That’s why I am confident that New Labour’s ability to look on society without isms and abstractions will find favour once more.
The party’s credibility depends on New Labour showing it can match the coalition’s commitment to resolve the questions that dog Britain’s long-term economic outlook, particularly those related to an ageing demography and the ballooning costs of some aspects of the welfare state. That does not mean surrendering to the coalition’s hastily conceived and hamfisted agenda. New Labour should stress how its skills of triangulation and compromise are needed now more than ever since the economic downturn heightened conflicting claims over scarce resources. The coalition’s failure to appreciate this is why its sudden and swingeing hike in tuition fees triggered rioting, whereas New Labour’s patient, piecemeal approach to the same subject was broadly accepted. New Labour, the great reconciler, can scupper the Conservatives’ scaremongering about the wrath of the markets by pointing out the simple truth that only solutions that deliver growth will succeed and that only policies perceived as fair will endure. This is what will provide the certainty needed by businesses and investors, not ideological faits accomplis that alienate more people than they persuade.
Any economic message New Labour attempts to deliver is, however, likely to invite attacks on its own record. This is why it must take ownership of that critique.
Acknowledging that greater fiscal discipline during the boom years would have meant more room to manoeuvre during the bust would help draw out the poison. New Labour’s proponents should put together a blueprint for a more countercyclical fiscal policy to help set the party’s direction of travel. A combination of fiscal restraint and genuine radicalism on banking reform would have broad appeal, with the second of these also helping to atone for past shortcomings.
In addition, New Labour should push for its hard-headed sensibilities to shape the party’s social policies. Ken Clarke’s feet-up, sombrero-down attitude towards prisons creates space to the right of the coalition, but there are reasons for filling it besides political opportunism. Part of New Labour’s success was that it recognised that crime and antisocial behaviour are class issues, in that they primarily blight the lives of the poor, just as it is socially disadvantaged children who have the most to lose from a lack of structure, discipline and standards at school. New Labour voices have an important role in halting any drift towards the metropolitan, bien-pensant mindset that continues to consign the Liberal Democrats to a distant third in national elections.
If New Labour’s tenets were as out of touch with the British public as Conservative obsessions with Europe and teenage mothers were in the mid-1990s then I would say, without a doubt, bin them. But they are not. New Labour remains the party’s link to the mainstream majority. The further the party drifts from them, the more mocked and marginalised it will become.