Labour's Category Error

Wednesday, 23rd June 2010

Have you been impressed by Labour's response to their election defeat? Hmmm. Next question: is anyone listening to Labour's complaints that the Liberal Democrats have "betrayed" themselves and everything that is nice and sweet and wholesome about this pleasant land? Best move on from that one too. Sunny Hundal makes a good argument that, at the very least, it is much too soon for Labour to be taking this line.

It's a good post but it misses one trick, I think: Labour continue to suffer from the category error of believing that liberals are really Labour voters who don't quite realise this. But this is not the case and it's quite evident that Nick Clegg is no Charles Kennedy. Indeed, the Lib Dem leadership might be thought closer to Germany's Free Democrats or their own ancestors in the Manchester Free Trade movement than to the SDP. When Nick Clegg said "I am not a Social Democrat" (or words to that effect) it might have been wise to listen to him.

Because - and this ought not to be too difficult a point to grasp - one reason some people vote Liberal Democrat is that they don't want to vote for the Labour party. And they don't want to vote for the Labour party because they don't agree with it.

Despite this, many Labour types continue to believe that a Liberal Democrat is just an absent-minded Labour voter. Sooner or later they'll come to their senses and return to the mother fold. Well, maybe. This leads one to the curious position in which some Labour supporters seem to believe that the Lib Dems should essentially be advancing left-wing causes from within the belly of a centre-right government. This seems a recipe for disappointment.

So too, I think, is the belief that Liberal Democrat voters will be so scunnered by the (novel!) experience of power that they will enthusiastically desert their party at the next election. Doubtless some will, but there just may be rather more who quite like being in power and consider it, all things being equal and all that, preferable to life in opposition. (Plus, there are quite a number of voters who like seeing politicians from different parties working together. They consider this sensible and grown-up.)

So, one measure of Labour's recovery may be when they cease patronising liberals and appreciate that, actually, the left doesn't have a monopoly on the non-Tory vote and that, again, it has no right to presume that non-Tory votes are actually a super-secret endorsement of Labour. Right now, however, there's little sign of that happening.

Filed under: Clegg (60 more articles) , ConLib (118 more articles) , Labour (2033 more articles) , Lib Dems (97 more articles)

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John Halton

June 23rd, 2010 1:00pm Report this comment

Hmm. I know what you mean about Labour tending to assume that Lib Dems are just Labour supporters afflicted with false consciousness, but in this case the charges of "betrayal" are based on the Lib Dems having betrayed /their own voters/ by cheerfully signing up to and implementing policies which, during the election campaign, they attacked as ruinous and unfair: premature and deflationary cuts, the Tories' "VAT bombshell" and so on. I should think a number of Nick Clegg's constituents feel pretty "betrayed" by the withdrawal of the Forgemasters loan.

shorpe

June 23rd, 2010 2:01pm Report this comment

Couldn't agree more. I'd be very interested to hear your thoughts on Tom Harris' blogging since the election. As you know, he's generally one of the more decent and sensible political bloggers, especially for a serving MP, but since the coalition took power we've been served an increasingly tedious series of "look, this LibDem manifesto promise is completely different to this coalition policy - it's like the Reichstag fire all over again"-type posts. That even someone of his calibre can be reduced to that kind of sour-grapes sideline-sniping shows just how far Labour have to climb to be a serious party of government again.

To be strictly fair, though, I don't seem to recall the Tory party of June 1997 being a haven of dignity and forward thinking.

Mycroft

June 23rd, 2010 2:15pm Report this comment

I get the impression in conversation that many LD voters are essentially non-committed centre of the roaders who find both Labour and the Conservatives to be too ideological for their tastes (it is one of the bad effects of the Thatcherite legacy that the Conservatives have widely come to be reagarded as ideological as Labour). Furthermore as many LD voters are near-Conservatives as are near-Labour, so when Simon Hughes (say) appears on the radio saying that the LDs are 'left of centre progressive', he is speaking more for a not-insignificant faction among LD activists more than for LD voters in general. This affects how the compromises made by the LDs in government are viewed, since uncommitted centre of the road people generally like to see politicians working together co-operatively and accept such compromises (the objections come from committed people on the right of the Conservative party and left of the LDs); and if many LD voters fall into that category, they will not be much worried by them either.

I think you are right to see a distinctive LD (or indeed Liberal) line emerging among Clegg and other LDs in government, which makes one less able to regard as being just watered-down Labour, as some of the older LD people are. An excellent thing in my view, because the old-fashioned Liberals represented a distinctive and valuable strain in British politics.

gareth

June 23rd, 2010 5:35pm Report this comment

Labour just need to find someone to lead them who doesn't look or sound as dodgy as their politics, like Obama. Vernon Kaye would be perfect, with some harsh, tasy beats thrown in to make it all cutting edge modern dogma, instead of outdated dogma.

Alex - you should get a job on CNN with Anderson Cooper or the BBC with Gavin Esler - you are perfect at news-muzak - background, constant, low-level, optional and irrelevant. A bit like the Corrs.

ndm

June 23rd, 2010 6:57pm Report this comment

Isn't this type of analysis a bit premature given we are only 50 days out from the election?

paulg

June 26th, 2010 11:11am Report this comment

The lib-dems are rooted in municipal government - they have a srong tradition of running local authorities - thats why they support devolving power from the centre.

This approach is entirely at odds with labours centralising tendancies.

Positive liberalism has a different mindset from labours socialist roots. Hence a different set of values and beliefs - similar but different.

But Mills philosophical liberalism can also taper with the conservatives belief in history and culture. Similar but different.

labour have not found their footing in this new territory because their core beliefs are entirely at odds with our history culture and the liberals philosophy. I have a strong feeling that the lib dems could become the main party of the left come the next election and, could even take some tories away with their odd bod beliefs: such as yourself Alex!

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