Unity or division?

Strategy with Sue Marsh

Every political party who has ever governed has found themselves tired of and rejected. The longer they spent in power, the more they lost their way. Over time, all parties fracture and split, in the end becoming sluggish and impotent.

When the electorate finally give them their marching orders, they take their schisms and passions and last-years tarnish and slink off to lick their wounds in relative obscurity.

At first, opposition does not sit well. The arrogance of power still hangs in the air, the conviction that they were right and the electorate simply misguided haunts every move. The blame game starts: “He was too far to the right” “She was too weak” “This faction let us down” “That faction lost us the election”.

And so begins a period of rejuvenation. The only question left is how long it will take.

If the divisions run deep, then a real fracture must occur. A public battle has to be fought and for every blow dealt, the party becomes less electable. Just look at the time the Conservatives spent in opposition. It took them at least 8 years to accept their defeat and begin to examine the reasons for it. For 8 long years they lurched from one disaster to another, clearly so out of touch with public opinion that they barely managed to flicker onto Blair’s radar.

The answers they provided were answers from decades past. They were so busy looking inward, they had no way of looking forward.

Back, then, to Labour in the 80s. So busy fighting internal battles, they alienated the public with policies that appealed only to themselves. They tried to shape politics in their own image, forgetting entirely the people politics is supposed to represent.

Since politics began, this process has repeated and will repeat again.

In every case, the tipping point came when parties decided to pull together again. When Blair addressed the fundamental schisms in the Labour Party, they were finally able to move forward and become a party that represented all the people. When Cameron started hugging hoodies and talking about the environment, he put the electorate back on centre stage and drew line under the endless Tory in-fighting.

Unity is simply a matter of ego and politicians have some of the biggest egos known to man. It took abject defeat for Conservatives to put aside their differences and look like a party of power. It took a desperation that Labour would never govern again for them to stop tearing each other apart.

Ed Miliband has an unenviable job. He gets the ruptured party, the in-fighting and the recriminations. He has to try to convince his party to conduct these bitter battles in private. He has to placate and soothe, encourage fresh talent and gently prise misguided fingers from the levers of power. Somehow, he has to persuade Purples to see the good in Reds and he has to persuade Reds to once again trust Purples. Each will try to fight for what he believes in, forgetting that party and public come first.

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We, the grassroots, can support him by reaching out. By engaging with those we naturally fear, by making our arguments through evidence and sheer force, not factions and division. The time will come when that will inevitably happen anyway, but we get to choose how much time we waste along the way. We get to choose when to put ego to one side.

Arguably Labour did just that in the most spectacular way of all. For 11 long years, Blair and Brown governed together – the longest PM/chancellor partnership this century. Yes there were divisions, yes they infuriated each other and yes, they represented quite different strands of the Labour Party, but in the end, no matter how furious the battles they fought, how bitter their frustration, they always remembered that they were stronger together. Always.

For 11 long years, Blair and Brown used their differences to create balanced policy – a little social democracy here, a scattering of progressive change there. They presided over the longest period of sustained growth for decades, low interest rates, falling crime, improved health outcomes and educational improvements. These are the things people care about. Blair and Brown’s natural conflict created policy that worked. It hammered out ego and left only consensus.

If we turn away from that, if one faction tries to harm or even destroy another, we all lose. It is only when we make our divisions work for us that we will win again.

So, over to you Labour. Unity or division? Just remember, if you choose division, unity will find you in the end. You just waste time along the way.