David Skelton once produced a very interesting document called ‘Renewal’ which had as its aim explaining various ways in which the Conservative Party could extend its appeal to voters nationally. Instead, it has become a rather convenient checklist for the Left to annotate how it has come to be that the Conservative Party under David Cameron has deteriorated so precipitously.
For Ed Miliband, can it be a simple choice between the State and the markets? In a way, of course ‘yes’. You can answer this question by saying you can’t be ‘half-libertarian’ or ‘half-socialist’. The problem here is that a legacy of the Thatcherite era has been for Labour to triangulate itself both into and out of government. The fervour for a ‘third way’ has meant that even that a “progressive” brand of politics from the left has become problematic. Even the incorrigible David Miliband was getting nostalgic about progressive politics this morning in the context of energy prices.
‘Responsible capitalism’, whilst a coherent concept in economic theory and practice, does have a political semblance of trying desperately to make capitalism work. The fundamental desire of responsible capitalism is to make capitalism make for both the company and for society, given an ‘assumption’ that a company’s directors must deliver a positive dividend for its shareholders to remain in business. That it has, however, been justified more in terms of delivering a competitive advantage for businesses more than being a worthy ethos in itself should raise eyebrows on its own. Its analogy for NHS hospitals is that safe hospitals delivers some sort of competitive advantage, meaning a patient should prefer to go to a safer hospital, rather than being a necessary and proportionate ideological drive in itself.
One might not be able to ‘hate markets’ in the same way that it is possible to ‘hate people’, but the ideological drive against markets often fails to draw the distinction between a contempt for the consequences of some markets, and a contempt for the markets themselves. On that point, markets can be compared to religions. It might be easier to draw up a list against fanatics of certain religions than the religions themselves. Markets which come anywhere close to perfect competition, rare as they are, can deliver good customer value on the basis of the good relationship between supply and demand. The voters Ed Miliband perhaps hopes target to get him into Downing Street are possibly not that much interested in the difference between perfect competition, an oligopoly or a monopoly. However, they might share ‘the state of shock’ when they open their exorbitant energy bill.
I suppose Ed Miliband is hoping people will wish to blame the market and to blame politicians. I don’t suppose Ed Miliband realistically wishes people to embrace socialism on the basis of the rejection of the market. If he were to achieve this, he would be achieving something which had not been achieved with the failure of the securitised American mortgage products when the US market ‘overheated’ around 2008. However, the problem with this strategy is that people might begin to blame the politicians who actually were in charge at the time. Whatever the deconstruction of the energy bill per se, for example in the contribution of ‘green taxes’ which the Liberal Democrats may or may not support for their short-term political dividend, the fundamental failure was the State either creating or failing to stop a faulty market of six players instead of fourteen. Ed Miliband is able to do this, because people see the size of their energy bills. David Cameron is hoping to do this with water bills next week. And so it goes on. As Tony Benn says, most politicians aren’t in the business because they fundamentally wish to change things. They are in the business they want to appear to be managing things ‘a bit better’.
There will be some Labour voters who would prefer Ed Miliband to adopt this approach, to get his team into Downing Street rather than to produce a manifesto of unworkable policies. The ‘cost of living’ gulf, compared to real income, has undoubtedly been a success for Ed Miliband to shift the narrative from a rather dry discussion of the deficit and Labour spending too much to the real day-to-day lives of people. And it is helpfully a policy which appears to bridge the Left and Right. Another such issue is ‘the living wage’, which many expect Labour to adopt as a flagship policy in their 2015 manifesto. Miliband’s drive to incentivising private companies into providing a living wage for the wonks will be predistribution. For others, it will be attempting to solve a problem to do with the unfairness of a policy at the source. Miliband will successfully be able to produce the rather Aunt Sally argument that such an approach from multinationals is far better than those multinationals fleecing the worker on less than the minimum wage, and for the State having to make up the difference somehow. The trick for Ed Miliband must be to frame the argument on his terms, like he’s framed the argument on the economy on his terms. Given that the mayor of London and the Evening Standard are about to ‘big up’ the policy from their vantage points on the right, and that Matthew d’Ancona says, for example, that Chuka Umunna is one of the most impressive young politicians he has ever met, means that David Cameron cannot afford to sit on his laurels for too long over this one.
When people point to the fact that the Conservatives appear to be more ‘trusted on the economy’, they tend to ignore almost unanimously that Labour is trusted more than the Conservatives on the basis of utility bills and workers’ rights. That Nick Clegg and his colleagues in the Liberal Democrat Party have turned their party into an irrelevant wooly-hat and sandals -wearing brigade is no minor feat. Crucially, there is absolutely no doubt that the narrative has changed. This means that David Cameron has now next to chance in leading his Conservative Party to a first election victory for years. No doubt there will be numerous column inches written on where it all went wrong for the Conservatives in times to come, but there will be some who say victory is still within his grasp. Even with the boundary changes. Even in producing a stagnant economy for three years. Even in producing the worst winter A&E crisis for years. Even in causing a climate for rent-seeking fiascos in the outsourced provision for services. Even for closing down legal aid in England and Wales. David Cameron does, nonetheless, need a miracle.
The critical thing now is for Ed Miliband to win the election. It is clear David Cameron has already lost it. People, I suspect, won’t be that much interested in an Oxbridge tutorial-style explanation of the failure of markets coming from the Left. The usual things will come to dominate the campaign: Labour defending its record of ‘spending too much’ and ‘letting too many immigrants in’. It’s not so much that the Conservative record is stuck, it’s more of a problem that it’s well-and-truly broken. Ed Miliband has produced his cake, in the manner of an overscrutinised contestant for the ‘Great British Bake-Off’. And the bad news keeps on coming. The excessive profits from hedge funds, allegedly, on the Royal Mail privatisations. The dodgy conflicts-of-interest allegedly in the turbo-boosted market of the NHS. Certainly David Cameron and crew have to worry when criticisms of a giant rat produced by a Union fail to produce much other than a reaction from Labour that any intimidating behaviour from the Unions is to be deplored. The giant rat nonetheless has given a lot of air-time to how the company achieved quite a good deal, but the works of Grangemouth. And you have to worry, if you’re on the Right, when there’s a huge cheer for Paris Lees even slightly mooting the idea of state ownership of energy, water, and – you guessed it – the National Health Service.
The 2015 general election is there to lose. Anything or anyone will be able to throw Ed Miliband off course, such as a rapidly improving economy (this happened for Ted Heath in the early 1970s). If the economy is not rebalanced, however, as many suspect, with too few private companies running badly critical functions which had been the preserve of the State, the Conservative Party will be in trouble. On that occasion, the well-worn anecdotes of ‘do you want a State-run delivery van service like the 1970s?’ or ‘do you remember when you had to wait six months for British Telecom to fix your phone line?’ will become even more mind-numbingly boring than they are now.
The most spectacular phenomenon to happen was not Ed Miliband suddenly making an intellectual debate between the State and markets sexy. It was the failure of the Conservative Party to observe the most cardinal of market principles, ironically. That is – if you’re an antiquated ‘incumbent’ – you lose all flexibility and fail to adapt. It is this failure to adapt that many feel will cost the Conservative Party dear in 2015.
Many posts like this have originally appeared on the blog of the ‘Socialist Health Association’. For a biography of the author (Shibley), please go here.
Shibley’s CV is here.
