Triangulation

There's been some interesting commentary recently about how the various realignments in British politics are going in this post-coalition world; and how these relate to previous years. In particular, these thoughts were triggered by some comments from David Lammy who mentioned that New Labour had increasing success under Blair as they triangulated their opinion by shifting rightwards on to natural Tory territory.

This was tactically succesful because core Labour voters weren't going to shift to Tory; and because it might encourage those in the centre to vote Labour. Mostly, Blair pushed right, and nastily, on war in Iraq, and cosying up to Americans, along with all the law and order and civil liberties stuff, along with some pretty unpleasant hints about immigration.

What this did, initially, is to shove the Tories out further right - they appear to have had a feeling that they wanted to be even more nasty than Labour, because they all knew Labour were soft and pathetic.

This created a mood in the public of an extreme and rather scary Tory party who were unelectable.

When Cameron came in to the leadership of the Tory party he almost immediately changed the mood music on civil liberties stuff. You never quite trusted that he really believed it; it always seemed pretty cynical. And as the last couple of years went on, Tory policy seemed to drift further and further back to the sort of stupidities we heard under Hague and Howard.

Now, though, he's in a much stronger position, ironically. Being in a coalition with the Lib Dems, it means he has an excuse to not track to where his party wants him; and this breaks the mould a bit. He can push for more redistributive policy, and to protect services, or - as right now - he can push to raise tax through using CGT and when his party throws a fit he can stand up to them. It is, in a way, his Clause 4 time. His way of proving to the public that he's not as mad as his party.

And that makes this coalition extra dangerous for Labour - it means that the public, which are used to seeing the Tories as extremist nutters, get to see them as people inclined to pragmatism and compromise, and implementing some sensible policy, like the elimination of ID cards, or cutting tax for the poor by raising tax on the rich.

This makes some mutterings I heard last week from Andy Burnham "The Blairite it's OK To Like" seem even more problematic. Burnham commented that the public liked some Blairite stuff, and that their anti-crime stance really helped the poorest; he was pushing the line that the anti-civil liberties extremisms of Labour were, in fact, not only redistributive but also popular. This is the same sort of madness as we regularly hear from Tories claiming that the public are concerned about immigration, so they actually want to hear politicians being extreme and unreasonable.

As I mentioned in my previous post - the public may want tough on crime, or tough on forriners, policy; but they very rarely vote for it. They understand, enough, that this is representative democracy, and even if we want nasty policy in individual cases, we'd rather have moderate and reasonable leaders who, in general terms, will be moderate and reasonable. The ones who froth about rivers of blood are not, basically, to be trusted to be reasonable on any other matters. The ones who think Labour should talk more about beating up criminals are not to be trusted.

Cameron, I think, does understand this, and is going to reap the benefits - provided he can keep his party together. If the party begins to reject it, and brings down the coalition with the Libs, there's a good chance the public will see the Conservatives as still being unreasonable and extreme - and not only that, it means likely future coalitions will be Lib/Lab and thus pretty crippling for the Tory future. At the moment, Andy Burnham, and I suspect the various Eds and Millibands, do not quite understand this, and until they do, they'll be in an IDS type wilderness.