The autumn conference season is now in full flow. We have had the TUC and on Sunday the Liberal Democrats met in Brighton to discuss their future strategy and direction. With Tony Blair now definitely leaving office in the next 12 months, possibly around the 10th anniversary of Labour winning power in 1997, talk within the party is of renewal. It is a good time to look back at what has happened to the so-called project: the attempt to bring together the forces of liberalism with those of democratic socialism in order to prevent the domination of the right.
All the great reforming governments of the centre left – 1906, 1945 and 1997 – have been based on a coalition of ideas. In the case of the 1997 and 2001 general elections, this was augmented by a tacit alliance between many in New Labour and the Liberal Democrats to defeat the Conservatives and to keep them out of power.
In the heady days of 1997 there was broad agreement between the two centre-left parties on the environment, democratic and constitutional reform and on the need to increase the resources going into public services. In the case of constitutional reform, there was even a formal agreement between the two parties (the Cook-Maclennan Agreement).
Today we find ourselves post-Iraq war with a resurgent Conservative party and a deeply divided centre left. In the last general election Labour won 356 seats with a little over a third of the vote. In the tail end of the campaign, it used fear of the Tories to try to prevent people who had voted Labour in the past switching to the Lib Dems or to the Greens.
In the next general election, Labour only needs to lose 33 seats (less than the Tories gained at the last election) to lose its majority. The late Robin Cook estimated that it less than 30,000 voters to switch from Labour in the new uber-marginals for Labour to lose the election. And it will be more difficult to scare voters with David Cameron’s new look Conservatives. It may be far too early to talk about many centre votes actually switching from Labour to the Conservatives, but Cameron has already started to make the Conservatives seem less scary and has therefore removed one of the disincentives of voting for another centre-left party.
If Labour wants to win at the next election it needs to find positive ways to attract new centre-left voters. Simply replacing Tony Blair will not be enough. This is not a plea for formal deals and talks between the Lib Dems and Labour – the time and circumstances are not right for that. It is a plea to Labour and to its next leader to start building a new coalition of ideas. Part of that new coalition of ideas needs to be about how to make Britain a more democratic country.
In the run up to 1997, democratic and constitutional reform was one of Labour’s strengths. The first term of the Labour government will go down in history as one of the great constitutional reforming governments of all time.
But since 2001 the pace of reform has slowed and today the Labour government is seen as a block on a number of key reforms, including the House of Lords and party funding.
Labour needs to reconnect and restart the democratic revolution it started in 1997. For a start it should complete Lords reform, abolish the royal prerogatives and take the opportunity of the Hayden Phillips review to reform the way parties are funded, making them less dependent on large donor and special interests.
But this would only bring the government into line with the Conservatives and the Lib Dems. There are two ideas that Labour should embrace that would put it back at the fore of the democratic reform movement. It should formally adopt the idea of a constitutional convention, made up of ordinary citizens, to draw up a new political settlement for the UK. This would also have the benefit of allowing Labour to put to rest its failure to fulfil its promise in the 1997 manifesto of a referendum on electoral reform.
Second, Labour should move away from simply using the market as a mechanism to empower consumers and start looking to democracy as a way to empower people as citizens and to give them more control over their lives.
If Labour grasped hold of these ideas, it could make the democratic reform agenda its own again. That would take it a long way towards rebuilding the coalition that was New Labour and to ensuring that the party is fit to fight the next election.