Politicians must dare to shape public opinion, not just follow it | Abi Wilkinson

Within Labour, there are two competing narratives about the 1997 general election. The first is that Tony Blair was the party’s saviour. After the best part of two decades in the wilderness, his programme of “modernisation” finally made the party electable again.

By ditching Clause Four and embracing some elements of the neoliberal economic consensus – combined with a commitment to poverty reduction and, perhaps the central principle of Blairism, meritocracy – New Labour was able to appeal to a broader cross-section of voters than a more traditional incarnation of the party ever could – particularly to the aspirational “Mondeo man” – a traditional Labour voter who had switched to the Conservatives under Margaret Thatcher thanks to tax cuts and policies such as right-to-buy.

The alternative narrative, favoured by people on the left of the party, is that anyone with a red rosette could have won it – that the Tories were on their last legs, and voters were ready for change of some sort. They point to Black Wednesday as crucial in undermining the Conservatives’ reputation for economic competence, and suggest that people were growing tired of the cruellest excesses of Thatcherism.

It’s quite possible that both sides have a point. After 18 years in government it would be unusual for a party not to see its popularity drop. And it’s true that bungles such as Black Wednesday are likely to have damaged public trust. At the same time, Blair’s deliberate targeting of specific types of voters paid off. As the first Labour leader to win an election in over two decades, and with a landslide at that, it seems churlish to deny that his specific policy programme had anything to do with it.

What both narratives have in common is that they conceive of popular opinion as something parties must respond to, rather than something they can easily manipulate. Appealing to voters is about tapping into their existing priorities and concerns, but you can’t change the underlying assumptions informing their views. So you can’t make “Mondeo man” less aspirational, but you can speak to him in different ways. Right-to-buy and New Labour’s “education, education, education” focus ticked similar emotional boxes. Alternatively, voters were fed up with the Tories and it was time for Labour again. Either there was no going back after Thatcher, or public opinion is more like a pendulum.

But what if the causal relationship is actually more complicated? That is to say, what if parties can actually shape public opinion rather than merely responding to it? Though this suggestion might not sound particularly controversial in the abstract, it does raise uncomfortable questions about the logic of the triangulation approach pursued by Labour since the 90s.

Tom O’Grady, a researcher at the LSE, has produced an interesting analysis on public attitudes to welfare and welfare recipients, which significantly challenges conventional wisdom. The usual assumption is that New Labour’s adoption of a “tough” stance on benefits was tracking public opinion, and that concerns about fraud and the belief that unemployment was a lifestyle choice were already widespread. In reality, evidence suggests voters became significantly more hostile towards benefits claimants after the Labour party did.

In the early 1990s, only 25% of people felt benefits were “too high and discourage work”. This increased rapidly and by the early 2010s 50-60% held that view. In 1993, almost half of the population disagreed with the idea that “most benefit recipients don’t deserve help”. They didn’t agree with the notion of the “undeserving poor”. By the end of the New Labour years this figure had halved. This is despite the fact that unemployment was at a historic low, public spending on benefits had fallen in real terms (with most increases being to in-work benefits), and there was no evidence fraud had increased. Efforts to “make work pay” by cutting benefits for single parents, while subsidising childcare, increased the rate of employment among this demographic particularly dramatically.

Perhaps it can be explained like this: when the Conservatives accuse unemployed people of being lazy, a decent chunk of voters will dismiss that as typical Tory talk. When even the supposed party of the workers is saying it, it’s different. You don’t get that sort of consensus unless there’s something to it.

In 2015, the caretaker leader Harriet Harman decided that Labour couldn’t afford to vote against the government’s damaging welfare bill because public opinion on benefits was so negative. I wonder if she regrets, as secretary of state for social security in the early Blair years, helping to manufacture the box she found herself in.

And what if Labour is also responsible for other damaging consensuses? Here’s a real dilemma for Blair admirers: what if the Brexit vote is less a consequence of Corbyn’s personal Euroscepticism than it is the product of decades of triangulation over immigration. Every Labour leader from Blair onwards has deployed some form of anti-immigration rhetoric in an attempt to connect with voters, even if it isn’t really an accurate reflection of their policy.

If you assume hostility towards immigration is an unchangeable social fact, it’s logical to adopt a sympathetic stance in response to voters’ “legitimate concerns”. It doesn’t matter if you agree that immigration is the source of all, or any of, the problems it’s blamed for: many of your target voters believe it – and they’re less likely to support you if other parties are better able to speak to that view.

It’s difficult to know how different things would be if Labour had consistently challenged anti-immigration claims and defended migration as a positive thing. Perhaps it would have been a losing battle. But with hate crime on the rise since the Brexit vote, the possibly that further triangulation only exacerbates the issue deserves serious consideration. The issue is both moral and practical. Many would argue that acquiescing to hate for political gain is unjustifiable regardless of effectiveness. What the LSE research may point to, though, is the possibility there’s another way.

• Abi Wilkinson is a freelance journalist