Rt Hon Alan Milburn MP
The Sovereign Debates
Thursday 14th September 2006
Check against delivery
A health warning at the outset. I know in the current somewhat febrile atmosphere this speech is bound to be interpreted in different ways but my motive here is simple. To make a considered contribution to a debate that is now rightly underway about Labour’s future policy direction. It is a debate that in recent days both Tony Blair and Gordon Brown have welcomed. I believe that we can conduct it in a way that is inclusive, outward-looking and rises above either personality or faction. After the events of the last week we all have a responsibility to go about this debate in a way that avoids division and creates unity. The way we conduct the debate cannot be allowed to aid our political opponents. But above all else it is a debate that needs to be about how best we serve the British public. That is why we are here. And we should never forget it.
So the government needs to get on with the business of governing and implementing the full agenda we set out in our last election manifesto. And the party needs to get on with the business of mapping our future direction that takes us beyond a few years to the next 10. For governments, in particular, the focus is rightly on the here and now. But in the end politics is about the future. Parties that don’t talk about the future – still less have ownership of it – pretty rapidly find they do not have one.
Politics, to state the obvious, is changing. Tony Blair is going. David Cameron has arrived. For over a decade Tony Blair and New Labour have been the dominant forces in British politics. Blair has done more than make Labour electable – no small feat given how parlous our position was just 15 years ago. He has reshaped the political landscape and created a new orthodoxy in British politics: the minimum wage, gay rights, Bank of England independence, devolution to Scotland and Wales. This orthodoxy goes beyond individual policies to a political approach that is liberal on economic and social policy, internationalist in foreign policy, marries rights with responsibilities and makes reform and investment in public services a modern route to social justice. And Britain is a better, stronger, fairer country as a result. Poverty is falling. Prosperity is rising. Services are improving. From abroad others gaze on with envy at the success story modern Britain has become and many seek to emulate Blair’s success.
And yet after a decade where Labour effectively had no serious opposition the first signs are there of a more competitive challenge from the Conservatives. While Labour is having to contemplate a life without Tony Blair, David Cameron is having to come to terms with Blair’s legacy. The true test of political greatness is precisely this: the ability to forge a new orthodoxy that lives on beyond your own political lifetime and which opponents as well as supporters have to accept as the norm. Cameron’s problem is to persuade his party to abandon its ideology if it is to accept this orthodoxy. Hence the lack of policy specifics. Cameron’s is an empty vessel. And here lies Labour’s opportunity. To prove we have wind in our sails and a course for the future. That is what this debate must do.
It is not just the personnel of politics that is changing. The paradigm of politics is changing too. Old challenges are giving way to new ones. Take the leftist bible of the mid-1990s, The State We’re In, authored by Will Hutton, arguing for a new marriage between economic vibrancy and social justice. It was a new plea then. It looks like a dated call now. After all it has been the central governing motif of New Labour for a decade. Or take the challenges Peter Mandelson identified in The Blair Revolution, which he co-authored with Roger Liddle exactly 10 years ago. Its strategic promise was that New Labour would build a coalition of support beyond our traditional heartlands, that we would stick religiously to the political centre ground and in so doing we would force our political opponents to the extremes. Its policy promise was to deliver prosperity alongside reforms in health, education and welfare systems, constitutional change and a new relationship with Europe.
Two things strike me. The first is the extent to which New Labour has fulfilled its 1996 promises. Not everything has been delivered but in large part these challenges have been met. The more interesting thing is what is missing from the list. How we respond to globalisation not by resorting to economic protectionism but through open markets, free trade and a new accent on skills and employability. How we build genuinely inclusive societies when there are huge pressures going in the opposite direction, most notably a widening gap between rich and poor. How we deal with both the causes and the consequences of global terrorism and get the trade offs right between the protection of wider society and the defence of civil liberties. How we avoid racial conflict in an era of global migration. How we deal with the challenge of demographic and environmental change. Above all, how we fulfill the desire people have for greater control in their lives.
These were not the main challenges then. But they are now. And I believe they form the basis for a new orthodoxy. So the New Labour political strategy – of sticking to the centre and being radical on reform – is right and is supported by the vast majority of opinion in the Labour party at every level. Nor is anyone saying that economic stability and improvements in schools and hospitals are unimportant. They matter, they have been hard won and they have to be maintained. Indeed you only have to imagine how the political mood would change if the economy nose-dived. But Bill Clinton’s famous campaign mantra ‘it’s the economy stupid’ is no longer enough to secure political victory. There is new political terrain. And the battle is on between the main political parties to seize it.
