The lessons I take from the three years of coalition government since 2010 are fourfold.
• First, it is possible to make coalitions work in modern Britain, and for them to be as stable as single-party governments.
• Second, in a future hung parliament, coalition is therefore likely to be a serious option, provided the Lib Dems have enough seats to give one or both of the larger parties a majority. All three parties need to prepare properly for this eventuality – only the Conservatives did so in 2010 – while of course campaigning for an outright majority.
• Third, coalition is not a superior form of government to single-party majority government.
This is a sobering lesson for pragmatic social democrats like me who in the past thought that coalition, as a form of government promoting consensus and unity, might be stronger and more effective than single-party government. Instead, since 2010 we have had an almost undiluted Conservative government – entirely undiluted in its core economic policy – plus a few, largely random, Lib Dem vetoes and delays in lesser areas. Far from being more than the sum of its parts, the Cameron–Clegg coalition is not even the sum of its parts. Tellingly, public support for coalition as a form of government has plummeted since autumn 2010.
• Fourth, Nick Clegg went into government but not into coalition, which is why Lib Dem influence is so weak.
Nick Clegg has played a poor hand within the coalition. He made two strategic mistakes at the outset from which he has not recovered: he failed to take significant ministerial posts for himself and his lieutenants; and he made constitutional reform – a change to the electoral system and an elected House of Lords – the essential Lib Dem policy contribution to the coalition. Since these constitutional reforms, having little popular support and being largely about the political self-interest of the Lib Dems, proved fairly easy for the Conservatives to subvert, it is the Tory social and economic programme, overseen almost exclusively by Tory ministers, which dominates the coalition and will be its legacy. As a result of these two structural faults, Clegg went into government but not into coalition.
Coalition has become deeply unpopular with most Lib Dems and Conservatives, which is the most graphic evidence of its weakness.
Back in the Downing Street rose garden in May 2010, coalition was touted as an enduring Tory–Lib Dem partnership. There was even speculation, by leading figures on both sides, of a joint policy programme for 2015 and a possible electoral pact. No one talks like that now. Lib Dems blame the Conservatives for destroying their constitutional reforms, chafing at Osborne austerity yet without any alternative to offer. Tories blame the Lib Dems for diluting or delaying parts of their programme, and are publicly and privately contemptuous of a weak coalition partner whose only value to them is votes in the Commons.
Far from contemplating a renewed coalition, the Conservatives are staking out a policy programme with plenty of ‘clear blue water’ between themselves and the Lib Dems, particularly on Europe, welfare and economic policy. There is now no possibility whatever of joint policy positions, let alone an electoral pact, in 2015.
So, England still does not love coalitions. As a necessity they can work, and they need to be prepared for. But for the two major parties, they are the product of electoral and policy failure. For the Left, this makes Labour’s One Nation strategy all the more important. Labour must seek to win on its own, and to do so as an effective progressive coalition within itself.
I used to think coalition government was preferable to single-party government. But I have changed my mind in light of experience over the last thirty years, culminating in the Cameron–Clegg coalition.
For a pragmatic social democrat, the case for coalition between parties of the centre-Left and the centre is superficially attractive. The argument goes thus. Believers in a social market economy and an open, liberal society are spread across all three major parties. On key issues – such as Europe, civil rights, balancing economic dynamism and social protection, and public service reform – they may have more in common with progressives in other parties than with the extremes of their own party. Coalitions might therefore promote consensus behind mainstream social market policies, and make governments stronger and better.
This view was popular in the 1970s and 1980s, when I was coming of political age, because of the extremist drift of both the Labour and the Conservative parties and the foundation of the Social Democratic Party (SDP), intended by its founder Roy Jenkins to strengthen what he called the ‘radical centre’.
So central was coalition government to Jenkins’s thinking that the very existence of the SDP – which I joined as an eighteen-year-old founder member in 1981 – depended upon an electoral pact with the Liberal Party. The SDP stood down in favour of the Liberals in about half of all constituencies in the 1983 general election. Jenkins set up the SDP, rather than simply joining the Liberal Party and encouraging fellow social democrats to do so too, because he thought this was more likely to strengthen the centre-Left and showcase coalition politics.
