Republican's devastating critique of Jimmy Carter chimes with Labour plan to make cost-of-living crisis a battleground
As the father of modern conservatism, Ronald Reagan is not a natural poster boy for thinkers on the left. But one of the main brains drawing up Labour's election battle plans believes that Reagan's lethal question in the 1980 US presidential election, which helped him defeat Jimmy Carter, could help Labour tip the balance against the Tories in 2015.
"The Reagan formulation from 1980 against Jimmy Carter was 10 words – 'are you better off than you were four years ago?'," the shadow foreign secretary, Douglas Alexander, says. "It seems to me that David Cameron has no convincing answer to that question."
If that sounds a bit gloomy – a stern-looking Reagan delivered the killer line directly to the camera in his closing statement in the presidential debate – then Alexander plans to jump forward four years to take a flavour of Reagan's "morning again in America" theme from his successful re-election bid in 1984.
"For the next 18 months we've got to fight a campaign based around optimism and confidence, challenging the cynicism and defeatism abroad in Britain today," Alexander adds.
The lessons from US politics in the 1980s – which come naturally to Alexander, who worked on the doomed presidential campaign of the Democrat Michael Dukakis in 1988 – highlight Labour's key themes in the runup to the election.
Ed Miliband and his shadow cabinet will unveil a series of policies to tackle the crisis of the growing cost of living. The party will also highlight what Alexander calls the Tories' "relentlessly pessimistic and negative" campaigning, which he says shows they have no idea about the impact of the costs of living after inflation outstripped pay in 37 out of the 38 months the coalition has been in office.
Alexander cites as an example of the Tories' negativity the decision to hire Lynton Crosby and Jim Messina, Barack Obama's campaign manager in 2012. "Jim Messina says that his favourite political philosopher is the boxer, Mike Tyson, who says: 'My opponents have a plan, then I punch them in the face and my opponents don't have a plan any more.' That gives you a sense as to how Messina, Crosby and the Conservatives are planning to fight a negative campaign against Labour."
Labour made a start on Friday night to its week of announcements when it pledged to reverse the so-called bedroom tax after the National Housing Federation found that more half of the families affected by the change had fallen into debt three months after the so-called "spare room subsidy" was introduced. In a Guardian interview before the Labour conference, Alexander explains Labour's dual track approach – attacking the Tories for pessimism while offering an upbeat message about its own plans.
"There is an almost imprisoning cynicism towards the condition of Britain and the capacity of Britain to be better in the future at the moment. As a party of the progressive centre left we have to counter that cynicism with a message that Britain can be better in the future. It seems to me that the Conservatives neither recognise the scale of the living standards crisis facing British families nor offer credible answers as to how the British economy or British society can be better in the future.
"The kind of complacency that we've seen in recent days from George Osborne speaks volumes to me."
As a former student of the "iron chancellor" Gordon Brown – he eventually broke with his former boss – Alexander, 45, knows that Labour cannot snipe at the Tories and assume the election will automatically fall its way. He knows that Labour has to offer credible plans which acknowledge that the greatest economic challenge facing developed countries like Britain – wage rises that fail to keep up with inflation as China undercuts workers in the west – pre-date Cameron's arrival.
Unsurprisingly, the former University of Pennsylvania exchange student turns to the landmark poster pinned against Bill Clinton's campaign office for the 1992 US presidential election by the Ragin' Cajun James Carville which said: "The economy, stupid." The poster symbolised an era, Alexander says, in which it was assumed that if the economy grew then living standards would rise. "That assumption doesn't apply any more," Alexander says as he acknowledges that all sides face "fundamental questions" about how benefits of growth can spread across the UK.
The Tories, he says, will hit trouble because they have very little to say about the most important debate of the era which will become even more intense as the economy picks up. "Even if, as we all hope, we see sustainable growth in the British economy in the years ahead, we may see the end of the great recession but many millions of British voters will still be suffering a personal recession. The gap between pay and prices is a real and dominant reality for families across the country. In 37 out of 38 months of this government, the gap between pay and prices has increased. So in that sense we have been in a position where in every one of those months people have been working harder but find that they are falling behind."
