The Labour Party can make a comeback under Pat Rabbitte, provided it gets its thinking a little straighter, writes John Waters.
As demonstrated by the recent annual convention, it has come a long way in confronting new realities, and, as signalled by Mr Rabbitte in his leader's address, now sees itself as a party of the middle classes. More precisely, it is the party of middle-class elements seeking to present their self-interest in the apparel of social concern. Since this is now the outlook of a majority of the voting public, Labour's time may finally have arrived.
The modern era has delivered a new and disquieting reality-equation with regard to democratic participation: the less money you have, the less inclined you are to vote. Hence parties which have traditionally targeted the lower end of the economic scale must change or die. In truth, the Labour Party's past inability to break into the premiership had to do with the lack of motivation of its client base: without a revolutionary ardour, it was impossible to mobilise the working/social welfare classes, or even, as Pat Rabbitte concedes, to get them to vote for the party which seemed their natural home.
But in the past decade the Irish middle classes have grown exponentially, and with this expansion has arrived an unexpected opportunity for left-wing politicians with a rudimentary grasp of social psychology. Nowadays, voters are concerned with the management of their interests, which mainly means their money, and in ensuring that this is given a gracing aspect by being clothed in a rhetoric of social concern.
But this aspiration is doomed because it is all about optics. And so we need to develop a public discourse focused on the promulgation of the rational, enlightened self-interest of comfortable society in questions like justice and fairness. For the moment we persist with a mixture of the old dialogue based on compassion and opposing class interests, punctuated by lapses into unabashed self-interest when specific benefits are threatened.
A glance down the top 10 priorities of the electorate as expressed in last week's Irish Times/TNS mrbi opinion poll demonstrates this succinctly: hospitals, inflation, jobs, economy, crime, education, housing, car insurance, transport, childcare - all fundamentally issues of money.
Two months ago, we were led to believe that two-thirds of the Irish electorate were terminally displeased with the Government's tacit support for the US/UK-led invasion of Iraq, and the alleged breach of Irish neutrality involved. In last week's poll, with the war over and won, we observe that neutrality would influence 2 per cent of voters.
Labour is coming to understand that post-socialist politics is not just about the market: politics is a market in which candidates and parties seek to sell their competence to lead. While there was a degree of talk in Killarney about socialist principles, equality and fairness, the core message had to do with Labour's capacity to represent the reasonably well-off. The leader, while careful to gratify the institutional doublethink with the occasional red-tinted broadside, placed most of his emphases on issues - health, education, the economy, housing - which have been seen to dominate the political appetites of those who already have money.
And at the end of his speech he made it crystal clear: "We have to adapt to the new Ireland that we ourselves helped to create."
The Minister for Communications, Dermot Ahern, put Labour's dilemma rather succinctly in the final paragraph of a letter published in this newspaper in the wake of the Labour Party conference: "Still defined by an exuberance of concern and an absence of credible policy, Labour will remain a mere party-political refuge for middle-class guilt." And yet, despite a superficial eloquence, this analysis is somewhat unfair, since it fails to acknowledge that the condition diagnosed affects all other parties also.
While the Tiger years have unleashed their share of ostentation, we have not yet seen here the shut-your-face-and-take-a-look-at-my-wad sensibility that characterised Thatcherite Britain. And while our guilt-buds are irritated by the daily preaching of the new clergy who would have us believe that acquiring wealth is little short of a crime, we are unable to mobilise the resulting guilt and unease in either our own interests or the common good.
We are uneasy about getting richer, but are not persuaded of the practical virtue of sharing. The challenge for the Labour Party, therefore, is not so much how to disguise its advocacy of the interests of the new middle classes in a convincing rhetoric of social concern, but how to convince the newly affluent that a drive towards justice and fairness would deliver unexpected benefits to render their affluence more comfortable in every sense of the word.