Russell Brand made a good point on Question Time last night. If a party derives half of its funding from a group of people, it’s not going to do anything to annoy that group. He was speaking in the (incorrect) premise that the Tories are bankrolled by the banks, bit his overall conclusion was spot on. Ed Miliband’s Labour Party takes about 80% of its funding from the trade unions, which distorts the way it sees the world. With each major battle, Labour is not becoming the party of change. It is becoming the party of the bureaucratic empire, anxious to strike back. This opens up new electoral territory, which I look at in my Telegraph column today.
Ed Miliband is taking his party on a distinct direction, and has proven that he is capable of transcending the Blair/Brown era. Tony Blair liked reform (and I very much supported him) and once told Labour Party conference that they are the ‘change makers’. No longer. On health reform, education reform and welfare reform, Labour is the party of the ancient regime. Stephen Twigg would discontinue free schools, and believes it is a ‘scandal’ that new schools open when there are ‘surplus’ spaces to fill in bad schools. Who on earth could this point be aimed at? Not the parents. I spoke to one yesterday, from the Bedford Free School, and she put it succinctly: ‘There’s no point in surplus places if none of them are good enough for your child.’
Once, Blair pitched the entire Labour Party at that type of voter. As he correctly worked out, the world was changing: voters wanted power and choice, and thanked whoever gave it them in the outside world – from Sky TV to Amazon. The era of monopoly providers (BBC, M&S) was drawing to an end. Labour’s mission, he thought, should be empowerment – people wanted choice, not a Big Brother with deeper pockets and greater powers. Blair correctly drew a dividing line, between the users and providers of public services. He’d champion the former, and acquire some ‘scars’ on his back when taking on the latter. He rejected the Marxist idea of the masses as weaklings, who needed Big Government to sort things out for them. Blair thought people wanted tools, to sort things out for themselves. As he put it in 1995, ‘the aim of socialism is to give greater freedom to the individual’. At the time, I agreed with every word – but not the last bit. I didn’t think Blair would be able to redefine socialism in that way.
The Brown years saw the wholesale and comprehensive destruction of what Blair had created over so many years. The problem was that Brown could not build; he could only destroy. Ed Miliband is now building, but it’s something rather different. It’s a modern version of the old mode of socialism that Blair wanted to move on from. Where Blair saw parent choice, Miliband sees market forces. Blair spoke about ‘choice,’ but Miliband (and Twigg) prefer ‘collaboration’ vs ‘competition’. Miliband is not doing this because he’s in hock to the unions; he genuinely believes it. But the unions are happy to let him talk about ‘pre-distribution’ as long as they get their way – which they do.
As a result, Labour has not only walked away from these public sector reform battles, but from the people these battles were intended to help. This is what matters. New ground is being surrendered, and the Tories should take it.
It is Tories who wish to capsize the English education system, which is so good an entrenching privilege. It is Tories willing to spend political capital reforming welfare, with all the setbacks and complications that always follow. It’s Tories who reject the notion of the unemployed being too expensive (or difficult) to help.
David Cameron should make more of this. His advisers have tended to argue that an Old Etonian with a Brasenose first cannot really pose as the anti-establishment candidate, nor the candidate of the working class. They’re being too sensitive: Boris doesn’t have such hang-ups. And posh or not, Cameron – as leader of the Conservative Party – needs to adapt to the changing electoral landscape. Labour is utterly mad to abandon the ground which Blair devoted his career to staking out and colonising. Things are developing precisely as Blair anticipated: people don’t want handouts, they want power. And if Cameron is smart, he’ll make it very clear that the Tories are the only party offering to give it to them.
Comments