11 minute read
Where is the Opposition?
We now know that the new leader of the Conservative Party, and Prime Minister of the UK, is Liz Truss.
With the Conservative Party having been in complete turmoil, Labour ought to be making hay from such upheaval, especially with the manner of Johnson’s resignation. However, their lead in the polls is miniscule. This leaves much of the country asking…
SO WHERE IS THE OPPOSITION?
Alan Wares attempts to unravel the unravelable…
Of course, the Truss campaign may well be largely forgotten by the time she enters No.10. It’s one thing appealing to your grassroots party membership; it’s another issue governing the world’s sixth largest economy.
Liz Truss cannot stray too far from the Conservatives’ 2019 Election Manifesto in terms of what she wishes to get done, and this will likely taint Truss - especially as she has been party to what has gone before. And what ‘went before’ was something never seen in politics in the UK; it transcended party politics, and went way beyond previous Westminster playground petulance.
It is of no concern or consideration that the incumbents are the Conservative Party - that’s largely irrelevant - nor that many members of the party now feel they have no voice, this has been an administration of breath-taking hubris and corruption. From wilful misleading of Parliament, to outright lying to Her Majesty the Queen; from the cost of living crisis to unlawful multi-billion pound contracts being handed out to the most inappropriate companies; from an ambivalence to their own lockdown laws, to a blatant disregard for their own international treaties. And more besides.
And all of this raises an even bigger question, pertinent to the UK population as a whole - where is the Opposition?
WHAT WENT BEFORE
In the 1990s, when then-Prime Minister John Major was struggling to hold together a coherent, functioning government with a faction-split party (mostly down the ubiquitous Tory fault line of ‘Europe’), Labour was able to offer a credible alternative, first with John Smith, the modernising leader who sought to water down the power the trade unions had within the Labour movement.
Smith’s early death brought in Tony Blair, cut from the same cloth, who continued to appeal to the centre ground. Today, given the calamitous and often illegal behaviour of many members the current government, the opposition ought to be miles ahead in the polls. So why are they not?
The YouGov polls for the first week of August 2022 put Labour four points ahead of the Conservatives. Three weeks earlier that gap was 11 points, and that bounce may well be on the back of Boris Johnson eventually announcing his resignation.
However, four points is a pitiful lead considering what has been going on since 2019. Is it the personnel? The policies? The perceptions?
The leadership could - and maybe should - be hammering the government relentlessly. There is the argument, as Napoleon Bonaparte pointed out of never interrupting your enemy while he is making a mistake, meaning Labour is careful in taking its pot-shots.
❛❛ In the mid-1990s, Tony Blair enjoyed the patronage of Rupert Murdoch. To many on the left, that was seen as a betrayal ❜❜
It’s not unreasonable to say that, certainly since the Brexit referendum, UK politics has been far uglier, dirtier, seedier and more polarised than ever before - and that includes the far left’s hapless efforts to unseat a very unpopular Margaret Thatcher in her first term in office. In the mid-1990s, Tony Blair enjoyed the patronage of Rupert Murdoch. Even the Telegraph, while still supporting the Conservatives, could see how tired and ineffective their party was becoming, and acknowledged a certain merit in letting someone else have a go.
To many on the left, that was seen as a betrayal, but since the deregulation of the press in 1981, unelected, often foreign or non-dom newspaper barons have set the political agenda. And the agenda from these barons has rarely been positive for Labour.
Labour will always be in the spotlight of having to fight not just for the political centre ground, but for a centre ground many commentators keep on shifting.
So given that Labour is only four points ahead (at a time in the administration when Tony Blair was constantly 20 points ahead), is Sir Kier Starmer the problem?
Labour, like most parties, is a broad church of political opinion. It largely abandoned its hardened socialist principles in the 1990s when the shifting sands of public opinion saw that working class people alone would not be able to get them back into power. The behaviour of their part-pay masters - the trade unions - during the 1960s through to the late 1980s didn’t help the cause.
Their interference in political matters, rather than concentrating purely on workers’ rights issues, led many to believe that they had overplayed their original remit. The issue with that today is that many believe that’s how the unions are seen now, 40 years later. Successive government bills have seen the power of the trade unions severely curtailed, and they no longer have anything like the political clout of the 1970s, but the perceptions remain.
Labour’s heyday was, of course the end of the 1990s, and into the first decade of this century. Two unprecedented landslide General Election victories sought to herald and new dawn for British politics.
However, not everyone in the Labour movement was pleased. Many felt that they didn’t have their man in place at No.10. Blair moved quite a way to the right, so much so that he couldn’t call his party ‘Labour’ without keeping a straight face. So ‘New Labour’ it was.
Meanwhile, for ‘traditional’ Labour members, it meant the Conservatives were no longer in power - so they played along. When the succession of Blair (clearly the safer pair of hands) to Gordon Brown (a safe pair of hands, but had to suffer the indignity of not being Tony Blair) took place, the wagons started circling. The banking crash of 2008, while not being Labour’s doing, still happened on their watch. So for them, the honeymoon period with the tabloids was up.
