Politics

26 July 2008

Steve Richards reviews the week in politics

The ministerial sensitivity is understandable. For Labour, Warwick Two looks awful. At a time when voters have turned away from the government here is the governing party in what seems like a negotiation with one limited section of the country. Union leaders are quite open about it. Tony Woodley, the joint head of the Unite union, stated emphatically in the build-up: ‘We have to speak for our two million members. There is no point backing a Labour party that does not support Labour policies.’ There is much for the Labour leadership to worry about in those two sentences. Is a Labour government meant to represent Mr Woodley’s two million workers or should it have wider ambitions about who will be the beneficiaries of its policies? It can only win and keep power with wider ambitions.

The problem with the ‘Warwick’ approach to politics is that it divides the electorate into separate entities, as if each has their own distinct needs. We enter a dangerous fantasy world in which providers of services are not also consumers, and in which the broader direction of the economy matters less than an immediate policy gain for a few. This defeatist insularity is not limited to some union leaders. At a conference a few years ago Peter Mandelson observed that, ‘We have done a lot for our core vote in recent months. We must not forget our Middle England supporters.’ But Labour can only win convincingly and credibly when it finds a narrative and a set of policies that brings together these different groups.

This should not be difficult. Some of Mr Woodley’s members will have similar concerns to Mr Mandelson’s Middle England voters. Both will have kids that attend schools. Both will fume in lousy trains. Both might need to visit a GP or attend a hospital. It should be possible to bind groups together into a potentially potent vote-winning force. The Cabinet minister who gets closest is Ed Miliband, who talks about a ‘self-interested altruism’ lurking in most voters. Mr Miliband means that we should want to pay up for decent public services in order to tackle deprivation for entirely selfish reasons. There is something in this.