New Ideas (Or There Is Nothing Wrong with Another Think Tank)
If Labour are elected to government, and with a large majority, will this be a time for a realignment of British politics?
In 1957, a former Conservative Parliamentary Candidate, Ralph Harris, was appointed as the first Director of a new Think Tank, (or some would say lobbying group but for argument at least I want to go along with Think Tank) the Institute for Economic Affairs. Harris was under no illusions, this was a long game and a long battle to bring a strand of Conservative thinking into mainstream politics which we now recognise as Thatcherism. Not for making paper planes in a dusty office to pass the time, Harris and his colleague, Arthur Seldon, wrote pamphlet after pamphlet, made connections and over a period of time were able to extend the influence of Right Wing thinks like Hayek.
So what has this got to do with the Labour Party? Well the IEA was a response to the middle ground consensus politics of the likes of Hugh Gaitskell and R.A. Butler and Labour also had it’s Thinkers and influencers. Note how Tony Crosland’s thinking permeated the Right Wing of the Labour Party in the mid 1950s, before he himself returned to Parliament in 1959 and ended up a senior cabinet minister.
More than that, the IEA’s long game and influence worked in gaining supremacy if Thatcherism is anything to go by, so the question has to be what have Labour got to offer in response and we must be prepared and ready for a response, if not now, soon!
If the next general election is the Tory meltdown that some Polls predict, if even the Lib Dems end up as the official opposition, then we need to have a radical rethink about where this country is going and what is should be doing. I have no doubt that Sir Keir Starmer will be a strong Captain at the Helm and will have the ideas to propel the country forward into the mid 21st Century, but we need more than that.
A successful political party swiftly adapts with the times. The Conservatives knew this, in spite of their name, and that is why they won more general elections than Labour or the Liberals in the 20th Century, but they got too successful, they were caught between being too enamoured with a bygone age that no longer exists and winning for the sake of winning and that is how the likes of Liz Truss got to be leader.
A political party that is successful, reinvents itself to reach out to the people in the generation that they are in whilst retaining their core values. It is tough and difficult to do but it can be done and has been done, but will mean at some point we will need to develop new ideas for Labour’s values that makes sweeping changes to the UK in the same way Thatcherism did, and I believe that the need for this is not far away in the future, and we all need to be ready for that. Not a return to the hard left that Corbynism attempted, that would be foolish and dangerous, but something akin to some of the Centrist ideals we have seen from Tony Crosland, Roy Jenkins, Tony Blair, and others in that arena. There is nothing wrong with a group, a Think Tank, that can work on these beliefs for the coming decades and I hope that will happen