PTSD in Political Parties

Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is pretty well recognised in humans; I think it also happens in political parties. In fact, I think it is one of the reasons why the dominant political discourse in our country is so anondyne. In the past 20 years, both of the dominant political parties in this country have had PTSD.

For Labour, it hit them in 1992 when Neil Kinnock managed to snatch defeat from the very jaws of victory. The party had already changed – it had moved to the centre from the alarmingly leftist Labour party of 1983. But it still hadn’t won – despite facing a tired government led by a weak-willed PM. At that point, the party changed. The desire to win became everything. And that led to the gutting of any real ideology. It led to the election of Tony Blair as party leader. The rest is now, mercifully, history.

For the Tories, it probably hit about the time they decided to concur with what just about everyone else was telling them – that IDS was an utter disaster as a leader. Their PTSD took a little longer to fully manifest itself, though. Of course, that manifestation is embodied in the incumbent Prime Minister – a man who dragged the Tory party to the centre ground and away from any controversial opinions or positions whatsoever. He gutted the Tory party just as surely as Blair did for Labour.

And herein lies the problem – both Cameron and Blair have gone on to get the top job in British politics, whereas many of their predecessors as party leaders did not come close. And that is what tends to silence the ideological critics in both of their parties – it is pretty difficult to argue with success. So we can trace the impact of debilitating events such as the 1992 General Election defeat for the Labour party and the failure of the IDS leadership for the Tories through to the eventual return to success – but at the price of shedding much of the ideology that made the different parties distinct in the first place. Success – but at what price?

Don’t get me wrong, an election defeat is a clear indicator for a political party that something needs to change, and the answer is seldom a superficial change like a new leader. This is a lesson that the Labour party – post-2010 – has still yet to learn. Yet the extent to which a party changes is the crucial issue; recent politics gives us two examples of political parties who sold their souls for a chance for electoral glory. They gave into the panic of PTSD, and lost their way as a result.

So what hope do we have that parties can start to take defeats – a natural part of any engagement in a democratic political process – as a reason for change, but not a mad dash from ideological commitments to the centre ground? Well, Blair is utterly discredited and a strong candidate for the dubious title of Worst Prime Minister in Living Memory (along with his successor as PM). And while Blair – for all of his flaws – did win a stunning victory in 1997, Cameron is only in power through a coalition with the Lib Dems. Labour gained 145 seats in 1997, the Tories 97 in 2010. The law of diminishing returns seems to be rearing its head for those party leaders who choose success over political commitments.

So my point is this – any defeat is difficult for a party to take. Any failure to be returned to power or to win an election is potentially traumatic. But the key thing is how parties deal with that trauma. Gutting yourself in order to win next time or the time after that is undeniably one option, but there are others – the options that allow a party to both win and lose at the next election, but to do so with dignity.