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Missing inaction - Kennedy the invisible man
Yorkshire Post - 25 November
2005
So where has he been all this time? Changing nappies? Resting? Tramping the undoubtedly spectacular landscapes of the highlands?
We are talking, of course, about Charles Kennedy. In political terms it is an inescapable fact that the leader of the Liberal Democrats has, quite simply, gone missing.
In theory the Liberal Democrats are the only major party not to have a leadership crisis. The Conservatives have managed to stretch their leadership election out into almost as long as a normal pregnancy. Labour, romping through the election and seemingly gliding into summer on the high approval ratings for its handling of the terrorist attacks in London and for winning the Olympics for London, is descending into civil war.
If ever politics seemed to be dealing the Liberals a perfect hand this was the time. Yet they have simply gone missing. True, their election results were disappointing, despite a small gain in the number of seats won. Their party conference was messy and irritable: Charlie Kennedy had to spend most of his time defending his “laid-back” style of leadership. A good half of his party thinks that it ought to be having a leadership election.
Some of the “new boys” in particular – and the new Liberal Democrat intake contains some real talent – are wondering whether the great breakthrough has already reached its high point.
They are right to do so. Politics could be about to get a whole lot tougher for them for two reasons. These are summed up in two words: Cameron and Brown.
Cameron first. Since the 1997 election defeat the Tories have been in search of their identity. They retreated from the populated plains of politics to a chilly mountain peak whose slopes sheltered only the “core vote.” The managerial and professional middle-class voters, to which the party had appealed historically almost by instinct, deserted the party because the party had deserted them. New Labour and the Liberal Democrats divided the electoral spoils between them.
That long retreat now looks to be at an end. The Tories are becoming interested in politics again. They will challenge the Liberal Democrats for the white collar vote. A “One Nation” moderate centre-right party will go head-to-head with the Liberal Democrats across the English shires and suburbs.
And what about Brown? Gordon Brown is not going to take Labour on some long trek back to a Socialist heartland. But he can do two things. The first is, quite simply, use the language of old-style Labour passion to promote the modernisation agenda. Brown is genetically Labour. He was brought up in Labour politics, from the Manse through student politics to Westminster. He can appeal to a traditional Labour voter in a way Blair not only found impossible, but uncongenial.
If Blair defined his politics by confronting his party, Brown will define his by appealing to it to join him in a crusade.
And, of course, when Blair goes he will take the Iraq war with him. Opposition to the Iraq war was the Unique Selling Point of the Liberal Democrats.
So Cameron will appeal to the Tory deserters to come home to the party and Brown will summon the Labour deserters to the Liberals to return to the fold.
So where do the Liberal Democrats go? At the moment they are characterised by two broad policy orientations. The first is their willingness to put up taxes to fund public services. They are already reviewing this after the election disappointment - local income tax to replace Council Tax and higher upper rates of Income Tax played badly in the relatively prosperous parts of England with multiple earning households.
It will be a heroic act of faith to believe that the electorate has an appetite for tax increases on top of the additional burden loaded on them by Gordon Brown.
The second policy orientation is an instinctive reaction to back the demands of public sector workers. The Liberals are, very much, the “producer” party. When Blair’s educational proposals finally hit the House of Commons it is a racing certainty that the Liberals will endorse the objections to them coming from local councils and the teacher unions.
Yet not all Liberals are happy with this. Some of its brightest MPs produced a policy programme before the last election which would have embraced the idea of the mixed economy in public services. In other words, the market would have had its role in delivering public services.
These ideas, assembled in the Orange Book, were suppressed before the election, and they still do not receive much of a welcome from the sort of Liberal activists who attends party conferences. But if the party is not to spend much of this Parliament making common cause with Labour left-wingers in defence of a pubic sector free of market contamination it needs to dust them down and offer them serious analysis.
And then there is Charlie. There are more than a few commentators, including those within the Liberal Democrats, who believe that Westminster will see one more leadership contest before the next general election.
© Yorkshire Post
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