You have said Britain needs a new kind of politics and style of government. What do you mean by this? What is wrong with the way Labour has done politics up to now?
The challenges of the next 10 years will be different to the past 10 years. That’s the start of why there has to be a new politics. If you take 1997, what we were concerned about was the stop-go economy, chronic under-investment in public services, and unemployment, so we had the New Deal. What are the challenges for the next 10 years: terrorism and security. So everybody expects there’ll be security for all, global economic competition and restructuring at a massive and very fast level, and people will demand that there is opportunity for all.
But in each of these areas there’s a common message that is obvious. You cannot meet the environmental, security or economic challenge, or the challenge of rising aspirations, without people themselves being involved in making decisions and solving problems. You can’t have community regeneration without the community itself being involved. You can’t win the war on security and terrorism without winning the battle of hearts and minds. People have got to be involved themselves. You cannot win the environmental challenge without people accepting some personal and social responsibility themselves.
So the new politics is that you cannot rely on top-down solutions, on pulling levers, on simply carrots and sticks, as we used to talk about incentives and commands. You have got – and rightly so – to involve people far more closely. And that’s why, when you see local community action, whether it’s community ownership of assets, or you see local referenda, or youth mayors, youth parliaments, youth councils: all these things that started on a local level are part of a new politics, where you accept that the cultural change that is necessary in our country means that people themselves must be involved in making the change.
Some in the Labour party are concerned we are seeing a fracturing of the coalition that brought Labour to power in 1997, with middle-class voters in the south-east in particular switching to David Cameron’s Tories. Do you share that analysis and, if so, what should be done about it?
No, I don’t [share that analysis]. What caused people to leave the Conservative party in the first place was their economic failure and their under-investment in education and health. What is the policy the Conservative party has at the moment? Their economic policy is one that would bring about instability, and they have no answers to the problems of the modern global economy. Equally, their public spending policy would take away money from health and education and not put money back into education and health.
So, on the central issues that I think the whole of Britain is concerned about, and particularly the group that voted against the Tories in 1997, we have a record of economic confidence and also of being able to understand the big global economic changes that are taking place and how to respond to them. But we also have a record of investing in health and education, and we are committed to continue to invest, as well as reform, health and education.
The forthcoming budget is likely to be your last as Labour chancellor. With public spending unlikely to increase significantly in the coming years as a proportion of GDP, how can Labour be progressive with less?
We have got to remember that public spending has increased on education, health, and all the front-line public services. In the coming years, it is our intention that public spending continues to increase, by investing properly in these vital services. So while you will be saving money by releasing resources – for example, expenditure on employment, hopefully reducing expenditure on bureaucracy, sometimes by selling assets that we no longer need – the whole intention is to make sure that there are sufficient resources for front-lines services that are the priorities that really matter. And that includes hospitals, schools, policing, and much of the community regeneration that most people will know is essential if we are to have a civilised society. So the public spending round makes the issue of priority very import. But it is our intention to ensure that front-line public services not only continue to improve because of reform, but expand because of the necessary investment that has been made.
How can the current round of hospital closures be reconciled with the government’s talk of more choice in public healthcare provision?
What we’re seeing is a health service where people now have the choice as to whether many of the operations they formerly had to go to hospital for can actually be done in the GPs’ surgery. They will go to a hospital and be able, as they want, as increasingly around the world everybody wants, to have their operation on a day-care basis, and to go home in the evening rather than to be an in-patient in hospital. And then, of course, the specialisation that was necessary in some of the facilities in the hospitals means that we can have, for example, the concentration of heart transplants or other specialities, in such a way that people are ensured that they get the best treatment.
So it is about the patient first of all, able to get treatment in a GPs’ surgery, to go into a hospital for a day rather than for weeks or days on end, and to get the best care possible. What we’re trying to do is to build a health service around the needs of the ordinary patient. These needs and the wishes of patients, as you said, the choices of patients, are more attuned to what they want to see happen now than what was a uniform process, where people spent days in hospital, when sometimes they could have had their operations earlier and closer to home.
