost a fourth election in a row because voters did not trust it to run the economy. He was even more precise. Gould said voters did not trust Labour with their hard-earned money. They did not trust it to spend money wisely, to raise taxes fairly and, while that remained the case, Gould argued, they would never win power. He also added that businesses didn’t trust Labour, either, and while it was so mistrusted by the business community it would remain unelectable, because the party needed the endorsement of at least some significant parts of the business community to have credibility in terms of economic policies.

For Labour, the era of mistrust began long ago, and the main mission of Blair and Brown was to become trusted. It was a tragic irony that they left power more mistrusted than any prime ministers who had preceded them. The irony was deeper in that the policies they pursued to restore trust were the very ones that ultimately fuelled irrationally high levels of mistrust.

Gordon Brown was made shadow chancellor in 1992. From the moment he took up this role, partly following Clinton but also his own embryonic ideas, he was determined to go into the next election with an economic policy that could be trusted by the voters. In doing so, he was very clear that Labour could not argue for higher taxes, beyond one or two tax rises that would be guaranteed to be popular – again a technique lifted from Clinton. Taxes on unpopular privatized utilities, for example, were guaranteed vote-winners.

But on the whole Brown knew that he had to work within the framework of the long-running Conservative government in order to give Labour a chance. In the context of the times, he made a perfectly valid judgement. Brown felt that he had to be seen to be close to business leaders, and in particular the hugely respected bankers who were generating such wealth across much of the developed world in the global economy, which was forming fast in front of their half-seeing eyes.

Brown liked to be photographed with bankers. Preparing his every public appearance as if he were planning for war, he would make carefully choreographed public visits when a new bank opened in the City of London. This was New Labour, working with the City of London and not against it. When Brown, as chancellor, sought a protective shield as he skilfully navigated a route towards raising taxes, in order to pay for much-needed improvements to the National Health Service, he asked a banker to chair an independent inquiry as to how taxes should be raised. This was a different age, one in which bankers offered a veneer of respectability when a Labour government was acting daringly. Being associated with bankers was seen as a massive additional boost to these left-of-centre parties. It was not just the centre right that could hold their own with the whizz-kids of the financial sector. The left of centre was a player now.

The coming-together of the Conservative and Labour Parties in the UK, and in other parts of the European Union, and the coming-together of the Democrats and moderate Republicans in the United States gave the chance for left-of-centre parties to create a large tent of support. In the UK, the Thatcher-supporting Sun newspaper became a cheerleader for Tony Blair. In the US, Clinton managed to frame arguments with a wider appeal than seemed possible for a Democrat in the previous era, when the Republicans won the presidential elections with relative ease. But the tent was not of a durable, long-lasting quality. Voters entered it with contradictory expectations, and some felt excluded quite quickly.

In the 1990s – the decade of left-wing retreat, during which Margaret Thatcher described Tony Blair as her greatest achievement – there were still significant differences between the two sides. Bill Clinton’s policy-making and priorities were distinct from those of his mainstream Republican counterparts. We got a sense of that when George Bush replaced Bill Clinton after his two terms in office. Under Bush, public spending was more constrained, tax cuts were focused on the wealthy, and foreign policy became more recklessly unilateralist. When Clinton came to office he bravely raised taxes, having run a campaign mocking his predecessor for doing the same. He attempted, through his wife, to reform healthcare. In terms of financial regulation, the pressure from Republican leaders in Washington was to move much further to the right, to make regulation a light touch, to the point of a near free-for-all. The right wanted spending cuts, when Clinton targeted spending subtly and yet substantially on poorer parts of the US. Clinton’s pitch of economic competence and social justice, a potentially vacuous pairing, seemed to take shape as the economy boomed, the budget was balanced and jobs were created.

In the United Kingdom the Labour government, particularly through the policies of its chancellor, Gordon Brown, was stealthily redistributive and increased public spending by significant amounts. But it did so without framing an argument around what it was doing. Defined by Labour’s election slaughters in the 1980s, Blair and Brown never spoke of redistribution in an era of widening inequality, or hailed investment in public services too noisily. They were fearful of falling into old traps around ‘tax and spend’ and the role of the state. Blair and Brown made more speeches than most prime ministers and chancellors. Only one was about the role of government; the relationship between the state and markets; when markets worked and when they did not. Brown delivered it in the spring of 2003. It was lost in the march towards war in Iraq, and amid a sense that every word he uttered was a bid for the leadership.

The public gap fuelled undeserved disillusionment. One of the defining insights into the rise of the outsiders, and the failure of the mainstream parties, comes from a politician who never witnessed the newcomers’ ascent. The UK’s former Foreign Secretary, Robin Cook, who died in 2005 was an MP for the Scottish constituency of Livingston, a relatively poor area. Speaking at a fringe meeting of the Labour Party conference in 2001, early in Labour’s second term in power, Cook noted that his constituents in Scotland had been beneficiaries of the government’s tax credits – credits that boosted the income of the poorest, especially those on low wages in work.

But Cook noted, with prophetic insight, that because the Labour government did not shout loudly about this policy – indeed, did not talk about the policy very much in public at all – his constituents thought their significant increases in income were a mere technical adjustment made by the Inland Revenue. They made no connection at all with the Labour government that had introduced the policy. The arduous work of Brown and many others in establishing tax credits went largely unnoticed, partly because ministers did not want them to be noticed.

