Progress recently gave Labour activists the chance to win a bursary place to attend our forthcoming political weekend. We publish here the offerings of three of the winners.
Sally Prentice, Vauxhall CLP
Labour will only win back people’s trust if it can demonstrate that not only can the party manage the economy well, but it can use taxpayers’ money wisely. In 2010 people felt that Labour had lost its way on welfare. They felt that their taxes were being wasted by subsidising households where no one was officially working – or indeed, had ever worked.
Labour left office with over five million people on out-of-work benefits, including two million people claiming incapacity benefit. We need to ask why we failed, after a decade of economic growth, to significantly reduce this number. One reason is that the longer people remain out of work, the less attractive they become to employers as their skills and motivation decline.
The next Labour government must give everyone a reason to get up in the morning. Unemployed people need to have new opportunities to stretch themselves and to meet new people; working people need to see them contributing to society. No one who receives rejection after rejection wants to be at home all day with nothing to do and no one to talk to. For some people this becomes a way of life. In Lambeth, where I am a councillor, people who had been on incapacity benefit for more than a year were more likely to die than return to paid employment.
A new welfare system would have ‘business community brokerages’ as part of its core offer. Everyone of working age claiming benefits would put together a ‘working week’ of volunteering, assignments with local SMEs and third sector organisations, and skills development courses. Each person would have a volunteer ‘coach’ who would offer advice and contacts to help them find work. Local micro-businesses could use the project banks as a way of recruiting people to help with specific tasks which they could pay for.
Unemployed people could use their skills – and learn new ones – to teach prisoners how to read and write and volunteer with the local Brownies or Scouts, who are short of leaders. Each person would have an account, in which they could build up ‘credits’ and earn money through doing short-term pieces of paid work. People would be able to use their earnings for specific purposes, such as paying off debts and investing in equipment for a new business, without affecting their benefit payments.
We do not have to wait until 2015: Labour’s Cooperative Councils Network offers an excellent opportunity to develop such a model. Critics will argue that such a programme is ‘workfare’ but they ignore the fact that most jobs are never advertised, most work is found through personal contact and networks decline rapidly when people are out of work. The jobs of the future will be in micro-businesses. The UK economy urgently needs a growth strategy – and here too Labour councils can lead by example – but the hard-working majority in Britain want to see responsible welfare alongside a responsible capitalism. Only then will they trust Labour to run the economy and welfare effectively.
Alan Lockey, Bethnal Green and Bow CLP
The ‘centre-ground’ is neither fixed nor definable. The most successful leaders, Clement Attlee, Margaret Thatcher, and Tony Blair, built broad-based majoritarian coalitions, appealing to all parts of society. The lessons from history are clear: a strong leader shapes the centre-ground at the same time as occupying it.
However, even allowing for its amorphous nature, the centre-ground is currently in a state of severe flux, contorted by the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression. There is a strong suspicion that on immigration, welfare reform and Europe, the national sentiment is moving in a reactionary direction. And on the key question of the economy, across the continent, voters have emphatically turned to a resurgent right.
However, if we cannot identify its precise location, we can at least identify the battleground. Throughout this process of renewal, Labour should look to emerging sociological currents, putting, in Eric Hobsbawm’s memorable phrase, ‘the future in our bones’. This requires a massive change in culture for a Labour party that has recently spent 13 years in government. Far too often we translate new political contexts into policy challenges, rather than exploring the opportunities they afford to develop the broad-based coalition that will lead us back to power. Emerging sociological trends that should be mined for political possibility include the ‘squeezed middle’, the ‘care crisis’ of both elder care and childcare, entrenched disadvantage and poor skills in the education system, the rise of single-occupied housing, and the politics of national identity.
We can also identify the two unchanging attributes of any party that resides in the centre-ground: economic credibility and the ability to offer a compelling vision of a future society. Currently, Labour is in deficit on both counts.
Ed Miliband’s analysis, that the financial crisis represents an opportunity to build a better capitalism, is correct. Yet unless our economic credibility is restored this will be an opportunity wasted. It is delusional to think that a new economic consensus can be built through the waging of a persistent, attritional soundbite war, particularly when our technocratic language is pitched against an opponent’s that is so firmly rooted in popular notions of common sense. That is not to say that our overall response is wrong, but that it is poorly defined. Until we clearly illustrate how, with concrete reference to cuts, we would implement the Darling plan, we will not regain voters’ trust.
Yet it is the second component that perhaps represents the more profound challenge. Progressives want to build a new and better society. But, as frequent relative GDP and average wage comparisons illustrate, for most Britons the past is a happier country. This is a deeply conservative mindset from which to craft an optimistic sense of mission. Furthermore, the unfortunate history of the Labour party is that when it acquires access to the levers of the state, it forgets about all other apparatus of engendering change. Even the most optimistic assessments of long-term economic trends indicate that the statist options, whether through redistribution or large-scale public investment, will not be available in 2015. And yet, even now, Labour party ‘strategy’ meetings can sound like they are answering the question ‘what would we spend first?’
The Labour movement urgently needs to develop non-statist means of political change. It may be clichéd, but the answer is the movement itself. A sense of resistance, through community organisation and democratic associations, is the uniquely Labour contribution to the history of social democracy. In an epoch when market forces will, as demonstrated by the eurozone crisis, increasingly escape state intervention and with ‘statism’ totally off the public services menu, it is only through harnessing a grassroots movement of ‘resistance’ that we will be able to create the right conditions for change.
Ronit Wolfson, Hackney North and Stoke Newington CLP
Ask any Labour party member about their values and their answer is likely to include ‘fairness’. Ask any voter on the doorstep what their gripes are and high on the list of concerns is most probably the unfairness of one or more of the following: benefit claimants ‘refusing’ to work; ‘uncapped’ immigration and its impact on communities; low pay and long hours; working hard for little or no pension; and excessive bonuses funded from tax pounds. Ultimately, then, these are all concerns about fairness. However, despite no obvious disconnect between the concerns of the electorate and Labour’s values, our rhetoric of being the party of fairness does not seem to be permeating.
Why? In part because, as a party, we have largely conceded the argument on the economy. As such, large swaths of the electorate believe that Britain simply cannot afford fairness. They are unhappy, yes, but they have bought in to the idea that we are all in this together and simply have no choice but to cut police, slash pensions and close sure start centres. Why the economic argument has been conceded is unclear, particularly when the government’s revised targets for deficit reduction are higher for every year of the duration of this parliament than the Darling plan.
The new centre-ground is a place of fairness – where the social contract works two ways and the government gives hard-working people a break but does not provide handouts to those individuals who fail to keep their side of the deal. Tony Blair has said that in government one should be concerned about right and wrong, not right and left. This ‘new centre-ground’ politics should seek to address fundamental issues of fairness in society without becoming mired in narrow conceptions of the sort of policies a left, right or indeed ‘centre’ government should adopt. That means that housing benefit probably cannot cover the cost of living in those London boroughs out of reach even to middle-income families. That means that university education will not be free for all. But it also means that where the cost of childcare makes working prohibitively expensive, government needs to step in. It means that people who lose their job due to ill health or disability should be able to maintain a good standard of living after decades of paying tax.
However, before we can articulate this to the country we need to become credible again on the economy. We need to offer the electorate an economic policy that is more than ‘well, it used to be the Darling plan’. Only then will the electorate accept that fairness is, in fact, something that Britain can afford.