‘Some form of coalition is essential for democratic leadership,’ Jenkins argued in his Dimbleby Lecture of autumn 1979. ‘Sometimes the coalitions are overt, sometimes they are covert. I do not think the distinction greatly matters. The test is whether those within the coalition are closer to each other, and to the mood of the nation they seek to govern, than they are to those outside their ranks.’
Reflecting the depth of divisions within Labour and the Conservatives at the time, Jenkins argued that ‘big tent’ parties of Left and Right ‘make the moderates too much the prisoner of the extremists’. He added, with some bitterness, of his experience in dealing with Tony Benn and the Labour Left in the 1970s: ‘I would much rather that it [coalition government] meant overt and compatible coalition than that it locked incompatible people, and still more important, incompatible philosophies, into a loveless, constantly bickering and debilitating marriage, even if consecrated in a common tabernacle.’ He ended with Yeats’s lament: ‘The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.’
This was a fair argument from the vantage point of 1981. And had the SDP–Liberal Alliance held the balance in the 1983 parliament, able to change the electoral system to proportional representation, making inter-party coalitions unavoidable, then it might have been vindicated. But something very different happened.
Instead, the SDP, with its Liberal allies, failed to make an electoral breakthrough in 1983 and fell back further in 1987. Far from being a strength, the existence of two separate parties, with separate leaders and programmes, rapidly became a hindrance and after 1987 the two parties voted to merge and become a single conventional party. This was itself a retreat from coalition politics. Furthermore, it only happened after severe bloodletting within the SDP, which demonstrated, first, that bitter infighting with an ideological edge is not the preserve of large broad-church parties (small parties, including centrist parties, are just as prone to it); and second, that centre ‘liberal’ parties generally contain as broad an ideological spectrum of activists as parties of the Left and Right. In the case of the Lib Dems, the spectrum of views even among the party’s MPs range from the Left of the Labour Party to the Right of the Conservative Party, with plenty in each camp, as witnessed by the debate on The Orange Book since 2004. And being a small party preoccupied by survival, they prioritise constitutional reforms in their political self-interest rather than broad social and economic policy, about which they are anyway sharply divided.
All of these characteristics are exhibited in sharp relief by the Lib Dem participation in the Cameron–Clegg coalition. They largely explain why the Lib Dems have been so weak a force either for moderation or for reform within government.
Furthermore, to return to the 1980s, the extremist drift of the Labour Party turned out to be a passing phase. From the mid-1980s, under Neil Kinnock, John Smith and Tony Blair, Labour moved to the centre-Left and developed a credible social democratic reformist mission. However, it did so by leadership from within, not by coalition from without. By the advent of the Blair government, the extremists had become the prisoner of the moderates, not the other way around. So much so that Roy Jenkins himself became a close confidant and adviser to Tony Blair while the superfluous Lib Dems remained on the opposition benches after New Labour’s landslide in 1997. To paraphrase Yeats, it was the best, not the worst, who acquired all conviction and passionate intensity. (Ironically, Jenkins came to fear that Tony Blair possessed rather too much of both by the time of the Iraq invasion.)
The Conservatives also moved to the centre after the defenestration of Margaret Thatcher in 1990, although less decisively, and John Major proved unable to contain Tory infighting on Europe beyond a truce sufficient to win the 1992 election. This shift, too, had nothing to do with external coalitions. Indeed, fast forward to the coalition in 2013 and the striking point is the inability of the Lib Dems to moderate the Conservatives – their coalition partner – on any major aspect of policy, not least economic policy or European policy. On economic policy, Nick Clegg does not even wish to be a moderating force. On Europe – the cause of serious last-minute angst on Clegg’s part during the five days in May – he tried but failed to stop Cameron committing to an in/out referendum. Tory policy could hardly be more Eurosceptic had the party won a landslide in 2010.