The reason why Gordon Brown and Tony Blair did not talk about the tax credits, making the connection between policy formed in London and the beneficiaries, was multi-layered and, again, understandable in the context of the time. Blair was not a great fan of the credits, and chose always to make public arguments that appealed to Middle England and the newspapers it read. In contrast, Brown was passionate about credits. But Brown did not highlight the policy because he felt that Middle England, so crucial in the electoral calculation of New Labour, would disapprove. Middle England voters would be appalled at the idea that their money was being redistributed.

But secretly Brown was redistributing. The fact that large numbers of voters who were the beneficiaries never realized what he was doing explains what happened in Scotland subsequently. One of the most powerful arguments of the Scottish National Party – itself one of the most astonishing examples of outsiders seizing power – was that the parties in Westminster were more or less the same. Labour and the Conservatives both let down Scotland: that was the potent message from the SNP. They were not interested in poorer communities, but were bothered about big business and cosying up to the middle classes of England. In some respects, precisely the opposite was the case.

If anything, Scotland – because of Brown’s background as a committed Scot – benefited disproportionately, compared with other parts of the United Kingdom. But no connection was made. Those Scots who voted for the Scottish National Party, and deserted the once-dominant Scottish Labour Party, did so on the false assumption that the Tory and Labour parties in the New Labour era were almost interchangeable. They heard the messages and did not follow the policies. Having decided they were all the bloody same down at Westminster, the course was set. In the referendum on independence in 2014 the more overt left-wing Labour leader, Ed Miliband, was regarded as little different from David Cameron. Miliband’s actual views chimed more with the social-democratic pitch of the SNP’s leaders. But when he went on a walkabout in Edinburgh, the protesters were out in large numbers, as they would have been for Cameron. At one point Miliband hid in a barber’s shop to await calm. His experience was a portent of what was to come. After the referendum, voters in Scotland turned away from the Labour Party in droves towards the SNP, a major factor in Labour losing the 2015 general election.

The muted messages from the New Labour leadership, fearful of alarming its new Middle England voters, formed part of the backdrop to Brexit as well. ‘Those politicians at Westminster are all the bloody same… we’ll back the outsiders,’ was a common refrain. It was a vote against the ‘elite’ formed of the mainstream left as much as the mainstream right.

While genuine differences between mainstream left and mainstream right were underplayed, the degree of actual convergence mattered, too. There was a coming-together before the crash, one that remained in place afterwards. While many voters despaired at what had happened and were fearful of the consequences, the elected leaders from the centre right and centre left seemed to be making roughly the same point: the bankers were to blame, but the ‘people’ would have to be punished through unprecedented public-spending cuts.

After the 2008 crash, the framework that had taken shape during the Reagan–Thatcher years – the one that had endured beyond their rule and had sucked in left-of-centre parties as well as right-of-centre ones – was suddenly vulnerable. The crash raised major questions about the relationship between the state and the financial sector in particular, but also about the relationship between the state and individuals.

The crash was required in order to trigger such questions. How can the government regulate more intensively? Should the state own the banks? Before the crash, even raising such questions was politically nightmarish. Governments could have regulated more intensively and they could have intervened to make mortgages less wildly accessible. But it would have taken a brave and prophetic administration to have done so, when the policies of the light regulatory touch were so popular and so apparently benevolent, in their consequences for people being able to buy on credit, including the purchase of houses on relatively low incomes. There was no obvious way in which a government could have become hyperactive with any confidence, without alienating voters. The headlines about a ‘nanny state’ erupt at the tiniest excuse. Imagine the furore before the crash, if the state had taken away the right of those on low incomes to borrow indiscriminately. What is right and what is politically possible are often unrecognizably different.

The crash changed the dynamics of politics immediately. What was the right thing to do not only became politically possible, but urgently necessary. Yet the centre left was trapped by its immediate past and its failure to form accessible arguments about what needed to be done next. In the days leading up to the collapse of Lehman Brothers, the then Cabinet minister, Ed Miliband, caught the end of a radio interview with two guests pleading for governments to intervene, in order to prevent a financial crash across the globe. He assumed that the interviewees were two left-wingers. To his delighted amazement, one was from Goldman Sachs and the other was from Lehman’s, which was heading towards the cliff’s edge. Miliband was one of the most left-wing ministers in the Labour government and he had ached to frame arguments about the benevolent potential of an active state. Rightly, he saw the crash as a moment when space was created for left-of-centre arguments to be made. But he misread the mood on another level, underestimating the degree to which left-of-centre governments in power at the time of the crash would be blamed for what happened. Soon Miliband would be a political victim of the crash, and not a beneficiary.

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There were attempts in many countries, by mainstream left-of-centre parties, to try and suggest that what was happening called into question the orthodoxies that had dominated economic policy-making for so long. But as they themselves had been supportive, or appeared to be supportive, of those orthodoxies, their attempts never had much chance of wider resonance.

The lack of political space to lead a distinct debate about the reasons why the crash happened was matched by what followed. The most common response to the crash was a series of austerity measures, most specifically deep, real-terms cutbacks in public spending. The victims were not those who had caused the crash, but those who were previously in secure jobs, enjoying and benefiting from higher public-spending levels. Once again a semi-consensus formed on the mainstream left and mainstream right around the need for less government, when the crash highlighted the need for more.

Mainstream left-of-centre parties were caught in a different trap post-2008. If they tried to challenge the post-crash consensus that favoured deep spending cuts, they were deemed to be irresponsible and reckless, in proposing spending when borrowing was ‘out of control’. But whereas before 2008, and certainly in the early to mid-1990s, the consensus on the so-called centre ground had been a cosy and electorally fruitful terrain, this new consensus around support for spending cuts was as politically dangerous for the mainstream left as challenging it was. The new orthodoxy, known vaguely as ‘austerity’, appeared to victims of the crash in poorer areas as collusion – almost a conspiracy to continue supporting those who had been responsible for the crash, and punishing those who had not.