You said in your recent BBC interview that ‘we have moved on from the old comprehensive ideas’. So how can Labour ensure equity in its education provision?
Every child should have the best possible start in life, and by the time every young person leaves school they should have their pathway to a career. That is why we’re giving personal and special tuition. So that instead of waiting until children are 11-years old and finding out that there is a literacy problem, you intervene early and take action, and make special tuition available for people. And that is true when people fall behind in other areas as well.
We’ve got to take some of the advantages that private schools have given people, which is essentially the need to get people personal tuition, and make that available so that no child falls behind and every child has the best possible start in life. And what’s different from the 1960s and today is that we now see the scope for personalised learning. They used to talk about education as ‘talk and chalk’: the teacher lectured, and pupils listened. Now you’ve got interactive learning, which makes it possible to have personalised tuition, for people to move ahead if they’re doing well as individuals in a particular subject.
But it also means it is possible for us to help those who are falling behind, move forward, and that’s what I mean about ‘moving on’. Moving on means far greater attention to the individual potential, and the individual talent of every single child; that no child is left behind and every child has the best possible start in life.
There is a degree of uneasiness in the UK about the social and economic impact of globalisation, in terms of issues around immigration and job security. Are people right to be concerned? Has Labour failed to convey the more positive aspects of globalisation?
There should be a national, perhaps a worldwide debate about globalisation. It’s such a big change that is happening. It’s bigger than what happened during the industrial revolution. Now you can buy a good in Britain that can be sourced from any part of the world. The changes brought about by globalisation mean that, for example, China and India are going to produce half the world’s growth. Asia is now producing more goods than Europe. Half the textiles, clothes, televisions and computers in the world are being produced in China. You can go to one place in China, where they’re producing, in one town, 40 per cent of the world’s microwaves. The restructuring of the world economy is so big that, in America, they’re suggesting that 30 million jobs could be off-shored. In America, Europe, and Japan we’re losing a million manufacturing jobs a year.
Now this is not just a challenge, it is a huge opportunity. The only people who can provide answers to the challenges of globalisation are the progressive parties of the left, in Europe and elsewhere. And why do I say that? Because the only way to make a global economy – which is, after all, about free trade, open markets, and flexibility – work is also by investing in people and their education, public investment in science and technology, and policies that make the process of globalisation fair to hard-working people in every country. If you left it to some of the right-wing parties, they would have either just a free-for-all, in which case you would do nothing to properly invest in education and science and fairness, or you would lurch back into protectionism where people would try and say: ‘Close the doors, we’ll shelter our industries, we’ll walk away from involvement in the global economy.’ And it is such a delusion that it could work, because basically you’d be selling people a false message that somehow you could prevent the change that is happening all across the world.
How do you deal effectively with the threat of extremism and terrorism without alienating the communities whose help you need the most?
On terrorism, no matter how much we can do by security, and by policing, and by the strength of our intelligence services – and we should praise all the security and defence services for what they achieve – I think that everybody has come to realise that this is also a battle of hearts and minds. You cannot win against an extreme jihadist terrorist ideology unless you can show people that the message they are sending out is wrong; that there is an alternative which is ethically strong, that also makes sense of peoples’ experience.
If people in Britain who have considered terrorist action, like the suicide bombers, thought of Britain, or of the western world, as for debt relief, for the poorest countries, for education for all, for every child in the world – no matter which religion and which country they are in – as helping bring about the Middle East peace settlement, and economic and social development for people who are now in poverty. If they thought of the challenges of Africa, met by us preparing to invest and build a new relationship between the rich and poor countries, then I believe they can start to see that the message we’re bringing forward is one that is a far more attractive answer to the problems the world faces than anything we’ve heard from what is called the ‘singular narrative of al-Qaeda’.
