The Orange Book was the Liberal Democrat modernisers’ manifesto that promised to “reclaim liberalism” for a party that had become dominated by social democracy. Edited by David Laws, and with contributions from Nick Clegg, Chris Huhne and Vince Cable, it paved the way for the formation of a coalition government between the Conservatives and the Lib Dems that would have been inconceivable before its publication.
Now, the Blairites in the Labour Party are planning to publish their own modernisers’ manifesto that they hope will reshape politics on the Centre Left in a similar way. It is going to be called The Purple Book.
“Purple was the colour of new Labour,” says one of those involved. “It’s what you get if you combine red and blue. It symbolises the need to stay on the centre ground.” Like The Orange Book, which came out in 2004, the purple one will be made up of contributions by different writers, including Shadow Cabinet ministers, rising stars on the back benches and party advisers. Tessa Jowell, Liam Byrne and Alan Milburn are among those who have already agreed to contribute, as well as some of the new MPs, including Liz Kendall, a former aide to Patricia Hewitt, and John Woodcock, who once worked for John Hutton.
There will be other, high-profile names added to the list before the book is published in the autumn, around the time of the Labour Party conference. It is not yet clear whether David Miliband will write a chapter, although he sympathises with the aims of The Purple Book.
This modernisers’ manifesto will include essays on the economy, the role of the State, public service reform, welfare, crime, the family and social mobility. The overarching theme will be the need to move away from reliance on a big State and redistribute power to individuals and communities.
It will not just be a rehash of old policies from the Blair years. One idea is to do more to empower consumers against big business, another is to create a non-state social insurance scheme for welfare. But the blueprint will be wideranging and detailed. Already, those discussing the project hope that they may in future be known as the Purple Book group rather than Blairites – an outdated adjective, almost two decades after Tony Blair first became leader – just as some Lib Dems are described as Orange Book MPs.
The manifesto is a sign that the new Labour wing of the party is starting to reassert itself as Mr Miliband finds his feet. The Purple Book is being organised by Progress, the Blairite pressure group funded by Lord Sainsbury of Turville, the former Science Minister who gives it £250,000 a year (and has not donated any money to Labour since its current leader took over). Increasingly, Progress is balancing the power of the trade unions in the party and it is determined to flex its muscles on policy as vigorously as the barons.
“The Purple Book isn’t an academic exercise,” says one of the organisers. “Ed Miliband has said he has a blank page for his policy review and we want to start making some notes on that page. This is about what Labour should be saying in 2015, not what’s happening right now. It’s not the abandonment of new Labour, it’s the next stage of new Labour.”
The choice of words is deliberate. One of Mr Miliband’s first declarations, on becoming leader of the Labour Party, was that “the era of new Labour is over”. The Purple Book brigade wants to ensure that he does not abandon the basic principles that won three elections. Although Labour is consistently ahead in the polls, is winning by-elections and looks set to clean up at next month’s local elections, many MPs are sceptical that their leader will be walking into Downing Street in 2015.
“There’s a real danger of a false dawn where Labour starts to do quite well, the coalition falters and we retreat to our comfort zone,” says a Shadow Cabinet minister. “But we can’t just be the party of protest. The new Labour brand may have become contaminated but the underlying principles are as relevant today as they’ve ever been.”
There is a personal dimension to all this, of course. Privately, some of the supporters of the more Blairite older Miliband brother, David, are still not entirely reconciled to the fact that he lost to his younger brother. One frontbencher told me recently that there isn’t a day that goes by when he doesn’t wish that David, not Ed, had won the leadership. Another senior MP is brutally frank: “Ed’s not doing badly enough for us to get rid of him but he’s not doing well enough to win power.” David Miliband is not out of the game: he remains in close touch with many of those who backed him for the leadership, although nobody detects a plot.
But this is also a political issue. Labour is winning votes from disillusioned Lib Dems and its own former supporters who are returning to the fold, but it still has a mountain to climb in the South East, among the aspirational “conservatory-building classes” who were key to its previous election victories. Mr Miliband has rightly identified the “squeezed middle” as a crucial target audience but not everyone agrees about how to win these voters over. There has not been a revival of the factionalism of the TB-GB years, but tensions are emerging behind the scenes, within the Shadow Cabinet and beyond, over how far Labour should admit to mistakes on the economy, as well as the extent to which the party should distance itself from its “new” Labour past.
In a recent speech, Douglas Alexander, the Shadow Foreign Secretary who was David Miliband’s campaign manager, called for his party to revive the spirit of the “mid-Nineties modernisers” for whom “making the party comfortable was never enough. The aim was always to make the public comfortable with the idea of living in Labour Britain.”
Len McCluskey, the Unite general secretary, by contrast, says his union will not give money to Labour again until it recognises that “you can’t ignore your roots”. The Purple Book will make the case for reaching out rather than digging down. In this at least it is just like The Orange Book. There are, the organisers say, some “common themes” around the role of government and decentralisation. In fact it is possible to see scope for a new Lib-Lab alliance, grown out of the liberal Centre rather than the social democratic Left. With orange and purple all the rage on the catwalks this year, this could be the colour-blocking coalition.
Two Tory Parties will only lead to one thing coalition or in fact me joining a real party the Tories. I love the idea of a insurance for welfare, how about holiday camps for the hated sick and the disabled, nice doors with say, “work pays”. New Labour Thatcher could be the photo on the front of the pamphlets
Big fan of David and I expect that the actual content of the Purple Book will be quite appealing to me but it strikes me that anything that associates the Labour brand with Nick Clegg and his Orange Book would be a supremely stupid idea. He’s got to be the most hated politician in the country at the moment. Robert’s comment above is pretty telling – there is a perception that Red Tories, Blue Labour, Orange Lib Dems are all different names for the same thing. I disagree or I wouldn’t be a Labour member but let’s try and persuade people we are different rather than that we’re a more competent and cuddly version of the same thing.
