Stephen Bush reviews the influence of The Purple Book on Ed Miliband’s Labour party

For Labour, things tend to get worse before they get better. Narrow losses in 1951 and 1979 were followed by emphatic defeats in 1955 and 1983. In Holyrood, a knife-edge result in 2007 turned into a full-blown rout in 2011. Boris Johnson won only narrowly in a boom year for Conservativism in 2008, but held on against Ken Livingstone in 2012 despite a Labour wave elsewhere.

The Purple Book was intended to help Ed Miliband in his attempt to defy history and return Labour to power in just one term. ‘The Purple Book-ers (if I might term them such) are making a decent fist of rejuvenating the debate about Labour’s future,’ the journalist Caroline Crampton declared at the time of its release in autumn 2011, adding: ‘There’s a lot in this book that Ed and the leadership will welcome.’ Matthew Parris was less fulsome, declaring that the book would be ‘more brandished than read’.

Four years on, how did it do? Like that wider mission of returning Labour to office, things are neither as bad as the pessimists feared or as rosy as the optimists hoped.

The most troubling thing about The Purple Book is that it does not feel dated. It came out at a time when Rachel Reeves was still a junior pensions minister, Chuka Umunna only just at the end of his apprenticeship as Miliband’s parliamentary private secretary, and the likes of Kate Green, Alison McGovern, and Dan Jarvis not even on the frontbench. Labour’s poll rating, meanwhile, hovered at the 40 per cent mark.

So one might reasonably expect the book to, if not be entirely obsolete, to have at the least been largely superseded. The BBC, to take one example, has endured a traumatic four years, buffeted by scandals, its governance heavily criticised, and all the time eyed hungrily by its rivals in the media and its opponents in the Conservative party.

And yet Tessa Jowell’s suggestion that the BBC be made a mutual, endorsed in The Purple Book, remains Labour’s only really original piece of thinking about the corporation since the party left office.

More understandably, Jacqui Smith and Jenny Chapman’s chapter on crime has been allowed to gather dust. The anti-crime measures pursued by successive Labour home secretaries have been continued – albeit to a backdrop of increasing reductions in spending and a watering-down of antisocial behaviour orders – under Theresa May, with similar levels of success. It now appears that 1997 may have been the last election in which crime played a significant part, although high-profile cases, like the imprisonment of the farmer Tony Martin, who shot and killed a 16-year-old burglar in 1999, will likely continue to be exploited by desperate politicians, as Michael Howard attempted to do in 2005. That said, the areas where fear of crime remains acute and antisocial behaviour continues to be a blight are overwhelmingly those that Labour sprang from and still exists to serve. The party should revisit this theme.

On housing, Caroline Flint powerfully set out Labour’s challenge – ‘to rectify the hopes unrealised, the aspirations denied, the hardship caused’ – but a significant offer to ‘generation rent’ is still unforthcoming. Fine words butter no parsnips, and the phrase ‘New Labour didn’t do enough to build houses’ has yet to trigger a renaissance in housebuilding. That housing was absent from Labour’s pledge card – unveiled in March – suggests that Miliband, like Tony Blair and Gordon Brown before him, may have placed the issue in the ‘difficult box’, at least in the short term.

Other chapters, however, have enjoyed a far happier afterlife. Robert Philpot, the editor of the book, dubbed ‘the revival of Labour’s decentralising tradition’ the significant theme of The Purple Book, and it is in this area that it remains at its most vital.

Events, however, have robbed Labour of much of its confidence, if not its central mission. Andrew Adonis felt able to suggest in his chapter that the conurbations around Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds, Bristol, Newcastle and Merseyside all be given mayors, without a referendum. After the defeats, some by heavy margins, of the weaker and smaller mayoralties in 2012, the momentum has gone out of Labour’s devolutionary impulse.

Now it is George Osborne’s eleventh-hour discovery of northern cities that dominates the conversation, with Labour devolution often a half-hearted attempt to pivot away from Conservative efforts to ‘weaponise’ the West Lothian question. And mutualism, too – which provided ‘a golden thread’ running through the chapters of Jowell, Tristram Hunt, Stephen Twigg, Paul Brant and Steve Reed – has been buffeted by scandals around the Co-operative Bank and the wider struggle to prevent the Co-operative from ending its historic association with Labour.

