Clegg, Lady Di and the left’s new opportunity
I’m as bemused as anybody by the apparent surge in LibDem support. I saw most of the TV debate, and I really can’t say I saw anything special, though I accept I’m a pretty atypical viewer.
So, yes, I think the sudden desire on the part of a section of the public to be feel attached to some kind of sudden mass movement of emotion is a bit like Dianamania.
That’s not to be Johnsonesque in dismissing voters as too stupid to see the truth.
It’s simply to say that for those voters now expressing support for the LibDems, a key attraction appears to be be to feel like an active part in a some kind of anti-establishment swell (and the anti-establishment urge was very strong in the days after Diana’s death).
This desire to be part of a sudden, organically growing surge for some kind of change, however ill-defined, is clearly stronger than the desire to look at policy differences. That’s pretty understandable in an anti-politics age brought upon us by the right’s deliberate anti-politics of depoliticisation.
So if Clegg is to this emotional outpouring what Diana was to the feeling that swept the country in 1997, who plays the role of the Queen in all of this?
No prizes for guessing that I think Cameron is the one who gets to play the unfortunate monarch, struggling to cope with forces he doesn’t understand, and which threaten to sweep away his shallow platitudes about change and his now irrelevant ’big society’ verbage.
Did the sudden mass Diana movement really care, in the late summer of 1997. that the queen had already started to pay tax as part of her moderate package of reform? Will the new Lib Dem lovers really care what Cameron has to say about his vision for change?
There is now a chance that Cameron will be thwarted at the last, and if he is, I’ll be glad. There is even a chance that a Lab-LibDem coalition will be open to the kind of shift leftwards that many of aspire to and a few of actively plan to organise for.
Clegg is like Diana (or perhaps more aptly, her brother, Earl Spencer, who became her spokesperson-in-death). He is no real reformer, no real catalyst for change. It is only last month that he was praising Thatcher, for gawd’s sake.
But the Lib Dems are like Labour, in that the membership generally has views well to the left of their leadership. Many LibDems in the south and West of the country would be Labour party members if they lived in the North, because they feel they have to belong to an anti-Tory party with a chance of winning. That doesn’t mean that LibDems in local government don’t quite often do deals with the Tories for the sake of power, but that is often about the lure of power overriding poorly developed political principles.
That is why, for example, the LibDem leaflet delivered through my door today (see above), is out of keeping with Clegg’s ’plague on both your houses’ approach. In a Labour held seat, there is not a single message about the Labour party; all the attack messages are against the Tories, because the LibDems know that, around here, that’s the attack that counts.
It’s why the only two people I found, during a whole weekend’s campaigning, willing to say they were tempted to go LibDem now were doing so on the basis that they might now be able to take a principled stand against Labour’s shift to the right over the last 13 years, in the knowledge that others might be doing the same. (I asked them politely if they’d like to cast their minds back to Clegg’s performance in September, when he was proposing savage cuts.)
So while the anti-establishment groundswell that followed Diana’s death soon died away because Earl Spencer was never going to organise anything further than a big funeral oration and some brownie points in a slightly remodelled nobility, there is a chance – if the left get it right after the election – that real grassroots stuff might start to happen, and that some real political change, of the kind that involves real shift in power over material resources, and of the kind Cameron and his chums can’t possibly conceive, may be possible.
But it won’t happen on its own. Organisation, even in a changed electoral environment, will be the key. The political landscape may change, but doing politics doesn’t.
THough I understand the LibDems are often pretty well organised as campaigners. The missing piece was always a fair chunk of the national media attention …
Disclaimer: I am not associated with the LibDems. They are far too much Democrat and not enough Liberal for me to join them. However, I’m an historian by training, and learned my politics in the third world, so I can spot a bankrupt political oligarchy sustained by the vested interests of a corrupt plutocracy as well as the next man. And I’ve been saying so on the internet since a hell of a long time before last Thursday.
The OP seems also to have made a mistake I’ve been seeing in other places, a kind of general mystification: “COUNTRY GONE MAD !!@!11! How can such a political shift come from just 90 minutes of television? We’re ALL DOOOOOOOOOMEDcaptainmainwaring”.
