Below was originally published as a chapter as part of an eBook called "Labour's Future" published by Open Left.
You can download the eBook for free by clicking here.
Revitalising Our Message'What matters' is more important than 'what works'
The great danger with election post-mortems is that everyone decides that they were right all along. Our preconceptions are superimposed onto the results. Did David Cameron miss out on a majority because his party was insufficiently modern? Or because he didn’t talk about Europe, tax cuts and immigration enough? Cameron’s inner circle has one view, the 1922 committee has another.
Labour needs to avoid this mistake. We must get beyond a conversation in which New Labour types speak only of lost support among C2s while idealists lament the betrayal of the working class. The truth is more complex – and more challenging – than either of these diagnoses. People turned away from Labour because they were not clear what we stood for. Many of those who voted for us did so whilst biting their lip.
I served in our government and am proud of its achievements. As a minister it was a privilege to be involved directly with a few of them, including building a national apprenticeships scheme; helping thousands of adults learn to read and write for the first time; and seeing more people from a wider range of backgrounds go to university than ever before. But pride in what we achieved must not stand in the way of admitting that we made mistakes, or that our government lost its reforming zeal and sense of mission. Rightly, the threshold for a fourth term in office is high – it requires more energy and radicalism not less – and we must accept that we fell well short.
The question now is how deeply we rethink and how quickly we regroup. Rather than attempting to sort the electorate into neat voting blocks, with each offered a new shopping list of policies, we need to face up to some bigger questions. We must revitalise our party, recognising the limitations of the political methods of the last fifteen years. We must re-discover some clearer values that people can identify with, whatever their race, gender or social class. And we must get to grips quickly with a new political landscape that no-one expected just a couple of a months ago.
Rebuilding our movementThere is now a growing consensus that Labour needs to become a movement again. Good. This is a return to politics as it should be.
Traditionalists may laud the ‘evolutionary’ nature of the British political system but the voices of campaigners echo though our history as the force behind great social and political change. The Chartists paved the way for dramatic extensions of the franchise in the nineteenth century; women won the vote by demanding it, not asking for it politely; unions brought working people together to campaign for decent pay and conditions in industrial Britain; civil rights campaigners won great cultural and political battles during the 1960s and 70s; and most recently the green movement has helped put the environment centre stage.
There are new tools and technologies that must be harnessed by modern political movements, but this is a tradition as old as politics itself. Politicians should help mobilise people, not just represent them.
The task is to make sure all the talk does not sound hollow. To inspire and engage people we must enfranchise them. Over the last fifteen years our own members have often felt ignored and patronised by the party hierarchy. Policy was centralised, our party conference became ever more stage-managed and any form of disagreement was seen as an unwelcome distraction. There are historical reasons for this political culture. They include a powerful and hostile press that had played its part in our defeat in 1992; the emergence of twenty-four hour news coverage, which demanded a new announcements and initiative to cover every day; and of course the long shadow cast by internal strife in our party during the 1980s.
Each of these increased the temptation to reduce political parties to tools of mass communication, directed by a few people at the centre. But this political culture has hollowed out our party and demoralised our members, who feel shut out from their own party. As a first step to restoring their voice, we should commit to balloting all members on policy for the next manifesto.
Nor can we afford to be too inward looking. We must open up our political culture, experimenting with open primaries and other methods of reaching people who don’t carry a party membership card around in their wallets. Movements are energised not by narrow tribalism but a willingness to work people from other organisations and political traditions. The coalition is having to learn how to agree and disagree in public, we should too.
Reconnecting values with policy Few people in the party will doubt that Labour now needs a policy review. There hasn’t been a comprehensive exercise like this since 1994. But if we think better policy will be enough then we are mistaken. Too often we have given the impression that politics is merely a process for determining ‘what works’. It should be a contest over what matters.
People want to know not just that we have a four-point plan for the economic recovery, but also what the values are behind the ideas we put forward. In a less ideological age this can’t be taken for granted. Voters know that however comprehensive a manifesto (or coalition document), all governments have to respond to events that cannot be anticipated. Clear values are how voters negotiate the unknown and get beyond what can seem like technocratic debates over policy.
