Twenty-six months remain until the next general election, as Jon Cruddas reminded the audience at the recent launch of IPPR’s Condition of Britain project. Time to get the policy house in order, then. Three years lacking clear pitches for the doorstep may have felt frustrating for activists but the period of reflection may be resulting in some forward-looking Labour agendas. And thinktanks have played their role in incubating this process.
Echoing the slow but steady approach, Jim Murphy noted at The Henry Jackson Society last month: ‘It was Einstein who said, “If I had an hour to save the world I would spend 55 minutes defining the problem and five minutes finding solutions”. Too often in politics we can be tilted towards instant answers when we should be better at first understanding the problem.’ In the wake of the raised profile of Islamist terrorism and state instability in north and west Africa, and conscious of the increasingly ‘complex risk’ of modern security concerns, Murphy outlined his vision for a new model of ‘preventative intervention’: developing adaptable forces, superior intelligence, forging international alliances and properly understanding the situation ‘on the ground’, as well as understanding that new technology poses ‘risks proportionate to their enormous potential to advance humankind’.
If we have not heard much about intervention from Labour’s frontbench over recent years, neither has the case for choice in public services been much in evidence. In an address to Reform’s conference on ‘The New NHS’, shadow care minister Liz Kendall offered a powerful corrective.
The core of Kendall’s speech was ‘giving real power to patients and the public, and radically reforming how and where care is provided’. ‘Some people criticise Labour for backing patient choice, saying what most people want is a good local hospital,’ she noted. ‘This is true. But what if your local hospital isn’t good? A recent Freedom of Information request revealed that the number of patients who chose to go to Mid Staffordshire hospital through “Choose and Book” fell from 15,700 in 2007-8 to 6,500 in 2012-13. In other words, almost two-thirds fewer patients chose to go to Mid Staffordshire in the space of five years. Would anyone seriously want to have denied people this choice? And can anyone who claims to stand “for the many, not the few” accept that when a doctor, or a member of their family, needs an operation, they can ask their peers which is the best hospital and who is the best consultant but deny this knowledge to ordinary members of the public?’ Kendall also reiterated Andy Burnham’s backing of ‘whole person care’, as described to The King’s Fund in January, by anticipating the bringing together of ‘three essentially separate systems: physical health treated by the mainstream NHS, mental health on the margins, and social care’.
Returning to IPPR’s Condition of Britain project, Cruddas spoke the same day as Ed Miliband’s speech in Bedford floating a return of the 10p rate of tax coupled with a ‘mansion tax’. IPPR director Nick Pearce described the project as helping to ‘define the central questions to which centre-left politics need to offer answers, rooted in people’s own experience and asking them to play their part in any solution’ and cited the Commission on Social Justice which the thinktank ran in the 1990s. He also criticised the centre-right’s ‘broken Britain’ critique, lambasting it for framing problems as it imagines them to be, rather than as they are.
Meanwhile, Resolution Foundation set about understanding the contemporary condition, releasing its latest Squeezed Britain report on the economic position of low-to-middle-income households just as Miliband fired the starting gun on the race to 2015 by heralding a ‘living standards’ election. With 26 months to go, the building blocks for a coherent policy platform may be falling into place; activity in wonk world could help provide election-winning policy and country-transforming action. But a long lead-in time is needed for key messages to reach through to the public. Can it all be successfully tied together and communicated in time?
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