This leads us to 2010. Gordon Brown lost the General Election. He could have formed a minority government with Nick Clegg’s Liberal Democrats, but the latter chose the largest party to form a coalition with.
This left Labour at a crossroads; do they continue with the previously-successful New Labour project, or did they look to find a new path? THE ONE WHO GOT AWAY?
And this is where, for many floating voters that all parties rely on, Labour took its decision to - wrongly - head left. The favourite for the leadership was David Miliband, previously the foreign secretary under Gordon Brown. A policy advisor to Tony Blair before he took office, he was seen as representing a continuation of the New Labour project, and a safe pair of hands.
He was nominated by the largest number of MPs, and - without taking up too many column inches explaining Labour’s electoral college system - won the clear vote of MPs, MEPs, and regular Labour Party members.
However, it was the third branch of the college branch that did for him, and he was beaten by - of all people - his younger brother Ed.
Ed was supported by the trade union members and affiliates whose vote makes up the final third of the college system. The support for junior within the trade union movement far outweighed the support David had within the other two branches. After his defeat, David left Westminster in 2013 to take up other projects in the United States, where has remained since. Some in the party want him back, as they believe he could be doing better than the current incumbent in opposition. But nine years out of the loop? Even Harold Wilson pointed out ‘a week is a long time in politics’.
As for Ed Miliband’s time as a leader, he did not gain the traction of an electorate that is still suspicious of trade unionism within politics. He was geeky, a political nerd - unlike the more suave David Cameron. The PM appealed far more to those who take presentation over content.
With hindsight, it’s tempting to consider how the Labour Party would have fared under David Miliband in opposition from 2010 to 2015. Certainly he presented very well and very passionately.
Would David have done better in the 2015 General Election? Very possibly. Would he have kept a more divided part together in that time? That is something that many within the Labour Party look back on, mournfully wondering, ‘what if…?’
OTHERS WHO GOT AWAY
JOHN SMITH
The untimely death of John Smith in 1994 almost certainly denied the UK of a leader many could believe in, especially given John Major’s government’s behaviour at the time. This has been glossed over by the fact that Tony Blair took on much of Smith’s reforms, and managed two landslide victories.
POST MILIBAND
For a party who have spent 12 years out of government, Labour have got through relatively few leaders.
A real jolt to the political universe was felt when long-standing backbencher, and outsider, Jeremy Corbyn, won the 2015 leadership election. The main reason he won, according to political commentators, was because he was the only one who opposed the government’s austerity policies. The fact he was able to make in-roads on by now-Prime Minister Theresa May’s government majority after the 2017 General Election was not something expected inside nor outside of the party.
But even for the cult status - or maybe because of it - he divided the party, and he was never going to be able to command a majority in the House.
SIR KIER
Corbyn’s tenure came to an end after a crushing defeat for Labour in the 2019 General Election. It’s an election which has since become one of the most infamous in history as one where the Government has largely ignored its own manifesto, going back on several promises.
ANDY BURNHAM
Like David Miliband, there are many within the Labour Party who would like to see the return of Andy Burnham. He stood down from his seat in 2017 when he became Mayor of Manchester.
He was a champion of the Hillsborough victims, of tackling homelessness, and he regularly - mostly successfully - challenged government when he felt that too much assistance money during Covid-19 was being spent in London. LIZ KENDALL
Liz Kendall was a challenger in the 2015 Labour leadership election. She was to the right of the party – so much so that many in the party dismissed her as ‘Tory-lite’. She was, however, according to many political commentators, the one the Conservatives feared the most.
In the end, she finished a distant fourth. Again, it would have been interesting to see which direction she’d have taken the party. Her lack of dynamism was among the reasons for her not doing better. The opposition, licking its wounds – and really not expecting the kicking they got – chose former Director of Public Prosecutions, Sir Kier Starmer to lead.
Since that most recent election, Starmer has had to stand up, in his role as Her Majesty’s Leader of the Opposition, and hold a government unbothered and ambivalent to its many shortcomings to account.
Starmer, rightly or wrongly, is being compared to Tony Blair, who consistently held a lead while in opposition, and usually a big one. The picture is different now; politics is dirtier and more unpleasant; and a new epic scale of corruption that appears now to sit front and centre within the political arena is not something everyone knows how to deal with.
So is he making a decent fist of it? The main priority for Sir Kier Starmer at present is that he is not fighting a General Election now, though many wish that to be the case. He will be fighting a General Election at the end of 2024. Until then, it has always been the case that opposition parties like to keep their powder dry during mid-terms, whether they have formulated policies or not.
That, for many, isn’t good enough.
Every government needs an effective opposition. This can either kick the government into doing the right thing, or make the electorate see that the Opposition may well be able to do better. Tackling an administration through the legislature that has an 80-seat majority is extremely difficult.
While a General Election is due to be held in two and bit years’ time, what Starmer’s supporters - and maybe even those who hitherto voted for Johnson but who now want something else - would like to see is an effective Opposition; landing the blows, calling out the untruths (something for which Johnson is not out of the woods from) - all the while supporting the government where appropriate - and being ready at a moment’s notice to fight for office, should the call come.
Is Starmer there yet? Is the Opposition properly there yet? There’s only one way to find out…
