Far More Right Than Wrong

Norman Tebbit writes:

There are moments when even my heart goes out to Ed Miliband as he tries to dig the Labour Party out of the wreckage of the Blair/Brown era and back on the road to Government. It was such a moment when I read over the weekend that Mr Jeremyn Corbyn had declared himself in favour of elections for the Shadow Cabinet and that at least half of its members should be women.

Mr Corbyn cannot grasp that the Shadow Cabinet needs Labour’s best brains and that they need to be loyal to their leader. Whether they are male or female (or any other category) is not relevant. Such nonsense merely distracts Mr Miliband from his formidable task. First he must persuade his party that they have become the “unelectable party” and that this was not just the result of one bad campaign in 2010, but a long-term trend of falling support.

Back in 1945 Labour polled 12 million votes. They peaked at 13.9 million in 1951 and fell away to 8.4 million in 1983. There was a recovery to 13.5 million in 1997 at Blair’s first election win, but since then a remorseless slide to 10.7 million, 9.5, and then last year only 8.6 million.

Of course this is a mirror image of Mr Cameron’s problem and the questions that Miliband must ask himself are not greatly different to those which ought to be bothering the Tories. Why, as the electorate has grown by a third since 1945, are we getting fewer people to vote for us?

It is a miracle that Labour has not lost more. The mid 20th century socialist certainties, so clear to Ed Miliband’s father, have melted away. No one now believes in nationalisation. The collectivist view of society with great estates of council house and private ownership in decline has gone. The man in Whitehall is no longer believed to know best. The trades unions are in long-term decline. The bourgeoisie has not been abolished, it has expanded as the working class has moved upwards.

Labour’s one-time supporters, like the Conservative Party’s, have new and different concerns. Concerns to which Labour (like the Conservatives) have been indifferent.

A combination of the increasing power and influence of the EU and the unprecedented levels of immigration have left the white working class traditional Labour voters angry and disenfranchised. To make matters worse for Mr Miliband, those essentially socially conservative electors are bewildered by a welfare system which leaves the feckless, scrounging, workless family next door as well, or better off, than they are. It is their kids who are condemned to sink schools ruled not by teachers (a profession once commanding respect), but by hooligan children and their antisocial parents.

Low-level crime and vandalism and urban street drunkenness are bad enough in the middle class areas, but in the parts where Labour’s core voters live, they are appalling. The police are no longer respected and Mirror readers share the disgust and anger of the readers of The Daily Mail at the way in which the justice system favours the criminal rather than the victim.

In the face of all this where does Ed Miliband take his party? That is quite difficult for him, for he must repudiate the Left-wing intelligentsia into which he was born. He has to rediscover the zeal of the Welsh Valley Christian non-conformist respect for education… the real stuff that is. And he has to look to the self-help ethos of the Rochdale Pioneers. Then he must remember that patriotism and love of one’s country are as strong amongst the poor as the rich, and that political correctness is even less popular in the public bar than in the champagne bar.

Of course he must look to sensible policies on the economy, but he has little leeway there and would be wise not to pretend that he has. Above all, he has a huge advantage in that the Coalition is essentially divided and it, rather than Mr Miliband, has to force the country to submit to unwelcome measures. He has the chance to redefine Labour as a national, patriotic, un-doctrinaire party, of law and order and public decency, intent on widening opportunity and fairness rather than imposing equality.

The Tories have left their clothes on the beach. There is a great opportunity to leave Mr Cameron and Mr Clegg covering their blushes on that muddy centre ground whilst Mr Miliband could identify and stand on the common ground which unites most voters.

If Blue Labour and the tendency of which it is the vanguard really did take hold between now and 2015, which the hysterical reaction of the Blairite rump suggests is already happening, then we might very well have another 1974 moment. In that year, Enoch Powell told his supporters to vote Labour, the swing to which in his own West Midlands was decisive.

Lord Tebbit told people to vote UKIP at the last European Election, so if Cameron and CCHQ tried to come after him for telling those same people to vote Labour, then he could, and doubtless would, turn round and ask, "Why now, but not then?"