So we have achieved a lot. But 10 years is a long time in politics. The world has moved on. And this is time to take stock both about the things that we have got right and those we got wrong.
New Labour’s insight was that for progressive values to be realized they had to be applied in new ways. Winning meant becoming as comfortable with notions of aspiration as redistribution. That would require a new relationship between state and citizen, between the collective and the individual. So there would be modern means applied – reform alongside resources in the public services, tax reforms in the welfare state, devolution in the governance of our country – to achieve old ends: fairness, social justice, community empowerment. The controversy that these reforms sometimes generated led some people to make the mistake of choosing between the means and the ends. Reform was caricatured as lacking in values, even hostile to values when it looked all-consumed with means – what works – and indifferent to ends – what counts. Purpose matters in politics. It is what pumps a party’s lifeblood and it is what sustains public support. As we renew New Labour we need to reconcile again the means we deploy and the values we believe in. Reform is for a purpose, a progressive one – to make for a fairer society. And for me that means resolving in a way that we have not yet managed fully to do the central issue in modern politics: the relationship between the state and the citizen.
I want to change the distribution of power in society. That is why I came into politics. This, I believe, is the central job of progressive politics in the years ahead.
Of course, on many of these new fronts – poverty, security, the environment – more not less co-operation between states is needed. Pollution, terror, avian flu all share one thing in common. They make a mockery of national boundaries. They make the best defence against both the tide of anti-Americanism and the wave of Euro-scepticism that are all too prevalent in our country. And they make the case for the reform of our existing global institutions so that we can forge a stronger partnership between sovereign nation states.
But meeting the future challenge requires something even more fundamental – a new partnership between states and citizens. On their own governments cannot meet the environmental crisis or the pensions crisis any more than they can bring about better health or lower crime. That requires actions by individuals not just governments. And it calls for reforms to the old paternalistic relationship between State and citizen. A grown up relationship is what is required in which as much power as possible is moved outwards and downwards from centralised states to individual citizens and local communities. So that citizens get more power and take on more responsibility. This should be our explicit purpose. It should be the golden thread running through the whole of our new policy programme. If New Labour’s old agenda was driven by competence on the economy and change to the welfare state so the new agenda should have at its heart reforming the State and empowering the citizen.
I say that for two big reasons. First because it is what changes in society call for. And second because it is what our values demand.
So to the first. Massive structural shifts in the basic contours of the economy and society, largely brought by globalisation, are transforming the landscape, and the political system has not yet caught up. The days when there were ‘jobs for life’ have disappeared for men, so too has a life defined by housework for women. Families are smaller. Communities are weaker. Opportunities feel bigger, but as any working mum will tell you, pressures are greater. Deference is lower, expectations higher.
The tectonic plates have moved: with implications for every walk of life. Businesses, services, politics. What in the USA Ted Halstead and Michael Lind have called the rise of the citizen as ‘free agent’ – and what Andrei Cherny calls ‘the choice generation’ – has come about because of greater prosperity and sophistication among ordinary people. Technological change is shifting the economy from one based on the production of standardised goods and services to one where the emphasis is on customisation to individual needs. Greater global competition is making the consumer more powerful. So too is the power vested in users by the internet. People are more informed and inquiring. As the phenomenal growth in trading on Ebay demonstrates, consumers are even able to create their own markets. Ordinary consumers a getting a taste for greater power and control over their lives. In the US one survey found that over half of Americans who use the world-wide-web to check for health information consulted the internet before visiting their doctors. Eight in 10 did the same after their visit.
What this speaks for is the very modern desire people have to exercise greater control in their lives. Hence the growing concern among women and men alike to achieve a better balance between their work lives and family lives: to find fulfilment beyond immediate material concerns. Hence too the desire people have to have more choice over how the services they use are delivered. Nor is this feeling limited to the young. When I was health secretary and introduced a new right for NHS patients to pick a hospital of their choosing in place of the old system which chose the hospital for them, we started with cataract operations, a condition of old age. Of these elderly patients seven in 10 offered choice took it up. Faced with an ageing population we would be wise to heed this call from older people to have greater control over the care they receive. It seems unlikely to me that future generations of the old will tolerate the inevitability of a council-decided care home in the way previous generations have done. They are far more likely to want to live out the end of their lives cared for in their own homes by people they choose with budgets they control. Evaluations from both the US and the UK show that such policies manage to combine higher levels of personal satisfaction with lower levels of public spending than traditional forms of service delivery. That is why the policy should be far more widely extended.
