I can’t pretend I am happy about the political environment this morning. No one in the centre or left of the political spectrum can be.
It will take time to analyse the results, but let me offer you my thoughts on what has happened.
I believe that people essentially vote for one of two reasons: hope or fear.
I make the bold, but entirely justifiable claim that for the majority in any population the left offers hope. They should rightly be fearful of the right. And of course, the reverse applies.
At least, that would be true if economics were the main reason for people’s fear, and their motivation for hope.
But right now that is almost certainly not true. The vast majority of people in the UK enjoy material well-being. Not as much as they would like, I know. But sufficient (despite the perception that the advertising industry creates) for many to enjoy a standard of living that was beyond imagination a generation or so ago. That’s the lasting success of the post war years.
But it also means that people can have other aspirations. And fears.
They fear for their jobs. And despite government having proven its ability to salvage the mess within the economy that largely unregulated capital can create, people have believed the narrative on this issue of the right.
And they fear for their communities.
They fear for their jobs.
They fear for their pensions.
They fear for the future for their children.
Many of those fears are rational: there are enormous challenges that we face. But what is very clear is the left has not presented a narrative that addresses these fears. This is the real problem, and the fact that the Labour Party leadership has simply failed to represent anything that could be remotely described as ‘left’.
UKIP, the Tories and even the BNP have set up straw men; simple straw men, but ones that are designed to exploit these fears. They do not address them. But they do exploit them. That is, of course, the politics of fear. These parties are good at that form of politics.
And the left - especially in the form of Labour, has not offered them hope as an alternative. Indeed, that hope has been taken away. The expenses scandal reveals that the left has not lived up to the promise that hope requires that it deliver. That hope requires integrity. All hope is built on that basis. And at present that has been lost.
I don’t see how Gordon Brown can recreate that hope. He has helped destroy it.
I do not see how he can create that narrative: the story he has spun has for so long been short of any narrative of any sort. Expedient cooperation in the pursuit of power is not a narrative.
In its own way the tax justice campaign has been about creating a narrative: a cause for hope for many who have currently lost out so badly in this world. We can hold our head up. I know others who can.
But now we need to translate this into political narrative.
It’s a big job.
It can and must be done.
But politicians, Labour politicians in particular, have to play their part by sweeping the decks clean.
They have to: we have to recreate hope in a country that looks in the grip of fear right now.
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Surely hope must begin by reform of our evil soak-the-honest-poor tax and benefits system? At present, anyone attempting to climb out of the welfare dependency pond is kicked back in. That is what is bound to happen when tax is progressive and benefits are targeted.
Henry
Do you really believe we have a progressive tax system?
That’s not what the evidence shows
But I agree with you: the interaction of welfare and tax is a massive problem
And I can’ see how LVT will solve it
Richard
It’s not about hope and fear; it’s about with the grain and against the grain of human nature. The “right” is with the grain and the “left” against it or counter-intuitive. Both ideologies use fear. The right that your money will be taken and wasted, leaving you insufficient for your own needs. The left that you will find yourself poor or sick and unable to look after yourself and your family.
The only money a government has comes from its people in taxes. Allowing some person or organisation to take one’s money is irrational unless there is belief in the eventual bargain being favourable; ie that what is lost to taxation will come back in other forms in advantageous measure.
This is what is breaking down; the taxpayer is losing faith in the left’s ability to deliver a good bargain. The feeling is that taxes rise continuously while services decline in quality (NHS, schools etc) and fair distribution/accessibility (immigration, the EU and so on).
It was this state of mind that brought Thatcher to power in 1979, ending the soft left consensus that had operated in UK politics since 1950. We’re not quite there yet but that’s the direction we are going in.
We need one nation politics to reassert itself. Tax policies based on outdated class war notions don’t help. Nor does the constantly repeated mantra that it’s all about the poorest least capable stratum of society and nothing else matters.
People believe that taxes should be fair and even those amongst us – 98% of the working population – who will never earn £100,000 or more a year consider taking more of someone’s money than they keep themselves to be somehow not quite right.
Using tax income for social engineering also causes disquiet and a sense that unreasonable people are in control.
Ignoring fears over too rapid change in the cultural make-up of parts of the country will inevitably produce a back lash.
In power, the left can never achieve a sense of balance; it is a political philosophy that has extremism at its heart simply because it believes it alone of all the political parties has a moral justification for whatever it does. This inevitably leads to authoritarianism followed by totalitarianism funded by a tax war on anybody seen as “not one of us”. The actions of left wing governments in South America over the last 100 years or more provide lesson after lesson in the inevitability of this outcome.
Self righteousness is always very expensive.