Britain is not a weak country, nor will we ever have a weak government
It is now generally agreed that Theresa May has an enormous helping of that vital political attribute: luck. But we may still be underestimating the scale of her good fortune. There is only so much that Prime Ministers can do on their own. Their destiny is bound to be shaped by great events, great historical forces. In her case, there could be a benign congruence which will enable the PM to stamp a lasting influence on British politics and become the second suburban female demiurge in modern British history.
In part, she would achieve this by playing Joshua to Margaret Thatcher’s Moses. Mrs Thatcher hoped to kill off the Labour party but did not quite succeed. A fellow called Blair brought about a revival. There were moments when he too appeared to have demiurgic qualities. But he turned out to be no more than a life support machine. That has ceased to work. Mrs May has the chance to switch off the machine and send the corpse to the mortuary.
Labour is dying for two reasons. First, working-class labour tribalism is not what it was. In the old days, Tory canvassers all experienced the same frustration. They would knock on the door and find a salt-of-the earth patriot and social conservative, who would agree with everything they said, before finishing up: “Vote? I’m afraid not. We’ve always been Labour here.” Anno Domini has taken care of a lot of those characters. Others have been progressively alienated by the Labour creed as preached in Islington and Hampstead. Especially in the North, many of them were drawn to UKIP. Once lost, the Labour voting-habit may be gone for good. Former adherents are not going to be enticed back by Jeremy Corbyn and Diane Abbott.
The second reason is more fundamental. Labour has a decades-old problem because it is still hopelessly divided over a question which it has been unable to answer since the end of the Attlee government. Is it a socialist party, aiming to transform the existing social and economic order, or is it merely a social democratic one? If the latter, why does it need to exist as a separate party? After all, we are all social democrats now.
In the early ’30s, writing about Joe Chamberlain, Churchill pointed out that all the reforms which he had proposed in the 1880s which were then: “thought so shocking, have been achieved and left far behind us… It is now the axiom of the Tory Party that the well-being of the people, the happiness of the cottage home, is the first duty of the ruler, once the preservation of the State is secured.” Update the language, throw in a reference to Beveridge’s five evils, and we come up with a modern consensus. All Tories believe in health, education, decent housing and the relief of poverty (as opposed to the subsidising of idleness). In providing this, Tory governments are prepared to spend proportions of national income which would have horrified Mr Gladstone. In response, Labour can offer nothing more than scare stories plus a thoughtless attachment to old-fashioned and wasteful methods of delivery.
This does not mean that the Tories will have everything their own way, forever. To adapt one cliché, politics abhors a vacuum. There will be a decent opposition, one day. Here, however, another cliché comes into play: you can’t beat something with nothing. There are a number of perfectly adequate and on the whole amiable Labour figures who are horrified by Jeremy Corbyn. Between now and June 8th, they will be concentrating on sauve qui peut. After that, they will want to do a Gaitskell: fight, fight and fight again to save the party they love. To put themselves remotely in that league they will have to raise their game, and they ought to start by telling us what they believe. Can they? Mr Corbyn may be hopeless but he does have convictions. It is not enough for his Labour opponents to say that he is no good because he is destroying their prospects of ministerial office: the Red Flag be damned – I want a red box. Yet it may be that they are too crushed and too demoralised to be of much use. Where is the fight?
Even if they could summon up some élan vital, they would face plenty of difficulties. The Corbynistas who paid their three pounds to take over the party will no doubt convince themselves that Labour only lost because of malevolence by the Right-wing media and treachery by so-called moderate MPs. They will exhibit the passion which the moderates seem to lack. If they succeed in replacing Jeremy Corbyn with John McDonnell, those moderates have only two choices: a split, or a head-hunter. But a split would bring problems with tribal loyalty and with general wetness. Apropos of wetness, there would also be difficulties with the Liberals. It is not clear that the average Liberal activist would be up for an SDP mk 11. Back in the early ’80s, there were large figures who could make the weather: Jenkins, Owen, Steel, Shirley Williams. Where is even one equivalent today? It is probable that the Labour party will split, that a new centrist party will emerge and that it will eventually challenge for electoral victory – but that the leader who will mount such a challenge is still unknown.
All this gives the Tories an immense opportunity. For years, they have been handicapped by a public perception that they were the party of the rich: a party of, by and for the people who do not need to worry about money. There were innumerable attempts to counteract this, all at best partly successful. At the same time, the Tories were failing to fight an intellectual battle which Mrs Thatcher made her own: to persuade voters that a society in which no-one could become rich was one in which everyone was condemned to be poor. It was Peter Mandelson who said that he was relaxed about people becoming filthy rich as long as they paid their taxes. No Tory would have dared to say “filthy rich”, but nor did many Tories dare to make the essential point that far from leading to public squalor, private affluence creates the resources to eliminate it.
On that, as on many other issues, we do not yet know what Theresa May believes. But she has the chance to proclaim the message that the best aspects of social democracy are only affordable in a society which encourages free enterprise and wealth creation.
That leads on to her third challenge and third opportunity. Barring an economic crisis, Brexit is irreversible. In order to make it work, and ensure against such a crisis, this government has to preach the virtues of modernisation, de-regulation, Northern powerhouses – powerhouses everywhere. We British are frequently guilty of lacking industrial self-confidence. There are too many ingrained memories of belching smoke-stacks, gross over-manning, trade unions really in charge, huge government subsidies: all to no avail. These days, it is not like that. Although the government should keep well clear of picking winners, there is no harm in extolling winners.
Extol: that is what the PM needs to do. Express her confidence. Give the impression that she does not give a… whatever word a vicar’s daughter would use… for her critics. There is still the little matter of Europe, to which we will no doubt return. But this is not a weak country. Nor will we have a weak government. There is a lot of scope for pressing ahead.