The point is that no where and no one – even the least consumerist generations – are immune from the spread of this desire for control. Recently, Rupert Murdoch spoke about the challenge the digital age posed for the media industry. With 57 per cent of teenagers in the US now apparently creating their own content for the internet he talked about the growing demand from people – the young in particular – to ‘have control over their media, instead of being controlled by it.’ The same challenge confronts politics.
The purpose of politics today should be to help people take greater control in their lives. And herein lies a conundrum. While people may have become more empowered as consumers, they have not as yet become empowered as citizens. So on the one hand, average turnout at national elections across the OECD has fallen by 10 per cent in just 20 years. In the UK membership of political parties has halved in the last 25 years. The UK is far from alone in witnessing record levels of cynicism and weariness about politics. And yet on the other, in many respects public involvement in civil society is increasing not diminishing. Twenty years ago 44 per cent of people reported they had volunteered for a church, charity, or other community group. By 1997, 58 per cent were making the same claim. Alternative forms of political activity – whether boycotting goods or lobbying MPs – is rising, not falling. By getting involved in consumer boycotts, protest movements, or local community organisations, citizens are becoming restless – less passive and more active. As the Make Poverty History Campaign demonstrates people are not choosing between consumerism and citizenship – and neither should we. Make Poverty History gives the lie to those who say that a culture of contentment or a post-communist concensus have killed political participation.
The evidence points in a very different direction. It suggests the public is not so much turned off by politics, as the way politics is done. Or for that matter, the way public services are run. Too often we shut people out when we should be letting them in. Disengagement is a symptom of disempowerment. In a modern society, voting at elections is not sufficient. Democracy needs to be broadened, and the state’s role reformed. Doing things to people will no longer do. Doing things with them is the key – whether to improving health, fighting crime, regenerating neighbourhoods or protecting the environment. And to those who say this is conceding too much to citizens’ rights, I say bringing the public inside the decision-making tent is the only way of getting people to accept their responsibilities.
Two examples. The first comes from my experience growing up as a teenager in the west end of Newcastle in the early 1970s. The area suffered deindustrialisation and deprivation and had appalling housing provision. In the last three decades I have seen an endless succession of regeneration schemes come and go in that part of the city. They have cost the public purse an estimated £500m. In truth we are not much further forward. It almost breaks my heart to see what has happened to those communities. New houses were put up only to be knocked down, destroyed by de-population, drugs and despair. The pattern has repeated itself for over 30 years. Why? The reasons are complex but I think one of the most fundamental faultlines was that the people who were supposed to benefit from these schemes were never fully involved either in their formulation or their implementation. It is striking that across the city in the east end of Newcastle an earlier housing development – the famous Byker Wall – avoided these pitfalls precisely because residents from the old terraced communities in Byker were actively involved in the process of designing their new community.
The second example is drawn from my time as health secretary. I championed an expert patients programme to give people, mostly those with chronic conditions, the tools to better manage their own care. After all if you are asthmatic or diabetic you have to live with it 24 hours a day 365 days a year. By putting the individual patient in charge of managing their own conditions – the food they ate, the exercise they took, the medicine they used – the programme succeeded in reducing hospital outpatient visits by 10 per cent, accident and emergency visits by 16 per cent and physiotherapy visits by nine per cent. And as we focus more on public health – on preventing not just treating illness, as I believe we should – the way to do that is not by preaching at people but by empowering them. Giving people, through our unrivalled primary care network of pharmacies, GP surgeries and community services, the practical help they need – blood pressure monitors, testing kits, food co-ops – to improve their own health.
The lesson I draw from these experiences is simple. Relocating power and responsibility so that it is in the hands of individuals delivers results. Too often governments – including New Labour – have fallen for the fallacy that once the commanding heights of the state have been seized, through periodic elections, progressive change automatically follows. In truth this works neither for citizens nor for governments. People are left confused and disempowered. Governments end up nationalising responsibility when things go wrong without necessarily having the levers to put them right. Progress in the future depends on sharing responsibility with citizens. And that means openly sharing dilemmas. Life is complex. We make a mistake far too often of pretending it’s easy. If we are going to get the public bought in to radical solutions they have to be insiders not outsiders as the recent Power Inquiry report rightly argued.
