After looking at democracy, attention turns to the star teams in the sport of representative democracy: the parties.
Ideology (“left” vs “right”) has become less important in recent years, even if it’s how most political parties and politicians are categorised.
Largely a result of the growth of online media, there’s more focus on how policies are developed, how they’re communicated and how governments approach enacting them. Do people think there’s an out-of-touch elite running things (populists)? Or are problems so complicated they need to be left to scholarly experts (technocrats)?
You could add another axis – Authoritarian vs Libertarian (which is what I did last time) – but technocracy and populism have become far stronger driving forces.
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Populists have been in the ascendency over the last 15 years following a long post-Cold War period of technocratic consensus – which delivered growth and stability but also interventionism and overconfidence in the free market.
Take Brexit. It was never solely about anti-immigration sentiment. There was a populist argument against EU membership because of its technocratic approach to trade and economics, preventing states from pursuing popular, but anti-competitive, measures like nationalisation.
You would normally pinpoint an exact point where a party or individual’s political beliefs lie, but can you do that anymore? Most of our political parties now occupy multiple points at the same time and are rarely exclusively progressive or exclusively technocratic or whatever.
Take Labour. There are Momentum/Corbynites (progressive populists), Blairites/Starmerites (mildly conservative technocrats) and Welsh Labour (progressive technocrats), which means a pretty broad spectrum of political beliefs.
Parties become less successful the further they move away from the central point because they start pursuing policies that the public deems to be undeliverable or just plain nuts.
Similarly, parties that get too close to the middle end up standing for nothing and everything at the same time; that’s where you find the autocrats, with democracy ultimately sucked into a black hole.
So there’s a “goldilocks zone”/”zone of political acceptability”, where parties can expect reasonable competition to win votes, using policies that are “just right”: deliverable; in tune with the public’s desires; affordable; different enough from the status quo without being too radical.
Different factors will also change the shape and central point of each party’s orbit. Over the last 40 years, the “zone of acceptability” might have looked like this:
So where do the main parties in Wales fit in?
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Does this explain why Labour are so successful in Wales?
You could write an entire piece in itself on this, but it might go some way to explain why Labour has been so successful and why they’ll be hard to shift.
There’s the demographic angle to it. Labour does well in the most populated areas with the most constituencies. Under first-past-the-post, they rack up 100% of the seats in some regions with under 45% of the vote.
Politically, it’s because they cover the broadest ground – something I touched on when analysing their 2021 Senedd election performance.
They offer enough progressiveness without appearing overly radical (unlike Plaid and the Greens). They’re also technocratic enough to appear “clever”, while the same time act conservatively so they don’t over-promise, behaving more like managers and stewards than drivers of real change.
We’re happy with that. Wales is a small-c conservative country. Labour bends in the wind enough to offer stability and security to the ever ageing electorate, while doing and saying enough to keep the centre-left and trade unions on board. They wrap themselves in the flag when they need to, but are also “good Unionists” who don’t expect rewards for being so.
It’s not “electoral genius”. It’s just playing politics on easy mode because they’ve never had that position properly challenged.