This is being characterised as “some kind of sudden mass movement of emotion” (my emphasis); even with the caveat, this phrase pretty much does imply agreement with Johnson’s view that when the electorate turn against the Establishment, the problem is clearly that we’ve got the wrong sort of voters, what?
This is not sudden to anyone not blinkered by tribalism and industrial-era thinking. Cameron is, famously, a lightweight and Osborne is in hiding: the assumption that it was their turn is the only reason the Conservatives looked set to win at this election. This tidal shift has been building on a steady curve since Hyde Park 2003 and the resignation speech of Robin Cook. Since the death of Ian Tomlinson and the fall of Michael Martin, it’s been obvious that most of the country didn’t like the arrogance of “taking turns”.
Customers in my pub (which is in Hackney) who’ve voted Labour every election since the 60s, have been complaining about how there are no real options any more ever since Labour turned into hysterical authoritarians. “The Tories are only running to the right because Labour have parked their tanks on Thatcher’s lawn”; once the Smiler was gone, the country finally noticed that the New Labour experiment was to move the Labour party away from the politics of labour and into the arms of the mill owners. The expenses scandal left most of the country not, as people keep trying to say, anti-politics but anti-politician. We’re looking at potentially the highest voter turnout since WWI and an immense flood of non-party, issue- and policy-based activism. That’s not anti-politics; that’s what politics looks like. The oligarchy haven’t seen it for so very, very long that they had genuinely forgotten what a politics looks like.
It was most enlightening to watch (last night) a repeat of the HIGNFY episode that was filmed just before a Liberal leader got their hands on the biggest audience they have ever had. Hislop saying “It’s the only type of bigotry that’s ok on TV, really; taking the piss out of the LibDems” on air looks a bit silly now, as do all of the other scripted references to LibDem irrelevance, hopelessness and puppyish naivete.
Every Lab/Con front-bencher has spoken to an audience of over 10 million multiple times. No Liberal leader ever had in the history of the party. Why are people shocked by the public’s reaction? The era of TV-dominated politics began exactly 50 years ago with the Nixon-Kennedy debate. So, shutting one party out of the media narrative and minimising their TV exposure results in their profile being so low that they’re unelectable? Of course it results in that, that’s precisely why they’ve been doing it.
Many Tory commentators have pointed out that it was a fatal mistake to allow Clegg to look like an equal. They’re right. It was ethically and morally correct, and very, very long overdue, but there is no question that it was a mistake.
What the debate did, the only thing the first debate did, was expose the Liberal platform of ‘we’re not the other guys’ to the public at large, rather than only to the clattering classes. 64% of those polled actively want a hung parliament, want no party to be able to ram through bad, stupid laws for partisan or electoral advantage. Finally, those people have a name to vote for who can make that happen.
People have been saying “Why can’t we kick ‘em both out?” in increasingly loud voices ever since they discovered that said “em” were institutionally corrupt. All that happened last Thursday is that the people in question discovered that they can.
I think this needs to be addressed. If you read the actual quote, he actually compared the scale of Thatcher’s actions with regards to the unions with the scale of the actions required to tackle the banking establishment, and pointed out that the Tories were very keen on the former but not so keen on the latter (to the point of refusing to believe it’s even possible).
It’s possible to praise someone without liking them or being glad of their achievements. As a Liverpool fan, I think Alex Ferguson is a great manager, but I wouldn’t piss on him if he was on fire.
Also, the general notion that the Lib Dems are to the right of Labour needs some evidence. The Lib Dems are clearly to the left on civil liberties, internationalism, nuclear weapons, criminal justice, banking reform, devolution, freedom from censorship and so forth. On tax, their policies involve the richest paying more and everyone else paying less, as well as “green” taxes on pollution. Now, I can see why you might conclude that these policies don’t go far enough for your tastes, but I can’t for the life of me fathom how that translates into a positive case for voting Labour, given that Labour is to the right on the issues I’ve just listed. It can only be that either a) you believe that the electoral system leaves Labour as the only viable not-the-Tories party, or b) you believe that in the long run, at some point, as yet to be determined the Labour party will wake up to its socialist heritage and institute ‘proper’ left-wing government, and it’s worth keeping it alive and in power on the off-chance that this happens in our lifetime. Neither feel like good arguments to me, but perhaps I’m missing something?
