During the Depression, tent cities sprung up across America. Today, in the second great contraction, they are appearing in the financial centres of the western world. But there is a crucial difference: the contemporary campers are there out of choice not necessity. Pitching your tent has become the fashionable form of protest.
It is easy to dismiss the attention heaped on ‘Occupy London’ and its criticisms of greed in the City as a classic example of left-wing media bias. The rally for an EU referendum attracted nearly ten times as many people, but didn’t receive even a tenth of the news coverage.
But the reason Occupy is causing such a stir is because of the sense that some new form of politics should be emerging. The 200-tent encampment outside St Paul’s is, we are told, the new home of radicalism. And when one considers the collapse of the economic model of the past decade and the loss of trust in nearly every institution that underpins our society, it is indeed remarkable that a new movement or party has not gathered momentum. Ukip might have attracted some new supporters, but even its leaders can’t see how they can win a single seat at the next general election.
Most politicians view the Occupy movement as a threat, a form of politics that they can’t control. Ed Miliband sees it as an opportunity. He has already adopted the protestors’ slogan about the responsible 99 per cent and the irresponsible top 1 per cent.
Miliband wants to take their inchoate agenda and mould into it something more substantial, to use politics to answer the questions they are struggling to pose. His circle now view Blair’s ‘one nation’ attempt to govern for the 100 per cent as a mistake.
The Labour leader is drawn, almost instinctively, to the politics of protest. As climate change secretary, he spent a huge amount of time talking to green activists — even inviting them into his office before they went on marches. Where most see a long-haired layabout, Miliband sees an interesting point of view. As a friend points out, his Marxist father’s belief in extra-parliamentary action left a deep impression on him. Unlike his brother, Ed Miliband is keen to embrace his father’s intellectual legacy; several of his colleagues have been struck recently by how often he invokes his father.
But there are other, more pragmatic reasons for him wanting to move onto this turf. Miliband’s manner means that he is never going to appear more prime-ministerial than Cameron, a man who looks and sounds like he was born to the purple. Instead, Miliband hopes to be seen as an insurgent figure, a tribune of the supposed 99 per cent. He knows that his best chance of making it to Downing Street lies in tapping into the widely held sense that something is wrong with the current capitalist system. The Labour leadership is also acutely aware that the Tories’ electoral Achilles’ heel is that they are seen as the party of the rich. The more Miliband can tie Cameron to the 1 per cent, the more he can damage him.
Margaret Thatcher is, bizarrely enough, acting as an inspiration. Miliband’s allies point out that the criticisms he faces now — that his victory in the leadership election was a mistake, that his voice sounds funny, that he is too outside the mainstream to win a general election and that he trails in the ‘who would be the best Prime Minister?’ stakes — are all things said of Thatcher before her victory in 1979.
Ed Miliband’s allies are quick to argue that worrying about capitalism is no longer the preserve of the loony left. They point out that even Charles Moore believes the system is no longer delivering for the vast majority of people.
There is, however, a danger of Miliband overreaching, of imagining that he’s leading a great movement when he’s really just trying to appeal to disgruntled voters. When he spoke at the TUC’s anti-cuts rally in March, his invocation of the spirit of the suffragettes and the civil rights and anti-apartheid movements was ripe for ridicule. One member of the shadow cabinet blamed the whole episode on Miliband spending too much time with his speechwriter watching Martin Luther King videotapes.
The Cameroons believe that Miliband is making a mistake by identifying with the Occupy protestors. One tells me that ‘he’s playing up to the stereotype that he’s a bit of a weirdo’. But, tellingly, the government’s wonks and spinners are now looking to engage with the growing debate about how to create better capitalism. Having roundly mocked Miliband’s conference speech and its verbose attempt to distinguish between ‘predator’ and ‘producer’ capitalism, they are planning a foray into similar territory by talking about the need for ‘moral markets’.
The cynical explanation would be that the Cameroons are worried that the distinction between good and bad businesses has resonated with the public. But, in fairness, the Cameron project has always taken an interest in ethical capitalism. Steve Hilton, the Prime Minister’s senior adviser, set up a consultancy called Good Business in the 1990s to show companies how to make money out of ‘socially responsible’ brands.
Cameron’s advisers believe that their man is better placed than Miliband to pursue such an agenda. ‘If you’re coming from the left and doing this you just look like a socialist,’ says one. ‘Whereas from the right, it is about how you make the system work better.’
Miliband has so far proved adept at spotting the next big issue. His much-derided talk of the squeezed middle, for instance, has now become a mainstream catchphrase. But he hasn’t managed to capitalise on his foresight. To succeed now, he must find a way to channel concerns about the economic system into a coherent agenda that doesn’t just seem like more old Labour.
The challenge for Cameron, meanwhile, is to show that his party is not the party of a supposed ‘1 per cent’. He needs to demonstrate that it is those who truly believe in the free market who are most repelled by bailouts for banks and rewards for failure.
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