It’s stating the obvious that Labour has a real battle on its hands to ensure that it is reelected, whenever that elusive election comes. We need to be organised, campaigning and getting our message across. But we also need to be developing new ideas.
We need to avoid the comfort zone of thinking that just spending more money on public services will see us through. If we do this, we will eventually fail and be outflanked by the Tories. In any case, current economic constraints are closing off the option of large increases in public spending. So now, more than ever, we need to be examining how we reform public services. The point of doing so isn’t simply to save money but to provide better services for those who need them.
This new thinking isn’t always easy and painless. Change can be unsettling and challenging for orthodox ways of delivering public services. But if we don’t keep our minds open to new ideas, then we risk drying up and becoming irrelevant to people’s needs.
That’s why the, sometimes over-the-top, reaction to Caroline Flint’s recent Fabian speech on council housing and worklessness was so disappointing. She was right to draw attention to the fact that despite Labour’s success in dramatically reducing unemployment, worklessness isn’t just high but rising. Today, 55 per cent of all households in social housing have no working aged adults in employment – an increase of 20 percent since 1981. Given that this is the case, surely we need to be doing something about it.
What Caroline Flint said, or is claimed by her critics to have said, may well have unsettled and challenged established orthodoxies on social housing and welfare support, but she did at least attempt to address the issue.
She was not stigmatising council tenants but trying to develop some new ideas that will enable Labour to improve the life chances of thousands of people who have been left behind by our undoubted economic success story. Her ideas should at least be given a fair hearing.
We often claim that our policies fit into a framework of rights and responsibilities but if this is to amount to anything more than a vapid slogan, then we have to be serious when we talk about the responsibilities that we, as individuals, have towards the collective of which we are a part.
The notion that the collective, that is, society or the state, has a duty to help those in need is a foundation stone of Labour thinking. So too is the proposition that the individual has a responsibility to contribute to the collective, where they are able to do so.
Asking council tenants to enter into a voluntary contract or obligation to work in return for help in finding employment or training is entirely consistent with this traditional Labour thinking. Equally, if we’re giving the private sector opportunities to make profits from providing welfare services, then they should be required to give support to those parts of our communities that are most in need of targeted help.
Flint said that she wanted to start a national debate on the issues she raised. She certainly did that but the tenor of most responses has been to close down any debate rather than explore her ideas further. We could do this and find that they won’t work but if we don’t have open-minded policy debates then we won’t find anything that works.
Richard Olszewski