There is another point of context. The ‘Labour Right’ and the ‘Tory Left’ ran out of ideas, leaders and governing competence in the 1970s. This is why Margaret Thatcher and the Right, and Tony Benn and the Left, took over or came close to taking over their respective parties. Tellingly, Roy Jenkins’s lecture cited earlier was entitled ‘Home thoughts from abroad’. He delivered it while President of the European Commission, having decamped to Brussels after losing the battle for the Labour leadership in 1976, four years after he voluntarily resigned the deputy leadership of the Labour Party. As for Roy Jenkins the brilliant liberal moderniser – as Home Secretary in the mid-1960s – it took place while he was securely in the Labour mainstream, and his very success at the Home Office and afterwards the Treasury made him for a while a serious contender to succeed Harold Wilson. Had Jenkins become Labour leader, I suspect he would have been less keen on founding another party and promoting coalition.
In reality, the best way to advance mainstream progressive politics is to organise, lead and win from inside the major parties. It is a chimera to regard coalition as a means of securing ‘external’ victory after ‘internal’ defeat. Coalition may be a necessity where there is no Commons majority for a single party; but it is no more than that.
The strengths and weaknesses of governments, and their seeds of ultimate demise, can usually be traced to their foun-dations. This is certainly true of the Conservative–Lib Dem coalition.
From the outset, there were two clear strengths. First, the two leaders got on. Cameron and Clegg cultivated good relations in opposition before 2010. This was crucial to the formation of the coalition, as it has been to the weathering of vicissitudes since. The aides and lieutenants of the two leaders have also had fairly good relations, largely in consequence.
Secondly, the two leaders and their key lieutenants agreed on economic policy and have stood behind it confidently, without which the government would have foundered in short order. (The economic policy itself is in my view flawed, but that is another matter.) Tellingly, the one department where the two parties work closely and harmoniously together is the Treasury, where first David Laws and then Danny Alexander as Chief Secretary have worked hand-in-glove as deputy to George Osborne as Chancellor, in both cases as true believers in the Osborne strategy. So much so that Laws spent his seventeen days in the Treasury overseeing emergency cuts while one of Alexander’s first acts in the weeks immediately afterwards was to cancel a high-profile government loan to the Sheffield Forgemasters, one of the largest employers in Nick Clegg’s own constituency.
By contrast, in other departments either only one minister counts – almost invariably a Conservative, even where policy is controversial (notably Michael Gove at Education and William Hague at the Foreign Office; the same was true of Andrew Lansley at Health until 2012) – or, in the few cases where there is a Lib Dem Secretary of State, they are deliberately ‘man-marked’ by a hostile Tory and there is endemic tension between ministers of the two coalition parties (notably between Ed Davey and his Tory deputy, John Hayes, at Energy and Climate Change (DECC), and between Vince Cable and his Tory business and employment affairs deputy Michael Fallon at Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS)).
This highlights the first big weakness of the coalition as a coalition: that hardly any Lib Dem ministers count.
This weakness starts at the top. Nick Clegg’s decision in May 2010 to become Deputy Prime Minister without leading a major department, basing himself in the Cabinet Office with constitutional reform as his only portfolio, has given him little leverage within the government. The idea was that, shorn of departmental responsibilities and bias, he could better oversee all departments, like the Prime Minister. But the Prime Minister wields the resources and authority of No. 10, the Cabinet Secretary and his position as chair of the Cabinet, ministerial head of the civil service and leader of the major party. The Prime Minister also treats bilaterally with overseas leaders, represents Britain alone in the European Council and controls most of the levers of patronage and appointment. The Deputy Prime Minister has little or none of this power.
