The Cedar Lounge Revolution

Fianna Fáil Futures… November 22, 2011

I’m still minded to return to the Tim Bale book on the Conservative Party which I recently read, not least because so much of what he writes about their unhappy history in the aftermath of Thatcher seems to have a resonance for contemporary Irish politics and a contemporary Irish political party, that being Fianna Fáil.

As with FF, in 1997 the Tories had suffered a massive rebuff, although to not quite the same degree as FF. Labour won 418 MPs, and a majority of 179. By contrast they had just 165 MPs, with none at all in Scotland or Wales. Interestingly, as Bale notes, 41 Tory MPs were new, and only 36 had any experience of opposition.

That said the Conservatives could point to a number of more positive aspects than FF. For example they were just under 31 per cent of the vote.

But what is interesting is that in the effort to rebuild support and regain power they went for a series of fairly poor leaders, and all these in the aftermath of the election, unlike Fianna Fáil who chose Martin before election day. That was in a bid to shore up support but it may be that in retrospect the party will come to see that as a negative rather than a positive because it linked him too closely to their defeat and without the psychological gap of the election itself tied them too clearly to the previous cabinet and the previous government.

Anyhow, Bale in an interesting section ‘Search for a Strategy’ details how the rather hapless William Hague sought to reposition the Tories. Some of this was risible, for example at party conference the first year of his leadership much was made sotto voce about how he shared a room at Brighton with his fiance. Actually quite a lot was risible. He ‘ran into ridicule for wearing an irretrievably naff baseball-cap and cajole combo for a photo-opportunity’. Indeed.

But Bale also notes that a paper – Kitchen Table Conservatives – was produced by Central Office staffers Andrew Cooper and Danny Finkelstein ‘who had grown increasingly concerned that the party was simply treading water’. It asked ‘Where are we now? where do we want to be? How are we going to get there?’ and it noted that ‘a lot of the things that people had said about us before the election were true… We were out of touch. We had stopped listening. We were undisciplined. We didn’t have any clear idea of the direction in which we wanted to take Britain.’

And no less importantly the Party had to ‘communicate that the Conservative Party is changing’ and ‘was a different kind of party from the one that had lost the election’.

To do this Cooper and Finkelstein suggested four points:

First we must understand that, the more Conservatives talk like (and as a party, look more like) the rest of Britain – in both language and content the more credible our political messages will be and sound…

Second we must ensure that we are once again trusted more than Labour on the economy…

Third we must neutralise our vulnerabilities on key policy issues – principally the perception that our instincts are to undermine and under-fund our public services, especially schools and hospitals. Other things being equal we will will not win re-election while people suspect our motives on those issues.

Fourth out of the issues we identify and the new ideas we develop – we must define our purpose of the years ahead, fashioning a new narrative, which embraces the exciting opportunities as well as the new threats and challenges facing Britain in the new century.

A number of thoughts come to mind, though as a brief aside it’s entertaining to read how Peter Lilley, Deputy leader, once an arch-Thatcherite, but in some ways a premature ‘moderniser’ attempted to push the Tories from 1997-8 towards a more centrist position only to be strongly criticised for his temerity.

But what’s most immediately apparent is how little use these are to Fianna Fáil, at least in its present state. Although it is true that Tories were exhausted their project was not quite as discredited in 1997 as that of Fianna Fáil, or to be more precise it was Fianna Fáil’s last term in Government that so discredited the party. Moreover it’s difficult to see how Fianna Fáil could ‘look more like’ the rest of Ireland. There are basic logistical issues, FF is locked out of Dublin for the foreseeable future, at least at Dáil level.

Then there is the idea that FF could be ‘trusted…on the economy’.

Moving swiftly onwards, there’s the basic problem that unlike the Labour/Conservative divide FF’s approach as regards ‘key policy issues’ is that it’s too similar to the others. Perhaps it could attempt to generate some ideological differentiation, but the issue of the economy overwhelms almost all else.

And finally the ability of FF to ‘fashion a new narrative’ from their reduced state is much diminished.

None of which is to suggest that FF cannot become a potential repository for votes drifting away from Fine Gael and Labour, but as a former ’national’ movement with national reach it means that the goal it has to achieve is now arguably more difficult than ever before. One major problem for Fianna Fáil is that its nature as a cross-class coalition, encompassing the urban working class, parts of the rural working class, sections of the middle class both urban and rural and so on appears, at least on the face of polling data from Dublin, to have fractured substantially. One could argue that hitherto Fianna Fáil had few enough competitors in the urban working class. Way back when canvassing for the Workers’ Party a continual jibe from FF canvassers or members one would meet would be that they pulled in many more workers than we did. And the problem was that that was true. Neither the WP, nor Labour, could argue convincingly that they had the sort of broad based support within the working class – however defined – that FF did. All that though seems to have changed, even if one argues that the nature of the working class itself has changed. With competitors in the shape of Labour, Sinn Féin and the further and independent left to its left and Fine Gael to its right Fianna Fáil has seen a significant change in the nature of the terrain upon which it operates.

This poses obvious problems for it in terms of reaching back towards the level of support it enjoyed as recently as five years ago. It suggests that even with a fair wind it will take a long time for that to happen, and given the fissiparous nature of Irish politics in the contemporary period where coalition is now very much the norm it suggests that Fianna Fáil might never see itself regaining that level of support again. There’s nothing terribly strange about this. There are polities where the two larger parties and numerous smaller parties is not the model, and where instead there are three, or even four parties of similar size. Whether though that is the way things will stabilise or whether others will occupy the territory Fianna Fáíl once claimed as its own will provide some entertainment.