Also can’t help but thinking it would have been better to wait until after May 5th for this.
Not only it is a supremely stupid idea, but the notion of “combining blue and red” is an idea which leave me feeling so grubby I need a shower. We are the LABOUR PARTY, not some hybrid of soft Tories and modernisers. There’s a name for those people … Lib Dems. And if the Purple Book brigade admire that politics so much they should cross the House. It is about time we were open about this. The Lib Dem-Conservative coalition is where these people really belong. It is their natural home and if they had any sense of intergrity they would acknowledge that fact. I came back to Labour with the election of Ed Miliband. I came back precisely because the New Labour tendancy had been beaten and a new course was being charted. Anyone who REALLY believes the economic downturn and the election of Gordon Brown as leader were the reason we lost the last election missed the last two years of Blair, when we were behind in the polls consistently. No-one is suggesting Ed Miliband will “walk” into Downing Street in 2015; it is going to be a hands-down fight, and it will take every one of us pulling in the SAME DIRECTION if we’re to win. Most party members are not concerned with entering the Campaign Hall of Fame with another landslide ….. we will take a working majority with which we can do good things. The Tories and their coalition partners are dismantling this country without the benefit of a big majority ….. we can change it back without one. As to the notion of a grubby, sometime future deal with the Lib Dems, I think I am not alone in stating how that would make my stomach churn and my skin crawl. In government they have proved themselves to be interested only in the taking and holding of power. In that, they and the Purple Bookers have a lot in common. The objective for the next election campaign should not be to reach out to the Lib Dems but to annihilate them as a political force. Far from trying to embrace them, we should be seeking to destroy them. Far from believing, as Gould does and as some of the Purple Bookers evidently do, that we should be seeking a long-term assimilation with the Liberal Party, our job should be to wipe them out and stand alone as Britain’s party of the left. That too would make us the permament party of government, or something close to it. For the first time ever, that ambition might genuinely be within reach. It would be a crime to waste it on naval gazing ephemera such as trying to reform that which is dead and gone.
Times change. Thankfully. I left (new) Labour in 1996 because I loathed the Blairite project, rejoining in early 2010 as I saw the ground start to shift. Two things – The banking crisis, and ideological return (expansion) of Thatcherite politics, means that I see a generational shift in politics. Where the last Liberal government laid the foundations for modern Britain, then post war there was the welfare state consensus born, and Thatcher shifted politics again, we’re now in a position where politics is ripe for change – real change, not re-jigging the deck chairs. That’s an opportunity Labour need to grasp; reconnect with all those millions who’re disatisfied with the calcified system that sees all three parties playing musical chairs for who can be more pro big business, pro-banker and anti public service. Secondly, it’s the role of politicians amd thinkers surely to shift opinion, no merely reflect the status quo. The “middle ground” moves, saying ‘That’s the middle ground, we need to inhabit it’ concedes the political argument to those who’re defining the middle of the road – currently the Tories, their collaborators and the media. This isn’t a call for a socialist utopia, but a wish that Labour can be bold and assertive in declaring, and fighting for, democratic socialist values and redefine where the centre lies – as Thatcher did, Atlee did and generations before did.
The piece which has exclusively revealed the project sets out that the Purple Book is …. * Seeking to emulate the Cleggite Orange Book, to reshape the centre-left in a similar way * Based on a belief that the best way to symbolise a centre-ground Labour party is a very shallow triangulation – the centre is about combining blue and red. (The strategic implication: if the Coalition wants to shift the centre right, move right and concede the centre). * It is a project of Blairites, though it hopes to rebrand Blairism as the new purple. (The organisers are apparently unaware that the election maths show that his own supporters cost David Miliband the leadership by putting him in this Blairite box, esp Peter Mandelson’s interventions). * That it is “deliberate” for the organisers to couch the project as a direct challenge and rejection to the Labour leader’s argument that New Labour was right for its time, but that a future project needs to be something new. (Even though there is an acknowledgement that New Labour has become a “contaminated brand”, and although this is quite a silly and restrictive debate about labels). * That it is not a leadership plot, because that isn’t on at the moment, but that its sympathisers would like to keep the opportunity of a plot on the table, and so have deliberately briefed it as a David Miliband inspired project of which he approves, while making off-stage noises about leadershp possibilites. * The organisers point to “common themes” with the Orange Bookers, so it is suggested that a new centre could come from a Blairite-Cleggite alliance. (The idea of a possible Coalition between the broad mainstream of liberal social democratic centre-left LibDems and the broad mainstream of Labour is being rejected here). As a supporter of many Progress activities and ideas, I do worry that the desire to chase headlines and create controversy seems to have led the Purple organisers to switch off their political brains. This has done their supporters a disservice by presenting Progress as backward-looking rather than about the future, aggrieved about the leadership result and factional rather than interested in building alliances with the leadership and other modernising voices in the party, and more about political plotting than new ideas. It will be interesting to debate the ideas, but it will now be necessary to dig them out from underneath these political briefings in order to get a fair hearing from Labour people who don’t want to see the type of factional approach with which these anonymous briefings took place. If it was important to publicise the project some months early, why not do so openly and on the record, and in a way not designed to begin a round of factional infighting a fortnight before important elections?