Once again there were many nuanced differences between parties in their responses, in terms of the scale of public-spending cuts they proposed and the degree to which they argued that bankers should be penalized and constrained in terms of future policy-making. But the fundamental consensus between mainstream left and right appeared to be still intact. The coming-together provided space for outsiders, both on the left and on the right.

The framing of the pre-crash centre / centre-left ideology – whether it was around the ‘Third Way’ promoted by Clinton and Blair, or around the view espoused most passionately by Blair while still UK prime minister that there was now no left or right divide – vacated space for those who were, more defiantly, still on the left and right. Until the early 1990s the centre left and centre right engaged in big battles about the role of government: what it could and could not do. Under leaders like Clinton and Blair, that ideological battle became muted or engaged so discreetly that few people noticed. In the empty ideological space, outsiders started to make grandiose claims about what they could do with power.

In abolishing left and right, Blair and those who thought like him failed in the end to strengthen the position of the left-of-centre, but colluded in a weakening of the values that underpin a political party. As Blair found increasing common ground with the Conservatives’ new leader, David Cameron, after the 2005 election, he hailed an era of ‘political cross-dressing’, a metaphor which suggests that, irrespective of party, a leader could – and would – take on the clothes of opponents, and vice versa.

As was often the case with Blair, he extrapolated from his own personal journey a new global phenomenon. By the end of his leadership, Blair was dressing in the clothes more readily worn on the right. So much so that the Conservative peer and Times columnist Daniel Finkelstein wrote that one of the many reasons why Tony Blair was popular with Conservatives like himself was because the prime minister was clearly a figure on the centre right.

Blair grasped part of the debate. In the era of globalization, free-trade internationalists like himself, George Osborne, David Cameron and Nick Clegg were on one side. Interventionists and protectionists were on the other. But the simplistic division ignored the new challenge for the mainstream parties. How could they intervene to make globalization work for most voters and retain, or re-create, a country’s sense of identity and purpose? The answers to these thorny questions were bound to divide on left and right grounds, even if many of those responding supported open societies and free trade.

When the outsiders claimed that the insiders were all the same, they were talking dangerous nonsense; and yet at times, almost openly, the likes of Blair and Cameron were close to being ‘all the same’. When voters hear a leader with that rare privilege of speaking from a pulpit, which can shape the way the country thinks about itself, say that there has in effect been a coming-together of right and left, it is not surprising if they look elsewhere.

Some voters in the UK, as in the US and parts of Europe, suffered falls in their standard of living and unreliable public services, even though they were told (by supposedly different party leaderships) they would have ‘choice’ in public services and would benefit from economic growth. They now look elsewhere because they have been informed that the two major parties are cross-dressers, are similar, share the same ideas and views. Yet they feel they haven’t benefited from the long rule of interchangeable leaders at the top of mainstream left and right parties, with their apparently similar cross-dressing philosophies.

Unsurprisingly in the US, when another Clinton came along to represent the Democrats in the 2016 presidential election, those voters who felt excluded from the consensus that had formed in the early 1990s (of which Hillary’s husband, Bill, had been the main architect) also began to look elsewhere. Hillary Clinton was a substantial progressive figure. She would have made significantly different policy decisions from even moderate Republicans. She showed a left-of-centre faith in the state when she tried to introduce reforms to healthcare in Clinton’s first administration, and in some of her largely hidden policies that were put forward in the presidential election. She was a passionate progressive in relation to policies associated with social liberalism.

She was also part of the old consensus, the one that started to emerge in the early 1990s. How could she not have been, when her husband was the pivotal instigator? Aspiring leaders never escape from their political upbringing – the era when they became fully formed public figures. Hillary’s was formed in the cautious, defensive 1990s when the centre left was conceding ideological ground.

Ironically, the manner in which many commentators from the Democratic wing and the moderate Republican wing – and, indeed, the right Republican wing – coalesced around Hillary highlights the reason why she lost. She had become part of a seemingly apolitical, non-ideological elite, where in the eyes of many, and certainly that part of the electorate who felt excluded and dispossessed, power was almost an end in itself. All of them, in their mutual supportiveness, were in the same political place, or so it seemed, huddled together on terrain that produced the financial crash and the war in Iraq.

The same consensus took shape in the United Kingdom, where quite a few of those who would regard themselves as Labour and followers of Blair welcomed the election of David Cameron, first as prime minister of the coalition, and then with an overall majority in 2015. There are some who worked for Blair in Number Ten who supported Cameron privately in both those elections, and certain columnists in the UK media who switched from Blair to supporting Cameron; they could not cope with either Gordon Brown or his successor in opposition, Ed Miliband, who were seen as dangerously left-wing, being two or three millimetres to the left of the inter-party consensus.

What was missing in that ideological rootlessness – the coming-together of figures from the centre left and centre right in support of free trade, free movement, a free market, a relatively small state, light regulatory governments – was a view about the role of the state, the role of government. In the end this is the fundamental divide between left and right. Both sides have perfectly legitimate arguments, but it’s an argument that has been constantly reapplied to changing times, yet was missing in the 1990s and into the twenty-first century.

