Labour Party: Trapped by the past

While Burton attempts to make election about the future voters recall past eight years

‘We’ve conquered ... fear and replaced it with hope.” If only. Tánaiste Joan Burton set out Labour’s stall on Saturday at its annual conference in Killarney with a confidence and optimism that she knows only too well is belied by polls which show that even if her message that the economy has turned the cormer is beginning to percolate, voters remain unconvinced. Hope remains in short supply.

The language on the doorsteps remains that of revenge, the sense is that, fairly or unfairly, Labour must pay the price for the politics of austerity, of water charges. Labour languishes on 7 per cent in the polls. Burton's deputy leader, Minister for the Environment Alan Kelly, may insist that 14 months from an election is an eternity, time enough to get the message across, but his backbenchers are more sanguine. Fourteen days, is how it seems.

Labour’s challenge is to sell a pair of largely irreconcilable, contradictory messages. On the one hand, that things are genuinely getting better for most – and they are – thanks to Labour’s steady hand on the tiller, its courageous willingness to administer distasteful medicine, its willingness, as its leader reiterated with the old, hackneyed line, to “ put Ireland first - and we always will”. The enemy, the irresponsible Opposition, Fianna Fáil, who got us in this mess, to Sinn Féin and the hard-left who have no realistic solutions.

On the other, to acknowledge that the medicine was unpalatable but to insist , without being irreparably offensive to the Coalition partner with whom it is seeking another term, that it would have been far worse without Labour. The party faced the choice, as Siptu president Jack O’Connor put it, “of opting to go into opposition and grow our electoral support while the most draconian austerity agenda ever inflicted in Ireland was implemented by Fine Gael and its political allies on the right”. “I would not like to have seen a government,” Kelly argued, “over the past four years which did not have the Labour Party in it.” The enemy, Fine Gael and the right.

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The problem is that voters remain rooted in their experience of the last eight years, and that the defensive, back-foot arguments of Labour's leadership have the quality of a "qui s'excuse, s'accuse" – making excuses is in effect a guilty plea. Burton's attempt to make the election about the future, to put forward a positive programme – paid paternity leave, two-years of free pre-school, increased child benefit, more families out of the USC net, a commitment to raising the minimum wage, marriage equality – is certainly the only way to break the negativity and to rekindle the "vision thing" in Labour's lost support base. She quoted Larkin's reformist vision for Labour 's essence, to "close the gap between what ought to be and what is". It's not a bad starting point. But it may not be enough.