How did we get to here?

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Thatcher once said that she thought that her greatest success was Tony Blair’s Labour Party. Subsequent history shows that her success wasn’t so much an event as a process; a process which continues to reverberate today. Underlying the creation of Blairism was the way in which she, and those around her, succeeded in moving the parameters of acceptable political debate, often referred to as the ‘Overton Window’, sharply in one direction, and it’s a process which has been continued by her successors. Osborne’s creation of the Office for Budget Responsibility was another event during the process, an event which locked into ‘acceptable’ political discourse the utterly false notion that governments must seek to balance their income and expenditure over the long term, and pay down any accumulated debt. It’s a shibboleth which the Reeves's and Starmers of this world have adopted with enthusiasm.

They’re still at it today. Views within Labour which might have been regarded as being rather to the right of the party’s centre just a few decades ago are now routinely described as ‘soft left’ or even ‘hard left’. And Kemi Badenoch announced yesterday that there is no room in her Conservative Party for views which would have been seen as entirely mainstream until very recently. It isn’t only a success for the likes of Thatcher and Badenoch, of course; it’s also a success for a media which is owned by, and seemingly exists mostly to promote the interest of, those who own the wealth and in whose pockets and bank balances money continues to accumulate under neoliberal economics.

It didn’t have to be this way. In the immediate post-war years, a Labour government, which was rather more radical than it is often given credit for, actually shifted the Overton Window in the other direction. Whilst there was some pushback from the ‘right’ over some issues (such as nationalisation), it became generally recognised over two or three decades that the state had a role to play in industrial policy, that more homes – including council houses – should be built, that the NHS should be funded, that there should be a decent system of benefits. Albeit in a mild form, what one might call ‘social democracy’ became established as the accepted norm. Thatcher may have been the instigator-in-chief of the rupture, but Labour then played along, facilitating the conversion of an event into a process. That has brought us to a position where someone like Macmillan, Eden, Douglas-Home – and maybe even Heath – would be unwelcome in the party they once led, and where the Labour leadership seems to draw more on the thinking of Enoch Powell than of Bevan or Beveridge.

At the bottom of this lies a major question – should politicians lead or merely follow public opinion? Clearly the leaders of the UK’s three right wing parties all believe that public opinion is further to the right than they are. If they’re correct (and I’m not at all sure that they are – the most vocally-expressed opinions aren’t always the most popularly-held), then how do they think that we got from there to here? Blaming the media is a soft option, although that doesn’t make it entirely inaccurate. Ultimately, weak politicians, prepared to sacrifice any beliefs or principles in the pursuit of power, and anxious to secure the endorsement of the worst elements of the media, must take at least as much blame. It’s a tradition in which Starmer firmly sits.