Hillary Clinton rarely reflected on the role of government. President Obama did, but before he got into power. His book The Audacity of Hope was partly an argument about the benevolent impact of government. It was more overtly social democratic than many of the writings of aspiring Democrat candidates who hope to become President of the United States. But once he got close to that position, Obama too adopted a much more cautious framing. Blair and Brown made thousands of speeches, but none on the role of the state, partly because they did not have a clear view, and also out of fear that any talk of ‘the state’ would seem to Middle England as if they were returning to the dreaded 1970s.

The problem with that caution – apart from the obvious one of leaving space for the outsiders to form their own, very populist approach to the state – is that the omission doesn’t leave them with the necessary ammunition to make sense of what’s happening, to explain the changing world. If government is viewed as largely technocratic, a Third Way where you navigate between conflicting ideological positions, then what do you do when the order you have embraced appears to collapse, as happened in 2008? What position do you take, in terms of regulating a financial sector that is evidently out of control? Where do you stand when figures who seek a small state, as a matter of ideology, claim to be taking public-spending decisions purely on the basis of a managerial response to the 2008 crash? How do you frame an argument about more spending being necessary, and that government itself can stimulate economies and has a role in delivering public services more effectively?

Leaders on the mainstream left avoid debate about the size and functions of the modern state. As with all defensive evasions, the omission is understandable. To put the case for the state triggers rows about higher taxes, profligate public spending and the stifling of individualism, not least when mediated by a right-wing media. But not to put the case proves to be more dangerous, giving up much of the stage to the outsiders.

These questions are more relevant in a global economy and not less, because the challenge for mainstream leaders is to make sense to many frightened and bewildered voters of globalization’s opportunities and dangers. They are ruling in fast-moving times. One of the tasks of a leader is to explain those times. Very few mainstream leaders are great educators. The ability to be a political teacher is not an added luxury, but an essential part of leadership.

The outsiders are better educators. Highly contentiously, sometimes absurdly and often dangerously, they seem to make sense of these sweeping, changing times. The mainstream leaders haven’t even tried to do so.

More fundamentally, they have a duty to explain to their electorates how they – as potential or actual leaders – will try to protect them, their voters, from the inevitably destabilizing consequences of a globalized economy; and how they – as individual leaders – will govern in order to make sure everybody gets the chance to fulfil their potential in this unruly new world. That is where the political debate in individual countries should lie. The mainstream left needs to have a sense of where they stand in relation to the state, its size, its responsibilities, its functions, its roles within a global economy, from which there is no turning back. And the mainstream right, too, if it wants a smaller state, needs to explain how that will benefit its electorate: the poor as well as the already wealthy.

But that debate has not just been avoided; there has been an assumption that it should not, and does not, deserve to exist. The divide where insecure, vulnerable mainstream leaders feel safest is one between competence and incompetence. It is one that they are doomed to be trapped by, because at some stage they will appear incompetent or be incompetent, such is the complexity of government. So the wider ideological framing is essential and, ultimately, politically safer. An ideological clarity is in the self-interest of the mainstream, but is almost non-existent.

_____

The support for Hillary Clinton among the mainstream centre left and mainstream centre right in the US presidential election was mirrored in the consensus for ‘Remain’ during the referendum on the European Union in the UK. Here, once again, there appeared to be a coming-together of those who had apparently shared similar views about the economy since the early 1990s.

In Cornwall some Brexit voters were interviewed for a BBC programme during the 2016 referendum. A decorator said the reason he was going to vote ‘Out’ was that he had heard both George Osborne (then Chancellor of the Exchequer) and Labour equivalents (the former chancellor Alistair Darling, and the former Cabinet minister and special adviser to Gordon Brown, Ed Balls) warn that the benefits of recent years would be lost, if the UK left the European Union. The decorator said, ‘We feel we have had no benefits. They must have been speaking to a different audience to us. We can’t afford to buy a house here. Our living standards have gone down. A lot of us struggle to find work. The elite supporting Europe have done nothing for us.’5

Many of those who voted to leave the European Union may well become victims of the departure, both during the transition towards exiting and in the longer term. But it is understandable, when a group of leading figures from two different parties have come together on many issues, it would seem, in their search for the largely mythical centre ground, that those who feel excluded from that consensus move outside it.

The legitimate wariness of ideological consensus is fuelled by the dangerous, lazy, foolish anti-politics instinct. In the end, it’s an instinct that threatens democracy and is not reasonable or based on evidence. But in that coming-together ideologically of the mainstream parties of the left and the right, voters feel with good cause the need for an alternative.

The alternative, from their perspective, takes the form of a cry for the government or other mediating agencies to intervene on their behalf. This is deeply ironic, given that many of the disillusioned are anti-politics and in a way anti-government, which is why the mainstream left became fearful of putting the case for government.

The disillusioned voters tend to respond positively to any campaign that declares government should get off their backs and let them be free. But on a deeper level, their cry is for governments to intervene more. Evidently there is a demand for governments to be more active in order to constrain the free movement of labour. The concern about immigration means so much more than the specifics of immigration, reflecting a deep sense of insecurity as to whether some voters will have a job for very long or whether they will have a job at all; an insecurity about whether they will have provision when they’re ill or old; and a need for decent, reliable, affordable public services.

That phrase ‘left behind’ is a reference to being left behind by government. And in that cry for help the outsiders have found they have all the political space they need. Trump is both a tax-cutting right-winger and a big-government activist. Hillary Clinton had no alternative story to tell in explicit, vivid language, accompanied by accessible, attention-grabbing policies.

Trump was never an outsider. The power conferred on media celebrities, through revered influence, is often greater than the power that despised elected politicians seek to wield. Many elected politicians have no influence or power whatsoever. Still, Clinton was more part of the despised mainstream than Trump, because she was shaped by the era when the consensus formed.

