It might just be that the Labour Party, in spite of being out of power since May, will tell us more about British politics in the next few years than the coalition will - even though they will be the ones dictating the focus of the national conversation and agenda (this is after all what liberal government really consists in, yes?). The reason for this is the litmus test it will provide for political reactions. Reactions are not quite the same as opinions. An opinion is pretty easy to measure, you just ask, but a reaction is much harder to gauge. You can ask people (How would your opinion change if x happened?) but people are very bad at knowing how their opinion would change. There are probably a number of reasons for this, not least the fact that people rarely find the actuality of something the same as they had envisaged it and so take a less favourable attitude once a thing has actually come to pass, but it clearly happens. One of the best examples is the fate of the Conservative Party in 2005.
Polling at that time, much as now, showed that people were uneasy and unhappy about the levels of immigration to the UK. The Conservatives took a harder line than Labour but were rewarded with yet another defeat. The stock explanation for this was that while people may have agreed with the Conservatives on this issue Labour had one the 'big arguments' and so were, taking everything into account, preferred by voters. But the Polling had also shown that Immigration was the most mentioned issue when people were asked what the 'most important issue' facing the country was, with 42% also identifying the conservatives as the best party to deal with it. This seems totally absurd, what was going on? The best explanation is probably that while people thought that they would feel inclined to vote for an anti-immigration conservative the reacted to the reality in a way that they didn't expect or predict - they voted Labour instead. On that occasion what we learned about at least one section the British people was that, although they were opposed to immigration, they were not prepared to identify with a party that, because it took an anti-immigration line, came to be seen as unsympathetic and heartless (the 'nasty party' to borrow Theresa May's phrase).
What we stand to learn from Labour now is even more interesting. Labour are determined to do the difficult thing, at least what they perceive as the difficult thing. I'll let David Milliband explain...
'There are two ways of defining the task for Labour. One blames election defeat on public boredom after 13 years in government, a leader who was a great thinker but not a good communicator, the recession and expenses scandal, and voter anger about immigration. This is a comfortable analysis, but wrong. While the points are true, there is something more fundamental. The second view instead argues that we lost and lost badly because we did not occupy the ground of progressive reform.'
I think that more or less sums up the view of most of the contenders in the ongoing
leadership race. Of course what progressive reform means, to slightly over-generalise, is a move to the left. This is because there is no 'hard lesson' for labour in this message. Sections of the party have been aching do dump what remained of the the Blairite reform agenda from the party program. They thought that labour had 'lost touch' even when they were winning - so it seems fairly clear that a move to the left is coming. What this move will tell us is whether people will, in spite of being opposed to excessive wealth and growing inequality, will actually react against a party that promises it, just as they did with the Conservative Party over immigration in 2005. This will be hugely revealing about what socialism means to people in the 21st century, and attitudes to wealth more broadly. Perhaps people will react positively, this would be just as interesting, it may depend on exactly the way in which it was done. In any case it may well end up shaping the paradigm of politics far more than the coalition, which by it's nature may end up being more pragmatic than ideological.
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