I was born in 1958. The council estate I grew up on as a youngster in an old mining town in the North East of England was the product of an era of paternalism. It was the council not my family who chose the colour of our front door. I suppose my politics – my thirst to share power more evenly in society – grew out of those experiences. In those days communities were supposed to be truly grateful for what they received. In the 1970s and 1980s, things changed. We moved into an era of consultation where people are asked what they would like to receive. Each year governments – locally and nationally – run hundreds of public consultations. But as a colleague of mine, Margaret Jay, once memorably put it: it is all too easy for consultation to become not so much a process and more a period of time.
I believe we are ready to move out of that era and into the next – one of involvement where citizens get more than just a chance to have a say. They get the chance to decide. The new principle at the heart of our governance, as the philosopher David Marquand and others have argued, should be one of subsidiarity: where power is located at the lowest possible level consistent with the wider public good. Those who say there are limits to the role of free markets are right. We should be as explicit in recognising there are limits to the role of centralised states.
From the mid-19th century the state took on more roles and responsibilities. In large part this accretion of power was necessary and it was right. State action was needed to guarantee clean water and safe streets. The expansion of a market economy relied on legal rights and clear rules which again only the state could uphold. And in the creation of the welfare state – with its jewel in the crown the NHS – the state offered equity and security as an antidote to the deprivation and injustice of an era of economic upheaval and total war in a way that charitable endeavour and employer philanthropy could never hope to match. And yet by the last quarter of the 20th century it was becoming clear that too much state could be as bad as too little. When Labour got on the wrong side of that argument we lost. The Berlin Wall was about to tumble and with it the ideological perversity of state-communism. In economic policy western governments had demonstrated a poor record of picking winners but losers had developed a consistent habit of picking governments. State regulation had come to stifle market innovation. So in the Thatcherite reforms of the 1980s – most notably the great privatisations – power was moved from the state to the market. And in the New Labour reforms of this new century – most notably the creation of new institutions like an independent Bank of England, NHS foundation hospitals, city academies and, now trust schools – power has been moved again from the state to new service providers.
What neither Thatcherism nor Blairism have successfully done is moved power from the state to the individual. There remains at the heart of New Labour an unresolved ambivalence about the role of the state. You can see that in our approach to local government. It has veered between centralising distrust and grudging devolution. The same ambivalence is reflected in our evolving approach to public service reform. In the first term the accent was on top-down targets and prescription from the centre. I for one quickly learned that improving services run by caring professionals cannot happen through finger pointing or blame gaming. So in the second term there was a welcome change in language towards greater devolution and diversity.
Despite sometimes fierce resistance to change Tony Blair has put in place lasting reforms in public services. The old state monopolies have been replaced by greater organisational independence and new competitive incentives to improve services. But with the notable exception of the choice programme in the NHS these reforms have empowered institutions not individuals. Diversity, devolution, even democracy (in the case of NHS Foundation Hospitals) on their own do not empower the citizen. Only giving individuals real power will make that happen.
As a parent I don’t want power in the hands of either councils or schools. As a patient I don’t want it in the hands of either managers or hospitals. I want it in my hands. This is the new political agenda.
There are good reasons why the modern progressive left should make this territory our own. Our values call for power to be evenly shared in society. It is our values – not those of the right – that are best placed to reconcile individual aspiration with collective endeavour
That is not to say it’s easy. It isn’t. I don’t think we have always acknowledged there are real conundrums and tensions here – between national standards and local autonomy for example. And we have to do much more to accept there are trade-offs to be made and assurances to give that choice and voice can live side by side as can equity in outcome and diversity in provision as they do in the social democratic heartlands of northern Europe.