Similarly, in the European Union debate in the UK, there was a group of people who appeared – whether they were Labour or Conservative, or indeed Liberal Democrat – to have ruled the country for decades, all promoting one message on the EU. Meanwhile those who could not be held directly responsible for the failings of the recent decades were on the other side: the apparent outsiders arguing that Britain would be better off ‘Out’.

The problem for those who argue that the only relevant ideological debate is ‘open or closed’ is that their support for openness over the last few decades has inevitably brought about many crises. Although the supporters of the ‘open’ consensus are sincerely and justifiably terrified by what Trump and the other outsiders represent, they presided over the era of the financial crash, the war in Iraq, the disappearance in many countries of once-vibrant manufacturing industries, to be replaced by far less reliable sources of work and income. The great liberal consensus brought many gains, but also many threats and insecurities and some moments of reckless wild danger. It is not as if they, in their consensual coming-together in favour of ‘open’, can claim a record of unqualified advancement. After a long period of rule, the chickens come home to roost.

Given that the mainstream insiders are largely in the same space, the critiques of the problems that have arisen in the decades during which the insiders have ruled is left to the outsiders – those who were not part of that governing consensus. The more pertinent debate could, and should, be between the centre left and centre right, but that can only happen when they stop agreeing with each other.

The same problems have arisen for the centre left in Germany, where the Social Democratic Party (SPD) understandably became fascinated by the electoral success of New Labour in the United Kingdom. After New Labour’s victory in 1997 the then SPD chancellor, Gerhard Schroeder, launched with Blair, Peter Mandelson and others an attempt at a Third Way governing philosophy. Several commentators on the centre left in Germany argued that the joint ‘Third Way’ document that followed was much closer to the policies of the Christian Democrats and, to some extent, to the right of them. The SPD have struggled with identity and purpose ever since, and already lacked self-confident direction, which ‘The Third Way’ document did not address. Even some UK commentators who were supportive of New Labour considered the Anglo-German centre-left initiative to be too right-wing. In the Financial Times the political columnist Philip Stephens described the proposals as being far too close to the Thatcherite ideas of the 1980s.

The document published by Blair and Schroeder is of great significance, showing the degree to which the leaders of the centre left had moved towards the right. In the late 1990s they won elections on this basis, but their assumptions and ideas also set the scene for the rise of outsiders. They were too timid, too unquestioning of the status quo, making even those moderate, pragmatic left-ofcentre leaders from previous decades, like Harold Wilson and Willy Brandt, seem like wild socialists by comparison. To understand Corbyn, Oskar Lafontaine’s move leftwards from the SPD, the continuing political vivacity of the Greens in Germany and, indeed, Austria, this ‘Third Way’ document is a useful guide.

The document – entitled the ‘The Third Way’ for the UK and ‘Die Neue Mitte’ (‘The New Centre’) for Germany – begins by arguing that in the past, as far as the centre left was concerned:

The means of achieving social justice became identified with ever higher levels of public spending regardless of what they achieved or the impact of the taxes required to fund it on competitiveness, employment and living standards.

The context in which this was written is revealing, especially in the UK. In 1998, after one year in power, the Labour government was sticking rigidly to the previous Conservative administration’s spending plans – ones that were so tight the Conservatives had no intention of adhering to them, if they were re-elected. There was, and always is, the need for relentless scrutiny of the way public money is spent, but services in the UK were in crisis by 1998, partly because of a sustained lack of funding. The opening insight might have had legitimate force if, in the UK, the Labour government had increased public spending on, say, the NHS to German levels. It had not done so. The words are therefore breathtaking in their naïve complacency. Instead of agonizing about how to address much-needed public investment, such concerns were lazily dismissed as the misjudged preoccupation of the centre left.

The same complacency applied in the superficial section on the relationship between the state and markets:

The belief that the state should address damaging market failures all too often led to a disproportionate expansion of the government’s reach and the bureaucracy that went with it. The balance between the individual and the collective was distorted. Values that are important to citizens, such as personal achievement and success, entrepreneurial spirit, individual responsibility and community spirit, were too often subordinated to universal social safeguards.

No wonder much of the centre left in power was ill-equipped to cope with the financial crash that followed ten years later. In the late 1990s the centre left tended to focus solely, and lazily, on the limits of what the state could do, as if it was still the 1970s, rather than a new era of change that was bound to bring new roles and responsibilities for government. The rest of the document was also written as if to prove that Blair and Schroeder had learned the lessons of the 1970s and 1980s, rather than as a forward-looking document addressing the new demands of globalization:

The ability of national governments to fine-tune the economy in order to secure growth and jobs has been exaggerated. The importance of individual and business enterprise to the creation of wealth has been undervalued. The weaknesses of markets have been overstated and their strengths underestimated…

Public expenditure as a proportion of national income has more or less reached the limits of acceptability. Constraints on ‘tax and spend’ force radical modernisation of the public sector and reform of public services to achieve better value for money. The public sector must actually serve the citizen: we do not hesitate to promote the concepts of efficiency, competition and high performance.6

As Philip Stephens had noted, Margaret Thatcher would have agreed with every word. Some on the centre left in the 1990s did not seek to win the battle of ideas, but accepted defeat and, in their contrition, hoped to win elections more or less on the same basis as she did. The parties on the centre left that followed this defensive route suffered severe identity crises, and voters became suspicious of their leaderships – leaderships that worked so assiduously hard to win their respect.

