The royal baby should give Labour a bounce, not the Conservatives

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/may/03/royal-baby-labour-conservative-princess

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People always expect a bounce for the Tories when a royal baby arrives. Well, I say “always”. Of course, a royal baby has never arrived in the middle of an election campaign. In an unprecedented constitutional scenario, the territory of “always” belongs to the person who claims it.

The logic of royal progeny leading to a Conservative government runs two ways. The first is that any feelgood sensation at all gives a boost to the incumbent administration. And there is some truth in this – though if it were that simple, you could just festoon your campaign literature with pictures of cats. Secondly, it is assumed that when royalty reproduce themselves, we remember what we love about authority; we remember that our aristocracy goes back a long way, and hasn’t been all bad; we tap into some ancient fealty that overcomes more recent, pretender-longings for egalitarianism. And then we vote Tory. This sounds reasonable, but mistakes both what a baby is and what authoritarianism looks like.

Related: Royal baby: Duchess of Cambridge gives birth to baby girl

I recently had the privilege – which you, thanks to the magic of the internet, could easily have too – of looking at Steve Bell election cartoons through the ages. The striking thing is how unchanged the Conservative line has been over the decades: if you vote Labour, they will destroy the economy, and you along with it. Whatever Labour suggests – even if it’s something pretty niche, like a ban on foxhunting – the wealth creators will leave and jobs will be lost. The Conservative delivery system can change radically – from Margaret Thatcher’s Technicolor fire and brimstone to John Major’s grey-out, with some patrician Michael Heseltine flourish on the side – but the message is fundamentally unchanged.Vote for us to avoid chaos and scarcity. Life is tough and mean, but a vigorous and self-sufficient person can get through it, so long as they concentrate on themselves (and their families). The spectre of hardship operates as a gating system, shutting out pro-social impulses such as generosity, compassion, empathy – all those traits that might make a Tory vote less likely. This, incidentally, makes the current economic situation perfect for the Conservatives: specifically, the disconnect between what they say is happening to household incomes and what is actually happening. Having been in power for five years, they have to claim that incomes have risen.

However, if incomes really had risen, people would be feeling more confident and secure, and would be less likely to respond to arguments predicated on risk. In real life, living standards data from 2013-14, which the government sought to suppress until after the election but which Professor David Gordon accessed through Eurostat shows that “the majority of the UK population has suffered from a fall in living standards during the current government’s term of office”. The starkest figure is that almost half the UK population (49%) say they couldn’t afford an unexpected expense. But while this would be bad news for the government if it were widely known and discussed, as a fact in itself it helps them: with half the country in a perpetual state of fear of a sudden bill, their message – “the other side will cost you money” – falls on fertile ground.

Labour, meanwhile, does best when it stimulates the opposite: hope, ambition, possibility, progress, solidarity, generosity and kindness. It’s not always successful, of course, which is why it often doesn’t win. In the Foot/Kinnock era, its problem was that it also conjured scarcity as a negotiating tool – exiguity created by the rich. Even though it made rational sense by those terms to vote Labour, the frame of the argument simply reminded people how hard life was, and sent them straight back to Thatcher. Paradoxically, it was Tony Blair – a person not so much of the left as merely carrying the scent of the left, as if he had been stored in a drawer with a leftwing cardigan freshener – who nevertheless was best at articulating the only principles by which Labour can triumph.

Enter the princess: if we respond at all to the sight of a baby (and plenty of perfectly sound people don’t), babies do not remind us that life is hard, but that it is beautiful. They remind us that all the money in the world couldn’t replace, for the most mercenary tyrant, the ever-changing smile of his or her daughter (or son). Even worse, from a Conservative point of view, the sight of a baby – particularly (for some reason) one in a hat – reminds us that to have someone depend on you, far from being a problem for society to stamp out, is actually precious and awe-inspiring.

The medical sociologists Paul Birrell and Marian Peacock recently wrote about the shame of poverty, and talked about the “no legitimate dependency” discourse – the necessity, for the politics of self-interest, of eradicating any sense that our dependence on another is a good thing. It’s quite hard to maintain the fiction that you’re the only person that matters, and all your best energies should go towards serving you and yours, while simultaneously responding on an emotional level to a stranger’s baby.

And one final thing: the universalism of motherhood; the fact that, for all that the Duchess of Cambridge may own and embody, she is right now probably crying because her toddler is upset and she doesn’t know what to do. Empathy is never so much stronger than suspicion as at this stage in the human life cycle. All told, this baby should give Labour a bounce, rather than the Conservatives.