So policies like a cap on interest rates, worker representation on company boards or policies for a living wage are good ideas. But we need to explain why they are things we, the Labour Party, are putting forward. A cap on interest rates reflects the belief that there are some ways of making money that societies should not accept. Worker representation on boards reflects is an assertion that shareholders’ interests should be balanced with those of other stakeholders in society. Campaigning for a living wage expresses the idea that people should be treated with respect, not exploited as commodities. Too often we give the impression that such ideas are concessions to one wing of our party. They are not – they are affirmations of the values that we should hold dear.
In other areas of policy we must regain ground that we surrendered to the Tories in the last few years. During the campaign we pointed out that the married couples allowance is a risible policy – wasteful, judgemental and counterproductive all at once. But what did we have to say about the family in modern Britain? Are we comfortable that a quarter of children now grow up in single parent households in Britain? What do we have to say about fatherhood in the twenty-first century? Shouldn’t parenting be a stronger part of the story we tell on improving social mobility or reducing crime? Family policy is ripe for new thinking.
On the vexed issues of welfare and immigration we must work harder than simply repeating people’s concerns back to them. There are underlying failures of policy. We didn’t build enough houses or recognise the pressure migration can place on public services. With welfare, the devilish complexity of the benefits system is part of the reason that too many people are languishing out of work. A serious re-think on these issues has to make sense, not just headlines.
More than this though, we must be clear about the values that guide policy. We must remember that our welfare state is built on the idea of contribution as well as need. People feel that time spent on housing waiting lists should count for something – because they have paid into the system. That is not a racist view, it is a communitarian one. Similarly, most people are clear that welfare entitlements are not unconditional and should depend on willingness to work – but that those who do work should not live in poverty. Rather than developing knee-jerk, reactionary responses to isolated issues, our job is to articulate a view on the modern welfare state. There must be a common set of principles that can be applied across areas of policy, including pensions and care for the elderly.
While we must be clear where we stand on markets, the family and the welfare state, we must also repair our relationship with liberal idealists who felt that they could no longer support us at the last election. One of the central reasons for this was our failure to see through our modernising mission on constitutional reform. We left office with an unelected House of Lords, no written constitution and a voting system many people feel takes them for granted. We made progress through devolution and the removal of hereditary peers – but paid an electoral price for our lack of urgency.
Civil liberties, meanwhile, were the casualties of New Labour’s political strategy. It does not take a libertarian to admit that we were too casual with civil liberties.
As party strategists sought to close down crime as an area of political vulnerability by moving to the Right, David Cameron simply occupied the progressive ground that we had vacated. We were left mocking the idea that young people need love to steer them away from crime and defending a series of positions that many were not comfortable with. We are a party that believes in the power of government to improve society but we must recognise that the State is not always a benign or welcome force in people’s lives.
The new political landscapeAs we renew our party and refresh our offer to the British people, we must be careful not to underestimate the political significance of the coalition. It is true that many centre-left voters were offended by the decision of the Liberal Democrats to join the Conservatives in government. Nick Clegg himself admits that much. But the early indications are that the coalition is more popular than many people would like to think.
More fundamentally, Nick Clegg may have done more to rebrand the Tory party than any Conservative politician that I can remember. David Cameron understood the need to change his party and rethink its approach on some important areas, from gay rights to the environment. But the swirling winds of the financial crisis blew his modernisation project off course. Faced with some fundamental questions about the market and the state he and his party retreated back into a more traditional comfort zone.
In this respect the coalition is a gift to the team around Cameron. It has given the modernisers the opportunity to finish what they started, demonstrating an acceptance of the more open and tolerant place that Britain has become. The budget demonstrated a residual attachment to Thatcherite economics, but on issues like civil liberties, constitutional reform and even prison policy there are signs that some of the more malign elements of Cameron’s party have been marginalised. The Tories may well be a different electoral proposition altogether if the coalition lasts a full term.
This is a big test of our maturity as a political party. We governed for just 23 years in the twentieth century. We spent years in the electoral wilderness, riven by internal divisions. We emerged nervous of pluralism and democratic debate. After three terms in office, an electoral defeat and the biggest economic crisis in generations the task ahead is clear. We must rediscover our faith in democracy, our own unique identity and our hunger for power.