Inevitably, neither Blair nor Schroeder followed precisely the ideological path they had unveiled with such confident lack of confidence. In particular, Blair announced suddenly, eighteen months later, that Labour would increase spending on the NHS to the EU average – a huge public-expenditure commitment that would inevitably involve tax rises. But this was how two dominant figures were thinking in 1998, and how they continued to frame public arguments in the years to come.

The same sequence of confused timidity applied more recently in France, where François Hollande led a bewildered administration, apparently ideologically robust when they were elected, exposing in their victory the myth that the left had failed electorally since the financial crash. The left has not failed electorally since the crash, in some of the most economically powerful countries, but Hollande struggled pathetically and moved towards the deceptive safety of a defensive path in the same way that the French prime minister, Lionel Jospin, did before him. Jospin famously said at one point, in a disdainful manner, ‘Don’t think I am no socialist.’ What was he? How did he differ from the centre-right alternatives in France?

_____

On the issue of immigration and asylum – those two distinct policy areas that outsiders on the right falsely conflate – the centre-left mainstream has struggled not only to come up with a coherent version of events, but also even to appear to have a coherent version of events. The outsiders are utterly incoherent in their approach, but they appear to be coherent and speak with conviction. Appearance matters, politics being an art form. The artists give the impression of coherence, even when they have not got a clue what they would do, when faced with the dilemmas of power. Take New Labour’s approach to whether the UK should join the euro, in the build-up to the 1997 election. The leadership was as divided and confused by the policy area as the dying John Major government was. But Blair conveyed a sense of clarity and purpose, while mocking the divisions within the Conservative Party. Blair was a political artist – and that is not a derogatory observation. In leadership, artistry is not an optional extra, but is essential. As the outsiders rose, the mainstream lacked artists.

At least, with Blairite defensiveness in the 1990s, there were immense electoral victories for the centre left. The centre left’s fearful opportunism in relation to the asylum crisis in particular has left it even less popular. The response to Angela Merkel’s generosity, as the Syrian refugees fled the nightmare in their own country, was one of cowardly expediency that led to no electoral benefit.

The response of the then Austrian chancellor, Werner Faymann, was fairly typical. At first Faymann stood shoulder-to-shoulder with the German leader, unwavering in his demand for a ‘European solution’ to the refugee crisis. This was a good slogan, suggesting that international coordination was the only way forward and that there was a way of resolving the crisis.

Indeed, it was at Faymann’s behest that in early September 2015 Merkel agreed to accept the refugees stranded in Budapest’s sweltering Keleti railway station and on Hungary’s border with Austria. Faymann hailed the gesture, saying that he and Merkel were ‘raising borders for humanity’ – another good phrase.7 Faymann was an effective communicator, but then he changed the policy he was communicating about.

In mid-September 2015 Faymann travelled with a delegation to Berlin to consult with Merkel and her top ministers. As the situation worsened during the autumn, and with other European countries refusing to pay more than lip-service to helping out, Faymann was resolute. He said Budapest’s rough treatment of the refugees reminded him of the Third Reich. In November 2015, on another visit to see Merkel in Berlin, Faymann warned against a ‘competition over who can build the best and highest fences’.8

But by then Austria had slowly begun preparations for its own fence, at its main border crossing with Slovenia. Vienna downplayed the move as a ‘temporary’ measure, designed to better direct the flow of refugees. The real reason for the fence, however, was that the Austrian public was becoming nervous. Between early September and mid-November 2015, some 450,000 refugees arrived in the country. While most of them travelled on to Germany, thousands sought asylum in Austria.

Faymann, who governed in a grand coalition with the centre-right Austrian People’s Party, was under pressure to take action. The Freedom Party, a right-wing populist movement, had gone on the attack over Faymann’s embrace of Merkel’s refugee policy and was climbing in the polls. Before the refugee crisis had fully formed, Faymann’s socialists, the People’s Party and the Freedom Party were neck-and-neck at about 26 per cent each. By mid-November 2015 the far-right Freedom Party had surged to 32 per cent, nearly 10 percentage points ahead of the socialists.

Efforts to share the refugee burden at the EU level were failing pathetically – a vivid retort to Eurosceptics who believe, wrongly, that the EU tells individual countries what to do. The fractured response to the refugee crisis shows that in some respects the EU is not powerful enough. Though EU members had agreed in September to allocate some 160,000 refugees across the bloc, Eastern European countries and others were refusing to honour the arrangement.

Meanwhile, Faymann was following the political debate in Germany with alarmed dismay. Merkel had been under persistent attack from within her own conservative base. Her approval ratings were plummeting. The Bavarians were demanding that she reimpose border controls and introduce a cap on refugees, but Merkel resisted on both counts.

Despite her assurances, the Austrian coalition began to worry that the German border could close, saddling Austria with all the refugees. While Germany had already introduced some border checks, a stricter regime could threaten Austria’s economy. Germany is by far Austria’s biggest trading partner, accounting for one-third of its exports.

The turning point came in early December 2015. By then, refugee numbers had dwindled to a couple of thousand per day, from rates of up to 10,000 in October. But instead of taking on all the refugees, as they had in the past, the Germans began turning some back, arguing that the migrants did not intend to apply for asylum in Germany, but in other countries, such as Belgium or the Netherlands.

