The UK Election: Lessons for Us?

Between the Conservative Party and UKIP, the right-of-center parties took just a sliver under 50 percent of the total vote in the UK yesterday. There is no sugar coating this for the left: it is an unmitigated defeat. UK voters just weren’t buying the leftism Ed Miliband and others further to the left of him were trying to sell.

I wonder if the same may play out here next year. With Hillary Clinton being tugged to the left by Bernie Sanders and the shadow candidacy of Elizabeth Warren, we might see the same dynamic unfold.

It is always fun seeing the experts and prognosticators (and mountebanks like Russell Brand) eat their words about how this was going to be a close election. Not everybody got it wrong, however. Back in February John Gray, a curious figure in British intellectual life whose idiosyncratic turns will need to be considered separately some other time, wrote a fascinating and very prescient article in The New Statesman about why he expected Miliband’s Labour Party to lose. Some of his analysis may very well carry over across the pond. Some excerpts:

Miliband . . . is convinced, with Thatcher-like certainty, that Britain is ready for a fundamental shift in direction. Speaking to Jason Cowley in 2012, he declared: “For me it’s a centre-left moment because people think there’s something unfair and unjust about our society. You’ve got to bring the vested interests to heel; you’ve got to change the way the economy works.”

The belief that large numbers of voters are yearning for a major alteration in Britain’s political economy – a rejigged version of socialism, or some hypothetical variety of “non-predatory” capitalism – is a delusion that could be fatal for Labour as a party of government. Miliband is misreading British society in ways not altogether dissimilar to those that hobbled Labour in the 1980s and allowed the Conservatives to rule for nearly two decades. . .

For all their lapses, the Labour leaders of an older generation had a more reliable sense of reality. It is impossible to imagine Harold Wilson or James Callaghan turning for intellectual succour to a writer such as Thomas Piketty, who has been feted by Miliband’s inner circle. These old Labour warhorses would spot at once the hole at the heart of Piketty’s book Capital in the 21st Century: no agency is identified that could counteract the built-in tendency to inequality that the book diagnoses.

In this regard, Piketty illustrates a disabling weakness of centre-left thinking at the present time. Whether they take their cue from legalistic philosophies of justice and rights or Marxian theories rejigged with the paraphernalia of contemporary econo­mics, the bien-pensants who are Labour’s leading lights today proceed on the basis that analysis and argument can in themselves have a political effect. . .

Miliband’s project amounts to a ragbag of populist measures. Energy price controls were probably never workable. Following the fall of the oil price, Labour has quietly dropped them, but they illustrate the unreality of Miliband’s thinking. The British economy can’t be managed as if the rest of the world didn’t matter. Tinkering about with utility charges that are largely set by global market forces is as absurd as the left’s idea of building socialism behind a wall of protectionism was in the 1970s and early 1980s. Politics after the election is likely to be fraught and financial markets hate uncertainty. What would they make of a government that relied on the support of a party, the SNP, which, if it had prevailed in the Scottish referendum, would now be presiding over a fiscally failed state? Whatever the Fixed-Term Parliaments Act 2011 may say, a run on the pound would bring a Miliband administration to an end long before the appointed term had been completed. . .

When Miliband compares himself with Thatcher, he reveals an impressive degree of self-belief. He also shows a lack of understanding of British politics over the past thirty years. There may be a regime shift afoot in Britain but, if so, it is a second act in the one that began in 1979. Now, as then, it is Labour’s failure that is pivotal. A few years hence, as he contemplates the British scene from the distant sanctuary of Harvard or Yale, Ed Miliband may come to understand how he opened the way to another era of Conservative rule.

I wonder if someone will be writing something like this after our election next year.

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