Public ideas
What’s left?
Can social democrats seize political territory from the populist right?
ABC listeners and viewers have been wondering what’s happened to Laura Tingle.
She’s reappeared with her ideas in a long read on the ABC website: Britain’s new PM is redefining populist anger. In a few words it’s about Britain’s turn to the left, a turn missed by the hyper-cautious Starmer government. There are lessons for our own nominally social-democratic government, secure in office only for so long as the troika of parties on the populist right remain so divided.
It’s easy to see that populist anger in democracies has been on the ascendency for at least ten years. It has proven hard, however, for parties on the centre-left to turn this anger to their political advantage. Trump, Farage, Orbán, Hanson and others have been able to present centrist governments as cabals of elites, out of touch with ordinary people, more concerned with cultural and symbolic issues than with the people’s electricity bills and the cost of “putting food on the table”.
Tingle describes how Britain’s Burnham is taking ownership of the grievance agenda:
Despite considerable scepticism from the UK’s powerful media, Burnham, who is Britain’s seventh PM in a decade, appears to have shown an early grasp of how to turn the sense of grievance that propelled him to Downing Street into a genuine connection with voters.
She goes on to describe his political assets, particularly his experience as Mayor of Manchester, a mid-sized city in Britain’s once industrialized northern region, and culturally a long way from London.
He overturned Thatcher-era deregulation and privatization of that city’s buses, not out of left-wing ideological fervour, but out of determination to see the public transport work for the people it is supposed to serve. Now in office as prime minister he plans to see Thames Water, the privatized monopoly responsible for water supply, sewerage treatment and stormwater in the London region, brought back into public ownership.
Without being too specific, Tingle suggests that our own government can learn from Burnham:
Burnham’s embrace and shaping of his own grievance agenda raises questions about Labor’s own political strategy. A strategy formed in the days when it didn’t want to look too different to an incumbent government, rather than one seeking to define its very own clear mandate.
There are always difficulties in translating UK politics to Australia. It’s a country with a very different history and culture. Their electoral system (first past the post) calls for different political strategies. Because they haven’t enjoyed a 50-year minerals boom their material standard of living is much lower than ours, which means their material grievances are much more serious than ours, and we have nothing so serious as their impoverished de-industrialized wasteland.
But there are opportunities for our Commonwealth and state Labor governments to recognise that the concerns of those now attracted to the populist right should also be the concerns of social-democratic governments.
As in the UK, there is pent-up anger in Australia against those who have enriched themselves through privatization and outsourcing while providing poor quality and high-cost services. Electricity distribution monopolies, employment services, telecoms, health insurers, toll roads, child care, aged care … The list could go on.
Sports and gambling have been transformed from entertainment to mammoth corporations, unrestrained by any sense of community responsibility. The defence establishment has used strategic threat assessments as permission to dip into the public budget, as if our security is to be guaranteed by spending more money. Well-heeled retirees are enjoying a tax-free life of luxury, shielded behind a media myth of a “cost of living crisis”.
To be fair to our government, it is making small steps towards taking on the really privileged elites. Tax reforms will make life a little harder for property speculators (they may have to direct their savings toward real investment). An Australian Business Number is no longer a licence to evade tax through use of discretionary trusts.
Unsurprisingly the petulant response – the tantrums – from those who have been forced to pull their snouts out of the public purse have been loud and strident, but that shouldn’t stop our government from taking on other elites. The louder they squeal the more assured can we be that the government is addressing the source of people’s genuine grievances.
To stress the point, in recognition of Burnham’s agenda, this is not about some hard “left” agenda. It’s simply about ensuring that the economy – markets and government services – work for the people they are meant to serve.
That’s am easily-grasped public idea.