Core Vote Strategy

According to Dan Hodges the 'new politics' espoused by Ed Miliband for the past four years is dead and the labour Party is now fighting to win the general election from the  centre ground.

Whether voters buy this latest repackaging remains to be seen, but the cat is rather let out of the bag in Neal Lawson's open letter to Tony Blair in which he argues that the 'wrong people' were voting for the Labour Party between 1997 and 2007. 

Now whatever you think of the wisdom of such a statement, the intent is perfectly clear - to lower and narrow the scope of Labour's political ambitions by focusing on its core or traditional vote.  

Ed Miliband's New Politics is dead. Don't bother sending flowers

It's too late for Labour to win the battle for the centre ground

By Dan Hodges - The Telegraph

Today, the New Politics died. The death notice appeared in The Guardian, alongside an eloquent obituary from Ed Balls. 

“There are moments in politics when, amid the fog of accusation and rebuttal, things suddenly become crystal clear,” the shadow chancellor wrote, grandly. One of these was last month’s Autumn Statement. It was, he said, “The day the chancellor, George Osborne, ceded the political centre ground to Labour.”

What followed was a less grand recitation of Labour’s familiar attack lines. Conservative proposals to cut public spending to 35 per cent of GDP presented the country with a clear choice, he argued. “Do we adopt a Labour plan to change our economy, so that it works for working people again and to get the deficit down in a tough and balanced way?

Or do we carry on with the same failed Tory policies and slash public services to a level of national income last seen in the 1930s?”.

Whether the country sees things in such laughably simplistic terms is questionable. But Balls may at least have planted a seed of doubt in the minds of an electorate that had come to see George Osborne as the least-worst manager of the economy.

Yet that was not what gave his article its significance. That came from Balls’s formal acknowledgement that the next election will be won from the centre.

For the past four years. Labour has been trying to win from the Left. The New Politics. The Thirty Five Per Cent strategy. Zen Politics. Whatever you wanted to call it, the grand plan – and the philosophy underpinning it – were clear. To win, Labour had to reject the consensus, “Big Tent” politics of Blairism.

Yesterday, in a refreshingly honest open letter to Tony Blair, Neal Lawson – a member of Ed Miliband’s early kitchen cabinet – set out the thinking behind the strategy. “In hindsight, the wrong people were voting Labour. The tent was too big and you spent the next 10 years trying to keep the wrong people in it: the very rich, for example. What meaningful project includes everyone?”

Miliband’s aides distanced themselves from Lawson’s comments. And it’s true that he’s no longer part of their circle. But he was when it mattered – back when Labour’s leader was first mapping out his direction of political travel. And the direction Miliband chose was to run as far from the political centre as his legs would carry him.

We’ve lived through an especially volatile political cycle. But I suspect the defining moment of this parliament will prove to be Miliband’s speech to the 2011 Labour conference. That was the day he stood up and announced, to cheers he happily milked, that “I am not Tony Blair”.

It was not just a rejection of the man, but of his methods. “You’ve got to be willing to break the consensus, not succumb to it,” Miliband said. “Nobody ever changed things on the basis of consensus,” he repeated.

In that instant Labour formally abandoned the political centre and swung to the Left. Deficit denial. Big state interventionism. Raw anti-capitalism. Public service protectionism. Not “One Nation”, but a nation divided between “producers and predators”.

Until today – when suddenly, consensus politics is back. The choice “is not about whether to get the deficit down”, Balls soothed his readers: “All the main parties are committed to balancing the books in the next parliament.”

Over the coming weeks, Miliband and his supporters will contort themselves into knots as they try to explain how this was the strategy all along. Ed always was a centrist, he was just mischaracterised by his Establishment enemies. It’s David Cameron who is the dangerous radical.

And, of course, it will be rubbish – and will quickly be exposed as rubbish. It was Labour, we were told, who were going to build electoral success on a foundation of ideological purity. Although it wasn’t called ideology, it was called “Letting Ed be Ed”. It was Miliband who was going to tear up the political rules, and redraw the conventional political boundaries. “Don’t believe this stuff about governments losing elections rather than oppositions winning them,” he said in 2011. “It sounds to me like a consolation prize for opposition leaders that have lost.” Well, quite. And today Labour is reduced to praying that George Osborne’s zeal for austerity will hand them the centre-ground of politics by default.

Which would be fine. Those people predicting that Ed Miliband will become the “accidental Prime Minister” are being unnecessarily churlish – and delusional. If he wins, he wins. No one reaches the highest political office in the land by accident.

But very few people seize the political centre ground by accident either. And Miliband has left his pitch to middle-England much too late. As, deep down, he and his party now recognise. When Tony Blair foresaw, earlier in the week, an election “in which a traditional Left-wing party competes with a traditional Right-wing party, with the traditional result”, his comments provoked a cry of pain from the Left. Proof, if it was needed, that the truth still hurts.

This was supposed to be the election Labour won or lost “the right way”. And Labour will get its wish. There is no danger of Ed Miliband making Tony Blair’s mistake, and attracting the wrong sort of voter.

The New Politics was supposed to bury New Labour. In the end, the reverse has happened. Today, the New Politics died. There is no need to send flowers.