Clegg’s mistake was to believe that simply by virtue of being leader of the second coalition party, his power would be institutionalised across government. At the point at which the government was formed, his power was indeed potent, in respect both of personnel (ministerial appointments) and policy (the coalition agreement), because the government could not have been formed without his assent to each. But since that moment, the Cabinet Office has been a weak base for the Deputy Prime Minister. The Cabinet Office is not a powerful department in its own right; nor is it integrated with No. 10 to give the Deputy Prime Minister a meaningful share of prime ministerial power. Perhaps Nick Clegg thought that proximity to No. 10, and his title of DPM and his status as a party leader, would lead to the office of Prime Minister being divided or shared, but this has not happened. Clegg does not even attend David Cameron’s daily planning meetings at 8.30 a.m. and 4 p.m., where the PM, George Osborne, Cabinet Secretary Jeremy Heywood and key No. 10 aides transact the government’s key tactical and strategic business day by day. Indeed, no Lib Dem is present at these meetings.
The one attempt at institutionalising Lib Dem influence in No. 10 was the decision in 2010 to make the No. 10 Policy Unit non-partisan, staffed largely by civil servants and reporting both to the Prime Minister and the Deputy Prime Minister. But for this very reason it has been marginalised and ineffectual.
In my post-election discussions with Gordon Brown in May 2010 about the shape of a possible coalition with the Lib Dems, I took it for granted that Nick Clegg would install himself in a major department and stamp his policy and Lib Dem branding upon it. Either the Foreign Office or the Home Office seemed obvious, given Lib Dem priorities. This would have followed Continental coalition practice of the leader of the second coalition party taking a key portfolio, typically the Foreign Ministry in Germany. I was strongly in favour of this. From my experience of Whitehall, where Deputy Prime Ministers based in the Cabinet Office without portfolio (like John Prescott between 2001 and 2002) have been powerless, it was clear to me that a strong departmental base, far from distracting the DPM from wider issues, was essential to providing the leverage necessary to impact upon them. Clegg badly lacks this.
Furthermore, the personal portfolio Nick Clegg took with him to the Cabinet Office – constitutional reform – simply reinforced his unsuccessful strategy of putting political reform at the heart of Lib Dem coalition policy.
Clegg’s weakness has not been redressed by ministerial strength elsewhere. In my discussions with Gordon about a possible coalition, I suggested that the Lib Dems should take Cabinet posts in each of three key ‘sectors’ of government – namely, international policy (Foreign, Defence and International Development); at least one of the public service or welfare departments (Home Office, Health, Education, Transport, Work and Pensions, Communities and Local Government, and Culture, Media and Sport); and a ‘green’ department (Energy and Climate Change or Environment, Food and Rural Affairs), as well as the No. 2 jobs in the Treasury and in other major departments where the Lib Dems were not in the lead. I envisaged the Lib Dems taking four head of department Cabinet posts, with Clegg combining one of them with the Deputy Prime Ministership as just described, plus another lesser Cabinet post or two to give a fair relative balance within a Cabinet of about twenty-five.
This was not so much to secure good posts for the Lib Dems but because I believed a coalition would only be strong and unified if the Lib Dems were thoroughly bound into its ministerial leadership across the Whitehall waterfront. Labour had a keen interest in not short-changing them.
Clegg secured almost none of these major posts in his coalition negotiations with Cameron. It is not even clear that he asked for them, although if he did ask and was refused then he badly underplayed his hand. (This will be a significant point of interest in the memoirs to come.) Of the twelve head of department posts just mentioned, the Lib Dems secured only one – Energy and Climate Change (DECC), which was among the least significant and, for the Lib Dems, the most problematic, given its responsibility for nuclear energy. They secured no Cabinet post whatever in two of the three key government sectors of international policy and public services/welfare, where there are ten departments. Instead, Vince Cable – Lib Dem Deputy Leader at the formation of the coalition, in a wary relationship with Clegg – took the Business, Innovation and Skills department, presumably with a view to being able to influence economic policy, where he is significantly to the Left of Cameron/Osborne/Clegg. However, BIS in practice offers little scope for cutting across the Treasury, as has proved the case since 2010.
BIS and DECC were the only head of department posts secured by the Lib Dems. Their three other Cabinet posts (Chief Secretary to the Treasury, Scottish Secretary and Clegg himself at the Cabinet Office) are either subordinate or non-departmental. (Technically the Scottish Office is a department, but its main job is to shadow the Scottish government, where the power lies.)
