What’s going to stop Labour from winning the next election is that, six years in, they still don’t know who and what they’re fighting. And since the next election could be a lot sooner than 2015, this is the gift that keeps on giving for the right. Before Ed Miliband can convince the public about himself, he needs to be convincing about David Cameron – and that’s never going to happen for as long as the left keep kidding only themselves that the Tory leader is a closet Thatcherite.
It’s hard to see on the face of it what the evidence is for this piece of wishful groupthink. Even with a crypto-Keynesian like Ed Balls as shadow chancellor rather than the more Blairite figure of Alan Johnson, it’s the scale of the economic consensus that ought to stagger us and not the, in truth, marginal cross-party divisions, which are hyped up for despatch box effect.
But then what else is there? Whatever the Guardian wistfully hopes about right-wing economics leading to heroin-dealing nurses, selling mush like the “big society” as a threat to voters is surely a fantasy too far. If even Tory MPs who approvingly spout “big society” platitudes can’t put any details on the warm feelings, it’s improbable that Tom Baldwin’s going to.
At every turn the government is exactly what Cameron hoped it would be – liberal. It’s liberal in its social mores, it’s at least as windily green as Labour, and it’s pro-European. Many on the Tory right would say it’s unarguably been so ever since Cameron broke his “cast-iron guarantee” that there would be a referendum on Lisbon. Yet like it or not, topped up by 50 Lib Dem MPs, the coalition also inescapably seems to people uninterested in politics to be that bit more liberal than a Tory-only government would have looked and sounded. Insisting that the government is not what the public plainly thinks it is, is a strategy Labour can try, but why’s it going to work?
You can’t even hope for a Thatcherite tone from this regime. There hasn’t yet been a fight that Cameron hasn’t run away from: from an abject refusal to milk-snatch to being pistol-whipped by Mumsnet, this Prime Minister will limbo under any tabloid headline held in front of him. So all Labour is doing now is repeating Steve Hilton’s Demon Eyes mistake. Telling voters what they know to be untrue – “this man is a ravenous right-wing ideologue” – makes Labour seem incredible, and not in the good way.
Instead of crying wolf and inevitably being caught out for doing so, why not take a leaf out of the Clinton playbook? If Labour wants to exacerbate Cameron’s undoubted party management problems, why not triangulate? Why not explicitly offer him support for his most obviously progressive and liberal measures? That’s the way to push the Tory right over the edge. And as things stand, it’s only they who are going to unseat Cameron any time soon.
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