Politicians are notoriously risk-averse. Few would adopt the mentality of Harry Truman who, ruminating on his party’s defeat in the 1946 midterm elections, wrote to his mother: ‘From now on I’m going to do as I please and let them all go to hell. At least for two years, they can do nothing to me, and after that it doesn’t matter.’
But the choice for Gordon Brown is between risk and certainty. The risk is taking big political decisions and governing for the moment with courage. The certainty is managing decline and coming out of the next election with a weak mandate or as the minority party.
Despite the poll reversals of the last few months British politics is still, currently, about Gordon Brown. Even if he’s the butt of jokes or the object of scorn it’s about him. Opposition parties have not generated the excitement around them that Tony Blair generated in the first three years of his leadership. It takes some recalling but then people were genuinely intrigued by ideas such as the stakeholder economy and the mysterious trinity that was the Third Way. Blair’s Labour had vibrant international links and it was closely associated with new waves of thinking and analysis coming out of academe or from policy-makers elsewhere. The polls reflected this. Throughout 1995 the Tories barely climbed out of the 20s, dropping once even to the teens. Labour was constantly above 50 in the polls. Right now the Conservatives are jubilant over a lead that struggles to reach double figures.
And, more widely, David Cameron is wrestling with the fact that the right – at home and abroad – is suffering a crisis of intellectual confidence and identity which matches that of the left in the 1970s and 1980s. In his new book Comeback: How Conservatives Can Win Again, David Frum, author of the ‘axis of evil’ speech, details the crisis of the American right, portraying his ideological bedfellows as stuck in the past, still trying to fight the battles of the Reagan era. While perhaps more switched on to the public mood than the Bush bunker – no serious conservatives across the Atlantic have performed the kind of political cross-dressing to match the Tory leader’s new year embrace of the National Health Service – the detail of much of Cameron’s nascent policy agenda is firmly Thatcherite.
Nor have the Liberal Democrats yet managed to capitalise on either their Iraq opposition or their Orange Book thinking to become a party of national excitement in the way the SDP achieved in the high summer of its mayfly life.
Despite their worst efforts, the ball is back in the government’s court. Government can bring disastrous events. But it can also bring a chance to set the agenda, day after day. And while Gordon Brown could be understandably chagrined at the intensity of the negative attention he is getting, he should be glad that the cameras are still on him. Highly volatile polls show that the public is making their mind up. The time to really worry in Westminster life is when the cameras aren’t pointing at you any more and public opinion begins to set, in the way that it did on the eve of Thatcher’s victory in 1979 or Blair’s in 1997.
So the choice is with Gordon Brown for the moment. And the choice is between the risks of establishing a refreshed mandate for his party or playing a defensive game of attrition. Governments have more territory to defend than oppositions. And if they simply aim to survive tactically, without renewing their mandate, their defeat becomes a matter of timing.
Besides, the fact that Gordon Brown was elected without a contest should not blur that fact that he has a strong implicit compact with his party and his wider supporters. He has long-portrayed himself as a man of values, principles and courage. Brown must now deliver on his own promise, and also some of the long-abated hopes of progressives for the last ten years and more.
What is suggested here are some big ideas towards a more progressive government. They are offered not in a prescriptive way but to indicate the scale of action needed and to start the debate. The government has to fight the very human tendency to risk less when under threat and instead to risk all to either win a real mandate or to embed its values ahead of a Tory government.
So here are three big initiatives at home and two abroad:
1. Localism has knocked around long enough without action. The prime minister should call and chair a summer conference of local authority leaders and oppositions, with civil service support, to ask the open question about the relationship between the central state and local government and how far localism can go. It could show a new open and forensic style of politics and create a new settlement. Decamping from London for several days, and taking a collection of his cabinet colleagues with him, the summit – by forcing the media to follow him – could provide a useful educative function. Many problems – such as anti-social behaviour, street crime, rubbish collection, services for immigrants – needs urgently to be ‘de-nationalised’. Dealt with by national government they are moral panics, dealt with locally they are amenable to solutions. More radically, we also need to recognise the limits of central government in areas such as health, education and welfare. While Whitehall may be capable of providing – and must promise to guarantee – adequate services, excellence will only be achieved by a new partnership between citizen and state at the local level. A summer summit would begin this much-needed debate and dramatically underline Labour’s commitment to it. An opening declaration from the Prime Minister that he and his government ‘cannot do it all’ would set the tone.
2. A massive London docklands approach to the northern city economies. Do the string of conurbations from Liverpool to Hull have the infrastructure to find their new niches in the global economy? How can the north heat up to match the glow from the south-east?
3. Set up a National Bank of Public Service Reconstruction. The bank would be run by independent figures and it would start with a review of the last 10 years of investment. In the future it could badge and benchmark public service infrastructure works to verify investment and to castigate governments who quietly starve schools and hospitals of capital.
4. Setting up a new regiment within the British army to specialise in post-conflict situations. Recognising that wars are no longer fought on battlefields, but on high streets, and that winning the hearts and minds of local populations is crucial, the new regiment could be integrated into any military plans for intervention or post-conflict work. While their comrades focus on their jobs, the new regiment can focus, right from the start, on preserving or repairing key structures, obtaining police payrolls, protecting key social assets and reaching out to the local community, for example. The last 15 years have shown us that we need armed forces that can do more than win wars. This would be part of a two-pronged approach that would see Britain become the global leader in investing in the promotion of democracy and human rights – and thus our own security – around the world. DFID’s remit in this field would be moved to a new independent, cross-party body modelled on America’s National Endowment for Democracy. The excellent but small-scale Westminster Foundation for Democracy, by which all three parties provide support to their sister parties in new democracies, could become a wing of the new British Foundation for Democracy.
5. To demonstrate this newly enhanced commitment to promoting democracy and human rights, Gordon Brown should visit Tehran and specifically the people and the civic institutions of Iran. Perhaps like the visit of the Chinese president it could be structured around a cultural exhibition. Perhaps he could reopen the scholastic links that have been lost or visit Shirin Ebadi. But there is an urgent need to reach out to the new generations in a country whose median age is only 25. It is they who hold the best hope of ridding the world of the regime in Iran. It is a risk, it could deliver a propaganda coup to Ahmadinejad, it could go sour. But Nixon did go to China.