Alexander acknowledges there are no easy solutions because global forces are at work, although progressives can move to mitigate their impact. "There are deep structural changes in society in terms of a coincidence of a globalisation and technology change that has meant that work is more mobile than ever was the case a couple of decades ago, but at the same time many of the checks and balances that worked effectively in more closed economies in the past have been found wanting when you have seen an elite of the super-rich, if you like, accelerate away from the rest of society."
With his ringside seat during the Blair-Brown wars – he first started working for Brown in 1990 and entered parliament at a byelection six months after Labour's landslide win in 1997 – Alexander knows that the electorate is unlikely to give Labour much of a hearing unless it owns up to mistakes in its past. "We do need to confirm we have broken from our immediate past, we need to be honest about mistakes that were made when we were in office and evidence that we've learned the right lessons," he says.
Alexander highlights this approach when he dismisses as a relic of a "discredited" past the memoirs of Damian McBride, Brown's former press secretary, who says that he failed to support his sister and former Scottish Labour leader Wendy Alexander during a donation scandal. "The style of politics that Damian McBride represents has been discredited and Labour has moved on," he says.
The Tories, who had great fun on Friday with the McBride memoirs, believe that a more recent legacy from Labour's past represents the greatest threat to the party. Osborne argues that until Labour acknowledges its role in allowing the fiscal deficit to reach more than 10% of GDP it will never win back the confidence of the British people.
Alexander dismisses the idea that the deficit, which was caused by the fall in tax receipts after the global financial crash, was caused by Labour spending: "Most people understand that Lehman Brothers didn't collapse because Gordon Brown built too many schools and hospitals."
But the shadow foreign secretary indicates that Labour did itself no favours when Brown insisted, in the wake of the financial crash, that the 2010 election would present a choice between Labour investment and Tory cuts. "I have said publicly before that we got the policy right but the political response wrong to the crash … for too long in the parliament we appeared to deny the consequences of the crisis."
Alexander says that the Osborne's view about Labour presents a risk to the Tories who are in danger of looking to the past. He argues that the Conservatives will want to fight "a backward-looking campaign because they have so little to show for the period of office they have had since 2010", while presenting Labour as progressive party "in the future business".
The future is uppermost in Alexander's mind because he is about to publish a book – Influencing Tomorrow, Future Challenges for British Foreign Policy – which examines the "crossroads" Britain faces a decade on from the Iraq war. Alexander has reached a conclusion: Britain can only play a major role in the world if it acknowledges the rise of Beijing and a shift of economic power from north to south.
Alexander will use the book to show that the Labour party is not turning its back on the world after it helped to defeat the government motion on Syria in the House of Commons last month, prompting Cameron to rule out any British involvement in military strikes against the Assad regime. But Alexander indicates that the vote also shows that the era of liberal interventionism on the scale championed by Tony Blair is over. "Kneejerk interventionism or kneejerk isolationism is the wrong course for Britain," he says. "We should resist an impulse to intervene now and ask hard questions later, as surely as we should resist an impulse to suggest somehow that Britain can pull up the drawbridge and retreat from the world.
"I have real concerns that Ukip-style isolationism is now abroad in the Tory backbenches, a kind of anti-Europe, anti-immigration, anti-foreign-aid, 'stop the world I want to get off' isolationism. As a party of progressive internationalism, we need to confront that political challenge. There is nothing splendid about isolation for Britain in the 21st century. We want to as a nation amplify our values and extend our interests and that's best done by engaging, whether it be in the EU, in the United Nations and Nato or in the Commonwealth, the range of organisations by which we can find shared solutions to the shared problems that we face."
The Labour party suffered a bruising few weeks after the Syria vote when the coalition accused Miliband of having put party before politics. Alexander, who insists there were major differences over the role of the UN and whether military action would be open-ended, sees it differently, arguing that the vote helped pave the way for the pause in military strikes by Barack Obama, allowing John Kerry and Sergei Lavrov to outline a timetable for the removal of chemical weapons.