It is hard to conceive that the Lib Dems could have negotiated a worse allocation of ministerial posts.
This absence of ministerial clout has rendered the Lib Dems largely unconnected and irrelevant to most of Whitehall. Government is made up of decisions and policies agreed day by day, week by week, by secretaries of state in charge of departments, sometimes involving discussion and agreement with the Prime Minister and the Chancellor. Virtually all of the players in each of these ‘power triangles’ are Tories.
Nick Clegg thought he could turn the triangles into squares by supervising all key government decisions from his eyrie in the Cabinet Office, supplemented by bilateral discussions with the Prime Minister as well as through the work of the so-called ‘quad’ (an informal grouping of Cameron, Osborne, Clegg and Alexander which discusses coalition business, particularly economic policy) and a rejuvenated Cabinet committee system, including a formal ‘coalition committee’ to resolve high-level differences.
None of this, however, has remotely substituted for the absence of Lib Dem leadership in key Whitehall departments. The best that the Lib Dems have been able to secure in most policy areas is an occasional veto or delaying power on Conservative policy. The Deputy Prime Minister’s ability to question decisions or proposed policies – usually on the verge of them being announced – is a long-stop power, and the same is true of Cabinet committees. Tellingly, the coalition committee has barely met since 2010. Furthermore, while Cabinet committee discussion is a good thing (there was far too little collective discussion among ministers in the Blair/Brown governments), this has not served to strengthen the Lib Dems to any notable degree. The story of Andrew Lansley’s health reforms, Michael Gove’s education reforms, Iain Duncan Smith’s welfare reforms and Cameron/Hague’s European policy largely testifies to Lib Dem weakness. As for BIS, three years into the government there is still no ‘signature’ Vince Cable policy or reform distinct from George Osborne’s Treasury. Indeed, the only major reform for which Cable and his department are responsible is the trebling of tuition fees, contrary to the Lib Dem manifesto pledge to scrap them entirely.
In short, in 2010 the Lib Dems went into government but not into coalition. They handed virtually all the posts that mattered to the Conservatives, and they also – partly in consequence – handed almost all the policy of the government to the Conservatives too.
Having made this initial mistake, Nick Clegg stuck to it in the 2012 reshuffle when he chose to stay in the Cabinet Office rather than taking a major department. Bizarrely, he even kept constitutional reform as his personal portfolio, even after the collapse of electoral reform and House of Lords reform. And he secured no change whatever in the other Lib Dem Cabinet portfolios. He did not even insert a junior minister into the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS), despite the raging Leveson controversy on press regulation. (Again, it will be interesting to learn from the memoirs whether Clegg asked for different posts and was refused. He was in a much weaker position than in 2010, given ministerial sitting tenants and his generally weaker political position.)
Having secured a precariously narrow foothold in the machinery of government, the only other way Clegg and the Lib Dems could exert influence within the executive was through the formal coalition agreement. However, here again the position of the Lib Dems was very weak because the only significant policy concessions they sought and gained from the Conservatives in the May 2010 coalition agreement concerned constitutional reforms which rapidly crumbled to dust.
To appreciate the scale of this misjudgement, consider the first major speech Nick Clegg made as Deputy Prime Minister, a week after the coalition took office. The subject was constitutional reform. The coalition was going to enact ‘the biggest shake-up of our democracy since the Great Reform Act of 1832’. Clegg could hardly have set his sights higher: ‘Incremental change will not do: it is time for a wholesale, big-bang approach to political reform, that’s what this government will deliver … a programme so important to me personally that I will take full responsibility for seeing it through,’ he declared. It was to be ‘our very own Great Reform Act’, including ‘an elected second chamber where members are elected by a proportional representation’ (‘the time for talk is over’), a wholesale reform of party funding, and a referendum on electoral reform. ‘David Cameron and I are very relaxed about the fact we may be arguing different cases in that referendum,’ he added, confident that he would win.