Our values have nothing to fear from reform – and everything to gain. Take the idea of extending choice to individuals over how they receive public services. This is more than a kneejerk pandering to consumerism. There is a compelling social justice case for doing so. For too long those who can afford it have been able to buy choice over health and education. Those without, do without. That is unfair and in my view must be changed. We know for example that despite higher health needs patients from lower socio-economic groups were 20 per cent less likely to get a hip replacement and 30 per cent less likely to get a heart operation than patients from higher ones. State control has not guaranteed equality of outcome. A top-down monolithic structure of public services has favoured those with a strong voice which only some have. Now of course we should extend voice mechanisms in the NHS to give more patients more say. But voice alone does not confer power. To guarantee a fairer spread of opportunities we also need choice that all can have. Choice mechanisms have to be properly constructed – not least to help people make informed decisions – but the evidence suggests where is done there can be a very strong levelling up effect with poorer people benefiting most. School choice programmes in Sweden, Denmark and the USA for example seem to show a beneficial impact on performance across schools as a whole. That is why I believe parents with children in schools that are failing – invariably serving the poorest communities – should be given new rights to choose a different school which should receive a premium payment for educating them. Previous attempts to narrow educational inequality have focussed on top down structural solutions. But what they haven’t done is empowered the parents who are most disempowered in the system.
We have not done enough to recognise there is a power gap in society that needs to be closed. It is true, of course, that life has steadily been getting better for most people. I see that in my own life. My grandfather was a labourer. My mother worked as a secretary. My children have life experiences unimaginable in my own childhood. And for people as a whole living standards are rising and poverty is falling. The inequality gap, however, remains stubbornly and persistently wide. Indeed while more people are better off, poverty has become more entrenched. We all pay the price. The taxpayers who pay the price of social failure. The decent hard-working families who live in fear of crime. The loss we all feel from a declining sense of shared community. An 80–20 society, in which 80 per cent do okay but 20 per cent are left behind, might be good enough for the Conservatives, but it should not be good enough for us.
I came from a council estate and ended up in the cabinet. I was lucky. I was part of the most socially mobile generation this country has ever seen. I think there is a hard question to be asked. Do we think that for a child growing up today in one of Britain’s poorest estates such mobility is possible or likely? Sadly I think not. And I also think it is a moral outrage that it should be so in a country as wealthy as our own. Over recent decades birth not worth has become more and more a key determinant of life chances. Social mobility has slowed down when it ought to have been speeding up. There is a glass ceiling on opportunity in our country. We have raised it, but we have not yet broken through it.
In part that is because of changes in the labour market with a growing gap between those with skills and those without. But it is also because addressing inequality requires an approach that goes beyond the economic arena alone. As Amartya Sen, the Nobel Prize winner for economics has noted, families and communities suffer not only economic disadvantage but social, educational and cultural disadvantage too. So we have to do more to shift the focus beyond the traditional welfare state solution of correcting the symptoms of inequality – such as low wages and family poverty – towards an approach that deals with the roots of disadvantage before they become entrenched. In my view that means a new form of redistribution – of opportunity – where people get chances at every stage and every age of their lives. Fair life chances is what we should seek. By giving more people a real stake in society. By liberating the potential of each individual as an individual. By enabling people, regardless of wealth or status, to take greater control over their lives By recognising that it is power that needs to be more fairly shared in our society.
Today, one in three low-income citizens don’t vote; don’t urge others to vote; don’t present their views to councillors, MPs or the media; and don’t participate in political campaigns. The sense of hopelessness that clouds the poorest communities in our country is a product of disempowerment. Of course beating crime, creating jobs, regenerating estates can help. But in the end I have to come to believe that this cloud of despondency and despair can only be dispelled through a modern participatory politics where both local communities and individual citizens have the opportunity to more evenly and directly share in power.
I will go on to suggest practical ways that we can make this happen shortly but for now I want to address where all of this leaves the role of the state.
None of it suggests the state has no role. Quite the reverse. We live in uncertain times. Fear is all pervasive – of job insecurity and terrorist attack. Of global warming and of immigration. People want to know they are not alone. But they want also to control their own destiny. So the modern State has dual roles. It has to be strong where citizens individually are weak – providing collective security and opportunity – and weak where citizens individually are strong – exercising personal choice and responsibility.
So globalisation makes economic success increasingly dependent on the role the State plays in unlocking the talents of individual citizens. That means moving beyond old Conservative notions of class hierarchy and privilege towards open, mobile, classless societies. In turn that means providing more opportunities for people to advance through childcare, education and training, a point Alan Johnson was making yesterday. Only the state can do that. But only citizens can take those opportunities and use them to fulfil their dreams and hopes and ambitions.
