Professional Politicians



Martin Kettle writing in The Guardian highlights a telling reason why Ed Miliband is finding it so difficult to win over the electorate - the Labour leader is so typically part of the 'political class' which the voting public seems to have turned against, for now at least.

In the House of Commons the other day a Tory MP, Tony Baldry, mocked the Labour leader for campaigning in his constituency as a 13-year old in the 1983 general election (along with his father Ralph if I remember correctly) in which the Labour leader of the day (Michael Foot) pledged to take the UK out of the European Union.

The Prime Minister, David Miliband, used the opportunity to ridicule the Labour leader over his idea of what constituted 'fun' as a young teenager, but the more serious point is that it chimes with what Martin Kettle has to say about insiders and the political class whose lives, like Hillary Clinton, seem to revolve totally around politics.

Which doesn't mean they can't win elections, of course, although it does make them rather strange human beings.      


Ed Miliband's key problem: he's an insider when voters want outsiders


It's not just about the Labour leader's policies. Since the crash, large numbers on both sides of the Atlantic have turned against the political class



By Martin Kettle - The Guardian


Illustration by Matt Kenyon

In the old days, the ideological axis of politics used to be left-right. It certainly isn't that now. That does not mean left-right has gone away. It hasn't. But it is no longer how most people define themselves or relate, if they do so at all, to politics. Left-right has ceased to be the sole yardstick, of either vice or virtue, and certainly of electability. Perhaps, in truth, politics never was quite that simple anyway.

A few weeks ago, invoking a speech made in 2007 by Tony Blair, the Financial Times columnist Janan Ganesh suggested that today's ideological axis is no longer left-right but open-closed. Everything that animates modern British politics, he argued – stagnant wages, migration, Europe – is primarily defined by globalisation. This open-versus-closed divide between nation and the world is in some ways a better way of defining ourselves. It also cuts across all parties of the left and of the right, in this country and elsewhere.

It's an intelligent moderniser thesis. If it is correct, then modern politics can be made to look a bit like a Venn diagram. At the extremes would be four positions: left-closed, left-open, right-closed and right-open. As approximate embodiments of these four extremes one might suggest, respectively: Nicola Sturgeon, Ed Balls, Nigel Farage, Margaret Thatcher. Most of the rest of us, including most members of most parties, would be somewhere in between.

Unfortunately, modern politics is not even simple enough to be reduced to the interface between left-right and open-closed. Having recently spent some time in the United States, for instance, I have been struck by the increasing importance of a third axis, which is also becoming very pronounced in Britain and across much of western Europe too. This third axis is insiders-outsiders.

The trigger for this thought comes from reading Elizabeth Warren's book A Fighting Chance. Warren is the Democratic senator for Massachusetts, who now sits in what used to be Edward Kennedy's seat. She came late to active politics, first elected at the age of 63. She won by blaming two groups of people for the difficulties that face average families: the bankers, who broke the social compact, and the politicians, who connived in letting them get away with it. Now, as the publication of her book may suggest, Warren could challenge Hillary Clinton for the Democratic party's presidential nomination in 2016.

You can certainly place Warren somewhere on the left-right axis. She stands to the left of Clinton, though in historic American terms more as a progressive than a socialist. It's a bit harder, on the basis of her book, to place her on the open-closed axis. She is neither an out-and-out protectionist nor an anything-goes free trader, though she is more of atrade-deal sceptic than Clinton. On the insider-outsider axis, by contrast, there is no confusion. Warren is an outsider, while Clinton is the insider par excellence.

The insider-outsider divide has deep roots in American politics. In a huge country, the mantle of the outsider is more easily donned than in small countries such as Britain. As a result, candidates who promise to go up to Washington and make a stand are legion – on both the right and the left. On the right, the Tea Party movement's success is not simply down to its positioning in the left-right or open-closed spectrums – though it owes something to both – but as the embodiment of the hell-raising outsider too. A key part of Warren's appeal to the left, like that of Barack Obama before her, is that she too comes from outside the system.

But the insider-outsider divide increasingly matters on this side of the Atlantic too. One need look no further for an example than the rise of Nigel Farage, or of a host of other outsider politicians across Europe, whose appeal rests in part on their hostility to, and distinctness from, the political class. In the wake of the financial crisis, in which the whole insider political class was implicated to varying degrees, the insider-outsider axis has become more important than ever.

Ed Miliband is certainly not the only member of this class who struggles with this question; David Cameron does so too. But no analysis of Miliband's position makes sense without it. Miliband's problem is often described as being that he is too far to the left (or to the right, in some leftwing eyes), or sometimes that he is too closed against globalisation's consequences. But a key part of Miliband's problem is that he is such an obvious insider at a time when insiders lack standing with many voters.

Today's politics is three-dimensional – and that's the simple version. Radicalism is fine in its place, but it is never enough. In reality, the holy grail of combining electability and effectiveness is as much an art as a science, as much about persona as policy. Look at Obama's difficulties – twice elected decisively but now with low ratings and the prospect of further electoral reverses in November. It's no wonder Miliband is having more trouble solving the Rubik's cube of politics than he is said to have with the real thing.

But the same would be true of Warren if she became president. On the face of it, she ticks a lot of Democratic boxes – more radical in her desire to cut the financial industry down to size, more closed in her desire to prevent globalisation from causing wages to stagnate still further, and more of an outsider at a time when insiders are discredited. But would punishing the banks raise the real wages of average families. Or import tariffs reduce the pension bill or the deficit? Or being an outsider mean that the usual rules of electability and re-electability mattered less? I don't think so.

martin.kettle@theguardian.com

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