Three years later? ‘The British public, when they were asked for a change in the electoral system, they did not seem that interested,’ Clegg told a Commons committee ruefully in February 2013. As for a new ‘constitutional blueprint’, that was ‘like waiting for Godot – it just won’t materialise’.
For the Lib Dems, the chronic weakness of the initial coalition agreement was compounded by the absence of any machinery or timetable to refresh the coalition’s programme in mid-term. The Lib Dems needed such machinery because of their junior status within the government. Only by securing at the outset of the coalition – in the founding coalition agreement itself – that this would take place within two years could the Lib Dems have retained significant ongoing policy leverage. However, this did not happen.
Instead the coalition’s ‘mid-term review’ was simply that: a review of progress on the initial coalition agreement, with a list of what was left to do from the 2010 agreement, plus a handful of new departmentally inspired (and therefore mostly Tory) policies. Even this document was repeatedly delayed. It was expected in the summer of 2012, at the end of the first two years of coalition (i.e. half the way through its effective working life, allowing for a lame-duck period in the run-up to a 2015 election). However, it did not finally appear until January 2013, and it was so thin that it made no impact whatsoever.
Learning from the Cameron–Clegg experience, it is clear that four things are required for a future coalition to be coalition of substance rather than name:
• The leader of the second party needs to head a major department in his or her own right.
• There needs to be genuinely joint control of economic policy and the Treasury.
• The second party needs to hold at least one Cabinet post in each of the three main sectors of the government (i.e. foreign/defence; public services and welfare; environment/energy).
• There needs to be robust machinery for ongoing policy development and negotiation between the parties.
Above all, to make a genuinely joint programme viable, there needs to be a sufficient identity of interest and policy, rather than a Tory–Lib Dem coalition of opposites held together by mutual fear of the ballot box.
However, this is all second best. First best is for Labour to win outright as a broad-based progressive party, informed by the best thinking in other parties and beyond but not reliant on coalition with other parties to assemble a majority in the Commons.
This requires One Nation Labour.
The Conservatives did not win the 2010 election, hence the ‘five days in May’ and this book.
The Tories fell well short of a House of Commons majority. They secured a smaller proportion of constituencies than any ‘winning’ party since Ramsay MacDonald’s Labour Party in the hung parliament of 1929. Even Harold Wilson did better in the election of February 1974 (the only other ‘hung parliament’ election since 1929), when Labour’s share of the popular vote was lower than for Edward Heath’s Tories but Labour won 47.4 per cent of the seats compared to 47.2 per cent for the Conservatives in 2010.
The Tories feel cheated by the electoral system. Hence their strategy, derailed by their Lib Dem partners after the defeat of House of Lords reform, to redraw parliamentary boundaries in time for a 2015 election. However, the Tory failure to win a Commons majority in 2010 wasn’t just bad luck. At 36.1 per cent, the Tory vote in 2010 was the lowest for a ‘winning’ party since Britain became a recognisable democracy in 1918, with one important exception (Labour in 2005, at 35.2 per cent).
The root of the Tory problem is that they are no longer a national party. For a generation now, they have barely existed in Scotland and in most of the conurbations of the Midlands and the North. In these large swathes of the country, Conservatives don’t fluctuate between winning and losing, they fluctuate around zero. In 2010 they won not a single seat in any of the cities of Manchester, Birmingham, Liverpool, Leeds, Sheffield, Bradford, Newcastle, Nottingham, Leicester, Stoke or Derby. In Scotland they won a mere two seats and in Wales only eight.
Even in the cities of southern England, the larger and more socially and racially mixed the city, the worse the Tories do. Labour won decisively more seats than the Conservatives in London (thirty-eight to twenty-eight), sweeping inner London. In Bristol, the biggest city in southern England outside London, the Tories won only one of four seats.
So the Tories have big problems. But Labour’s are equally big, because the biggest concentrations of population and dynamic energy in the country are in the south, and beyond London and Bristol, Labour won barely any seats in southern England.