The same partnership between the state – indeed states – and citizens is needed to tackle climate change. When almost half of harmful emissions arise from the decisions that individuals make about what they consume, how they live and where they travel, citizen action is key. And people want to know what it is they can do to make a difference. Here a varying scale of state intervention – from better labelling of household appliances to tradeable personal carbon allowances to green taxes – can help citizens make choices that are environmentally beneficial. We have to be brave and decisive here not least because David Cameron’s warm words on the environment have not been matched by policy specifics so providing the opportunity for Labour’s David – Miliband – to wrestle this terrain from the Tories. He has rightly argued that an environmental contract between State and citizen is the best guarantor of beating climate change.
A similar contract is needed to beat terrorism. It calls for strong states able to protect citizens collectively in a way that is just not possible individually. So too mass migration in a world of open borders and easy travel. I believe passionately that migration has been good news for Britain but as John Reid rightly and bravely said we have not always recognised that it has also brought uncertainty. As the rise of the far right in France and Holland all too graphically demonstrates, this insecurity, even fear, is not something the centre-left can ignore. Public support for migration relies on the application of fair rules and clear controls. It relies too on re-defining multi-culturalism so that it no longer turns a blind eye, often out of a misguided sense of political correctness, to a widening gulf between separate racial communities or to conduct – such as the treatment of women – that we would not tolerate in any other walk of life. In a post 9/11 and 7/7 world modern multi-culturalism must be fearless in institutionalising common values, through policies like ID cards, English-language competence and citizenship teaching, if we are to provide the glue that can bind a more diverse Britain together.
More widely it is this concept of fair rules that goes to the heart of what the modern state must do. This is tricky terrain for progressives. When we talk about fairness we usually mean one form or other of equality – since that is what we believe in our souls. But when the public talks about fairness they mean rules. Where New Labour has hit trouble is when we have got out of step with this common sense definition so that people feel the fair rules principle has not been sufficiently or consistently applied. Hence the public outcry over lapses in the criminal justice, asylum and immigration, housing allocation and benefit systems. These are lessons we need to learn in renewing our policy agenda. This concept of fair rules has to be applied to all aspects of policy – tax, crime, welfare, housing, immigration – so that people know that effort and merit are rewarded but that transgression is not.
So the role of the state is not to withdraw, leaving families and communities to the whim of a free market approach, as neo-conservatives on both sides of the Atlantic believe. Equally, nor is it the state’s role to assume sole responsibility for everything from the litter on the streets to the behaviour of children in the classroom. It is not the state that drops litter or disrupts classes. It is citizens. So where the old bonds of community – the male apprenticeships, the extended families, the churches and trades unions – are weaker, a new approach is needed to strengthen responsibility and aspiration in society. Today the priority must be to fashion an active citizenship where the state enables more people to make choices for themselves so they can realise their own aspirations for progress. The right are mistaken to reject the role of the state. They want to dismantle it. I want to transform it so that the state controls less and enables more.
What would this mean for the future policy agenda? Today I only have time to give a flavour of the policy direction I believe we should be moving to. In subsequent speeches and publications I intend to give more detail on four specific areas of policy.
First, economic policy. Our approach has to emphasise the benefits of a flexible economy as the best response to the rise of the new superpowers, India and China. There should be more help for workers adversely affected by globalisation and fair conditions at work but that cannot mean a return to old-style protectionism or micro-managerial interventionism. Instead the state’s role should be to create the conditions – clean government, clear fiscal rules, economic stability, limited regulation – for wealth creation to thrive. And here I stand full square behind Gordon Brown’s determination on wage restraint and public spending. Nor can tax reform be a no-go area. It is easy to forget just how key it was to making New Labour electable before 1997 and popular after with the introduction of tax credits and the new 10p starting rate.
The same is true for welfare reform. It needs to be back on the agenda with a vengeance as I know John Hutton intends it to be. With five million citizens still economically inactive – and with the proportion of lone parents without work still stuck at 44 per cent – both incentives and sanctions should be sharpened to increase participation in the labour market and civic society. People, including those receiving benefits, should be given the right to control their own training and reskilling budgets. Equally, learning from the success of President Clinton’s welfare reforms in the US, people should have the responsibility and support to find work so that we transform a culture of dependency into one of independence. Some of this is happening. But much more needs to be done to align the tax and welfare systems with the concept of fair rules.