What John Q Publican said.
Watch it again. I would never vote for any of them but I totally get Cleggmania based just on that performance. He is Blair 97. Where the others were getting bogged down with stupid learned statistics which meant nothing he was pitching Blair style vision right at the camera totally unopposed. Watch them scrabble about class sizes. Cleggs retort? The Educational Freedom Act- Get politicians out of the classrom, enshrined in law. I have no idea if Clegg would pursue any of this were he to be elected, my guess would be that he wouldn’t, but he is very very good at presenting ideas and his ideas stand out, just slightly,leaving the other two arguing about fractions.
John Q Publican is clearly correct on this one.
I just wanted to respond to Rob quickly – not a problem with analysis (which may well also be correct) but the language of left and right.
The Lib Dems saying they are “neither of the left nor right” is broadly speaking correct – they are both and thus neither. What helps is a quick dividing of political axes, as one might find on Political Compass, puts them roughly in the economic centre, since they borrow some policies from the right (cutting public spending on bureaucracy) and some from the left (redistributive tax). However, issues like civil liberties and internationalism get their own separate axes, and the Lib Dems are, unlike Tories or Labour, on the right side of these axes too.
So, while they might be to the left of Labour on tax, and to the right of Thatcher on attacking economic vested interests, they also just WIN, (in the internet sense) because they hit the right chords on so many issues that defy the left/right paradigm, like Nuclear Proliferation and Power, Localism, European Federalism on issues like Climate Change (and independence on issues like bureaucracies), and so on.
John Q @4 and ok Charlotte @4:
I actually agree with a fair bit of your analysis of the resentment that has been bubbling under since, as you say, at least 2003.
I just can’t understand how you can extrapolate, from my use of the word ‘sudden’, the idea that I think the electorate or stupid, or that this a completely new sense of alienation from the political classes. I say quite clearly that this moment has been some time coming, and refer also the notion of a ‘surge’ i.e.indicative of the fact that a movement was already developing, but that it’s now gathered pace, and taken on what looks to be certain spontaneity. I’m not criticsing the electorate for that – I think it’s a good thing and creates new opportunities for radical change, and just because it’s an emotional outpouring (or anti-politician ‘violence’) doesn’t mean that it’s irrational, or unjustified, though it does as I suggest need political organisation if it is to have longstanding beneficial effects in terms of power relationship between governors and governed:
I like the way Hannah Arendt assesses the kind of moment in political history that we may have beofre us here: ‘Violence, being instrumental by nature, is rational to the extent that it is effective in reaching the end that must justify it. Since when we act, we never know with any certainty the eventual consequences of what we are doing, violence can remain rational only when it pursues short-term goals.’
With respect, John – and I do respect a lot of what you write – I thin you are responding to an OP which you think should have been written by a Labour party ‘tribalist’ like me, rather than the one I actually wrote.
Rob @3: And with as much respect as I accord John Q, Rob, I’d say you too are responding to an OP you think a Labour party member of some years standing might have written, but didn’t actually write. I do not make a case for voting Labour in this OP as far as I can see ; the OP is a brief analysis of the opportunities the left (more in the Labour party, but also within the LibDems, for that is what I say) brought about by this surge in popular demand for change.
Dave @5: Fair enough, Dave. I did say that I’m a bit atypical. I look for policy detail in what people say and think less of their position if the omit it, but you are right to say that Clegg may have done well precisely because he didn’t get bogged down.
Charlotte: *blush* Thank you. I suspect that’s the most significant endorsement I’ve had yet.
Rob #3: ps. In another OP, however, I will be setting out why I think voting Labour is justified, though it will only cover ground I’ve covered at length over the months here, focusing not on the often ‘patchy’ track record of the Labour PLP, but on what the Labour party is and can be.
