Tonight:
4°c
THIS WEEK came an event more predictable than the migration of the caribou, the RMT threatening a strike ballot or an estate agent claiming "signs of life" in the property market. Everybody in British politics, with the understandable exception of the BNP, rushed to embrace Barack Obama as one of their own.
The absurdity of Prime Minister's Questions yesterday, with Gordon Brown, David Cameron and Nick Clegg each appropriating the 44th President as somehow an auxiliary member of their Front Bench, was especially delightful from my current vantage-point in Washington, where Britain looms very small indeed.
The Tories' latching on to Obama as the change candidate, Gordon's identification with a fellow signer of massive bailout cheques, and even Clegg's coveted endorsement of Barack as essentially a Lib-Dem on human rights: all rather miss the point, which is that the new Commander-in-Chief has set himself firmly against the kind of partisanship and side-taking epitomised by PMQs.
It's not just a pose, either. Obama genuinely does seem to want to be at least some things to all men (even if his ability to manage this must be in doubt). From his inagural address, European liberals homed in on his line about the "false choice between our safety and our ideals". But American conservatives loved his declaration that "our nation is at war against a far-reaching network of violence and hatred" - Bush-like "War on Terror" rhetoric of the sort recently disowned by our Foreign Secretary.
Yet British politics is seeing some real Obama-like trends. If he is difficult to define as Left- or Right-wing, so have our political divides, too, become fuzzy. This week, the blurring will enter a new stage: at separate events in London, both Left and Right will lay claim to the true mantle of "progressiveness".
I am just about old enough to remember a time when any self-respecting Right-winger would flee from the P-word. I remember the days when the homeless were people, in one Tory minister's famous phrase, who you stepped over on the way out of the opera. If you complained to Norman Tebbit about the price of vegetables, you would be briskly told to grow your own.
But today, the think-tank Demos launches its new Progressive Conservatism Project. Fifteen years ago, Demos, that professional sniffer of the Zeitgeist, laid much of the intellectual foundations, such as they were, for New Labour. And at today's event, the main speaker is the Tory leader, David Cameron.
In an article for next month's Prospect magazine, the project's director, Phillip Blond, calls on Cameron to lead a massive redistribution of power and wealth - not just from the failed centralised state, but from large corporations such as supermarkets; to restore Britain's "lost" civil society and local pride, to break up monopolies, protect small businesses and promote microfinance and self-improvement for the poor.
It is a very attractive vision of society, and one which would mark the Tories as distinctively different from Labour's big-statism. Cameron himself has spoken of being "as radical a social reformer as Margaret Thatcher was an economic reformer". But the giving away of control is one of those things that always looks more attractive in opposition than in government. It will be interesting to see how far, having struggled to achieve power, the Tories will want to hand it over to other people. Blond admits that some of the greatest centralisations of political and economic power took place under Thatcher.
The Left's rival event this week, a conference called "Progressive London", is complicated by the fact that it is essentially the latest cry of anguish in the most public grieving-and-trauma process ever seen in British politics - Ken Livingstone's inability to accept that he is no longer mayor, and a vehicle for his doomed bid to turn back the clock to the golden days of bendy buses, Venezuelan oil deals and Lee Jasper.
One reason why Ken lost - and one reason why he continues to behave as if he had, in fact, won - is that he and his supporters took, and take, for granted that by putting on a few extra buses he somehow came to embody, indeed monopolise, all progressive virtue in London. Looking on as the then Mayor embraced bigoted Muslim clerics, defended shoot-to-kill police chiefs, toadied to developers and harassed anti-war protestors in Parliament Square, many progressive Londoners begged to differ.
Yet even if we set aside the burden of Ken from the progressive cause, a problem remains. Labour does still have some very good people, some of whom will even be speaking at this week's conference. In some respects, it has a decent record of progressive outcomes - though Tory progressives would say these outcomes are fatally compromised by Labour's controlling methods.
But in arguably the two most important areas, the protection of the environment and the defence of our liberty, the Right is now plainly more progressive than the Left. The best way to stop a third Heathrow runway and halt the Home Office's creeping apparatus of surveillance, ID cards and state power is indisputably to vote Tory.
Perhaps the best analogy is with one of those bailed-out banks. Labour is as progressively troubled as the Royal Bank of Scotland is fiscally troubled - not finished, exactly, but in need of a huge injection of progressive capital. And it's by no means clear that the party knows where to get it from. The fact that Livingstone, with his dog-eared model, rejected by the voters, of identity and gesture politics is still taken at all seriously must symbolise the intellectual difficulty the Left finds itself in.
For a few months, it looked as if the economic crisis had redrawn the political boundaries in Labour's favour. State power was progressive again. But now, in the polls, pre-crunch politics appears to be reasserting itself.
Adding in the interesting noises being made on the Right about "progressive Conservatism", it is clear that the contest for progressive votes is very much joined. The Left's ownership of the progressive future can no longer be a lazy assumption. Ownership of the progressive future is going to be fought for.
Reader views (4)
The word progressive means so little today - the only people not invited to the Livingstone conference are the Conservatives and Demos group of 'progressives'. Boris Johnson might call himself a progressive. The Conference has George Galloway and his extreme left types and the old-fashioned Marxist Eric Hobsbawn. It's got the confused elements of the anti-war movement, who have links with Hamas and Muslim Brotherhood through the Muslim Association of Britain elements, as the 'defining' aspect of the 'peace' movement - going against the Barack Obama,President Mahmoud Abbas, EU and moderates Arab countries who understand that a two-state solution for a durable peace settlement is needed. Hamas are rounding up the opposition now - to eliminate them politically , if not physically (which they have already carried out once). Which bit of 'progressive' politics does this fit into? On economics, they oppose Heathrow Airport third runway, along with Boris Johnson - against the Labour government, trade unions and business organisations. What a line up? I am standing for Mayor of London 2012 - for London to have someone represent cosmopolitan London, an Asian Mayor of London following in the success of the first African American President of USA!
- Atma Singh, London UK, 23/01/2009 22:49
Report abuse
how is it that cameron can say if I get in I will make it a lot easier to get in in the future..???
we need proportional representation...
one vote for everyone and the party with the most votes win and I would also make it that people have to vote or they would get a fine.
that is true democracy.
- Robert Page, notts, 22/01/2009 21:43
Report abuse
Well A Stock, your comments are a bit rich, seeing as Labour has already gerrymandered the electoral map to suit itself as to win a general election the Tories have to poll considerbly more votes than Labour has to poll. Not to mention the fact that Gordon has created an untenable (in economically sustainable terms) number of state-funded non-jobs in order to protect Labour's client vote. And of course there is the Scottish question which results in England, where the Tories actually are the majority, being governed by a government elected by the Scots, and indeed run by them.
- Nicky, London, 22/01/2009 16:02
Report abuse
No matter what twaddle about being progressive is spouted by Cameron, as soon as he is elected we'll have a return to the Me First Conservatism of Thatcher and Tebbit. That s why he wants to gerrymander the electoral map, as it is the only way to a Tory second term.
- A Stock, Ilford England, 22/01/2009 13:18
Report abuse
