Be brave and take a radical turn

Ellie Keen — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 22:06:26 +0000

LABOUR appears to be in political freefall without a parachute. This is partly because of the collapse of many “new” Labour orthodoxies – the triangulations and trimmings based around a mythical middle England. This model now almost appears to belong to a different era, but to many it seems there is no coherent alternative to put in its place or too little time to implement it. That doesn’t have to be the case. I believe there is a way to regain the trust and support of those who are deserting Labour by meeting their aspirations for their place in a fairer society.

Recent election results demonstrate that support for the Labour Party is disintegrating. In Crewe, London and across the country in the local elections, the verdict was damning. But, as many of us have been flagging up over the last few years, this did not fall out of the sky, with the biggest shifts among public services workers and more generally among working-class labour voters.

In response, all we heard was: “Let’s not go back to the 1980s”. As if anyone wanted to. The other false accusation was that we wanted to retreat to some “old Labour” comfort zone. These are trite responses to a careful analysis of the trend in electoral decline. A year ago change was promised, but little delivered, as the general election that never was meant a rewind back to the old playbook of triangulation and tacking to the right.

Increasingly we are outflanked by a modern conservatism than maintains a more literate language. It talks about values and relationships, it empathises with people who are struggling, it appears to be going with the grain of people’s vulnerabilities. Meanwhile, some on our own side are adding to this topsy-turvy atmosphere by pitching for public spending cuts and tax cuts. We are in danger of trading off the very essence of social democracy.

At the heart of the debate is what the people of this country aspire to. These aspirations are not defined by individualist, Thatcherite, pro-private, anti-public greed, but by expectations of a political process that will focus on removing the barriers to realising aspirations in terms of poverty, child-care, access to housing, leisure, arts, culture and so on. It is not the aspiration of climbing the ladder and breaking the rungs after you. There is a formula at the heart of the Government based around a fundamental rupture between marginal seats and Labour’s heartlands. It cynically counter-poses aspiration and our core vote. We need politicians to break from this disparaging segmentation of the country and its associated patronising in terms of who is and isn’t aspirational. Politically, we need to reclaim the very nature of aspiration. We need to decontaminate it from the toxic interpretation of those such as Business Secretary John Hutton who see aspiration as a call for more millionaires and tax protection for fat cats. Voters are leaving Labour because of our failure to deal with their real aspirations, in terms of housing, their working poverty, their scramble over limited resources, their desperate desire for mobility and resources. These aspirations depend on collectivist social democratic actions.

So we need to start again. Simply put, why don’t we say that our purpose is to build a fairer, more equal and sustainable country and planet? With that as a goal, we need to get behind some policies which are promoted in a language and story that allows people to render intelligible their concerns and aspirations. They could include:

* a windfall tax on oil companies to help those struggling with escalating fuel bills, specifically those in fuel poverty;
* a new fair employment clause in all public contracts to end the race to the bottom in the world of work;
* building homes for families, allowing councils to build for renting;
* a fairer tax system with a new top rate and a cut in taxes for the low paid with all new revenues hypothecated to boost benefit levels for the poor;
* a moratorium on the private sector role in delivering front-line public services;
* protection for the universal service obligation of the Post Office;
* help children get healthy with free schools meals for all;
* access to all local authority sports facilities free for children under 16;
* make work pay by ending the national minimum wage rates and paying the rate for the job;
* abolishing health inequalities through proper funding of primary care;
* democratising the police through greater local accountability and elections;
* pioneering local area agreements to offer real and enduring devolution drawn up and delivered locally;
* a new radical covenant between the people and the military funded by the scrapping of Trident;
* workplace environmental reps to make work healthier and more fulfilling;
* greater working time flexibility for parents;
* tackling the legacy of Home Office failure with the introduction of earned regularisation of unregularised migrants.

These will meet the real aspirations or real people in real need – not least that half of the population which shares just 6 per cent of Britain’s wealth, while the top 1 per cent owns a quarter of it. The very rich have become the new untouchables through the myth that their massive wealth will somehow flow to the rest of us and that, if we dare tax them fairly, they will jump ship to another country. A new politics of hope must start with idealism and the belief that another world is possible. No one’s life should be compromised by the brute luck of birth.

