“Man was born free, but he is everywhere in chains.” Not Marx, of course, but Rousseau (Jean-Jacques), philosopher and author of The Social Contract, published in 1762. Recent media speculation suggests that the ministerial policy groups announced several months ago are considering a new social contract with the British people as the philosophical underpinning for New Labour beyond 2006. The thinking involves putting conditionality at the heart of citizens’ public service entitlements – in the same way as jobseekers are expected to be actively seeking work in exchange for receipt of benefit. It is a further progression of the “rights and responsibilities” going hand-in-hand approach that has been a long-term cornerstone of New Labour rhetoric.
As with so much of New Labour, this thinking has deeper roots in our history than many commentators would have us believe. It is not, however quite Rousseau, whose focus was about sacrificing one’s “natural liberty” to gain a “civil liberty” and the security of “rightful ownership” of property. Nor is it Wilson (Harold), whose famous social contract was at the heart of his 1974-76 government. That was a bargain between government and trade unions – in exchange for price controls and food subsidies, better pensions and public services, the trade unions agreed to moderate wage claims. Its failure against a background of galloping oil-price-rise fuelled inflation was at the heart of that government’s travails.
New Labour’s “social contract” approach is different – it is rooted in the 1940s conception of Beveridge and the role of the state in slaying the Five Giants: illness, ignorance, disease, squalor, and want. Though Beveridge himself was a Liberal, it was a Labour minister (Arthur Greenwood) who commissioned the report and Labour who pushed through its implementation, in the face of opposition from many Conservatives.
It was Herbert Morrison who was at the heart of framing Labour’s legislative approach under Attlee. He explained in speeches at the time, “we have swept away the Charity and Poor Law state and established the Social Security State, but the Social Security State cannot endure unless it is also a state of social responsibility.”
Morrison’s point was that the new welfare state was a precious and delicate edifice which could only be sustained with the buy-in of the majority of voters who saw themselves as payers in, as well as on occasion takers out. This was as much true for working-class as for middle-class voters. In a famous speech to Labour Party conference Morrison attacked what he called “drones” , “useless mouths” and “people engaged in activities which are a hindrance on our national effort or [are] defiantly anti-social. We have no hands or brains to waste, and no resources to fritter away on those who don’t contribute to our national effort. Let us point the figure of public scorn at those who make themselves comfortable at the expense of the community.” A little like Blair’s “forces of Conservatism” speech, this was aimed at more than one target: at the aristocrats who consumed but did not produce, and those, including the spivs and black-marketers of that era, who might seek to exploit the welfare state without wanting to give back. He knew that the welfare state and Ernest Bevin’s 1944 pledge to maintain full employment were part of the same virtuous cycle – and those in the community who wanted benefit but did not want to work undermined the potential generosity of the system for those in genuine need.
He knew that for aspirational working-class Labour voters, the belief that hard-work and playing by the rules should pay-off was strongly held, as it still is today. In 1997, aspirational working-class families, members of trade unions such as Amicus for example, saw New Labour as “their” party, as they had seen Labour as being for many decades until the madness of the 1980s.
These issues are integral to Labour voters’ confidence in public services today. People want mental health provision that is supportive as possible – as has been highlighted just last week, they are concerned by a system that puts at risk both patients and public by failing to ensure that patients take the medication they need to avoid their conditions prompting them to endanger the public and themselves. The miracle of modern medicine is that it allows so many more of us all to overcome disabilities both physical and mental. The implicit contract around care in the community has always been that said care would ensue that neither patient nor public was put at risk. If that contract is not maintained then public confidence in the system will collapse and there will be pressure for alternative approaches. One of the challenges for New Labour has been that Sir Humphrey has not necessarily bought into the concept of implicit contracts – prompting the complaints from Labour voters that “their” government is failing to ensure that anti-social neighbours are dealt with for example.
I remember encountering a classic case of this when I was a civil servant at the Home Office. A young adolescent had finally been excluded from his school after recurrent violent attacks on fellow pupils and teachers. He had just been thrown out of home by his parents after beating up his mother, smashing down his parents locked bedroom door, stealing car-keys and writing off parental car. He had therefore been taken into care. In consequence he had become a priority case to get back into school, and therefore, top of his new social workers “to-do” list was to support him in an appeal against his school exclusion and get him back into his old school. Nowhere on their tick-box list was there anything about helping him with behavioural change or any thought to the educational, psychological and physical consequences for other children at his school that would follow from getting him back without at the same time persuading him to desist from the violence that had prompted his original exclusion. The kids at this school were from a part of south-east England with one of the highest levels of deprivation in the country. To these social workers their life-chances did not seem to matter. All that mattered was winning this appeal and ticking the box. For a Labour government it must matter and if it does not the parents of the other children at that school and others like them will ultimately desert a party they will feel is no longer “batting for their people,” despite all the real new investment in public services that Labour has brought. And it is the same for Labour voters who welcome the refurbishment of their council estates but whose lives are still blighted by anti-social families who council officials are reluctant to tackle (though ASBOs have helped), and patients, doctors, nurses and paramedics who welcome the new hospitals but wonder why they have to endure abuse and violence from some patients – some of whom are under the severe influence of hard drugs and alcohol – with precious little sanction – the paperwork, bureaucracy, panel meetings and appeals processes necessary to “section” someone is such a nightmare that many psychiatrists are simply unable to use this procedure in the way they would consider appropriate.
Thus ministers are considering how to make the implicit social contract explicit. Were they not to do so the way would be open to David Cameron’s continuing challenge to the welfare state – his idea that it can be supplanted by the voluntary sector. As Ed Miliband reminded us at the Progress seminar last week, the voluntary sector – Morrison’s “charity state” – has a vital role to play but it cannot do everything. It was the inability of “the community” as a voluntary body to provide the support necessary to avoid the horrific conditions so vividly portrayed by Dickens in the 19th Century and Orwell in the 1920s and 30s that required the welfare state to be brought into being. That is why there is a gaping intellectual hole at the heart of David Cameron’s rhetoric around reliance on voluntary provision. But the existence of that hole does not make his rhetoric any the less seductive to many voters and to avoid a Cameron government putting Britain in aforesaid hole New Labour must ensure that the welfare state and public service provision resonates with the many and not just the few.