Edward Timpson’s acceptance speech following the Crewe byelection felt eerily familiar. His claims were, first, that the government, by ending the 10p tax band, had increased poverty and his party was on the side of ‘hard-working families’. Second, his party says you don’t have to put up with crime but has no plans to prevent it, and he accused the government of cutting services. He added that people had rejected old politics and voted for a positive future.
People in the Labour party used to complain that we have failed to change the terms of political debate as Thatcher had. But that speech shows we have. Its themes were stolen straight from the New Labour songbook. But the toxic coda was ‘Gordon Brown doesn’t get it’.
If we let this bold attempt to bag the centre ground force us to retreat, we will forfeit all the gains that Labour has made and it will become impossible to continue to deliver the progress we have delivered in government.
The most important lesson of the 10p tax fiasco should be that a party will lose public confidence when it tries to do something which goes against all its stated values. People felt furious, because this is not what Labour is supposed to do. We are not the party of taxing the poor to help the prosperous. In politics what you do must always be based on your values.
What we achieved is what the public have a right to expect. We must look forward. We too often convey a sense that they should be grateful for what we have already achieved. But they shouldn’t. We need to keep coming up with fresh ideas, and when we do – as we did in negotiating rights for temporary and agency workers – we must celebrate it and involve people who are affected in getting the details right. This could help to reduce anxieties about our immigration policy, linking in with the minimum wage, health and safety standards, to demonstrate Labour’s commitment to fair chances to succeed in education and at work.
Labour must be the party of ambition and aspiration of a kind that does not contradict but builds on Labour values. Our commitment is to the many not the few, to providing better security for the broad mass of people, to focus in public services always on the patient, the parent, or the passenger.
Timpson’s claim, probably drafted by Conservative central office, that ‘Gordon doesn’t get it’ conveys the message that the drive for modernity which characterised Tony Blair and frustrated many Labour members has been abandoned. And when we retreat to anti-immigrant sloganeering the message rings even more true. The world has changed. Britain is a different, multicultural place – and in a scary way it can look as if the Tories are adapting to that better than Labour.
We may know that in practice that is not true, but in politics what things look like is almost as important as what they are like. We must look like a party with our finger on the electoral pulse to protect ourselves from the Tory charges that it’s ‘time for a change’. Because times are changing, and we must change with them.