William Hague, however, said that Alexander's approach reminded him of the "cockerel who thought its crowing brought about the dawn". Alexander gives this short shrift: "I wish his jokes and his lines were matched by his judgment. Don't take my word for it. Look at the words of the president of the United States, within 48 hours of the vote in the Commons, specifically referencing the votes in Westminster in explaining his decision to take the matter to Congress. Look at the New York Times last week in its report that said the votes in the British parliament had dampened the momentum.
"Nobody who cast their vote that Thursday evening can claim to have anticipated the diplomatic path that would open up, in part as a result of the pause in military intervention. But all of us should be grateful that that outcome has now been reached."
Alexander, who accepts in light of the findings of the UN weapons inspectors that the Assad regime was responsible for the chemical weapons attack on 21 August, says Labour will be "unstinting" in its support of the Geneva II talks which the US and Russia are trying to convene. He is highly cautious about the claim in the Guardian by Qadri Jamil, the Syrian deputy prime minister, that Damascus will call a ceasefire in Geneva because the conflict has reached a stalemate. Britain should make a judgment on actions, rather than words, he said.
But he agrees with Hague who has said British troops will not play a role in guarding weapons inspectors if they enter Syria under the Kerry-Lavrov plan.
"I would be concerned, indeed unconvinced, that if British troops participated in that mission on the ground in Syria it might not exacerbate rather than assist the weapons inspectors in their work, given Assad's view of Britain to date and the views that Britain has taken at the security council."
The Labour party may have had a hand in inadvertently shaping diplomatic events on Syria. But it knows from Reagan that its success in 2015 will depend on a compelling and credible domestic vision instead.
But domestic and international affairs are likely to collide as the Labour leadership faces calls from within the shadow cabinet to pledge to hold a referendum on Britain's EU membership. Alexander said he had not changed his view that now was not the time for a referendum.
He said: "I have long stated Labour's position that we don't believe now is the time to commit to an in-out referendum in 2017. That was my position back in January, that was my position last week and it will be my position next week … The best policy for Britain is not exit from Europe but reform within Europe. That was our position, it is our position, it will continue to be our position." Reported by guardian.co.uk 2 days ago.
As the father of modern conservatism, Ronald Reagan is not a natural poster boy for thinkers on the left. But one of the main brains drawing up Labour's election battle plans believes that Reagan's lethal question in the 1980 US presidential election, which helped him defeat Jimmy Carter, could help Labour tip the balance against the Tories in 2015.
"The Reagan formulation from 1980 against Jimmy Carter was 10 words – 'are you better off than you were four years ago?'," the shadow foreign secretary, Douglas Alexander, says. "It seems to me that David Cameron has no convincing answer to that question."
If that sounds a bit gloomy – a stern-looking Reagan delivered the killer line directly to the camera in his closing statement in the presidential debate – then Alexander plans to jump forward four years to take a flavour of Reagan's "morning again in America" theme from his successful re-election bid in 1984.
"For the next 18 months we've got to fight a campaign based around optimism and confidence, challenging the cynicism and defeatism abroad in Britain today," Alexander adds.
The lessons from US politics in the 1980s – which come naturally to Alexander, who worked on the doomed presidential campaign of the Democrat Michael Dukakis in 1988 – highlight Labour's key themes in the runup to the election.
Ed Miliband and his shadow cabinet will unveil a series of policies to tackle the crisis of the growing cost of living. The party will also highlight what Alexander calls the Tories' "relentlessly pessimistic and negative" campaigning, which he says shows they have no idea about the impact of the costs of living after inflation outstripped pay in 37 out of the 38 months the coalition has been in office.
Alexander cites as an example of the Tories' negativity the decision to hire Lynton Crosby and Jim Messina, Barack Obama's campaign manager in 2012. "Jim Messina says that his favourite political philosopher is the boxer, Mike Tyson, who says: 'My opponents have a plan, then I punch them in the face and my opponents don't have a plan any more.' That gives you a sense as to how Messina, Crosby and the Conservatives are planning to fight a negative campaign against Labour."
