The politics of Win-Lose

Win or lose in May, Ed Miliband will have transformed British politics.

Miliband’s best days have come when he challenges vested interests: the banks, the energy firms, the press and this week Tory-funding tax evaders. Miliband’s challenge to these entrenched institutions is based on the recognition that power and money are finite, and that one group of people often gains at the expense of another. We can’t have low energy prices and high profits for gas firms; massive tax evasion isn’t compatible with decently funded public services.

All this seems obvious to those of us who live in the real world. But for the denizens of the political class, it is a frightening insight. From the poll tax until Ed Miliband’s election as leader of the Labour Party, British politics has been dominated by the search for the win-win situation. In the process, the art of managing political conflict was submerged under the search for outcomes in which everyone is supposed to benefit.

For almost twenty years professionals who were expert at finding these Panglossian scenarios dominated the political world. Political offices were stacked full of researchers from privately funded think tanks, advertising managers, public relations professionals, journalists used to courting big business. These groups propagated the idea that a good society could be created without tension. Trade-offs, conflict and negotiation were unnecessary. You could be nice to capital and labour; give pay rises to city bankers and cleaners; talk about localism and make sure everyone has a standardised service; court big business and celebrate the values of Red Clydesiders like James Maxton.

Just like the perfect world that Voltaire satirised in Candide, all this was, of course, a delusionary fantasy. In the real world interests clash and resources are limited. Conflict is inevitable. Politics is the art of working out how it should be resolved.

Instead of recognising its delusory pathology, since the early 1990s British politics has developed a peculiarly abstract language to evade the truth. Our politicians learnt to be long on vague aspirations and short on concrete plans. Anything definite would create tension or cause someone to suffer. From ‘forward not back’ to ‘Britain needs a payrise’, politics has been ruled by language that has no discernible connection to political action. The public’s loss of faith is caused by our recognition that political leaders spent most of their time talking bullshit.

Ed Miliband’s successes come by cutting through this verbiage, and identifying situations where a small band of winners-take-all to the detriment of the rest of society. This week Labour challenge to a Tory tax dodger was exactly that – and it caused a 6% lead to open up in the polls.

The problem is that these moments haven’t been sustained. That is hardly surprising, given the places that shadow ministers come from. To them, tension is difficult to manage; the idea of being opposed by powerful interests is frightening. Unlike previous generations of Labour MPs schools in Trade Unions or councils union bosses, they are not skilled in the kind of relationship-building and negotiation which the politics of win-lose requires. Too often, they imagine there is a quick fix, a canny phrase or neat policy idea that allows them to evade conflict. A lot of the time, you just need to sit face to face in a room and tell a powerful person you’re not going to do what they want. In the long run, we need a generation of politicians who have backgrounds where they’ve had to do that.

We also need to reconfigure our institutions so the conflict between different interests is visible and is resolved in public. Whitehall isn’t the best institution for managing the conflicts that currently cut through our society. Regulation is a poor tool for checking vested interests. Where the greatest conflict of interests currently are, there needs to be radical institutional redesign that allows people who are mostly directly affected to challenge those in power.

Here we need to be bold. The solution to HSBC’s corrupt manipulation of the press and tax system is to break the firm up, and then insist consumers and tax-payers have a say in managing it. The same goes for energy firm. It’s already Labour policy to split energy generators from retailers, but at the moment both are far too big. It’d be a popular move to bth break-up and mutualise the energy market.

We should also rethink how tax collective is managed. Now that government departments have executive boards, why not put an elected group of ordinary taxpayers on the board of the inland revenue?

I don’t think we’re going to get that far in the run-up to the election. We might move some way in the right direction in a Miliband government, with a clear recognition that win-win politics is dead, and that Whitehall doesn’t have all the answers. 

But to have any chance of getting to No.10, Ed needs to keep the pressure up. There should be no retreat to comfort zones like the NHS. First, there needs to be a relentless search for points of conflict that expose David Cameron’s inaction in the face of elite-run institutions. Second, we need clearer plans about how we’ll manage things differently which don’t just rely on regulation or appear punitive, but genuinely rebalance interests. Between now and May, Labour needs to force Cameron, again and again, to acknowledge his refusal to take sides in the battle between a tiny out of touch elite and the rest of us and show that we will do things differently and better.

I don’t know if we have the discipline and confidence to do that – I hope we do. But either way, the win-win genie won’t go back in the bottle, and politics will never be the same again.