In 2010, out of 218 seats south of Birmingham excluding London, Labour won only ten. In the twenty-five counties of southern England, Labour won no seats at all in nineteen (Buckinghamshire, Cambridgeshire, Cornwall, Dorset, East Sussex, Essex, Gloucestershire, Herefordshire, Hertfordshire, Kent, Norfolk, Northamptonshire, Somerset, Suffolk, Surrey, Warwickshire, West Sussex, Wiltshire and Worcestershire).
This weakness in densely populated southern England also explains why Labour did so poorly in the popular vote, polling only 8.6 million votes to the Conservatives’ 10.7 million.
Some have suggested that Labour’s real problem in 2010 lay in its ‘core’ constituency of working-class voters, where it also fell back. Or that Labour’s predicament is essentially a ‘rising tide’ issue because its support is ‘naturally’ weaker in southern England; as the electoral tide recedes Labour is submerged in the south, but when the tide rises again, it will reclaim the territory.
However, this simply re-poses the challenge for Labour to build substantially more support, without which it will not win seats in southern England. In 2010, Labour’s national vote fell to 29 per cent. Tony Blair won in 1997 with 43.2 per cent and with 40.7 per cent in 2001. So Labour lost about a third of its support over the following decade. It is important to note that this was not a post-Blair phenomenon – Labour’s vote fell to 35.2 per cent in 2005 – but rather an ‘exhaustion and heartlands’ effect: as exhaustion and attrition took hold in government, particularly post-Iraq, Labour was pushed progressively back to its heartlands and now has the challenge – as under Kinnock, Foot and early Blair – to become a national party once again.
Put thus, both major parties have the same problem: neither have strong nationwide support. In one respect the Tory predicament is worse, in that their wipe-out in the North and Scotland now appears permanent, whereas for Labour, the recent Blair elections yielded fairly strong support in votes and seats in southern England. Nonetheless, the Labour wipe-out in southern England outside London was near total in 2010, and it will take a dramatic shift in support and perception to reverse it. The Eastleigh by-election of February 2013, where Labour stuck at 10 per cent while UKIP surged to 28 per cent and second place, highlighted this challenge starkly. The necessity to become a party of southern England becomes still greater when the parliamentary boundaries are finally redrawn for the election after 2015, when the balance of seats shifts decisively south.
Ed Miliband is therefore right to advance ‘One Nation Labour’. It not only seizes the ‘One Nation’ mantle from the Conservatives at the point where their credibility as a One Nation party is shot through. It also concentrates Labour’s mind on the imperative to become, as in the early Blair years, a One Nation party in social appeal and geographical reach. This requires Labour’s philosophy and programme to be avowedly national, not sectarian.
One Nation Labour is a party of aspiration, enterprise and responsibility as well as social justice. It is proudly liberal as well as Labour. It is the party of modernisation not the status quo; of responsibility – personal responsibility, social responsibility, economic responsibility – as well as equality, rights and freedoms.
One Nation Labour speaks the language of Middle England – middle class and working class – which wants to see more and better jobs, more choice and higher standards in the public services, more and better opportunities for their children to get on, and which also wants greater security, both physical security in neighbourhoods and greater security in facing the challenges of modern life.
One Nation Labour does not mean recycling New Labour policies in an unthinking way. Some, like the quest for greater choice and higher standards in education and health, are still appropriate. Others, particularly Labour’s approach to financial regulation, growth, infrastructure, welfare and devolution within England – need to change radically in the light of changed circumstances and challenges.
Labour’s 1945 manifesto – written amidst the break-up of Churchill’s great wartime coalition – seized the One Nation modernisation theme under the inspired title ‘Let us face the Future’. Its final chapter was entitled ‘Labour’s call to all progressives’, and it warned: ‘It is very easy to set out a list of aims. What matters is whether it is backed up by a genuine workmanlike plan conceived without regard to sectional vested interests and carried through.’
That is our challenge today. To set out not just a list of aims – one nation, responsible capitalism, more and better jobs – but a genuine workmanlike plan conceived without regard to sectional interests and carried through.