Labour made a start on Friday night to its week of announcements when it pledged to reverse the so-called bedroom tax after the National Housing Federation found that more half of the families affected by the change had fallen into debt three months after the so-called "spare room subsidy" was introduced. In a Guardian interview before the Labour conference, Alexander explains Labour's dual track approach – attacking the Tories for pessimism while offering an upbeat message about its own plans.
"There is an almost imprisoning cynicism towards the condition of Britain and the capacity of Britain to be better in the future at the moment. As a party of the progressive centre left we have to counter that cynicism with a message that Britain can be better in the future. It seems to me that the Conservatives neither recognise the scale of the living standards crisis facing British families nor offer credible answers as to how the British economy or British society can be better in the future.
"The kind of complacency that we've seen in recent days from George Osborne speaks volumes to me."
As a former student of the "iron chancellor" Gordon Brown – he eventually broke with his former boss – Alexander, 45, knows that Labour cannot snipe at the Tories and assume the election will automatically fall its way. He knows that Labour has to offer credible plans which acknowledge that the greatest economic challenge facing developed countries like Britain – wage rises that fail to keep up with inflation as China undercuts workers in the west – pre-date Cameron's arrival.
Unsurprisingly, the former University of Pennsylvania exchange student turns to the landmark poster pinned against Bill Clinton's campaign office for the 1992 US presidential election by the Ragin' Cajun James Carville which said: "The economy, stupid." The poster symbolised an era, Alexander says, in which it was assumed that if the economy grew then living standards would rise. "That assumption doesn't apply any more," Alexander says as he acknowledges that all sides face "fundamental questions" about how benefits of growth can spread across the UK.
The Tories, he says, will hit trouble because they have very little to say about the most important debate of the era which will become even more intense as the economy picks up. "Even if, as we all hope, we see sustainable growth in the British economy in the years ahead, we may see the end of the great recession but many millions of British voters will still be suffering a personal recession. The gap between pay and prices is a real and dominant reality for families across the country. In 37 out of 38 months of this government, the gap between pay and prices has increased. So in that sense we have been in a position where in every one of those months people have been working harder but find that they are falling behind."
Alexander acknowledges there are no easy solutions because global forces are at work, although progressives can move to mitigate their impact. "There are deep structural changes in society in terms of a coincidence of a globalisation and technology change that has meant that work is more mobile than ever was the case a couple of decades ago, but at the same time many of the checks and balances that worked effectively in more closed economies in the past have been found wanting when you have seen an elite of the super-rich, if you like, accelerate away from the rest of society."
With his ringside seat during the Blair-Brown wars – he first started working for Brown in 1990 and entered parliament at a byelection six months after Labour's landslide win in 1997 – Alexander knows that the electorate is unlikely to give Labour much of a hearing unless it owns up to mistakes in its past. "We do need to confirm we have broken from our immediate past, we need to be honest about mistakes that were made when we were in office and evidence that we've learned the right lessons," he says.
Alexander highlights this approach when he dismisses as a relic of a "discredited" past the memoirs of Damian McBride, Brown's former press secretary, who says that he failed to support his sister and former Scottish Labour leader Wendy Alexander during a donation scandal. "The style of politics that Damian McBride represents has been discredited and Labour has moved on," he says.
The Tories, who had great fun on Friday with the McBride memoirs, believe that a more recent legacy from Labour's past represents the greatest threat to the party. Osborne argues that until Labour acknowledges its role in allowing the fiscal deficit to reach more than 10% of GDP it will never win back the confidence of the British people.
Alexander dismisses the idea that the deficit, which was caused by the fall in tax receipts after the global financial crash, was caused by Labour spending: "Most people understand that Lehman Brothers didn't collapse because Gordon Brown built too many schools and hospitals."
But the shadow foreign secretary indicates that Labour did itself no favours when Brown insisted, in the wake of the financial crash, that the 2010 election would present a choice between Labour investment and Tory cuts. "I have said publicly before that we got the policy right but the political response wrong to the crash … for too long in the parliament we appeared to deny the consequences of the crisis."
