When the British people swept Labour to power in 1997, they were voting for one thing: hope. Hope for an alternative to Thatcherism. Hope that there was such a thing as society. Hope that Britain could once again have a politics of fairness and social justice. And in our first term, we showed them that it could.
By 2001, people’s expectations of the government were rightly being transformed. They now had a right to expect a stable economy, not subject to endless cycles of boom and bust; to decent, 21st-century public services; to a new constitutional settlement, bringing up to date the archaic, elitist British state; and to a more equitable society, directing resources towards those left behind by the rampant individualism of the 1980s.
By and large, the government has gone a long way to satisfying these expectations, though of course much remains to be done.
Yet, despite our achievements, there is a sense that the government has been forced to play catch-up. The need to make up for past mistakes has limited opportunities to concentrate on the future. Some mistakes were of our own making – the need to restore our credibility as a party fit to govern forced us to be cautious in our first term – but many were not. Under the Tories, years of chronic neglect and underinvestment in our public and civic spheres deprived the British people of their entitlement to quality public goods and services. Our second term has focused on righting that wrong.
But as Labour looks towards a third term, it is no longer sufficient to define our party and our mission by reference to the past. We must transcend and exceed people’s expectations. It is time to set the country on a new journey, whose direction of travel marks as decisive and irreversible a break with history as that of the Attlee government in 1945. The time for caution has long passed. We have an opportunity to define our place in history as the government that prepared Britain for the 21st century, and was bold enough to invest in a future that will enable it to thrive.
To do that, we need to ask ourselves: what is our ambition as a government? On what do we wish to be judged? On what should we look back and say, ‘If we have changed anything it is this’?
How should we translate this vision into an institutional footprint that will become its lasting legacy? What are to be the lightning rods for progressive values in the 21st century that the NHS and the welfare state were in the twentieth? How might we mobilise popular legitimacy around these institutions, embedding them in the social and political landscape so that their impact endures far beyond the life of this government?
Ambition, institutions, legitimacy: when I think about our achievements thus far, it seems clear to me where the most promising sources of each reside. First of all, while standards and targets have been an important part of our strategy in many areas, our most powerful signal of intent is the pledge to eradicate child poverty by 2020. What better expression of our values as a party than this? What better way to make a permanent difference to British society than to invest in improving the chances of its youngest members? That is what a Labour government is about.
So, with ‘investing in children’ as its overarching theme, what would a third term programme look like?
Given a new understanding of the risk of social disadvantage, we should signal our intention gradually to shift the focus of social security and welfare spending (over a 20 year period) away from the male breadwinner to a system with children and their parents as its top priority.
Other policies and systems would be aligned to support that goal. Our emphasis on making work pay through the minimum wage would give way to a new emphasis on making work just,
by providing employers and employees with support and incentives to extend childcare provision and promote
work-life balance. That is important not just for our children but for our communities: their renewal depends on reclaiming time and space for civic participation.
Urban regeneration and community cohesion would reflect the need to work from local people upwards. Building on the success of the New Deal for Communities and schemes like Sure Start in creating support networks, we should acknowledge the ideal that ‘it takes a village to raise a child’. We should begin to direct resources and responsibilities to these networks to broaden their activities by, for example, taking over the running of local parks and play areas.
Crime prevention would focus on those most at risk of involvement in anti-social behaviour. In inner cities in particular, investing in youth services must be the first line of defence in the fight against crime and the breakdown of families. Too many young people get drawn into criminality because they are bored, have nothing else to do, and lack appropriate adult and peer role models.
In health, our priorities would shift outside the hospital to preventing the diseases, often caused by modern lifestyles, that put people there, such as obesity, diabetes, cancer, heart disease. Building on the excellent work begun by Hazel Blears in tackling health inequalities, we need to ensure that all future generations grow up with a clear understanding of the risks they run, and create a new contract between the citizen and the state to ensure they are mitigated. Health would be integrated into each and every policy area including town planning to protect green spaces and turn back the tide of unhealthy fast food outlets.
In education, we would begin a steady switch from the emphasis on state spending towards early-years provision,
as well as investing in parenting support. This is not the nanny state, but a newly confident state. It understands that if it does not offer support at crucial moments, no one will and it will be
left to pick up the pieces.
To complement higher ambitions for youth services, we would also encourage the development of the ‘extended school’ model, in which schools do not just deliver the curriculum but act as a hub for the whole community, as informal support networks and brokers of goods and services including adult learning, health and social services.
Finally, in transport I would love to see a massive investment in municipal bus services for schools. The school run continues to be a cause of congestion and can be a challenge for poorer families. A well-resourced school bus service (perhaps with support from parents and local businesses) like that available in large parts of the US could make everyone’s lives easier.
Investing in children does not mean that we neglect our other constituencies. But as a simple political refrain with the potential to mobilise the kind of once-in-a-lifetime progressive coalition we saw in 1945, it seems promising.
It has been said since the earliest days of this government that it is in search of ‘the big idea’. Perhaps, then, the big idea will prove to be the simplest and oldest of all: look after those on whom the future depends.
