Don’t go that way

INTERVENTIONS by former prime ministers less than six months or so before a general election tend to be couched in hints and insinuations, rather than full-throated advice. But Tony Blair, who as leader of the Labour Party between 1994 and 2007 led it to three election victories, is more outspoken. In an interview with The Economist, Mr Blair says that he fears that the next election, due to take place in May 2015, could be a rerun of those before his ascent to the leadership, which regularly ended in disaster for his party.

The result in 2015, he quips, could well be an election “in which a traditional left-wing party competes with a traditional right-wing party, with the traditional result”. Asked if he means a Tory win, Mr Blair confirms: “Yes, that is what happens.” Although Ed Miliband, the current Labour leader, has spoken of a shift in economic thinking since the financial crisis of 2007-08, Mr Blair firmly denies that Britain’s centre ground has shifted. “I see no evidence for that. You could argue that it has moved to the right, not left.” Mr Blair says that the 2010 election (in which David Cameron defeated Mr Blair’s successor, Gordon Brown), was a “classic tax-and-spend election”, and that turned out to the Conservatives’ advantage.

The forthright comments encapsulate an undimmed Blairite criticism of Mr Miliband as being too far to the left on economics and too reluctant a public-sector reformer. “I am still very much New Labour and Ed would not describe himself in that way, so there is obviously a difference there,” Mr Blair says. “I am convinced the Labour Party succeeds best when it is in the centre ground”.

On the turn of election year, Mr Blair has thus revisited a long-running argument about the positioning and beliefs of the modern Labour Party which ran through his own premiership and continues to haunt it. The party lost power to the Conservatives in 1979, and won it back under Mr Blair in 1997 only with an uncompromisingly revisionist “new” Labour agenda. Mr Blair courted the business vote, boldly abolished the pro-nationalisation Clause IV of the party’s constitution, promised to be tough on crime and won three elections before stepping down to be replaced by Mr Brown, a more traditionalist leader. But since winning the leadership in 2010 Mr Miliband, a protégé of Mr Brown, has trodden a populist, proto-socialist path, attacking alleged examples of “predatory capitalism” such as soaring energy bills and the property rental market.

Both parties are likely to highlight the dividing lines between them in the next few months, with Labour emphasising that it stands firmly on the side of those who suffer from social and economic inequalities. Although some Labour modernisers, like Chuka Umunna, the party’s business spokesman, fret about estranging wealth-creators and people becoming too reliant on public-sector support, Mr Miliband has for now won that argument. He will make a pitch aimed largely at people who feel that the current economic recovery is unlikely to benefit them.

Asked what lessons he derives from his experience of election-winning, however, Mr Blair cites “not alienating large parts of business, for one thing”. He sees this as essential to the creation of a broad appeal to the vital centre-ground of politics. Those on the right of the Labour Party, including many senior Blairites who have gone into self-imposed exile from Mr Miliband’s incarnation of Labour, agree. They believe that the centre-ground lies vacant; the Conservaties have moved rightward to regain voters attracted by the UK Independence Party, which campaigns against both immigration and the EU, and Labour has lurched leftward.

Yet that presupposes that Mr Blair is right in his diagnosis that most British voters are still in the political centre, as he defines it. To test the thesis, Rick Nye, of the Populus polling organisation, proposed to a sample of voters four de-branded parties, named A, B, C and D, differentiated by where they stood on several high-profile issues: Britain’s membership of the EU, business regulation, the urgency (or otherwise) of climate change, private delivery of public services, same-sex marriage and immigration.

Although there was support for a broadly Blairite approach to some of these issues, it did not translate into support for the most “Blairite” party in the mix, when it was flanked by alternative parties offering more strikingly left-wing or right-wing remedies. Thus the bad news for latter-day Blairites was that the most popular “virtual” party, winning almost two-fifths of the vote, advocated Britain’s exit from the EU, less immigration and less drastic action to tackle climate change, but was also against private involvement in public services (such as the National Health Service) and in favour of more business regulation.

That suggests two possible conclusions. The first is that the gap Mr Blair detects remains unfilled because there are now too few centrist voters. The second, more convincing, one reverses cause and effect: few voters identify with Blairism because too few politicians are promoting it.