Events | 2010.01.17
Where is the vitality and vision to win? | James Purnell
Labour\'s core traditions offer voters hope and radicalism. We need to give people power and expect them to take it
Gordon Brown will lead Labour into the next election. For all my known frustrations, I can also see that he\'s a remarkable man, who deserves credit for preventing this recession becoming a depression. David Cameron would have flunked that test.
We can win – but only by offering a radically different vision of society. That isn\'t hard to find. We only need to go back to the values of the early Labour movement.
I\'ve thought a lot about my resignation since last June. I knew that no one would follow me. But I also knew I couldn\'t continue in the cabinet, saying things I no longer believed to be true. I entirely respect those who disagreed and stayed – in a way, the more difficult and trying political choice. My one regret is not having set out a policy alternative. That was a mistake.
There were major policy differences. I argued in cabinet that we needed to talk about cuts. It was clear that some cuts would be needed, because the economy was smaller than everyone had previously thought. GDP had been artificially inflated by the housing and financial bubble. By being clear about that, early and fully, I thought we would be in a better position to convince the public that the debt was down to our response to the credit crunch, not to excess spending before it. I also thought we\'d be better able to argue for paying off the debt at the right pace for the British economy, rather than the current self-harming competition between the parties of who can cut the deficit quickest.
But I also worried that we weren\'t presenting an attractive enough vision to the electorate. In government, you always annoy some of the people some of the time, and without a compelling vision, "time for a change" will do for you.
The next manifesto needs to be full of passion, of confidence, a movement for change. Where can Labour find this inspiration?
We could do much worse than peer in at a remarkable meeting in London last November. London Citizens , an alliance of 140 institutions, brought 2,000 of its members to the City to hold a political assembly. These citizens were from all different kinds of churches, mosques, synagogues, trade unions, schools and local associations. Having engaged in more than a thousand one-to-one conversations and meetings in people\'s houses, they had developed an economic agenda in response to the financial crash: it tried to limit the interest rates charged by loan sharks, improve the pay of working people through the Living Wage, and use 1% of the bailout for an endowment to create local banks. There has been a transfer of assets from local areas to the City for a long time – this endowment would redistribute the bailout to local communities, which would have money to lend to those wanting to set up companies, or to the victims of loan sharks.
On 25 November, London Citizens asked their elected politicians why the richest city in the world couldn\'t pay security guards, cleaners, cooks and caretakers a living wage of £7.60 an hour. It was organised, it was peaceful, at times joyous. At all times it was political.
As someone who loves the Labour party, seeing London Citizens in action is a bittersweet moment. On the one hand, it is an affirmation: ending poverty pay, preventing exploitation – these are Labour values. That is the sweet.
Then the bitter. I cannot remember a time when Labour nationally engaged in this kind of politics. I imagine that being at a London Citizens meeting would feel quite familiar to Keir Hardie and the trade unionists and churchgoers who founded the Labour movement.
It brings home the nature of Labour\'s present predicament, which is that while things would have been worse without us, the principle of vitality and vision that must animate a Labour government is on life support. The words are managerial, the values administrative and the vision technocratic. The root cause of our predicament lies firmly in the half-lessons of the third-way paradigm and in our lack of confidence in our traditions.
A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. The third way learned the lessons of Labour\'s mistakes in the 70s and 80s. But it elevated avoiding mistakes to an ideology. It wasn\'t confident enough where it was right, or sceptical enough where it was wrong.
In finance, the New Labour lesson was that the City could contribute wealth to fund public services and redistribution. But the failure was to realise that uncontrolled lending could also reduce the nation\'s wealth. We should value the City\'s wealth creation, but not give in to the blackmail that it will leave if regulated.
In economics, the lesson was that competitive markets work. But the failure was forgetting that markets are a method, not a measure. What matters is what society can bear, not what the market can bear. If people cannot live on the minimum wage, then we need to change the market outcome.
In public services, the lesson was that we should never be defenders of poor services. But the failure was pushing naive models of choice that too often gave power to the provider rather than the citizen. So we need to go further with reform in schools, for example, by having pupils apply to schools two or three years in advance, so oversubscribed schools can expand, undersubscribed ones be taken over, and new providers come in for pupils who don\'t get a place at one of their chosen schools.
In democracy, the lesson was that power in Britain was too centralised. But the failure was seeing constitutional reform as marginal. We need electoral reform, but also need to have confidence to build up society as a rival to and buttress against the state\'s power.
We may be battle-weary but renewal is possible and can come from Labour\'s traditions. The Labour movement was built upon organisation, the practices of reciprocity and mutuality that, if successful, led to a shared responsibility for one another\'s fate. Under the harshest conditions our forebears buried, clothed and fed each other.
That was the Labour creed, what Tawney called the "common view of the life proper to a human being". For Labour, this not only means people earning enough to live and achieve some respite from debt and usury but also a society where people build a common life in the places where they live and work.
The state cannot do this. It can regulate the market. It can and should redistribute resources. It can help make individuals powerful. But it cannot replace society. Britain has many strengths, but both its markets and its state are too strong. To balance them, we need more powerful individuals, and a more reciprocal society.
The Tories have remembered there is such a thing as society – great. We never forgot. They agree with us that people should be powerful. Great, we welcome the compliment of plagiarism.
But there has to be a method, not just a wish. The powerless need to take their power. That will only be done by organising people to act together, not by shrinking the state. That was the original politics of the Labour movement. In creating the welfare state, we gained a claim to fairness only to lose the art of association and the energy for organising.
Once again Tawney understood this in 1931 when he argued that Labour went down to defeat because "when it ought to have called people to a long and arduous struggle, it too often did the opposite. It courted them with hopes of cheaply won benefits, and, if it did not despise them, sometimes addressed them as though it did. It demanded too little and offered too much." The next Labour government will have to share the burden of governance with the people. We need to move from talking about choice to giving people power and expecting them to take it.
Labour is best placed to govern because the tradition the times need is ours. We have strong roots in the liberal tradition but we are not a liberal party, our identity is rooted in the interests of working people and an analysis of capital. While there are deep conservative elements in the Labour tradition, and we should honour them – particularly in relation to the ethics of work, loyalty and love of place, family solidarity and a respect for the moral contribution of faith – we do not accept the distribution of assets as they are, we do not accept that inherited mega-wealth is deserved, and we do not accept that our rulers are always other people. We believe that Thatcherism was an often wicked period of our national history that celebrated greed, inflicted unnecessary pain and failed to govern for the whole country.
A larger vision is possible, one that measures up to the values, sweat and tears of the Labour movement. One per cent of the bailout going to recapitalise local areas is one very important way of saying society and people come first. A living wage is another. A cap on interest rates is a third. Giving parents real power is a fourth. If our next manifesto contains ideas like these, if it offers hope and radicalism, Labour can win.
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/[...]vision-labour-traditions-power
