Maybe Corbyn was right and Labour ‘won the argument’ after all?

The Conservatives have not had transformative ideas since Thatcher in the 1980s wtites JOHN MCTERNAN in The FT

Jeremy Corbyn has been much mocked for his claim that the Labour party “won the argument” in the UK general election. A defeat of historic proportions — Labour’s worst result since 1935 — would seem to prove otherwise. But what if Mr Corbyn wasn’t wrong? What if Labour has, in his words, “rewritten the terms of political debate”? 

Consider the evidence. Just this week Boris Johnson’s newly elected government restored bursaries to student nurses and vowed to put into law its commitment to increased funding for the National Health Service. The concession on nursing is a significant reversal of direction, but is being packaged with other policies as an acknowledgment of the new electorate that the Conservatives now represent. 

Winning seats that were formerly solidly Labour will shift the balance within the parliamentary Conservative party. New Tory MPs will find that many Labour arguments were driven more by place than by ideology. 

Yet something deeper is going on. From corporate capitalism to housing, from climate change to transport, Labour’s ideas are framing the decisions the new government is making. 

Take business. A common attack on Mr Corbyn is that he is “anti-business” — and there is plenty of evidence for that in the interventionist manifesto on which he stood. Yet how does one describe the reported comments of Mr Johnson at a diplomatic gathering when he was foreign secretary? “Fuck business” may be of a piece with Michael Gove’s quip that people “have had enough of experts”, but it is not far from the Corbynite narrative.  

Delegitimising business has traditionally been a fringe far-left position. It is now bipartisan. Think back to the general election campaign. Did either party reflect in their rhetoric or policies the fact that only 16 per cent of people in the UK work in the public sector? When both parties campaign as though the public sector is the norm and the benchmark, who speaks for competitive markets? 

Mr Johnson’s promise to intervene, to buy British and to use state aid to protect UK industries was interpreted as another example of parking his tanks on Labour’s lawn. But at what point does the mask actually become the face? When does Michael Heseltine-style intervention before breakfast, lunch and dinner become Bennite control over the commanding heights of the economy. As we learnt to our cost in the 1970s, government can’t pick winners but losers can sure pick governments. 

This is not a new process. It started with Mr Corbyn’s predecessor, Ed Miliband, and became a dance as formal as a gavotte. Labour would propose a policy. The Tory government would denounce it as extreme. The tabloid press would pile in. Then the government would adopt it after all. It happened with energy price caps. And it happened with the living wage. 

The problem for the Tories is that they have not had ideologically transformative ideas for public policy since Margaret Thatcher’s government in the 1980s. The trifecta of right to buy, privatisation and ending union power were fundamental in impact and irreversible. And, in truth, those ideas were developed in the 1970s and set out in policy documents in opposition. 

This is not to say there haven’t been other Tory-initiated policies that have been a lasting success. But they’ve all been bipartisan. There is a continuity between Norman Fowler, Peter Lilley and, say, Alistair Darling and John Hutton on welfare. The same continuity is discernible between Kenneth Baker and Andrew Adonis on education, Kenneth Clarke and Alan Milburn on health. 

The core of political leadership is having a strong point of view — a question that you ask in every situation. For Thatcher’s policy unit it used to be: “Is there a more market-based solution to this problem?” And there always was. To Mr Corbyn’s Labour party it was: “Is there a way this policy can help build a socialist economy?” And there always was. 

The government was elected on the promise of fulfilling a process — “getting Brexit done” — rather than answering a question. It has not formulated the challenge about the future to which it is the only answer. 

The worst of the Conservative attempt to devise an agenda aimed at working people was shown in an infographic after a recent budget in which they boasted about cutting tax on beer and bingo. That one-dimensional vision of working-class needs and desires has been ditched, thankfully. But the void has to be filled — and that is where Labour policies present themselves. 

When Tory plans for new council house building are announced or the remake of rail franchising begins, it will all be the hand of Mr Corbyn. The Conservative party won the election, but they are far from winning the battle of ideas.