Second, social policy. The emphasis should be on levelling up, not down in society. Redistribution of opportunity should become the new route out of poverty. Childcare would become a new arm of the welfare state to give every child the best start in life. Men and women alike would be given the choice of flexible employment to cope with the challenge of balancing home and family life. Most importantly of all asset ownership would be put within reach of all as part of a programme to tackle the most glaring inequalities in society. They are no longer between income groups, but between those who own shares, pensions and housing, and those who rely solely on wages and benefits. People act differently if they own assets. It gives them a real stake in the future. It enables people to act independently and make their own choices. Ownership works. It enhances responsibility. After all nobody ever washed a rental car. For these reasons I believe both employee share ownership and home ownership need to be extended far further driven in part by tax breaks. Government proposals here are modest and need to be beefed up. Corporate indifference or hostility needs to be faced down. By democratising wealth in this way we can set ourselves the ambition as a country of achieving the highest rates of home and employee share ownership in the world. So that Britain becomes a beacon for modern social democracy because we have a genuinely fair shares society.
Third, public service policy. People are seeking services more responsive to individual need and offering greater choice. They expect services that are responsive and high quality. People want to be treated like individuals not numbers. And as progressives we should want the poorest to have equal access, in a way they currently do not, to the best services. Hence the need to drive forward reform. The private and voluntary sectors should contribute more in years to come through their expertise, their efficiency and the incentives they bring to compete. But getting a public service – whether provided publicly or privately – to dance to the tune of the user requires more power to be put in the hands of users. It is this new accountability – to individual citizens – that should sit at the heart of the next phase of public service reform.
So the views of those using services, not just those of national inspectorates, should become the core of performance league tables as we move from a top down model of managing public services to a bottom up one. Every citizen – not just the better-off – would be empowered to make real informed choices over their schools, GPs, hospitals, childcare and housing in place of the take-it-or-leave it relationship of the past. In order to break the ghetto of service disadvantage that still exists particularly in education, choice programmes should be targeted at poorer communities. Elsewhere for some services every individual who wants to could control their own budgets just as elderly and disabled people are able to choose to do now through direct payments. By empowering individuals these reforms if properly designed – and experience elsewhere in the world suggests that they can – offer a double benefit: tackling inequity and raising standards.
Fourth, governance policy. A new assumption should guide policy. The state should be running less not more. And to give this new political assumption bite it will need to be given institutional form. After all nobody ever willingly gave away power. So Whitehall should be capped in its scale and its scope. Where one new regulation is proposed two old ones will have to go. Where one new form is issued two old ones will be replaced. Where one new standard or target is introduced two old ones will be withdrawn. Where one new job is created two old ones will be lost. Whitehall is in long-overdue need of reform. So the same disciplines that nowadays apply to other parts of the public services should finally and equally be applied here. Where Whitehall functions (aside from those covering vital constitutional and propriety matters) can be subject to periodic external competition – policy-making and delivery included – they should be. The effect will be to move power and resources away from the centre.
Such a shift is in keeping with the spirit of the times in which we live. Ironically globalisation has whetted the public appetite for localisation. In a world of swirling uncertainty, faced with forces that feel beyond control, people are taking refuge in what they know: their families, their communities, their local identities. You can see that, as the Liberal MP Vince Cable, has convincingly argued, in the worldwide growth of regional autonomy movements. Politics, if it is to command legitimacy, has to be restructured to better reflect this desire for local control.
So an active process of devolving power to local communities should guide government policy. Local government, led by elected mayors, should explicitly be put in the lead in enabling this to happen. Councils should be freed from much central government control, a process Ruth Kelly is starting. Its system of financing should move from national taxes to local ones with local communities having the right through referenda to determine locally-decided tax rates. Similarly where services are failing communities could have the legal right to have them replaced. Local communities could get control over budgets for street safety and cleaning. And building on the foundation hospital model a new form of public ownership – community-run mutual organisations – could take over the running of local services like children’s centres, estates and parks. In cities as diverse as Chicago in the United States, and Porto Alegre in Brazil, local people already control local budgets and services. The results are impressive both for public engagement and service improvement.
