The FishTank

The invitation for the right honourable John Hutton to head up a review of public sector pensions for the coalition has caused considerable disquiet with the less-than-honourable John Prescott. At the same time, sundry Millibands and Darlings are accusing the Conservatives of lying about the state of the public finances in order to pursue an ideologically-driven cuts agenda. Pundits in both Lib-Dem and Conservative camps also seem determined to colour every action of the new government with the betrayal of their party. As the new politics causes an outburst of the old tribal instincts it’s worth considering if it is really right that politicians should be so driven by ideology.

The simple answer would, of course, be no. It is, after all, ideology that prevents Labour from accepting any reduction in the size of the state – no matter how ruinous the cost of keeping the gravy train on the rails. It is ideology that drives some outspoken right-wingers both in the Conservative Party and the Telegraph to see any moves to raise Capital Gains Tax as wrong. And can the unions, insisting that there should be no cessation of bread and circuses if it means less of either for their members be anything other than ideological in nature? When ideas come from ideology, reality it seems departs stage left or right depending on preference.

The trouble is, of course, that ideology in its simplest form is a set of shared values that informs policy. It was Margaret Thatcher’s belief in individual reliance and meritocracy that led her to champion the private sector industries that strove for efficiency and profitability over those who thought they could just strike until the rest of the country picked up their wage bills. It was that same belief that led her to extend people the right to buy their own council house – liberating them from a dependence on state provision like no government before. Whilst those of a left-wing bent will still complain about both of these policies (less about the latter than the former, it has to be said) they cannot argue with the fact that in the pre-Thatcher decade it was the continual strikes by inefficient unionised industries that regularly brought governments to their knees and caused an inflationary spiral that made non-unionised workers worse off. By 1983, the average mine-worker was earning 25% more than the average manual worker in other industries and, had Thatcher blinked, there’s no saying how far that differential would have gone before the miners finally brought the country cap in hand to the IMF. It was Thatcher’s ideology that helped her to face down the miners, but her ideology was informed by the grim reality of the decade prior to her premiership. It wasn’t until she did something that wasn’t informed by her ideology – the poll tax – that she finally fell.

For Labour, meanwhile, it was ideology that kept them from office. Ideology had built the party, championing the rights of workers in an age of vastly unfair industrial practices. By the 1980’s, however, that war had been largely won and formed the basis of political consensus. The party were left clinging to the fragments of ideology they had never successfully enacted and that, as time went on, were becoming increasingly irrelevant and unpopular. Michael Foot’s 1983 manifesto, which called for large-scale nationalisation, nuclear disarmament and leaving the EU, struck the public at a time when most people spent their summers in Europe on package holidays whilst recovering from the memory of three day weeks, power shortages and widespread industrial unrest. Nationalised industries meant unionised industries and in an age when nationalised British Rail were banned from using the simple slogan ‘We’re Getting There’, promising the same fate for any remotely profitable business was political suicide. It wasn’t until Tony Blair parted definitively with the nationalisation agenda – succeeding where Hugh Gaitskill had failed forty years earlier and ditching Clause IV – that Labour finally became electable.

New Labour was, of course, a party without ideology. Whilst some of the old guard – people like John Prescott – still talked the old rhetoric (if you can use the word rhetoric in Prescott’s case) the party had for the most part moved on from the politics of envy and decided it was fine to be rich. Some of them even joined the ranks of the landed during their tenure. It was an era less divisive than that which went before – it was also an era less decisive.

New Labour’s fundamental weakness, ignoring Iraq, ignoring the sleaze that mired their final years, was that without a set of values on which to form policy they were forced to chase headlines as a way of appealing to people. Promises were made, ignored and made again because the short memory of the media made it more beneficial to make grand gestures than actually to realise them. Targets were imposed on public services because the intentions sounded good – even if the results didn’t. Money was lavished on the poor without any consideration of where it would ultimately come from. It was one grand party, but when it ended a bitter Gordon Brown found himself holding the empties and trying to work out if he could claim enough back from them to pay the cleaning bill.

Because let’s be clear, for all his failings, Gordon Brown was not entirely the architect of the current mess. He was chancellor for most of its generation, but by all accounts his legendary arguments with Tony Blair were invariably about the balance between Blair’s largesse and Brown’s prudence. When Blair was driven out and Brown assumed the top job, his weak popularity rating made it politically impossible for him to do the right thing and fix things. He was forced to continue bread and circuses for the sake of survival and because, tarnished as he was with his predecessor’s failings, he couldn’t establish himself as an agent of change. Change had to come from elsewhere, which is why Cameron was right to make it the central tenet of his election campaign, but a public wary of another ideological vacuum to follow Blair were hesitant to endorse his particular brand.

And where are we now? We have a government formed from two parties who have been forced to look for their common ground and make that their ideology. Now, more than ever, the party of government has to be aware of what their policies are intended to achieve, rather than simply how they play to the public. It’s not a form of neo-Thatcherism, but a retrenchment narrative based on a belief that a profligate state is as damaging to the poor as it is to the rich. To keep both parties happy and the coalition intact it is vitally important that every policy decision is judged against the core values in their agreement document. And if they are not only consistent, but intelligent and – let’s be honest – lucky, the public will see the country turn the corner and thank them for their efforts. They will see tribal gain-saying from whoever occupies Labour’s leadership as increasingly irrelevant, cheap party point-scoring rather than a considered view of what is good for the country at large.

In the end ideology does have a place in politics. It matters that a politician understands what he is trying to achieve, that a party shares a common ambition for their policies. But it also matters that a politician can see beyond the coloured rosettes and take on other points of view. A hard-right Conservative like Michael Howard would have been as constitutionally incapable of forming a coalition as a left-leaning Lib Dem like Charles Kennedy. A government led by a ideologue like John Prescott would be as damaging now as a government led by Michael Foot would have been in 1983. David Cameron and Nick Clegg are not devoid of ideology, but they are ideological realists, prepared to sacrifice some of their outlying views for the sake of a shared narrative that benefits their country. It’s a mature, sensible politics as needed by our times as Margaret Thatcher’s combative, unblinking politics were needed by hers. In asking the help of Labour MPs with similarly broad minds, what Clegg and Cameron are doing is not simply using the talent available to them (an important consideration given the amount of new blood in the Commons at present), it is also sending a clear signal that the coalition is not about power at any price, but about finding the right answers to problems the previous government – more concerned with tomorrow’s papers than those twenty years hence – were all too keen to sweep under the carpet.