I have interviewed shadow Defence Secretary Jim Murphy for this week’s magazine. He talks about a range of subjects: Labour’s difficulty talking about class; the protest camp at St Paul’s Cathedral; the epic problems facing the party in Scotland; the prospect of a nuclear-armed Iran.
As ever there wasn’t room to print everything he said and there was one extended passage that I thought deserved more attention than the constraints of the page allowed. We talked about the legacy of Thatcherism and the way she effectively changed the parameters of political debate in Britain. Did she identify a shift in the “centre ground” of politics or did she redefine it by force of will? There is a lot of discussion at the top of the Labour party at the moment about the prospect of a change in the political landscape equivalent to the one that happened between the late Seventies and mid-Eighties. The theory goes that the financial crisis that started in 2007-8 and continues today will force a social upheaval and a dramatic reappraisal of government’s role in the economy. The orthodoxy of the Thatcher and Blair years, in this view, is obsolete. Ed Miliband’s contention is that the Tories, wedded as they are to that Thatcherite orthodoxy, are intellectually unable to grasp the scale of this change and under-equipped to respond to it. Labour, he thinks, has the opportunity to harness the national mood.
I discussed this with Jim Murphy. He had an interesting take on the “new centre” which he characterised as follows:
This new centre is populated by ideas and policies from both the centre-left and the centre-right. People wanting a government to intervene in a way that would be more consistent with an ethos of the centre left on industrial policy, on bank bonuses, on those sorts of things – an instinct that would have its heritage in the centre left of politics. But then things like crime, immigration, welfare which instinctively some people – not me, the ill-informed orthodoxy – would have that on the centre-right.
Security is the biggest part of this new centre – financial security, job security, home security determination to have answers from centre left – and then there’s personal security – community security, immigration, welfare, cohesion. Some people say traditionally that sense of security comes from the centre-right.
I’m not sure that Miliband would phrase it in that way, but there is a lot of overlap. The Labour leader has accepted a lot of language traditionally associated with the centre-right (and, it must be said, New Labour) of “toughness” on crime and the need for a welfare system that makes demands of recipients to take more responsibility for finding work. But he has also reached across to more radical left impulses in his criticism of “predatory” capitalism.
There will always be people in the Labour party – and elsewhere – who see this attempt to find a position that appeals across the political spectrum as cynical “triangulation” and craven capitulation to fear that the country’s instincts are ultimately conservative. I’m not so sure. It is too early to say that Miliband has arrived at a settled new political philosophy for Labour – at least not one that can be easily distilled into a clear message and used as the basis for a campaign. But it is noteworthy that Murphy, who co-managed David Miliband’s campaign and is generally held up as the shadow cabinet’s leading Blairite, and Ed, who famously promised to “turn the page” on New Labour, are converging on the same political terrain.
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