The politics of aspiration has always been the driving force behind political change. Across history, it has sparked revolutions, driven social progress, created trade unions and political parties and changed the destiny of continents. The political party which best responds to the changing nature of public aspiration will dominate the next decade. In truth, the real prize will not go to those who follow aspiration but to those who anticipate and shape it.
The Labour party was born of the aspiration of an age. Both Tony Blair and Gordon Brown ensured that aspiration is part of the essential architecture of New Labour. As the party enters its second decade in power, it should embrace aspiration to reframe the debate on eradicating poverty, and to drive further reform of public services.
I believe that a modern sense of social solidarity can be founded on a renewed sense of progressive self-interest. There is currently a democratic disconnection on domestic poverty. Britain has the second lowest tolerance threshold towards further redistribution to the poor. Part of this reticence may be that when we speak about our determination to intervene to help the poorest, some wrongly perceive that we wish to place a cap on the aspirations of middle-class families.
We need to end the politics of charity. There has been a largely successful transformation in the language about international poverty. Over 20 years, the ‘charity’ of Live Aid in 1985 has been replaced by the ‘self-dignity’ of Live 8 in 2005. The focus has switched from charity to dignity. The discussion about poverty in the UK is too often still about a politics of charity, not a politics of aspiration.
I often reflect upon my own personal experience. I grew up in one of Glasgow’s poorest housing schemes, and am now the MP for the most prosperous constituency in Scotland. These two places seem worlds apart, but in truth they are separated by just one street and a mile of open ground. How can we continue to retain the consent of those who elected me, and also support those whom I grew up with? In this context, relying on traditional collective solidarity will not work.
Instead, progressive self-interest can strengthen the connection between personal aspiration and the continuing right of the state to enable collective solutions. Internationally, progressive self-interest, at least in part, already motivates demands for government action on global warming. It also bolsters the now well-established sense that to live in relative safety we should have a far-reaching foreign policy, which on occasion includes UK involvement in nation building. Domestically, it means the state enhancing our personal and collective prosperity by supporting a million people off incapacity benefit, training the under-skilled and investing in offender rehabilitation rather than paying the £11bn annual cost of
re-offending.
Aspiration created the Labour party. If we are to retain the political and fiscal consent for Labour’s values, we need to continue to embrace it. That means anticipating the almost limitless aspirations of the many, and lifting the near fatalistic intergenerational poverty of aspiration of the few.
Some wrongly claim New Labour will wither when Blair leaves Downing Street; but this ignores the nature of New Labour. It is sustained by deep political conviction not electoral convenience, and is about much more than one person.
One of our greatest political achievements is that we have repeatedly set the agenda. We must continue to do so. That agenda is aspiration. The challenge of our second decade is to successfully redefine the progressive sense of personal aspiration enabled partly through the collective capacity of the state. In doing so, we can expose the bankruptcy of a Conservative philosophy that holds to an atomised possessive individualism, which implies that aspiration can only be met by escaping from the state and public services.
Three decades ago, Tony Crosland said: ‘What one generation sees as a luxury, the next sees as a necessity.’ Now the timeline from luxury to necessity is not a generation, but at most a decade. When it comes to public services, politics and aspiration, the luxuries of one decade are the necessities of the next. We cannot expect a belated sense of gratitude from an electorate who are rightly more interested in our vision about the future, than retrospection about our achievements thus far. So, as always in politics, the past is the context. The future is the contest.