There were many lessons for Labour and both the politics of ideas and organisation from the Progress-supported three seats challenge tour of 24 target seats which took place last month. The least surprising fact was how hard the candidates are working and how much they are doing to win a Labour majority. But their ambition for the government they hope to be part of is not one of temporary changes but transformational changes. For them, it is not to be one-term members of parliament but life-changing ones. If the next parliament were to be cut short in some way many may have been candidates longer than they actually get to serve in the House of Commons.
They, like us, are campaigning not just for election, but for re-election. For this reason, and many others, Labour must set its vision for the end, not the start, of this coming parliament – a plan for a return to power in 2020, as audacious as it might seem. In doing so the party is not only more likely to get elected in the first place but will be a more successful government in office and better able to weather the challenges that will inevitably beset it. It will be harder still for a Labour government up against a more rightwing Conservative party and a clutch of smaller parties in the Scottish National party, Plaid Cymru, the United Kingdom Independence party and the Green party, which will all be waiting to snatch seats from Labour at the subsequent election.
Ed Miliband says, in his interview on page 14, ‘the country will be run according to a different idea’, and sets his sights for the long term, because some issues are about ‘more then a five-year cycle’.
Labour must set its vision for the end of this coming parliament – a plan for a return to power
This requires a Labour government to get to work from day one. As Chris Mullin argued in his interview with Progress in November 2013, ‘If we do form a government after the next election, however tenuously, we should take a leaf out of the Tories’ book. The Tories have not behaved as though they are a minority government since they were elected.’
After 2010, the Conservatives used the opportunity of power aggressively and opportunistically to squeeze every advantage they could out of their stint in government, however brief it might be. In contrast, Labour too must seize its chance, but look to rebuild Britain, and thus secure its own re-election, not through fiddling the rules like the Tories have attempted to do, but by providing strong leadership on the tough issues the country will face.
It is in this vein that this edition, starting with an interview with the would-be prime minister himself, looks to a Labour Britain of 2020, the year by when, if the party does not act, the care crunch will be hitting, an infrastructure capacity crunch will be biting, and the world of work and communication will have changed around us.
Parmjit Dhanda, on page 16, spells out the urgent need to forge strong communities in a changing world and to rebuild the public realm, passing power out of the centre to do so. ‘As the state shrinks, [central] levers have shrunk too. Policy changes in the 2020s will require more local levers.’ Labour in town halls across the country have shown the way. ‘We have seen local authorities come together to become more than the sum of their parts.’ But there is a tension between Britain’s past and its future which will make calls on a Labour government to resolve for the country. As Ben Shimshon of BritainThinks highlights, the growing cohort of older voters ‘believe the cause [of Britain’s woes] to be population pressure brought about by immigration’ while Naushabah Khan identifies, ‘the need to embrace the increasingly interconnected world we live in’, in all its diversity. ‘This is a Britain worth fighting for,’ she argues, a vision that will require Labour to ‘reclaim the immigration debate’.
On page 18, Karin Smyth argues that voters ‘rarely offer caring as a reason for voting or not voting’; Labour must shift the issue from the ‘personal’ and into the ‘political’. Get this right, and untangle the web of complexity that constricts families seeking to care for their loved ones, and we restore the standing of politics.
David Coats, formerly of the TUC, presents a challenge on page 20 that strikes at the heart of a party with Labour as its name. In what blue Labour thinkers might dub ‘pro-business and pro-worker’, Coats argues for a renewed industrial democracy, ‘not least because this can enhance productivity and boost innovation’. This is not risk-free for a party so often derided by its opponents as ‘anti-business’, and will require a renewed settlement between workers and business that benefits both, and the country as a whole.
All of these changes, especially the technological revolution, ‘will be both creative and destructive,’ warns Anthony Painter on page 22. He suggests we ‘think of drivers on the Uber platform versus traditional black cab drivers’ as an example of the shocks already making themselves felt across industries. Can Labour understand and embrace the change, as it intrinsically involves winners and losers, not between but within classes? Can it reform itself to adapt to a flatter, more pluralistic world, asks Neal Lawson, while Catherine Stihler contemplates a transformation in public services through technology.
Painter shrewdly warns of the ‘ten-a-penny populists ready and waiting to prey on people’s fear’. Labour can rise above this; Ukip may yet be but a forerunner to the forces of reaction that could make themselves felt. Labour must maintain momentum during what will be the party’s toughest years in government. To win again for the country and its hard-working candidates it must show vision and real progress when standing for re-election in 2020. The job for progressives is never done but, as Dhanda says, ‘To own the future we need to put our minds, today, to the challenges of 2020.’
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