Tories, curb your Corbynmania: you too need Labour to survive

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/aug/19/tories-jeremy-corbyn-labour-opposition

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The 30-year rule, which controls the release of official papers, acts like the mechanism on a window blind: it slowly winds up to let the light in on some of the small and big secrets alike of the Thatcher governments. The big ones get the headlines, but sometimes the small ones tell us more.

One batch of the prime minister’s papers, relating to the decision to form a strategy group of senior ministers to improve the presentation of government policy, was released last month. It did not attract much attention. On the face of it, this was the small print – a footnote to a row, well publicised at the time, between some of Thatcher’s most senior colleagues and Bernard Ingham, her legendary press spokesman. But something else was troubling one of Mrs T’s Mr Fixits: how parties maintain discipline when there isn’t an opposition.

Labour’s meltdown in 1983 had gifted the government a majority of 144. But all was not well in Tory ranks. Not because unemployment was still over 3 million, interest rates were in double figures or the Westland affair at the turn of the year had cost the prime minister two cabinet ministers and threatened her own position.

On the contrary. “The opposition parties have not really dented our armour since 1983,” wrote John Wakeham, the chief whip, in June 1986. “Our troubles … are self-inflicted. Unfortunately we remain our own worst enemies.” Wakeham’s note describes a cabinet not so much of rivals as of self-publicising individuals leading private armies recruited from a parliamentary party on the lookout for opportunities to rebel. As he noted with dismay, it appeared less and less to be a party that was serious about winning the next election. By 1990, barely four years later, Thatcher was out of power and the party was in turmoil.

Some of the more thoughtful Conservative commentators now are looking back and observing that it took 20 years to recover from the hubris fostered by the 1983 landslide. The conflict in cabinet and the lack of discipline among backbenchers left the party cut off, unelectable, unable to see beyond the next internal arm wrestle.

And they worry that the party’s facile enthusiasm for a Jeremy Corbyn victory in the Labour leadership election – a glee voiced again this week by Boris Johnson in the Daily Telegraph – is a terrible misjudgment. Faking it as a Labour supporter to get a say in who’s to be leader of the opposition may come to look downright puerile if a crushing defeat for Labour at the next election produces another catastrophe for them, like that one that followed the Thatcher-Major years. It is not only people who don’t want another Tory government who care that Labour chooses a leader capable of winning an election.

A lack of challenge is bad for the unchallenged and worse for the country.

A lack of challenge is bad for the unchallenged and worse for the country. Even with only the most slender of majorities, in its first 100 days this government has turned into a serial pledge-breaker – on capping personal liability for funding for social care, on extending tax breaks for childcare, on its commitment to invest in public health, on the promise of electrifying some northern rail routes. But for all the challenge it has faced, (excluding, notably, its plans for English votes for English laws and, er, hunting)the government majority might as well be not 12, but 120. Labour’s sole contribution has been to get into a disastrous muddle about how to respond to the budget and the impact of the latest round of austerity on benefits.

And then there is a wider and even more important issue: democracy doesn’t work if a large part of the country feels unrepresented. That is true of both parties. Labour leaders used to struggle to preserve its broad-church appeal and prevent the party being captured by left or right, trade unions or independent labour, Gaitskell v Bevan, Benn v Healey: it is a tension that, when it is held in balance, serves the party well.

The Conservative party once recognised the importance of allowing opponents the space to represent their supporters’ views – that’s why Stanley Baldwin let a minority Labour government take office for the first time in 1924. Now, according to some reports, the party is plotting the exact reverse: to squeeze Labour out of the debate entirely, with a baptism of fire for whoever emerges victorious in September.

They believe they succeeded in framing Ed Miliband as a creature of the trade unions, and now they can do something similar to his successor; by rushing ahead with of a list of potentially embarrassing challenges, they can inescapably imprison the new leader in a cage of unpopular commitments. This new Tory style of trying to freeze-frame opposition leaders into a position from which they can never successfully escape is a kind of political torture porn. It is undemocratic. It is, potentially, even dangerous.

As Britain’s nation-building adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan should bitterly remind everyone, among the many preconditions for a stable democracy is a culture of mutual respect. This does not just happen, even in a country with as long a tradition of elections as the UK. It needs to be nurtured. It demands a level of honesty. And it applies within parties as well as between them. It needs a kind of shared decency and a belief in transparency.

That Wakeham note of 30 years ago highlights a new and devastating development. Thatcher’s intransigent style, and Ingham’s sanctioned disloyalty to her ministers, encouraged a dangerous style of communication where criticism was shrouded in coded language. The speaker could appear loyal while cultivating disloyalty.

Presciently, the chief whip understood the danger to politics itself of saying one thing while meaning something different. He warned that it was alienating ordinary members of the public, who felt excluded from the political process. No one listened. The Tory party toppled into the trap of talking mainly to itself.

The corruption of political communication is certainly not the only reason for the catastrophic disengagement from the political process that is now so evident. But a small step towards a recovery is at least partly in the gift of Tory party managers. Lay off cheap point-scoring, and acknowledge that a single-party democracy is a contradiction in terms: stable democracy needs at least two roughly equal participants. The Tories should be trying to win the argument, not annihilate the opposition.

Related: Jeremy Corbyn is the curator of the future. His rivals are chasing an impossible dream | George Monbiot