This is an incisive, deftly edited volume of essays which takes up themes that may surprise more sceptical voices. The central thread is that Ed Miliband is charting a fresh direction for his party beyond Thatcherite neoliberalism and New Labour’s centrist modernisation. Are the authors searching for a third way? Certainly there are fresh debates opening up – over the ‘squeezed middle’, forging a more responsible capitalism, and reversing downward mobility for younger generations. What unites the contributors is scepticism about the capacity of free markets and the centralising state to forge the social democratic good society.
John Denham, the book’s progenitor, is candid about the fiscal pressures awaiting an incoming Labour government: a declining tax base; austerity lasting a decade after the financial crisis has abated; long-term spending pressures including the ageing society. Labour will inherit a more fragmented system of delivery in public services, but may encourage mutual co-ownership as a means of spreading power and control. Tentative answers are emerging about what a Labour government with no money might actually do. Indeed, there is more to displease traditionalists than avowed modernisers.
As befits a Fabian publication, the focus of the volume is Britain’s economic and social model, and the need for long-term investment in welfare and growth. It is the symbiosis between economic and social policy that provides a bridging theme for the collection. Without better paid, more secure jobs in the lower tier of the labour market, no government can control a rocketing welfare bill. In the absence of universal, affordable childcare, an employment strategy helping parents into work will surely fail. The emphasis throughout is Labour improving the material position of hard-pressed families who so often feel let down by government.
Not surprisingly perhaps, the book has rather less to say about non-material agendas: the distribution of knowledge, quality of life, environmental sustainability, democratic control. Perhaps the scale of the financial crisis makes the economic focus inevitable. But the broken economy surely emphasises the limits of material consumption, while the saga of House of Lords reform underlines the urgency of institutional renewal in British politics. A broader notion of human wellbeing in public policy, combined with a renewed commitment to political reform, ought to be integral to a radical social democratic programme.
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Patrick Diamond is senior research fellow at Policy Network
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The Shape of Things to Come
John Denham (ed)
Fabian Society | 144pp | £9.95