The next watershed election

Tired? I am. The relentlessness of life, in a persistently sluggish economy – yet at a time of quite dramatic change – takes a toll. And I’m lucky. The people who must be really tired are those who are without work, seeing their benefits cut, or fearing what further piece of austerity is going to be targeted at them next.

Ed Miliband says his greatest opponent isn’t the Tories, it’s cynicism. You know what he means. That sense of “learned helplessness”, as the psychologists call it, when you’ve been battered and disillusioned and don’t really know what to believe in anymore, can spread at a time like this.

As we start the long build-up to the next general election, the question is: can any party rise above this sense of exhaustion to offer something more uplifting? Or will the next two years involve a grim, zero sum game consisting mainly of personal insults and cynical negativity?

I think Miliband has been right to try and raise the tone and raise our sights. Of course he has been, and will continue to be, mocked for this. Miliband’s thesis constitutes a threat, or at least a rebuke, to the old order, to many still in positions of (fading) power, or to those who do not believe that anything can or should be done to change the political conversation.

This really is not an argument about where the so-called “centre ground” might be. It is bigger than that. It’s about whether politics, often called “the art of the possible”, has much point to it at all any more. Can politicians change anything, much, or are they doomed to be overwhelmed by global forces and mega-trends?

If Miliband is right, and there is still a point to politics, then the 2015 election will have more than a little in common with the one that took place in 1979. Back then Mrs Thatcher, as Stewart Wood said the other day, “spotted the exhaustion of an old settlement.” This moment was captured well by John Cole, the former BBC political editor, in his superb memoirs “As It Seemed To Me”.

“All governments end sadly,” he wrote. Drawing on an eye-witness account, Cole described the scene inside No.10 the day after the Callaghan government had lost a vote of confidence. “The prime minister was sitting there, alone, waiting for his car to take him to the palace. Soon he would be out on the famous doorstep, giving the traditional big wave to the crowd, for he would fight the election vigorously. But as he sat inside, my friend said, he looked incredibly old and tired.”

David Cameron’s lacklustre performances at PMQs suggest to me that he has already had enough of being prime minister, in these circumstances. He may not be a brilliant economist, but he can read the numbers like the rest of us. He knows the next two years are going to be difficult. And that he is unlikely to be in office after the next election.

Labour’s task is to persuade enough people that something better is possible. “The right thrives on pessimism about the possibility of change,” Stewart Wood said in his recent talk at Queen Mary college in London. The left needs to create some soundly based optimism. And it has to be ambitious, not modest, in its aims. That’s why Miliband has been right to grapple with the fundamental questions about how our economy operates. That is what brave leadership looks like.

In 1997 Labour supporters sang “Things can only get better”, and for a time believed it. People are wearier – warier – today. If an appeal based on the One Nation theme is to work, voters will have to believe that things can get better again. If that happens, 2015 will indeed be a watershed election. And a long, hard process of rebuilding can begin.