The Austrian coalition panicked. In March 2016 it announced tough new plans to reject almost all asylum-seekers at its borders. Under the new measures, all asylum claims were to be decided within an hour, at the country’s borders. Only migrants who had an immediate relative who had already been granted asylum in Austria would be allowed to enter. Faymann indicated that the country would no longer allow asylum-seekers to cross its territory on their way to Germany. They were closing their borders for the sake of appeasing the electorate. In doing so, the Austrian coalition exposed another myth perpetuated by the outsiders: that the insiders pay little attention to ‘the people’. They paid far too much attention. If Germany wanted to accept asylum-seekers, ‘they must be picked up from where they are, before they make an illegal journey,’ Faymann said, in a betrayal of Merkel, brought about by extreme electoral fragility.9

As is often the case when pragmatic mainstream parties concede ground, the betrayal did not make Faymann stronger. He became even more fragile. His hard-line approach boosted neither the coalition’s support nor his own standing. Within months he was forced to resign, becoming the first major political victim of Europe’s refugee crisis, after accusations from within his own party that he had caved in to right-wing populist demands to build fences on the country’s borders.

His standing within his own party had plummeted. At the May Day celebrations in Vienna in 2016 – normally a deeply symbolic day for the party, which has had a strong position in the city since the end of the Second World War – Faymann was booed and jeered, with Social Democratic Party of Austria (SPÖ) supporters holding up placards demanding his resignation. Faymann, who had been in office for nearly eight years, admitted at a press conference in the chancellor’s office that he had lost the support of his party and would also be stepping down from his role as head of the SPÖ.

‘This country needs a chancellor whose party is totally behind them,’ Faymann said. ‘The government needs a fresh, forceful beginning. Anyone who doesn’t have this support is not up to the job. A lot is at stake. This is about Austria,’ he continued, adding that he was ‘very grateful to have been allowed to serve this country’.¹⁰

Faymann’s U-turn reflected a much deeper insecurity on the centre left: a sense of rootlessness; the belief, formed with a degree of mountainous electoral evidence, that they had lost the arguments in the 1980s and, to some extent, the 1970s.

In their contrite expediency they had no ammunition to make sense of the changing times. What proved smart in some cases – brilliant strategic pragmatism in the early 1990s up to 2008 – became a calamity for them as they tried to navigate the disruptive consequences of the globalized economy. It left them unable even to find the language to inspire and lead and make sense of things.

Hillary Clinton, in her campaign for the presidency in 2016, talked a lot about her support for diversity and the historic significance of a woman becoming President of the United States. She is a passionate social liberal, who faced a male chauvinist of the extreme variety, and yet in a constraining way social liberalism became the essence of her message. Her campaign theme – ‘Stronger Together’ – partly suggested a celebration of diversity and tolerance, with a woman seeking to be at the helm. But what did it suggest about jobs and the economy? Such a focus was not, and could not, be enough to make sense of the changing global world.

The same narrow range of ideas applied to the UK’s Labour Party after its defeat in the 2015 election – an election that opinion polls had suggested that, one way or another, it would win. When its leading lights came to reflect on the defeat, they had nothing to equip them to make sense of what happened, other than banalities and clichés. Figures capable of thinking deeply and thoughtfully, like David Miliband, the former Foreign Secretary, offered utterly vacuous insights. Miliband declared that his party had, as he put it, ‘turned the page backwards’ and it was now time to ‘turn the page forward’ – a meaningless observation, which was not subsequently fleshed out in any depth at all.11

Labour’s philosopher-king in Parliament, Jon Cruddas, who had been theoretically behind the policy reviews of his party for the previous few years, said in his post-mortem interview, ‘it’s time for the party to visit some dark places’.¹² What he meant by that metaphor was the need to confront the realities as they were, not as the party might have hoped. But that is a statement of the obvious. It leads nowhere.

The former Labour MP who was, and remains, a historian, Tristram Hunt, wrote in a major article that ‘the party is regarded as increasingly irrelevant’.¹³ As if any political leader anywhere in the world would argue for irrelevance being its defining creed. In early 2017 Hunt left politics to run London’s Victoria and Albert Museum.

None of them had a more detailed, thought-through analysis, based on clear values and policies arising from those values. There is another pattern forming, related to the one that traces the rise of the outsiders. The accompanying pattern shows the failure of social democrats to engage in the deep thinking which can lead to a coherent policy agenda that commands wide appeal. The Labour Party post-2015 was an early indication of the problems that Hillary Clinton came upon, when she was making her pitch in the United States. In what way had she moved on from the early 1990s? In what way was she making sense of the globalized revolution that was transforming the lives of many Americans? In what way did she have solutions that were distinctively social-democratic solutions? Look at what she chose to emphasize during the campaign and you find few answers. That does not mean that she personally might not have had a whole series of detailed policy prescriptions, when in power, but she lacked the language and ideological route-map that could confidently convey them to the wider electorate.

In that space the swagger of Trump’s projection, with his indiscriminate use of government when he wanted to make a case for action, his incoherent arguments about lower taxes, at least resonated with an electorate that felt disconnected from the political process, partly because the political process had chosen to disconnect from them.

Reflecting on the early electoral success of the relatively new party on the left in Spain, Podemos, before the rise of Trump or the fall of Hillary Clinton, there was an illuminating exchange between the Spanish party’s political secretary, Íñigo Errejón, and the left-wing academic Chantal Mouffe. Their insightful exchanges were extensive enough to form a book.14 In the depth of their analysis, the strategic focus with a clear view about the need for an electoral strategy, there is a seriousness of intent that has echoes in a very different context with the sort of intensely smart, strategic conversations that those mainstream centre-left figures from the early 1990s had with each other.

