Halfway through our second term, the real challenge to Labour is not from the Conservatives – although we should never be complacent about them – it is from ourselves.
The danger is that we appear dislocated from the people we were elected to represent. The warning signs are clear: low turnout, cries of ‘they’re all the same,’ and a growing willingness by people to turn to any party that seems to be on their side against the system – the Lib Dems, Scottish Socialists, Independents or, most worrying of all, the BNP.
If we do not convince the public that we are on their side, we will lose their trust. Look at the Netherlands, where in 2002 Labour’s sister party, the PvdA, lost because, in the words of their former minister for Europe, Dick Benschop, ‘many social democratic voters felt neglected… the political class is regarded as having a life of its own, of being technocratic, barely understandable. So voters turned instead to a populist leader, Pim Fortuyn, someone clearly outside the establishment.
The PvdA is now renewing itself in opposition. But we’ve spent enough years in opposition. The challenge for us, if we are to avoid a mid-life crisis in our mid-term years, is to renew ourselves in power. We must remain insurgents despite being incumbents.
In the political sphere, we need to engage with people where they live, turning Labour parties and Labour councillors outwards to the community, enabling and backing people to change their own lives, neighbourhood by neighbourhood. It means government must be far more willing to engage in a grown-up dialogue with the public – spelling out choices and costs, involving many different groups in policy-making, creating structures that enable people to make changes for themselves.
Take Sheffield: lost in 1999 because Labour lost touch. Won back on 1 May through the hard work of the Labour party who recognised – and entirely accepted – the need for a cultural change within their own ranks that took politics out of the town hall and into the community centres. They made party politics real, and were seen to be acting on the issues – the very local, micro issues – that were relevant to people.
Take Burnley: a space created for the BNP to come in because Labour failed to convince people it was on their side. The high turnout and high vote for the far right is not because Burnley is racist, but because too many white working class people are fed up with a council that appears not to care, and want to kick Labour where they know it’ll really hurt. The solution is for Labour councillors, backed by the government, to do in Burnley what was done in Sheffield: to make party politics real for the issues
that matter locally – getting street-level improvements in housing, crime, refuse collection and opportunities for young people, in every community.
The great institutions created by the 1945 Labour government – the NHS, the nationalised industries – followed the dominant economic model of the times: large centralised corporations, guided by ideas of scientific management. But command and control doesn’t work in the modern world, where people are better educated and more demanding, whether it’s consumers challenging global companies or patients in self-help groups challenging their doctors. So we need a new approach
to public service transformation, with fewer centrally imposed targets and more emphasis on our core values and over-riding purpose, more responsibility to frontline staff – and more transparency, so that people are held to account within the service itself and by the people they serve.
More responsive public services mean that we need to give more responsibility to local communities. Primary Care Trusts are already enabling the NHS to identify far more effectively particular local health problems – whether it is teenage pregnancy or smoking in one neighbourhood, or the prevalence of heart disease within parts of our Asian community. Foundation hospitals, drawing on Labour’s long tradition of mutualism, will help strengthen local responsiveness and accountability.
The philosopher Alexis De Tocqueville was right to measure America’s democracy by the strength of its local civic organisations. We will strengthen our country by giving real power and responsibility to people coming together collectively to change their communities for the common good.
Resident involvement and leadership has been the keystone of Sure Start and successful neighbourhood regeneration programmes: however difficult it can sometimes be, we should never try to take the shortcut of imposing solutions from above. They simply don’t last. We should seek to spread social enterprise – the marriage of idealism and public service values with entrepreneurialism and innovation. There are opportunities for far more socially owned enterprises in childcare, housing provision, local parks and other local services.
The institutional legacy of our government will not be one great national organisation like those from 1945. Instead
it will lie in a rich network of popular organisations – tenants’ and residents’ groups, community-owned businesses, social enterprises and co-operatives, all making change that is not dictated from above – and cannot be destroyed from above.
Great businesses aren’t created top-down. Nor are successful economies.We will never be a fairer as well as a more prosperous country as long as wealth creation per head is nearly twice as high in London as in the poorest parts of our country, or the business birth rate remains twice as high in the south east as in the north east. But nor can we solve the problem by making decisions or passing laws in Westminster.
The real experts on local strengths – and local challenges – are the people who live and work and run their businesses there. Labour markets are – with some exceptions in the professional classes – very local. But unlike other economic concepts, labour markets are about people’s lives, their ability to get jobs and training and fulfil their potential. So it is essential that there should be sufficient devolution of policy levers in order to make them work properly.
The paradox of globalisation is that it makes localisation more, not less, important. It is precisely because companies and capital and, increasingly, skilled people can choose where to go that we need our cities and regions to succeed by acting as magnets, retaining their skilled people and their businesses and attracting more to join them. The places that have been most successful
in re-inventing themselves for a global economy are those with powerful partnerships between local councillors, business-people, our universities, faith groups and voluntary organisations, and communities themselves, all working together to make their area better.
‘Dare more democracy,’ said Willy Brandt. More power for people in our nations, regions, cities and neighbourhoods; more power for frontline workers in public services, as well as for the people they serve; more power for people to make choices in their own personal and family lives: they all go together.
If we don’t grasp this opportunity, midway through our second term, to prove we are on the side of the people, then others will. And we will be painted as the party of technocrats and managers – indistinguishable, as in Orwell’s Animal Farm, from the very establishment we worked so hard to overturn. Changing the way we do politics and government, changing the way we organise public services, and changing our understanding of how to create wealth: these aren’t a betrayal of our values, they are how we can be true to our values in a world that is changing faster than we are.