Twenty years after a Labour-organised conference that successfully wooed business prior to going on to win a general election, Ed Balls, David Sainsbury and Policy Network organised the Inclusive Prosperity conference in an attempt to repeat that success.
The Science Museum venue, as is pointed out by Andrew Adonis, was built on the profits from the Great Exhibition and the links with science and success as a nation were referenced by several of the speakers.
The day comprised a series of panels and presentations examining what the next government will need to do, in order to ensure the country goes on to perform in an economic capacity that spans from flourish to simply surviving. Panels examine business and growth and fairness.
The day also featured a keynote speech from Ed Miliband, in which he announced his five goals for a Labour government to set Britain up for a race to the top. Those goals were:
- Building a skilled workforce to address productivity
- Implementing an industrial policy that will generate jobs across the whole country
- Create a culture of long-termism in government to overcome the shortfalls of short-termism that prevent infrastructural improvement from happening
- Reform markets so that they work for people and for business
- To remain an outward-looking country that is open for business and investment.
To misquote a Belgian beer advert, he is reassuringly expressive. This was a slick performance in front of an audience that matters. He has become a prime minister-in-waiting. References to the government’s mistakes were sober and omitted the playground accusations that he is often subject to.
The day’s sessions chimed with common themes that were drawn out by speaker after speaker, suggesting that there is some clarity at the heart of the business community and the needs of Labour’s response to it. It also suggested a common belief in the urgency to address these themes.
Almost everyone spoke to the need to create the conditions for Britain to meet the global economic challenge. A race to the top, not a race to the bottom, is a message that has traction beyond the politicians at this conference. It is widely quoted and understood to be essential. The nation’s infrastructure and having a long view on improving it is widely recognised as being essential.
Training, skills, (proper) apprenticeships, German vocational education and especially digital skills were referenced frequently. In a delightful moment, Maggie Philbin, chief executive of Teen Tech, plugged her forthcoming report, Digital Skills for Tomorrow’s World.
The interdependency of businesses of differing sizes gets some attention, with several speakers stating that larger and midsized firms are often the customers of the smaller firms that are regularly quoted as requiring attention from policy-makers.
Any speaker stating that the United Kingdom must remain in the European Union was rewarded with a round of applause.
The productivity problems of the UK economy, which remains poorly performing, and our inability to export enough to balance our trade, featured in the business growth panel chaired by Chuka Umunna.
‘Growing the size of the pie’ to help determine how it is distributed moved the focus to fairness, and Peter Mandelson pushed for some contrasting opinions after witnessing too much consensus, and was rewarded with more divergent opinions on income distribution and equitable settlement – and the day’s only shouted intervention from the floor.
Gene Spurling provides the final presentation of the day through the lens of his experience working under Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. The need to focus on outcomes rather than tools should be kept front of mind in devising fiscal policy, he said. The implications for failing to get this right present an ongoing risk to the prospects for solving long-term unemployment.
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Matthew Turmaine is prospective parliamentary candidate for Watford. He tweets @turmaine