A new generation of Labour women can redefine Labour values in the way the last generation did while the party was in government, writes former minister Sally Keeble

Labour did not just change the externals: record satisfaction rates in the National Health Service, a Northern Ireland agreement, higher educational standards, a modernising economy. We also transformed the way our society worked, creating a tolerance that even the incoming Tories had to acknowledge.

The big challenge 20 years on is how do we win the right to govern again, regain the credibility that had gone by 2010 and has receded as our electoral prospects have eroded since then. How do we refashion Labour values to produce policies that are fit for 2020 and beyond?

That is the challenge that three of us, Caroline Flint, Siobhain Mcdonagh and I, first elected as members of parliament on May 1 1997, set out to examine in the publication ‘This Woman Can’ published by the Fabian Society today. It assesses what Labour did in government, and how a new generation of Labour women MPs can redefine Labour values for these more contentious times.

Women who were MPs at the time, or have been elected since, have written chapters looking at how Labour can build on past achievements with policy prescriptions that will provide renewed economic and social progress.

As Tony Blair noted in his recent Progress interview: ‘Labour has only ever won when it has been at the cutting edge of modernity.’

Equality is a big part of modernity, ensuring that everyone has the opportunity to participate and that the benefits that accrue from progress in one part of the country – or the world – are shared equitably. So, as we write in the foreword to the booklet, our male-dominated parliament pre-1997 left ‘a welfare state based on male living and working patterns while many children and pensioners, especially women, were living in poverty. Our economy was hampered by skill shortages while many women were trapped at home by lack of affordable childcare or a dysfunctional benefits system.’ If it sounds familiar today, it is because the impact of Tory austerity is to dismantle the services that Labour built as the essential infrastructure of equality.

Harriet Harman, in her introduction argues that modernising the party to get more women MPs and feminising the political agenda, was a bedrock of the 1997 victory.

And the authors of the booklet look at the policies we need for a new modernity. Yvette Cooper and Shabana Mahmood look at the need for measures that support the self-employed, especially those in the new gig economy, still bruised from the chancellor’s failed tax grab. Frances O’Grady, as the first woman TUC general secretary, argues for employment protection for them, and Lisa Nandy sets out the risk to employees of a hard, deregulated Brexit.

Caroline Flint and Sharon Hodgson’s case for affordable and flexible childcare comes after warnings that the Tory’s new regime is unsustainable for the sector. Jacqui Smith and Liz Kendall argue for more personalised choice as well as secure funding for the NHS. And Fiona Mactaggart and Anne Begg say that with people living longer, equality must be lifelong.

Austerity has its global dimensions, and our world has become meaner since Labour left office. Tulip Siddiq, with input from Margaret Beckett, sets out the challenge of Brexit, Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin. ‘The choice between globalism and nationalism has never been so destructive,’ they note.

Concluding the booklet Jess Phillips charts out the challenges that still lie ahead for Labour, including breaking through the final glass ceiling by having a woman elected as its leader. But she notes: ‘If the women elected in 1997 taught us anything, it’s that women’s voices in parliament make stuff happen for women in the world’ and that the ‘benefits of our freedom were shared with all.’

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Sally Keeble is a former minister. She tweets at @sally_keeble

You can read This Woman Can by Sally Keeble here

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