We’ve got to make sure that people understand that, in Britain, we stand for liberty, fairness, social responsibility and internationalism: these are the central values that make us British. And if people understood these things, and we could get the message across, we could have a huge influence on public opinion right across the country.
In the current global political climate, is the idea of an ‘ethical foreign policy’ no more than a pipedream?
Many of the things that we have done in foreign policy we can be genuinely proud of, because they arise from values that, I think, are the values of decent people everywhere: our defence of liberty and democracy around the world, and our promotioned of social justice. There should be new a deal between rich and poor countries, and I would like to see what you might call a modern Marshall plan, where the richest countries are prepared to enter a long-term relationship with the developing countries, to ensure that the beneficiaries of globalisation are not just people who are already wealthy, but people who are very poor.
Now, I don’t go for labels, but what we have been trying to do, particularly in relation to the Middle East and Africa, but also in relation to the poorest countries in the world, is to show that you can build a new relationship, a new deal between rich and poor, that is based on principles that most people around the world can support.
How do you envisage Britain’s ‘special relationship’ with the US in the years ahead? Would it be different from now?
There is no future for anti-Americanism in Europe. I think that one of the great mistakes would be to assume that somehow the values that America and Britain, indeed the values that America and Europe have, are not values that we generally share in common. I think people understand that America is a nation founded on an idea about opportunity and liberty. These are values that actually were, in some cases, values that were British values, that people took to America.
So I think that America and Europe have a great deal in common. We’ve got to work with other continents to solve this anti-Americanism, either in Britain or Europe. I certainly would not encourage, and would fight against the anti-Americanism that some people in other countries in Europe have been trying to promote. But generally, I think that most people in Europe now will come to see it as being a diversion from what is the real issue. The real issue is that we must all, different continents, work together to secure not just peace but actually justice around the world.
Tony Blair has called for a national debate on Britain’s international role. Where do you see the UK’s role in the future?
We are a major international force, and, as Tony has rightly said, we should continue to be. Why? Because we are a member of the European Union, and we’re part of an Atlantic alliance. We’re one of the members of NATO, and we’re a member of the security council of the United Nations. We’re part of a Commonwealth of nations, that in every continent binds countries that historically have had some association with Britain, to Britain; and indeed countries like Mozambique, that were never part of the British Empire, but have decided to join because they think the Commonwealth is important.
Britain has got connections and links in almost a unique way with every continent of the world. We’ve probably got more global connections than any other country. We should be proud that our relationships with different continents are strong and remain strong. Whether you look at it in terms of the excellence of our armed forces, and the success of building an efficient, disciplined, and capable military, which I saw first hand in Basra only a few weeks ago. Or whether it’s the influence of our foreign policy, and our economic and social policy, and international development policy, which is clearly important to security.
It’s very important to recognise that Britain must and will continue to play a very powerful and central role in the world. If you take Africa, if people were not persuaded for moral reasons that it was important to play a role in helping African people develop and be empowered over the next few years, then you would see the strategic argument now as well. There are more al-Qaeda cells in Africa than, I understand, in any other part of the world.
There is an issue about immigration relating to Africa, because Africa cannot be prosperous if large numbers of people leave Africa to find prosperity elsewhere. Africa is at the centre of the environmental challenge. China is taking a huge interest in Africa because of its natural resources. So Africa is important not just economically and morally, but it is important strategically for the future.
We used to say, ‘what can we do to Africa?’ – that was the old Empire. The real issue now is, ‘what can Africa empowered do for itself?’ How can we help Africa develop its own plan for the future, through the African Union, through women, who are changing the face of Africa now through their engagement in politics. And that’s why British engagement with the people of Africa is just one example of where Britain can play a very powerful and constructive role. Most people who read Progress – and I applaud the work you’ve done as an organisation on international development as well as raising other issues – would understand that we have to play a positive role in helping African people empower themselves for the future.