Alexander says that the Osborne's view about Labour presents a risk to the Tories who are in danger of looking to the past. He argues that the Conservatives will want to fight "a backward-looking campaign because they have so little to show for the period of office they have had since 2010", while presenting Labour as progressive party "in the future business".
The future is uppermost in Alexander's mind because he is about to publish a book – Influencing Tomorrow, Future Challenges for British Foreign Policy – which examines the "crossroads" Britain faces a decade on from the Iraq war. Alexander has reached a conclusion: Britain can only play a major role in the world if it acknowledges the rise of Beijing and a shift of economic power from north to south.
Alexander will use the book to show that the Labour party is not turning its back on the world after it helped to defeat the government motion on Syria in the House of Commons last month, prompting Cameron to rule out any British involvement in military strikes against the Assad regime. But Alexander indicates that the vote also shows that the era of liberal interventionism on the scale championed by Tony Blair is over. "Kneejerk interventionism or kneejerk isolationism is the wrong course for Britain," he says. "We should resist an impulse to intervene now and ask hard questions later, as surely as we should resist an impulse to suggest somehow that Britain can pull up the drawbridge and retreat from the world.
"I have real concerns that Ukip-style isolationism is now abroad in the Tory backbenches, a kind of anti-Europe, anti-immigration, anti-foreign-aid, 'stop the world I want to get off' isolationism. As a party of progressive internationalism, we need to confront that political challenge. There is nothing splendid about isolation for Britain in the 21st century. We want to as a nation amplify our values and extend our interests and that's best done by engaging, whether it be in the EU, in the United Nations and Nato or in the Commonwealth, the range of organisations by which we can find shared solutions to the shared problems that we face."
The Labour party suffered a bruising few weeks after the Syria vote when the coalition accused Miliband of having put party before politics. Alexander, who insists there were major differences over the role of the UN and whether military action would be open-ended, sees it differently, arguing that the vote helped pave the way for the pause in military strikes by Barack Obama, allowing John Kerry and Sergei Lavrov to outline a timetable for the removal of chemical weapons.
William Hague, however, said that Alexander's approach reminded him of the "cockerel who thought its crowing brought about the dawn". Alexander gives this short shrift: "I wish his jokes and his lines were matched by his judgment. Don't take my word for it. Look at the words of the president of the United States, within 48 hours of the vote in the Commons, specifically referencing the votes in Westminster in explaining his decision to take the matter to Congress. Look at the New York Times last week in its report that said the votes in the British parliament had dampened the momentum.
"Nobody who cast their vote that Thursday evening can claim to have anticipated the diplomatic path that would open up, in part as a result of the pause in military intervention. But all of us should be grateful that that outcome has now been reached."
Alexander, who accepts in light of the findings of the UN weapons inspectors that the Assad regime was responsible for the chemical weapons attack on 21 August, says Labour will be "unstinting" in its support of the Geneva II talks which the US and Russia are trying to convene. He is highly cautious about the claim in the Guardian by Qadri Jamil, the Syrian deputy prime minister, that Damascus will call a ceasefire in Geneva because the conflict has reached a stalemate. Britain should make a judgment on actions, rather than words, he said.
But he agrees with Hague who has said British troops will not play a role in guarding weapons inspectors if they enter Syria under the Kerry-Lavrov plan.
"I would be concerned, indeed unconvinced, that if British troops participated in that mission on the ground in Syria it might not exacerbate rather than assist the weapons inspectors in their work, given Assad's view of Britain to date and the views that Britain has taken at the security council."
The Labour party may have had a hand in inadvertently shaping diplomatic events on Syria. But it knows from Reagan that its success in 2015 will depend on a compelling and credible domestic vision instead.
But domestic and international affairs are likely to collide as the Labour leadership faces calls from within the shadow cabinet to pledge to hold a referendum on Britain's EU membership. Alexander said he had not changed his view that now was not the time for a referendum.
He said: "I have long stated Labour's position that we don't believe now is the time to commit to an in-out referendum in 2017. That was my position back in January, that was my position last week and it will be my position next week … The best policy for Britain is not exit from Europe but reform within Europe. That was our position, it is our position, it will continue to be our position." Reported by guardian.co.uk 2 days ago.