A wedge issue can be used to slice off a chunk of voters from the political party they traditionally support.
Can wedge issues destroy the left’s electoral coalition?
The US Republican Party has used ‘wedge issues’ like partial-birth abortion and gay marriage to entice poorer but socially conservative values voters from libertine Democratic candidates.
Australian PM John Howard has ‘wedged’, too. In 2004 he used his Labor opponent’s anti-logging policies (developed, it was said, by Canberra’s ‘latte set’) to win the votes of low income strivers whose jobs depended upon the timber industry.
Both Bush and Howard were exploiting the deeper and deeper internal contradictions of left-of-centre rainbow coalitions. The libertarian values of the Liberati - that tend to dominate the highest echelons of the ‘left-establishment’ - are increasingly foreign to working class voters who are more likely to support conservative majority values.
Britain’s Tories and wedge issues
Despite the alleged existence of a conservative majority within Britain the Tories have been slower to deploy wedge politics against Labour and the Liberal Democrats. Before the last election William Hague hoped that Section 28 (which prohibited the “promotion” of homosexuality to schoolchildren) might attract social and religious conservatives into the blue column. Opinion polls suggested that most Britons favoured the retention of Section 28. Labour still promised to repeal Section 28 and that didn’t seem to alter a significant number of votes.
The Section 28 experience shows that for an issue to achieve wedge – rather than sliver - status - it needs to have the power to move people’s votes. Many issues – upon which people have a view – are not electorally potent.
Wedge politics is harder for Britain’s conservatives because - unlike the USA and Australia – there is little to no conservative (media) infrastructure to build up support for conservative moral perspectives. The UK airwaves remain dominated by the ‘red corner questioning’ of the old media.
The left can use wedge issues against the right
In Britain, Labour has been more successful at using wedge issues against the Tories. On moral issues the elites of the Labour Party are united in their liberalism (against their base’s values) but the Tory parliamentary party is divided. Labour has used wedge issues like Section 28 and gay adoption to divide Tory MPs. MPs Alan Howarth and Shaun Woodward ‘crossed the floor’ – leaving the Conservative Party for Labour - over wedge issues.
On a broader level New Labour is trying to use its foxhunting ban to slice animal welfare supporters (who may well read The Daily Mail and are otherwise natural Tories) away from the largely pro-hunting Conservative Party.
Comments