Hi: I’m going to quote your first three paragraphs in full.
So; Sentence one. You clearly establish that LibDem support is … unbelievable, boggling, weird. Establishing the line that there is something ‘wrong’ here.
Sentence two: You saw nothing special. About the fact that for the first time in 100 years the oligopoly let a Liberal leader be seen as an equal. You saw nothing special about a unique political event, in which the third party was finally permitted to sit at the big-boy’s table in front of a statistically significant segment of the likely-voting electorate?
You saw nothing special about the “I agree with Nick” refrain? Even Cameron said it four times.
You saw nothing special about the agreement to a tri-partisan approach to the problem of aging population? The last issue which got that much agreement was WWII.
So we’ve clearly established that the LibDem bump is to be dismissed as an aberation, and that “nothing special” actually happened last Thursday, contrary to the public’s bizarre opinion. Now to business:
In paragraph two, you compare a real political shift in the UK to a Murdoch-manipulated outbreak of public hysteria which resulted in very little except the deaths of millions of innocent flowers. By putting things in these terms, you are communicating very clearly that this is hysterical; that an upsurge in LibDem support is analogous to a moment of national mourning.
And then, in paragraph three, the clincher: you deny that you are calling the people who are turning to Clegg stupid. Why bother?
The entire rest of the article is a relatively good assessment of the exposure problems Clegg has historically had and the challenges of perception he is about to face. You even admit that, contrary to your opening paragraphs, this might turn into what 1997 was *supposed* to be: a genuine shift in representation to reflect the steady liberal progress in society over the last 30 years.
But you start the article with spin. You explicitly categorise this shift away from old tribes as ‘sudden’, which it isn’t. And you put the bit which implies anyone supporting Clegg is both over-emotional and under-informed at the beginning of your article: if you’d put it at the end, I probably wouldn’t have been annoyed enough to confront you in such detail.
When the rest of it is so well-considered by comparsion with those first three paragraphs, it really stands out that you’ve put the sneers in the only bit of the article that will influence the thinking of 70% of those who read it.
What you did in your post was entirely honest; you seem to be a Labour apologist, and so I argued against your analysis as fairly as I could. But you have now claimed that you were not indulging in spin to try and break the LibDem bounce, when you clearly were. At which point, you have, unfortunately, lost my interest as a disputant. You have, I should mention, retained my respect for the original analysis of how booby-trapped the path is for the Liberals over the next few weeks.
Thank you for your time.,
You are a harsh critic of my writing style indeed.
Anyway, I acknowledge that I have lost your interest as a disputant so probably won’t be hearing back from you, but for my own sake at least I’ll reply, as you’ve accused me of motives I deny having.
Sentence one: I refer to my own sense of bemusement, and in stating that I’m an atypical viewer, I acknowledge that this sense of bemusement might not have been appropriate, and that I am struggling to come to terms with it through this OP. It might, I accept have been better to say: ‘I’m as bemused as many from the politically tribal community’ or some such, rather than ‘anybody’. What the first sentence does NOT do though, is to judge the wider reaction to be ‘wrong’, and as such it is a perfectly reasonable feed into the argument that the reaction is understandable, and justified.
Sentence 2: as above, I said I personally saw nothing special, but that is because, as I acknowldge, I am atypical, party tribal viewer.
Para 2: Yes, I do think there are simliarities in the suddenness of the surge in anti-establishment public opinion. What I am saying though is that that upsurge in 1997 might possibly have had longer lasting benefit, and produced more than dead flowers, had there been subsequent political organisation around the demands for change that were being expressed, though of course these demands were less exlicit about the need for change in the way politics is conducted.
What para 2 is NOT is a dissing of the current expression of alienation from the current political class, which – I will repeat again – I think is understandable and justified.
Overall, the fact that an editor of my unedited article (it’s a blog) might have suggested I headline my main thesis at the start of the article, and that my opening salvo might possibly mislead people as to the overall direction, (especially given the fact that I am a Labour party member) seems a strange rationale for your original unfounded onslaught.
I am, however, grateful for you time in turn, John.