Mind the pitfalls of decentralising power, argues Andrew Harrop
The Purple Book seeks to revive Labour’s long tradition of participation, self-government and moral reform. Decentralisation, pluralism and people power: who could possibly disagree?
But politics is about trade-offs and priorities. Yes, Labour should adopt a ‘presumption of decentralisation’, but there are clear restrictions on how, and how far, this should go. This is both because there are difficult tensions within the left-decentralist agenda, and also because decentralisation risks becoming a distraction from the huge national ambitions we need to embrace.
Our politics of the state must first be about the big, long-term challenges which only collective action on a national scale can resolve: growth and productivity; demographic change; carbon reduction; housing supply; and, for us on the left, a fairer labour market for the middle and bottom, reduced health inequalities and closing the gap in life chances. Labour’s years in office show what the state can achieve, and not just through tax-and-spend; for example, long-term, sustainable frameworks for pensions provision and carbon reduction.
Britain’s public finance settlement remains overwhelmingly an issue for the central state too. To win again we need to give cast-iron reassurances against spending profligacy, overseen by the Office for Budget Responsibility. This could take the form of a promise on the deficit, perhaps animated by a pledge that during economic recovery tax and spending would only rise in line with growth.
Creating this ‘cover’ would provide Labour with the opportunity to radically restructure how public money is raised and spent. This could include greater devolution of public service spending, and perhaps the introduction of more local taxation. But most of the task is for the national state. Labour should rewrite the tax code to make it pro-green, pro-work, pro-asset stability and long-termist. We should also seek to integrate tax and welfare, to bind everyone into a common, more universal and contribution-based system. And we should no longer tolerate social security causing widening inequality, but instead index state credits to earnings – a small change from the centre which over decades will transform life chances.
So the decentralist agenda will need to jostle with an inevitable and desirable programme of central action. But there is also intense competition within the decentralist camp itself, with many visions and versions of the new empowering state. Some decentralist solutions seek to disempower and bypass local democracy, while others aim to strengthen it. Giving cash to service users and big payment-by-results contracts are both pluralist innovations, but their consequences are totally different. At every turn we must ask what means and ends we are pursuing and how they may rub up against each other: personal control and responsibility; stronger democracy; professional autonomy; savings, efficiency and competitive innovation; enduring public institutions; community and civic life; and, of course, better service outcomes.
Finally, decentralisers on the left must be wary that they are not widening, rather than narrowing, inequalities of power. There is a fine line, for example, between creating aspirational inner-city schools that bind professional parents into comprehensive education and free schools which seem to be all about giving privileged parents the ability to opt out. The left’s version of power-to-the-people must be about levelling up for those without control over their lives, not just giving more to those who do.
—————————————————————————————
Andrew Harrop is general secretary of the Fabian Society
—————————————————————————————
It is time for the Labour party to choose pluralism, says Philip Collins
In his great poem The Whitsun Weddings Philip Larkin described how he felt as he watched wedding parties boarding a train: ‘there swelled a sense of falling … somewhere becoming rain’. It is clear that the Labour party has not fallen into recriminations after its 2010 defeat. Given the scale of the rejection it suffered in 2010, it is a notable fact. Neither has the party lurched to the left, particularly. It has crept to the left, a little bit, but no disaster has taken place.
Yet there is still a sense of falling, of the party in a place that is somewhere becoming rain. This is because the Labour party is on the threshold between two different conceptions of what it might do next. The first conception is what we might call vintage social democracy. The state is the principal, though by no means only, agent of change and the sovereign objective of government is to reduce the various inequalities that characterise British life. The second conception is scattered through the pages of The Purple Book. This is an account in which the Labour party is an active sponsor of a spread of power, in which a Labour government would seed popular movements rather than seek to engineer an outcome.
This argument is only just beginning but we should be in no doubt that it is an argument. There are, of course, many intermediate points between the two extremes but the tension between the two schools of thought is obvious. A strict egalitarian will denigrate the pluralist’s programme if, in the process, it widens inequality. The pluralist is more comfortable, by contrast, with inequality so long as it is chosen, so long as it reflects the choices that actual people make. The egalitarian begins with a concern with the overall pattern that people make when they are assembled in a society. The pluralist begins with the actually existing circumstances of people’s lives.
It is the first tradition – the domain of the social democratic centralist and the Fabian – that has been the dominant strand in the history of the Labour party. But it is worth dwelling for a moment on just how poorly this tradition has stood up to historical scrutiny. Soon after the Labour party was founded it acquired an overtly socialist economics, committed, at least in theory, to the public ownership of the means of production. That promise was never redeemed in practice and it was quietly laid aside in doctrine too, in favour of selective nationalisation. After its less-than-glorious application by Herbert Morrison after 1945, nationalisation was, in turn, dropped as the central economic nostrum, in favour of planning.
The revisionist formula articulated by Tony Crosland really bore no relation to anything the Labour party had thought before. The means were negotiable. The only value not up for discussion was equality. This is where the Labour right got to – ostensibly flexible on means but dogmatic on a narrow conception of income inequality. The trouble is that its own formula (borrowed passim by New Labour) made no real sense. It is never entirely possible to separate means and ends. If your end is greater income inequality, some means are likely to work and some are not. You spend a lot of time, like it or not, arranging income transfers through the central state.
There is a lot of emotional energy invested in this programme in the Labour party. That is not surprising, both because it has a historical pedigree and it is a noble aim. There is one overwhelming caveat, which is that the Labour party now has to come to terms with an era in which the easy money it so enjoys spending is going to be hard to come by. That is why the pluralist idea of Labour has to prevail. It will not be easy because it is a question of identity.
—————————————————————————————
Philip Collins is chair of Demos and a columnist for The Times
Trackbacks/Pingbacks