Whatever Labour does next, it has got to be radical

Anyone serious about understanding why Labour lost in 2015 should study carefully Margaret Beckett’s recent report. As its students know, often the victors are the arbiters of history. Long forgotten was Labour’s record investment in schools, hospitals, children’s centres and means of redistribution such as tax credits. Instead our legacy had been wiped clean and scrawled over again and again with the watchwords ‘deficit’, ‘overspend’ and ‘profligacy’.

Too often our response to the Tory rewrite of Labour’s record was defensive posturing. Our post-New Labour positioning coalesced around a handful of key policy changes – energy price freezes, bedroom tax abolition, increased minimum wage – all welcome but never explained as part of an overall framework about the type of society we wanted to build.

Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership, with its welcome emphasis on engaging debate, is an opportunity Progress readers should grab with gusto. The Britain of 2020 will be very different to the Britain of 2015. What is more, the tunes that first won us victory in 1997, 2001 and then 2005 will feel very old hat 23 years later. So the task confronting us is how to start mapping out what a radical and credible Labour alternative to Conservatism is for the 2020s.

Such a task demands returning to our first principles. What sort of society do we want to build? What would a Labour Britain look like in the face of global economic shifts that seem to be eating up middle-income jobs and creating more inequality?

Credibility and radicalism are difficult to marry, but if Labour is going to overcome the mountain we need to climb – a mountain composed of our current 232 seats, the impending boundary review and the increasingly tense state of the union – both credible and radical we will have to be.

Following economic, financial and political scandals trust in institutions has understandably declined but Labour cannot run away from a debate about the role of the state. George Osborne, despite his ‘common ground’ rhetoric, pursues a dogmatic non-interventionist approach to the economy, content to stand by while industries go to the wall and public services are undermined. Labour, in contrast, needs to get better at calling the Tories out and making the case for active government.

All of our past Labour governments from Clement Attlee and the NHS, Harold Wilson and The Open University to Tony Blair and Gordon Brown’s assault on child poverty showed us how to combine credibility with radicalism. They all built their success on a clear vision of what they wanted Britain to look like, but crucially they started with an understanding of people’s lives and the day-to-day realities that confronted them at work, in accessing housing, public services, and life in general. That is why my shadow cabinet colleague, Gloria De Piero, and I have embarked on a national listening tour to understand those realities.

With a radical purpose and a single voice Labour can achieve anything, but only if we have the courage to confront the challenges we face.

——————————— 

Jonathan Ashworth MP is shadow cabinet minister without portfolio