Mis-underestimated?

WASHINGTON — If you’ve not been brought up in the tribal politics of the UK, it might not have seemed so shocking when Prime Minister Gordon Brown welcomed Conservative former PM Lady Thatcher to Downing Street earlier this month. But Thatcher remains the ideological nemesis of Brown’s Labour Party: many of them see her as a symbol of privatizing, free-market liberalism run amok, and of the huge increases in unemployment and social unrest that accompanied her economic reforms. Brown himself had once argued that “Britain can no longer survive, far less prosper, on the simplicities of Mrs. Thatcher’s capitalism”.

And yet, this is much more than a surprise. It says a lot about how Brown wants to be seen - and that opposition parties may, in a critical area, have underestimated him.

In the pre-Brown world, the opposition Conservatives had scented an opportunity to paint their man David Cameron as the true heir of Blair’s legacy, while warning of a partisan lurch to left-wing politics with Brown. Brown has, after all, always been seen as a more authentic face of Labour politics than Blair, steeped in the party’s history in a way that Blair never was. Equally, Brown was the dour, serious Scottish politician relative to Blair’s English “ordinary guy”. The common assumption was that Brown would find it difficult to connect with the centrist and center-right voters that had put Blair in office.

So far at least, reality looks very different. Brown has sought to cultivate an image of more consensual politics, with government drawn from experts on both sides of the political aisle. He has attracted one Conservative MP to defect to Labour, while another (plus a Liberal Democrat) have joined Brown’s government to advise on their areas of expertise. Tea with Lady Thatcher, meanwhile, is a potent symbol to centre-right voters that Brown can be trusted to preserve her legacy. And if the point needed hammering home, Brown had earlier emphasized the similarities between himself and Lady Thatcher, describing them both as “conviction politicians”.

A speech to the party conference this week developed this appeal. It had plenty of meat for his own party, but he also spoke to a more conservative (and Conservative) audience: his speech was sprinkled with references to Britain and British values, appealing to a patriotism with which the Conservatives have traditionally been more comfortable; and, he tackled issues like drugs, immigration, and crime in a way intended to reassure middle class voters. Significantly, there was no conference-rousing criticism of Cameron and the Conservatives (or by extension, natural Conservative voters) – in fact, he didn’t mention them once. The right-of-center Daily Mail was left to opine: “couldn’t much of his speech have come quite as naturally from a Conservative?”

Have Conservative strategists ‘mis-underestimated’ Brown’s appeal to voters? Perhaps - and far from simply challenging them in the political center-ground, his approach may also hit the Conservatives where it hurts most. I noted in an earlier post that while Cameron was attempting to re-brand his party along modern and inclusive lines, vocal critics argued that he was abandoning some of their most deeply held principles. Brown’s approach potentially deepens Cameron’s dilemma by saying what some social conservatives in his party want to hear, but which Cameron himself may be fearful of saying because it conflicts with that modernising agenda. As one conservative commentator put it, Brown is: “reaching out to the conservatives of middle Britain who have been so completely abandoned by the [Conservative Party].”

Time will tell what impact this will have. Recent opinion polls look good for Brown, and speculation that he will call a snap election within the next few weeks is rife (constitutionally, he does not have to do so until May 2010). But these are still early days for Brown’s “big tent” and it has yet to be tested in the daily rough-and-tumble of regular politics. Meanwhile, his approach so far suggests he’s taking the task of building a sustainable new coalition of support very seriously indeed.

This entry was posted by Richard Salt on Thursday, September 27th, 2007 at 3:30 pm and is filed under European Union, Politics, Transatlantic Relations, U.K. Politics.

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