In the Dog and Duck, outside school gates, across garden fences, the talk is of little else. Britain nervously anticipates the publication next week of the new ‘National Plan’. Queues will form outside Waterstones, as the public eagerly awaits Labour’s proposals to take Britain from recession to recovery, from doldrums to the high seas. Not since the publication of Lord Denning’s report into the Profumo scandal, which sold 4,000 copies in the first hour, has a government document been so much in demand.
If only. Of course, the National Plan (a working title only, I am told) will have more authors than readers, and will have all of the impact on the public as a mouse treading on the toes of an elephant. I fear it will go the same way as the last major ‘strategic plan’ the government produced: rapidly into obscurity. Who can remember what it was called? It was published only in April this year, and I had to google it to remind myself that it was titled Building Britain’s Future.
The issue here goes deeper than presentation. It is not merely that calling any document a ‘national plan’, even in the early drafting stages, is a pointless own goal. For political aficionados, it is a chance to snigger at the echoes of George Brown’s national plan in 1965, which ended up as something of a shuttle-crash. The policy faltered and culminated in the devaluation crisis of 1967, the government department which produced it was abolished, and at the next available election the British people voted for the Conservatives. Even for those without a good working knowledge of the first Wilson government, it sounds like something from the Brezhnev era, and before long we’ll all be working in collectivised farms.
No, the issue for us progressives is that the release next week of yet another big document draws attention to Labour’s marked absence of an eye-catching forward policy agenda. It will be a ‘greatest hits collection’, trawled from the existing activities of government departments, perhaps with some added proposals culled from Stephen Carter’s Digital Britain report, but overall a little limp and disappointing. We want a steak, but we may well end up with spam.
What was designed to make Labour look strong, in fact may make us look weak, for three reasons:
First, whilst we’ve been very good on strategy (and indeed have led the world on the response to the credit crunch), we’ve been poor at tactics. Labour has not found the way to translate its meta-narrative about tackling the recession on the global stage, to how to beat the recession in Worcester, Chester or Leicester. Labour needs to think global, but campaign local, and so far we’ve not come up with the tools and tactics to catch the imagination of the voters on the high streets and in the market squares.
Second, it is proving impossible for the government to maintain momentum in these last few months before a general election. The senior civil service is preparing for the arrival of a new Conservative government. The Whitehall machine is being switched to ‘slow’, with departments unwilling to accept commissions for new projects and initiatives. The government’s arteries are furring up. It will take a renewed electoral mandate for Labour to kick some life into the Mandarins. So Labour looks lumbering and sluggish, compared to the fleet-of-foot Tories who can chop and change their policies and principles as the situation demands.
Third, we lack the voters’ permission to the heard. I recall a presentation by Philip Gould before the 2005 election where he identified Labour’s problem: we were playing well enough on the pitch, even scoring some goals, but the crowd had already gone home. Now, four years on, and in the midst of an unprecedented parliamentary scandal the problem is much, much worse. We can produce documents until our fingers are tired of tapping the keyboard, but it won’t make any difference until the voters take their fingers out of their ears every time a Labour figure opens their mouth.
We talk as though we have a year until the election, but we don’t. If you take out August, Christmas and Easter, and the month-long ‘short’ campaign, we have only a few weeks of active politics to remind people why they voted for us last time, and why they should again. I believe it can be done. But I doubt many Labour campaigners will be debating the contents of the National Plan on the doorsteps.