Progress recently gave Labour activists the chance to win a bursary place to attend our forthcoming Political Weekend. Over the next two weeks we are publishing the offerings of a selection of those who successfully won places, answering the question ‘How does Labour win a majority in 2015’?
To win a majority in 2015 Labour must regain the broad appeal that won it three consecutive terms from 1997 to 2010. The message will be very different – Labour must prove that it can govern when there is little money left, but an appeal that stretches across social and geographical boundaries will be essential.
To do this Labour must convince voters that the party can deliver where it always has done, in building a fairer, more equal society. But it must also prove that perceptions of Labour as profligate, opposed to aspiration and focused solely on people who are out of work are false ones.
This means engaging with subjects, even where the party feels less at home, in a way that is authentically left-of-centre but which challenges the perceptions that prevent key voters from endorsing us. It is a mix both of language and policy content and should emulate how Tony Blair connected with voters on a subject like crime, traditionally a safe Conservative policy area, by promising to tackle its underlying societal causes – a uniquely Labour approach – while making clear that there is nothing socialist or socially democratic in failing to take crime and its victims seriously.
And so on welfare this means being the party that refuses to leave a generation of jobless young people behind, that is sensitive and responsive to the genuine barriers people face in accessing work. But it also means saying that those who choose not to work should face sanctions for doing so, because families that work hard without seeing their wages rise care more than ever about how their taxes are spent. And so while Labour is right to oppose policies like the bedroom tax that are unfair and unworkable, we will never seem a credible government to those hard-pressed families if we fail to recognise their concerns on welfare.
On public services, Labour should defend state-provided education and healthcare while always wanting better outcomes for service users. We should recognise the importance that the NHS or comprehensive education have to many voters, while treating neither as sacred or beyond critical examination. Because, ultimately, ‘We love the NHS’ is not a coherent health policy; voters expect credible governments not to romanticise public services but to reform them. Labour must promise something to those who are seriously concerned about the care that their parents receive and feel scant comfort in it being provided by the NHS. Similarly Labour needs to appeal to parents who care less about who is running their school than whether it is delivering the best results for their children.
Finally, on the economy we must be a party that is fiscally responsible. The narrative that Labour ran up the credit cards may be as frustrating as it is untrue, but it has stuck. To win a majority, Labour needs to convince key voters that it will spend their money wisely, without making promises, however well-intentioned, that the country cannot afford. Our cost of living focus is effective as it speaks both to poorer working people as well as the squeezed middle who also see prices rising faster than wages. However, this must now be fitted into a more coherent economic narrative about the fair and stable economy that Labour would build.
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Owen Alun John is a member of Progress. He tweets @OwenAlunJohn
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Tickets are still available for Progress Political Weekend, which is taking place on the 15-16 March 2014. Further details are available here