Individual policies, too, have survived to form part of Labour’s final offer to voters, albeit not always in the ways that their proponents intended. Reeves was the first frontbencher to call for an end to tax relief for wealthy pensioners, calling the existing structure ‘fundamentally flawed and, one could argue, unfair’, adding that ‘those on the lowest incomes are undersaving, yet they have to pay 80p to save £1, compared to those on the highest incomes earning over £150,000 who only have to pay 50p’.

Reeves, then speaking with her pensions hat firmly on, intended that the ending of the relief be used to incentivise greater saving among less well-heeled pensioners. The revenue has instead been earmarked to pay for a cut in tuition fees from £9,000 to £6,000, although it is worth noting, for all the criticisms of the distributional impact of Labour’s fees policy, that reducing the amount students have to repay ought to have a beneficial effect on saving by that same group. On family policy, the root-and-branch reimagining suggested in Liz Kendall’s chapter is still a way off – but the policy levers, including increased childcare, are now central planks of Labour’s offer.

Elsewhere, other ideas from different places have taken primacy. Blue Labour, which Peter Mandelson derided in his chapter for its ‘populist, anti-immigrant, Europhobic, anti-globalisation language’, and which Crampton declared to have suffered a ‘rather unfortunate demise’ in her review of The Purple Book, has enjoyed an unexpected revival. A more belligerent tone on immigration has become a regrettable part of Labour’s repertoire.

But the undercurrents in Labour thought from elsewhere have not all been bad news. Community organising, mentioned not once in The Purple Book and at the time the black sheep of the Labour movement, has been revitalised as part of the party’s organising capacity, in part thanks to Miliband’s recruitment of Arnie Graf.

But a great deal of ‘purple’ has made it into the final picture. Douglas Alexander’s chapter – written before he was given the task of running the party’s general election campaign – could almost have been written by Miliband himself. ‘We had confused good times with a good system,’ Alexander wrote, ‘In truth, the weaknesses of that 1990s progressive settlement were already being felt years before the collapse of Northern Rock.’ The focus on ‘better capitalism in a very different environment’ – or, in a phrase beloved of Umunna, ‘social democracy in a cold climate’ – remains Labour’s biggest challenge.

Like all good collections, The Purple Book contained one cautionary tale, this one from Mandelson. ‘The problem with killing off New Labour and putting nothing in its place,’ he opined, ‘is that it leads us to clutch at straws and grab at any passing sentiment.’ That charge is not as unfair as we might wish. Labour’s thousand tiny blooming flowers have made for a somewhat incoherent garden, and the party’s policy platform, while not lacking in hit singles, is still not quite the hit record many were hoping for. Still, never mind; the book, and more importantly Miliband, have probably done enough to secure a shot at a difficult second album in 2020.

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Stephen Bush is editor of the Staggers and a contributing editor to Progress

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Purple pledges

The Purple Book urges Labour to ‘rediscover its decentralist tradition’. But what might that mean? Progress profiles the book’s top five priorities

Universal child and elderly care

As Sweden and Denmark show, the provision of universal, high-quality childcare helps promote higher employment levels among women. This, in turn, is crucial to supporting the long-term sustainability of the welfare state as the population ages, reducing the gender pay gap and allowing more women to provide for their own old age. Similarly, services that promote the health, wellbeing and independence of older people, and which prevent or delay the need for higher-intensity or institutional care, have been shown to improve the quality of life of older people and deliver significant savings in reduced NHS spending.

‘Something-for-something’ public services

Labour did not just lose an argument about the efficiency of the state at the 2010 general election, it also lost one about its fairness. Public services need to respect the values of the public: providing opportunity for  all, demanding responsibility from all, and helping to strengthen communities.

Predistributing power in the market

With public spending severely constrained, the days of big state ‘tax and spend’ redistribution to correct flawed market outcomes are over. Instead, we need to focus on ‘predistribution’ – or how the market  distributes rewards in the first place, and ensure they are distributed fairly.

Education credits for parents

Better-off parents can afford to move house to get their children into a good school. They can afford extra tuition or private education. The more wealth you have the more choice over a good education you can buy. No one should decry those parents. They are merely doing what all parents want to do – get their child into a really good school. The problem is that, despite all the progress that has been made, there still are not enough such schools and poorer parents, because they lack the market power of their better-off counterparts, invariably find themselves at the back of the queue. That cannot be right and it has to change.

Empowering England’s big cities

Half of England’s population lives in the major conurbations. Yet outside of London, these conurbations lack strong political institutions and voice and are largely poor.

Find out more at prog.rs/purplebook