Permission to speak

Much as I am loathe to admit to reading Guido Fawkes’ blog (feeling somewhat polluted as I do to read just how many people in the Tory blog world are obsessed with Gordon Brown’s supposed homosexuality, including those who cite Robert Mugabe to back their arguments. It’s also very clever of course of some of his readership to call him Braun instead. I think my sides may split), I was interested to read this document, also linked here, apparently from a BBC analysis of the so-called ‘Cameron project’. It sets out several timelines for the alleged transformation of the Tories away from being the ‘nasty party’, and into the party coming up with the ideas for government.

The main structure of such a strategy, as you’d probably expect, is based on spending a couple of years (now ended) securing the party ‘permission to speak’, i.e. to convince people they aren’t really Tories, and are in no way to blame for 15% inflation and record unemployment. This includes pushing environmental issues and rhetoric on families, before moving back to core issues such as immigration and tax cuts. The period in the middle focussing on the character of Gordon Brown seems to me to be the only one the Tories are currently pursuing with any fervour, suggesting that they are not that confident in getting to the phase of having to look like a party of government and come up with big ideas.

The only one they even heralded as a big idea seems to have come and gone with their return to tax obsession in George Osborne’s conference speech. But we in the Labour party seem to have slightly lost sight of the fact that since this they have done very little that is positive or practical. We however are today announcing a policy that is one of the most progressive things a government can do at the moment. By screening for the conditions that shorten lives across all groups in society, and allowing people to take more control over them, not only do we increase people’s standard of living and length of life, but if, as seems likely, health and lifestyle may become a primary force of social exclusion rather than a secondary one, this is a key way of tackling that.

So in a sense, we want the Tory party to have permission to speak. We want the political situation to be such that we have more of a fight than in 2005. Because ultimately, the Labour party is the force for change that people across Britain still need. And if world politics is becoming less afraid of progressive change, as seems to be happening in the US, we need a government that reflects that. We have one, and a fair fight allows us to make that point and lead better by having an opposition that represents the other side. The fact that they have misrepresented their priorities to get to a point of having that permission to speak only makes it clearer that our job is to make the case for change, because they are not going to.

The structure of public life and the media in Britain is such that we as a party of government get led away from making a political case for what we do, and into more technocratic arguments. We can’t do this when the Tory party is able to get more of a platform to make its case. Unfortunately the way public life if divided up means that making a political case makes change a Westminster story. Today’s NHS announcement is a case in point. While I’m sure that by the 6 o’clock news the BBC analysis will be focussed on what the announcements mean, albeit of course including arguments about funding and allocation, at the moment on News 24, bulletins featuring the story are going to analysis from James Landale, the Chief Westminster correspondent, to discuss what this means for the sparring between the parties. But that is not the only thing we mean by having a political discussion. Parliament is not the be all and end all of politics. We can have a discussion in hospitals and streets across the country, that doesn’t make it less political.

So we are winning by far the battle of ideas. But we need to be stronger in making the political case in a more relevant way. But we can’t fall into the trap that politics and Westminster are synonymous, and the Labour party could help itself by forcing public life in general away from this assumption. The way to lose would be to accept that Westminster politics is the only arena for the political argument, and now that the Tories do have a voice, we can’t let that happen.