Blair and Clinton, Blair and Brown in the UK – all of them were trying to find a way back for the centre left after a decade at least of terrible electoral setbacks and apparent ideological defeat. They addressed, with energy-draining focus, the failings of their parties in the recent past, without noticing that the recent past had been overtaken. The discussion between the Podemos duo was different, reflecting on the potential of the left-wing outsiders to take power in one form or another, but they were doing so with an emphasis on how that might happen. This was not a conversation in the abstract. The exchanges were rooted in what was electorally possible, as well as the ideas on which the left-wing outsiders could make their moves. In reflecting on the space that was available, Mouffe made this observation:

Believing that your vote will make a real difference, this is fundamental. This is interesting because the current post-political model of consensus at the centre removes from politics one of its key elements, its partisan nature. As we have seen, in order to belong to an ‘us’ there needs to be a ‘them.’ And what ‘them’ means in the field of democratic politics is an adversary. I think that in many countries one of the reasons that fewer and fewer people are interested in politics and there are increasing levels of abstention is that the difference between centre-right and centre-left is so minuscule that people feel that there is nothing at stake. Let me remind you of a staggering electoral episode. In the very first round of the 2002 French Presidential elections Jean-Marie Le Pen eliminated the Socialist candidate Lionel Jospin. I used to joke with my students that the difference between Jospin and Chirac was the same as that between Coca-Cola and the campaign against Pepsi. Jospin, who is of course a very decent person, had the very bad idea of proclaiming during the campaign against Chirac, ‘I am not a Socialist.’ Thereafter most of my friends told me that they wouldn’t be voting for him in the first round but only in the second round. People didn’t get mobilised for Jospin because there was no passion involved, and it was Le Pen that got through to the second round, leaving the Socialists out in the cold.

This is far too sweeping a summary in many respects. There are, and were, large differences between those standing on the mainstream left and those on the mainstream right. The election of one or the other would trigger significant policy differences. However, she is right to make the observation that the perception of the consensus is strong and, ultimately, dangerous. Parts of the electorate see those who rule, or seek to rule, in Paris or Madrid or London or Washington as the same. And the outsiders – whether they are the Scottish Nationalists or Podemos in Spain – will make that point repeatedly. Although a lazy or wilfully self-interested distortion, this would not resonate unless they had some ammunition to make it do so. The coming-together with part of the right’s agenda that was so fruitful for many on the centre left in the 1990s had become a hugely complex problem for it.

The political secretary of Podemos, Errejón, responded by saying:

This is because nothing of any substance was in dispute. The most important decisions are taken by unelected powers in a remote sphere that is far removed from any potential control by citizens. Meanwhile political representatives come to resemble each other more and more, and their constituents less and less. In the absence of any contestation over ideas and projects, democracy languishes and resignation spreads, and disaffection also breeds as the crisis of representation deepens and institutions are increasingly under the sway of powerful minorities.

This is both an observation and, of course, a political message. It was in some respects the message that Alex Salmond and Nicola Sturgeon from the SNP used so powerfully in their rise to dominance in the politics of Scotland, where in effect during the first Scottish referendum on independence they argued, ‘Look at London and Westminster, at Cameron, the [then] prime minister, at Miliband, the [then] leader of the Labour Party – they’re all the same, they’ve all colluded, they’ve all signed up to a programme of austerity in response to the financial crash, which was brought about by a set of policies and assumptions that both the major parties had been wholly supportive of.’ That perception of power concentrated in a few hands with a shared set of assumptions that continue, irrespective of what happens in elections, is part of what fuels the anger and disillusionment with the mainstream parties. Evidently those mainstream parties have not done enough to challenge that sense of disillusionment and anger.

Mouffe noted: ‘That is precisely what is needed in politics: something substantial has to be at stake, with citizens having a choice between clearly different projects.’

It could be argued that in the United States they couldn’t have had a clearer choice. There were so many vivid differences between Trump – a figure who had never held public office, who had treated women with contempt – and Hillary Clinton – a public servant, feminist and someone who had held high office. Yet because she was seen as being part of that early 1990s consensus and hadn’t broken away from it, the choice, bizarrely in such a wacky election, became a relatively narrow one. Perhaps if Bernie Sanders had been the Democrats’ candidate, the choice would have been more vivid, clear and tangible to those who felt disillusioned. But we will never know what would have happened if Sanders had stood. All we do know is that the choice was not one that propelled Clinton to office.

Continuing their dialogue, the political secretary of Podemos went on to say:

In my opinion, with this post-political narrowing of democracy the majority of decisions and the most crucial ones are being taken in places that are out of reach of popular sovereignty. And what is then left for popular sovereignty is merely to choose between variations on the same consensus, not to decide between alternatives. They cannot make a real difference to the lives of citizens. And it is certainly unlikely to galvanise any kind of passion. It is unsurprising in these circumstances that people abandon politics to the experts or leave it at the mercy of intricate machineries.15

In some respects this is a false analysis, because what has happened is that people – far from abandoning politics to the experts – are quite openly rejecting the views of experts. Or perhaps, because politics appears to be in the hands of experts who got some policies badly wrong, there is now a revolt against those with specialist knowledge. This is the point when political debate becomes impossible. An expert can assert something, only to be told that we have had enough of experts. There is no answer to that. The collapse of democracy follows.

In the 1990s the mainstream left managed to elect formidable political leaders, silver-tongued communicators with a forensic sense of strategic objectives. But they were not visionaries. They could brilliantly analyse the recent past and adapt their parties accordingly, but they could not see very far ahead. When they could – and the likes of Bill Clinton and Tony Blair had a deep sense of the global revolution that was erupting around them – they lacked the ideological depth to adapt. They governed in complex times, when few were inclined to recognize complexity. But they also made choices. In doing so, they gave space to outsiders on both the left and the right.