Last Tuesday, New York City elected its first Democrat mayor in 25 years. Bill de Blasio’s populist campaign, with its focus on inequality and his promise to govern for ‘the 99 per cent’, certainly produced an impressive victory: a thumping 72 per cent of the vote that left his Republican opponent trailing nearly 50 points behind.
It also set some pulses racing on this side of the Atlantic. Ed Miliband’s strategy adviser, Stewart Wood, saw it as proof that ‘a different kind of progressive politics can capture the imagination of a public ground down by economic crisis’, while Diane Abbott believed de Blasio ‘won by breaking every rule in the New Labour playbook’. Citing the mayor-elect’s pledges to build more affordable housing, end the city police’s controversial policy of ‘stop and frisk’, and raise taxes on the rich, Abbott threw down a gauntlet: ‘the rightwing of the Labour party has prided itself on learning from the Democrats since the earliest days of Tony Blair and New Labour. Will they be so keen to learn from Bill de Blasio?’
The fact that de Blasio managed to overcome a fearsome media assault – his support for the Sandinista government of Nicaragua in the 1980s was disinterned, as was his decision to spend his honeymoon in Cuba – should perhaps serve notice on the Tories and some of their Fleet Street allies that the voters will treat such old-hat, cold war-style ‘red scare’ tactics with the contempt they deserve. His victory should also serve as a warning shot to the Conservatives that a focus on cost of living issues provides an opportunity for the left to assemble a potentially potent electoral coalition of the poor and ‘squeezed middle’. Moreover, for all the attempts to paint him as ‘Red Bill’, de Blasio was an engaging and attractive candidate who managed, as Wood suggests, to convince voters that he was ‘on their side’. And it is that very quality that polls indicate Miliband has a strong lead over David Camreon on.
Labour should not, however, get too carried away about this apparent triumph of left populism. First, let’s consider where this great victory occurred: de Blasio won in a city where Democrats outnumber Republicans by six to one and Barack Obama took 81 per cent of the vote to 18 per cent for Mitt Romney last November. Republicans have won the votes of less than one in four New Yorkers in each of the last six presidential elections. A Republican presidential candidate has not won in the city since Calvin Coolidge in 1924. While Wood accepted in his piece that ‘New York City is not the UK, and a mayoral race is not the same as a British general election’, there is a slightly more fundamental point: New York City is not the US; its politics are representative of nowhere other than New York City.
And, although it is certainly noteworthy that de Blasio is the first Democrat elected to the mayoralty since David Dinkins in 1989 (when even then a mayoral candidate’s support for leftwing governments in Nicaragua and decision to holiday in Marxist Caribbean states was getting a little passé as a campaign attack), it is worth remembering that the Republicans elected by New Yorkers to the Gracie Mansion are very firmly on the dwindling reality-based wing of the party. Indeed, you could probably stage a convention in a telephone box with all the other Republicans who share the views of outgoing mayor, Michael Bloomberg – a man who supports abortion rights, gun control, same-sex marriage, opposes the death penalty, and accepts the scientific evidence for climate change . The fact that, after twice being elected on its ticket, Bloomberg abandoned the Republican party in 2009 to win re-election as an independent and went on to endorse Obama in 2012 rather proves the point.
Second, we should be cautious about the wealth of polling data which shows the British public support de Blasio-style economic populism. It is true that over 70 per cent of voters would like the government to control energy prices and fares on public transport. Renationalisation of the rail and energy companies, as well as the Royal Mail, also command widespread public support. These sentiments are by no means unreasonable. The undervaluation of Royal Mail looks like a dodgy firesale of the nation’s assets, while the government’s plans to privatise East Coast, despite its contribution to the public purse and high levels of customer satisfaction and the reliability of its services, show a kneejerk antipathy to public sector success stories.
But assuming that polling such as this translates into votes at the ballot box is dangerous. Throughout the 1980s Labour lost a string of elections while the polls showed high levels of public support for many of it policies – including increasing income tax to pay for them. Perhaps more importantly, as YouGov’s examination of the attitudes of ‘squeezed middle’ voters for Progress last month hinted, when Tory chief strategist Lynton Crosby scans the polls, he can find equally strong public support for a series of rightwing populist positions: cutting income tax, slashing fuel duty, controlling immigration and capping welfare, to name but a few. As Peter Kellner of YouGov argued yesterday, parroting apparently popular policies back to the voters doesn’t always meet with electoral success. In 2005, he reminds us, Michael Howard ‘stroked public opinion with tough policies on Europe, crime and immigration – only to be dragged down by a reputation for being too rightwing’.
Finally, dig beneath de Blasio’s signature policy for tackling New York’s ‘tale of two cities’ – the promise to raise taxes on the very richest to pay for universal pre-school and after-school clubs – and the picture is a little more complicated. There is a strong case that this a policy with some merit that Labour could learn from: certainly, the very clear link between a tax increase and what it will be spent on is an important one (although, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown’s decision to raise national insurance to boost NHS spending in 2002 suggests this isn’t totally outside the New Labour playbook), and many would agree that boosting childcare and nursery education should be a priority for an incoming Labour government. De Blasio’s policy is also rather more subtle than it has been presented here: he has promised to replace the tax after five years with another revenue stream or cuts in city spending.
However, as the Economist magazine suggested last week, while this is ‘a worthy project … New York’s public school system is not obviously short of cash – spending per pupil is nearly $20,000, far more than some private schools spend’. Moreover, New York’s schools improved on Bloomberg’s watch – before 2002 none of the city’s public schools made New York state’s top 25 schools, today 22 out of 25 are – thanks to a policy of closing failing schools, making principals accountable for test scores and making it easier to dismiss poor teachers. In other words, reform, as well as investment, matters. And here the de Blasio story becomes a little less encouraging, not quite so heroic, and rather more politics-as-usual. In the face of bitter opposition from the teaching unions, Bloomberg also dramatically increased the number of charter schools (publicly funded but independently run schools akin to academies) in the city. Research shows that charter school students outperform their peers in city schools in both reading and maths – especially among African-American and Latino students. De Blasio, however, says he ‘does not favour’ charter schools and intends to make it more difficult for them to operate. Last month, 20,000 parents marched across Brooklyn Bridge to protest against the Democratic candidate’s plans. It is a sad case of putting ideology above evidence, especially when those who will suffer the most are those for whom de Blasio claims the most empathy. No doubt his stance helped de Blasio manage the Democratic party’s internal coalition. But what works well in such cases does not always make the best policy. That’s another lesson that Labour could learn from de Blasio’s victory.
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Robert Philpot is director of Progress. He tweets @Robert_Philpot
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Photo: Kevin Case