Utopianism has been given a bad name by those who want everything to stay the same. The National Health Service, full employment and even the minimum wage were all initially decried as hopelessly utopian, but people had the courage and the desire to struggle to make them a reality. Political leaders are reluctant to take a lead. They play it safe, caught in the trap of electoral timidity when the moment demands bravery. This is not a surprise. History teaches us that lasting changes – from the vote and the NHS and on to greater women’s equality – were not handed down from on high by benevolent politicians, but fought for by millions of people, convinced that the time for change had come.

The bottom line is this. We can fight to change the direction of the party – but only if we have the political will. Given the patterns of injustice that we see every day, it is no less than a categorical imperative that we accept the challenge to change this country. It cannot be beyond our collective wit to do so. We could start by organising – and quickly – a lurch to the centre-left.

Jon Cruddas is Labour MP for Dagenham. This is an edited extract of a keynote speech given to the annual Compass conference in London last weekend.

Out-thought by the Tories

Ellie Keen — Sat, 10 May 2008 21:12:41 +0000

We could be at a turning point in the political life of the country. The electoral alliance that brought New Labour to power is disintegrating. Popular indifference towards the government is hardening into outright dislike.

While the government pretends nothing is wrong, David Cameron’s new Conservatives are staking out ground that once belonged to the left, talking about a social recession, taking the ideological initiative, hungry to win. Look at some of the rightwing thinktanks and you discover a profound shift in Tory thinking. It seeks a break from Thatcher and Hayek. The project is significant: to build a basic emotional connection with the people. Last week’s results suggest it is beginning to work.

This new pro-social, compassionate Conservatism is intellectually backed up by a focus on fraternity. The left, they argue, is wrong to think fraternity is another word for equality. And the Thatcherites are wrong to think that liberty will take care of fraternity. Fraternity is about society, wellbeing, and relationships. The Labour government, it argues, has failed because it has abandoned the fraternity of ethical socialism in favour of state management.

The government’s response has been woefully inadequate: it argues that the Tories have no policies, or they’re old Etonians with a financial black hole in their plans. They’re copying us. We’ll scrutinise their policies, expose their elitism. We’re for the many, they’re for the few. But these arguments miss the point. James Purnell has come out fighting: “We have a vision of the good society that the Conservatives cannot match.” Yet this is precisely what the Labour government lacks.

Rather than dismiss Cameron and Boris as Eton toffs, we should ask why is it that they are connecting with people. This government has lost the language of ethical politics – relationships, values, even social justice. It does not discuss fraternity or a culture of care and empathy. It doesn’t know how to speak to people’s insecurities. Its silence over the super-rich is matched by the harsh language deployed against migrants or welfare recipients. It has no vision of a more democratic way of governing. The joys, pleasures and frustrations of everyday life pass it by. Faced with a crisis it triangulates rightward. Initiative after initiative blurs into a white noise. It offers to listen. The danger is it hears only the echo of its own jargon.

And yet Cameron’s Conservatism is built on a major contradiction. It believes in social justice but thinks the state is the problem. Markets are the solution to social recession, economic development and the ecological crisis. But as the credit crunch leads us towards recession, markets won’t deliver security, let alone social justice. Yet the government can’t exploit this contradiction, owing to its own blind faith in markets.

Its time to take on the new Conservatism. We have to expose its own tensions and weaknesses. We must also spell out our own version of the good society. First, we need to reclaim fraternity – it’s not about brothers, it’s about togetherness in adversity and in joy. It goes to the heart of the question of what being human means. Fraternity is about living with and for others, building unity out of people’s differences.

Labour must re-establish its belief in equality. Equality is the moral standard of fraternity. It is the ethical core of social justice. It holds that each person is irreplaceable and of equal worth. As the dust settles on these elections, Labour needs to rediscover its soul.

Jon Cruddas is Labour MP for Dagenham. Jonathan Rutherford is editor of Soundings journal and professor of cultural studies at Middlesex University

cruddasj@parliament.uk

John Cruddas | ukwatch.net

Be brave and take a radical turn

Out-thought by the Tories