As the submissions to Labour’s policy review are digested over the summer, Progress will undoubtedly be a force within the debate. It’s important to use that influence to advance Labour values.
Looking back to the successes of early New Labour certainly teaches us lessons. Let’s just be careful that we don’t pick and choose which ones we learn. The steady rebuilding of support in the 1990s was attributable to a mix of factors: our growing economic credibility, a clear analysis based on the evidence of the challenges for social policy and, crucially, a commitment to social justice that underpinned some of our boldest and most radical policies: the national minimum wage, the Macpherson inquiry, the child poverty target.
What’s also important to note is that our most radical policies were also our most popular. It won’t surprise many readers that sure start, investment in the NHS and neighbourhood renewal enjoyed widespread support. But some may be more startled to learn that policies such as the restoration of union rights at GCHQ or even the removal of the ‘primary purpose rule’, or the introduction of the Human Rights Act, were highly popular too. Other initiatives, like the creation of the role of the PCSO, or the introduction of teaching assistants in classrooms, though now very widely approved, were by contrast the subject of much more mixed reactions at the time of their introduction.
We must remember all that now when thinking about our electoral appeal. Labour didn’t win in 1997, and again in 2001 and 2005, simply on a programme of public sector efficiency gains, increasing school choice, and cracking down on criminals. Of course, such policies were of importance. But many other policies were of equal or greater significance in defining what we stood for, and inspiring (I use the word advisedly, certainly in the 1997 election) thousands of voters to come back to Labour. A selective reprise of only elements of the New Labour project certainly won’t therefore be sufficient to meet our challenges now – or convince the voters.
Labour’s real and radical achievements in the redistribution of resources, the recognition and strengthening of rights, especially for the disadvantaged and minorities, and substantial public investment in the social fabric, were fundamental to our success, and must be properly recognised in our thinking today. So I was surprised to see so little interest in this policy territory in the most recent edition of Progress. Commentators seemed obsessed with harking back to a golden New Labour past, but too frequently their analysis was narrow and decidedly biased. There was little trace of the balance between responsibilities and rights, between supporting individual aspiration and achieving greater equality, that characterised our early appeal.
That balance once shone through all our ambitions, but seems in danger of being lost. As I read my way through the columns and commentary, I struggled to find any evidence of interest in progressive, pro-poor policies, surely important for a party of the left. Of course our party contains a range of opinions, and of course we must hear and learn from the lessons of the 2010 electoral result, and from what the voters have told us in our listening exercise over in the past few months. But this isn’t an excuse for one-sided conclusions, for abandoning values, for factionalism, or for kneejerk populist responses. Voters will see through all of those, and will punish us again at the polls. What earns us respect are our principles, our unity, our ability to respond to all our communities, and our determination to build a better, fairer future. Our starting point is our Labour values, not a partial reading of recent history.