And we should go further. Local police and health services should be made more directly accountable to local people through elections. Our aim should be to open up Britain to greater democratic input. That would include direct elections to the House of Lords. It would include an obligation on both national and local governments – perhaps enshrined in a binding and legal constitutional settlement – to share power not hoard it. And after a decade where New Labour has become associated, often unfairly, with central control it needs to include a new, less tribal, more relaxed and open culture – where there is more dialogue and less monologue. And to give this new plural politics force we should move to a more proportional system of elections – perhaps through the alternative vote method – for both Houses of Parliament. Parliament should have the power to vote on wars. More legislation should be scrutinised in draft form jointly by both Houses. Select committee meetings should meet outside London. Ministers should routinely hold consultative events as part of the process of policy-making both on the road and on-line. And as both Hazel Blears and Douglas Alexander have argued the Labour party should find new ways of reaching out to the communities it serves. I think that means giving a voice to its supporters, as well as its members, in its selection of candidates and its formulation of policies.
What does all of this add up to? Not just new policies. But I hope a new politics. And a new way of doing politics. With the one supporting the other.
At its heart the new politics I want to see goes beyond structures and committees to policies that empower the individual citizen to take greater control over their lives. This takes us well beyond the narrow definition of constitutional reform so favoured by the political elite to a far more fundamental redistribution of power in society. Constitutional change offers reform to the existing power paradigm when what is needed is a new one.
It is, I readily admit, a leap of faith to move from a system where governors govern and the governed consent towards a more active participatory democracy where the governed help govern. And I know it requires a new drive to grow people’s capacity to successfully participate. But do not believe they do not want to participate. Research by the Young Foundation shows that while 61 per cent of people do not believe they can influence decisions about their local area, 63 per cent say they are prepared to invest the time needed to do so. Or that they do not have the capacity to do so. It is not ability that is unevenly distributed in society. It is opportunity. And it is power.
This is the new political territory. Neither the right nor the left have in truth, yet come to terms with it. Whoever does so first I believe will win both ideologically and electorally.
For me this is what the new New Labour agenda should be for the next ten years. Others will have different views. One thing is certain. Politics, if it is to work, cannot stand still. After we lost the 1992 election many people thought they would never see a Labour government again. What changed was that we did. Building on the efforts of Neil Kinnock and John Smith, Tony Blair’s courage in transforming his party was a first step to us winning power. We should never forget that lesson. Renewal cannot be about going back. It is about moving forward. Bill Clinton is right when he says we have to be in the future business.
The first volume of the New Labour narrative might be closing. But a second volume is opening. It will have a different set of policies but be bound by a common set of values. And there will be a consistent political approach: take the centre not the extreme; face the future not the past, modernise the means, stay true to the ends.
One hundred years ago the men and women who founded the Labour party had a simple dream: a Britain run by the people, not an elite; one governed from the bottom up not the top down. The basic belief that this generation of Labour politicians shares with that generation is about harnessing collective power to better develop individual human potential. Indeed this is the fundamental difference between right and left. Ours is an optimistic view about the enduring potential of the people – what George Orwell called ‘the extraordinary genius of the common man.’ As Labour’s first leader Keir Hardie himself once proclaimed ‘Socialism is not help from the outside in the form of state help. It is the people themselves acting through their organisations, regulating their own affairs.’ This is the tradition of William Morris, Robert Owen, T H Green and R H Tawney. In this ethical, reformist tradition the state enables more and controls less. Of course there has been another tradition in the Labour party: one of top down control where power and trust is put in the state rather than in the people. A decade ago the creation of New Labour was a recognition that the world had changed and that the role of government had to change too. In economic policy, the top down approach of the past, based on the policy of nationalisation, was abandoned. It is time for all aspects of policy to follow. It is time too for the People’s Party to resolve its ambivalence to the people.
The empowerment of individuals and communities was a great progressive cause a century ago. The profound social and economic changes we have seen in recent decades make this a philosophy whose time has come. We need to forge a new contract between state and citizen where government provides opportunities and citizens strive to take them. Where the top down paternalistic statism of the last century gives way to a new bottom up agenda of empowerment that is in tune with the needs of this. This is the means to reconnect with those – middle and low income families alike – who want to know there are fair rules in play giving people who are prepared to put in the effort the chance to progress. It is the means to rebalance rights and responsibilities. And it is the means to reclaim for progressive purposes the banner of ambition and aspiration.
Empowering citizens. This is the politics of the future. A new orthodoxy for a new age.