Politics

In a footnote to Representative Government, John Stuart Mill once described the Conservatives as “the stupidest party.” Years later, during his brief spell as MP for Westminster, Mill clarified on the floor of the House of Commons that “I did not mean that Conservatives are generally stupid; I meant that stupid persons are generally Conservative.” He went on to say that the stupidity of the Conservatives was not something the party needed to apologise for. On the contrary, it was a principal source of its success. It may be that stupidity is no longer the electoral asset it was. But if it is, the Labour party is in the best place to benefit.

In The Future of Socialism, written in 1956, Tony Crosland identified 12 strains that went into making the Labour movement: Fabian, syndicalist, municipal, the planning ethic and so on. Yet Tony Blair has managed to add a thirteenth—unlucky for him. The mixture of fiscal conservatism and classical liberal openness to the world that Blair defines in the postscript to his recent memoir A Journey owes nothing to the Labour tradition. The path he set out is one that, broadly speaking, Ed Miliband will define his leadership against.

Miliband has told the chairs of his policy review committees that they should start their deliberations with “a blank sheet of paper.” The paradox of this philosophy is that, while Miliband does not actually start with a blank sheet of paper, he might well end up with one. Miliband comes from the stable in the Labour party that produced the Wilson cabinet of north London academics. This is Labour’s variant of noblesse oblige. It is a benign paternalism, a belief that experts are best placed to tinker and direct the way towards the good society. It is a view that combines social liberalism with a belief in the capacity and the efficacy of the state to make granular changes to the nation, in pursuit of the ideal of equality.

Whatever appeal this retains in theory, Gordon Brown dismantled it in practice. Brown at 10, the account of his tenure as prime minister by Anthony Seldon and Guy Lodge, is a grim saga of a man who, to the surprise of many who ought to have known better, is evidently out of his depth. But, oddly, Brown’s new book, Beyond the Crash, is the more revealing because it explores, inadvertently and between the lines, the great philosophical space that he has left in his wake.

It is a measure of the barren land of British social democracy that no serious competitor to Crosland has emerged since 1956. In office, Brown turned out to be a child of Crosland. Brown’s claim to have ended boom and bust echoes Crosland’s belief that, in his time, capitalism had been reformed out of all recognition. When the bust arrived there had been too much public spending and too little reform of the public sector. Labour government looked, in 2010, just how it had looked in 1967 and 1978: only a risk worth taking at the top of the market.

In the truncated debate about why Labour lost the election there is, somewhere buried, an appreciation that this was a profound defeat. Labour has dipped below 30 per cent of the electorate in modern times only when it has run out of ideas. After Michael Foot’s disastrous performance in 1983, Labour renewed organisationally through Neil Kinnock and then intellectually through new Labour. When the senior personnel in the party are refusing even to talk about the economic legacy they left the nation, it is hard to see the early signs of recovery.

It is worrying that Ed Miliband has just won the leadership expressly on the promise there is life yet in Labour being comfortable with itself. His only policy hints so far all involve taxes going up. The sheer emptiness of the social democracy that he stands for is the first reason he will end up with a blank sheet of paper. The second reason is that he half knows it. Now, half knowing it is not the same as knowing it. Half knowing it leads to paralysis.

The serious risk for Miliband is that he suddenly takes fright when he realises that his preferred political move to the left is just not going to work for him with the electorate. At that point, rather like Gordon Brown, he will start to creep, tortuously, back to the centre. But too late, too unconvincing. At this point Miliband will be written off for good as Mr Blank Sheet of Paper. It won’t quite be true. He does know what he thinks, but his tragedy is that he knows the world will not let him be as left wing as he wants to be. As a clever man denied the bliss of ignorance, Miliband will spend his time as leader splitting the difference. Philosophy and politics will be in tension throughout. Or, rather, the philosophy of Labour and the views of the electorate are in tension. There is only one winner.