‘It’s words, just words … politics-speak. They say it to get your vote. They don’t mean it!’ was the opinion of one of the swing voters interviewed for the recent Progress-BritainThinks report Meet the swing voters. As I headed to the launch of the IPPR’s new Condition of Britain report I couldn’t help but wonder whether it would contain anything that might help Labour overcome the deep-rooted scepticism of ‘middle England’.
There was certainly plenty of ideas and energy on display. Presentations from a community group, a charity that runs a children’s centre, a pioneering local authority commissioner and a participant in the National Citizens’ Service were interspersed with recorded messages from members of the public talking about the pressures they face.
Clear themes quickly emerged, a heavy emphasis on community empowerment being the main one. Ideas around redesigning public services so that they put the people who use them in control got a good airing, and there was lots of agreement on the importance of localism, encouraging volunteering and bringing people together.
The dread phrase the ‘big society’ even got a couple of mentions. These days it is only spoken about as a joke, if it is even spoken about at all. It seems impossible to believe that the Conservatives put the ‘big society’ front and centre in their 2010 election campaign. In truth, it never had much traction, especially not when compared to the Tories’ other line, ‘Broken Britain’. ‘People react to fear, not love; they don’t teach that in Sunday school, but it’s true’ as Richard Nixon once said.
Part of the reason that the ‘big society’ never got off the ground was that it was long on vision and short on policy. It was just words, politics-speak. When the Tories got elected they quickly forgot about it and got on with ruining the economy. The concern for Labour now is that ideas about building ‘One Nation’ of ‘Belonging and Earning’ will quickly be seen in the same light as the ‘big society’ is now.
Nick Pearce tacitly acknowledged as much in his blog accompanying the launch of the new report. He writes that ‘a traditional, Treasury-led spending review will not be able to meet the challenges posed by the Condition of Britain analysis’. Given the enormous institutional power of the Treasury, this suggests it’s just as likely that the challenges posed by the analysis will not be met as that Labour will come up with a radical new form of statecraft if we are elected in 2015.
That’s not to say that ideas like ‘affordable, good quality childcare [delivered] through local institutions rooted in neighbourhoods’ are not both possible and desirable for a future Labour government. They clearly are. But it is to say that we are still a long way from being able to credibly say to sceptical swing voters that we have the policies that will make our vision for Britain a reality.
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Thomas Neumark is a former Labour councillor and blogs at Dream Housing
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Cartoon: Ade Teal