A fitting tribute to Charles Kennedy would be a revival of popular liberalism
|
Version 0 of 1. Two huge political calls have shaped British politics in recent times. Tony Blair’s decision to go to war with George Bush in Iraq so toxified Blairism that it made it impossible to continue to sell his winning radical centrism to the Labour party. Then Nick Clegg’s decision to form a coalition with the Conservatives so detoxified them – and contaminated the Lib Dems – that it allowed the bridgehead created by the collapse of Blairism to be consolidated into today’s Conservative parliamentary majority. Over the next few years, the degree to which the Conservative party has moved to the right will surprise the country. It is true there will be more apprentices, improved public childcare and strenuous efforts to find the NHS sufficient resources. But the main drive, from damaging social housing to savage welfare cuts, from the undermining of the BBC to redefining our relationship to the European Convention on Human Rights, will be decisively to the hard right. Those two political calls may have created opportunities for David Cameron and George Osborne that they seized, but to hold their party together they have had to accept its dramatic rightward lurch. Charles Kennedy, whose death from alcoholism last week so shocked the country, saw that, and saw the results, more clearly than most. He opposed the Iraq war and the creation of the coalition not only out of principle but because he knew in his bones that the political dynamic of both decisions could only benefit the right. I have this vision of him in the last few weeks of his life sunk in private depression at what had become of the British liberal left. He had lost his own seat; Scottish independence was ever more likely; his own party had been broken. Why had so many good people not heeded him? If only he had never lost the Lib Dem leadership. It is this unpredictable and haphazard interplay of the personal, the march of ideas and the challenge of events that is the backdrop against which politics is played out. The reason why so many political careers end in failure is because so few politicians are capable of negotiating this complex interplay. Blair, Clegg, Brown and even Thatcher couldn’t; neither could Kennedy, if for very different reasons. Curiously, of all of them, he was the better reader of where the centrist majority of British politics lies and how liberal social democracy could best express it. His problem was that Britain offers no political vehicle for it to be done and he was unable to fashion it himself. Kennedy was routinely described in many obituaries as having taken his party to the left of New Labour. But such a description traduces the real political context. A refusal to be co-opted into an illegitimate, self-defeating war or later, in 2010, into a programme of crash public deficit reduction, almost entirely shouldered by expenditure cuts, should not define him as “left”. Today, neither the IMF nor OECD supports the palpably irrational approach of “emergency” spending cuts to the non-problem of British national debt and to the only modest problem of a moderate and easily financed public deficit. Kennedy was profoundly mainstream: to misdescribe him as “left” is to play the right’s deep game. His hallmark was his fairmindedness. He was pro market and pro capitalist like the majority, but not slavishly so, any more than he was slavishly pro public sector. He entertained reform of both. He was not for high taxes but for taxes sufficient to fund quality public services. He cherished institutions such as the NHS and BBC. He was sympathetic to organised labour but keenly aware of its faults. He was pro the British union, but a fervent advocate of reshaping and decentralising the British state, along with creating a fairer voting system. As he said, he did not have a trace of anti-Americanism in his body. Only perhaps in his ardent pro-Europeanism did his views depart from the majority mainstream, but even here I suspect the British are less Eurosceptic than Ukip and the Tory right hope. His were mainstream majority views and in this respect Tony Blair and Charles Kennedy were cut from the same ideological cloth – liberal social democrats. Tony Blair in his pre-1997 pomp captured this mainstream with brilliance: it was in office that the slide towards the right began. Part of his problem was the shallowness of his own convictions and his unwillingness, notwithstanding that he represented the mainstream, to take on the rightwing consensus and its ferocious press allies. Another part was the sheer volume and energy of rightwing views, with their drumbeat that markets are perfect and taxes and welfare barely moral. Kennedy did no more than hold the ground Blair vacated. Had he led the Lib Dems into the 2010 election my hunch is that he would have won up to 20 more seats than Nick Clegg and the only coalition formed would have been with Labour. Even in Nick Clegg’s position, any support he would have offered the Tories would have fallen short of coalition. Kennedy would not have legitimised what he knew was a toxic brand, nor played second fiddle in a government whose pro-austerity, anti-welfare, Euro-sceptic trajectory he so distrusted. Put brutally, his alcoholism disarmed Britain’s liberal left of a key voice at a key time in our national fortunes. He is not alone in failure. Nick Clegg will and must believe that the coalition option was the right thing. His party certainly tempered or vetoed policies that will now be rolled out in full splendour. But in betraying that centrist mainstream he has wrecked the Lib Dems for a generation. It is obvious that the Labour party will only win again around a refashioned Blairism. But Blair is so discredited that his party threatens to disown any leadership candidate who says so. And Ed Miliband has become the Labour politician the Conservatives love: a man with acknowledged principles but a loser. Messrs Cameron and Osborne are on a political high, but both should beware of the example of Lady Thatcher. The British electorate is not as rightwing as the Conservative party and press believe. There was a 15-year period between 1995 and 2010 when with better Labour and Lib Dem politicians – ones with a firmer grip on what Britain thinks, wants and needs – a new liberal social democratic ascendancy could have been established. Today’s Conservative party is lucky they made so many mistakes and lucky it has Cameron and Osborne who adeptly exploited the openings. But the party does not represent mainstream opinion. The tragedy, which Kennedy must have feared, is that we are going to have to live through another generation-long political cycle to find that out. |