Blog 2023 Malcolm Blair-Robinson

Core Voters

The Labour Party is now busy rallying behind its new leader and will spend a good deal of thought and energy working out the best way forward, not just to challenging opposition, but to power at the earliest opportunity. It is too soon to tell whether that could be months, years or decades away.

What is critical, as the blog has said more than once, is for Labour to re-connect to its core voters, the working people and the under priveleged. They are Labour’s raison d’etre and without them it cannot win. The problem is that they alone are not enough. The balance can be made up from the centre or it can be made up from those who see an opportunity for radical change. Not reform, change. It is important to realise that the voters who gave Attlee his landslide in 1945 were the same cast of voter, in many cases the same people, who put Thatcher into power in 1979 and Blair into power in 1997.

Attlee and Thatcher delivered in full. Blair did not. He brought peace in Northern Ireland and he introduced devolution and City mayors. The rest was general housekeeping overshadowed by a misguided foreign policy leading to disastrous wars.

Blair was re-elected in 2001 and 2005 not because people thought he was the best choice. He was the only choice. The Tories had crashed  into unelectability, for they had disconnected from their core vote on a binge of anti- European-ism and right wing excess. Cameron went out to the Shires and the suburbs and brought their shrunken numbers back to the fold, but needed those who had wandered over to the Lib Dems, to form a government. Those Lib Dems who had joined the party because  New Labour had moved too far to the centre were uncomfortable with the coalition and remain so. We now have a government of Liberal Conservatives occupying the centre ground. It is split on constitutional reform but united on the need to cut the deficit and to shrink the state.

New Labour overdid the building of the nanny state, controlling every nook and cranny of peoples lives. Not only was it very expensive but it got in everybody’s way. It employed a lot of people but too many in pointless jobs and too few where it really mattered. If the coalition sorts this out it will gain popularity. Labour needs to see the mess it got into and move on. Its opportunity lies in coming forward with a new economic model which does not suck resources from the poorest in society to pass them to the richest. Every time people borrow to make ends meet they grow poorer while the banks grow richer. This is why bankers are hated. If Ed comes up with a plan to deal with that he will get his landslide and he will get it within the next decade.  He may even get it in 2015.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 27th, 2010 at 7:25 pm and is filed under Malcolm Blair Robinson. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.