Many years ago, a bright young thing called Stephen Pollard organised a series of meetings, under the banner ‘Two Generations’ at the House of Commons designed to let Labour MPs’ researchers sit at the feet of party grandees and imbibe their wisdom. I attended two (they may have been the only two). One was with Douglas Jay, a treasury minister in Attlee’s government. I remember his eye-patch and his fierce anti-Europeanism. The other was with Len Murray, general secretary of the TUC in the 1970s. Both men are now attending the Great Branch Meeting in the Sky, and Stephen Pollard is the editor of Jewish Chronicle.
Len Murray constructed an interesting counter-factual which has stuck with me down the years. It goes like this: the Labour party, as everyone knows, was formed in 1900 by delegates from trade unions and socialist societies whose voting power within the new organisation was based on their size. The unions had tens of thousands of members, but the socialists (such as the Fabian Society) only hundreds. So the power within the party was vested in trade unions from the start, and as they merged into super-unions it was concentrated into fewer hands.
At my first Labour party conference in 1990, the unions controlled 90% of the votes, and the combined forces of the constituencies and affiliated bodies only 10%. Imagine all the blood, sweat and tears of party GCs across the country, distilled into motions sent to conference with all the attendant hopes and dreams of a child’s first day at school, just to be steam-rollered by the weight of the NUR or NUPE. I don’t think most local activists, crafting their resolutions with such care, ever really understood the futility of their position under the old system.
This balance of power, ran Brother Murray’s argument, meant that historically the Labour party was the party of producers. In the industrial age that meant coal-miners, steel-workers and cotton spinners. In the post-industrial age it meant polytechnic lecturers, social workers, and council officers. But it meant that the internal dynamics of the party were always to skew policy and action towards the interests of producers. But consider this: if the co-operative movement had attended that founding conference in 1900, its combined strength would have been a counterweight to the unions. The interests of working people as consumers would have been balanced with their interests as producers. How different Labour’s policy agenda would have been, and how different the political history of the 20th century.
When Labour’s programme reflects the demands of consumers, it tends to meet with electoral success. That’s what happened in 1945, 1966 and 1997. It was an argument made by Michael Young, the man who wrote the ‘45 manifesto, and invented the Open University. He founded the Consumers’ Association and Which? as a political act, not just to allow people to write reviews of toasters. As long ago as 1934 he wrote What Consumers Need for the thinktank Political and Economic Planning (PEP). In 1960, he wrote in the Chipped White Cups of Dover that ‘class based on production is giving way to status based on consumption as the centre for social gravity’ and flirted with the idea of a new consumers’ political party, drawing on the tradition of the co-op.
When we retreat into a comfort zone, and allow policy-making to be captured by vested interests, we lose the support of the majority of the electorate who spend more time shopping than attending union meetings. It was true in the 1950s and the 1980s, and it’s true today.
Which brings me to Andy Burnham. On a personal level, I like Andy Burnham. I think he is talented and intelligent. I once helped him out after he’d been punched in the eye by a drunken soldier in a nightclub somewhere in Staffordshire, and so I know he won’t mind me saying that I think he is making a big political mistake. By endorsing the health unions’ campaign that in-house service providers should be given preferential treatment over private, voluntary or co-operative movement service providers, he risks four things. One, it looks like Labour is in hock to a powerful trade union lobby, which never goes down well with the voters. Two, it is a slap in the face to the voluntary and mutual sectors, who have been developing excellent and innovative services within the NHS. No wonder they’re so annoyed. Three, it makes it look like Labour’s NHS reform programme has ground to a halt, which puts Labour on the wrong side of public opinion. The public is always more ambitious for the NHS than the politicians. And fourth, most damaging of all, it allows the Tories to outflank Labour as the party of NHS modernisation. It gives them ammunition to argue that Labour under Gordon Brown is the ‘roadblock to reform’ or some such nonsense. In a general election year this is especially daft.
In my experience, you don’t deal with the unions in the hope they’ll say thanks. The modus operandi of trade unions is to pocket the concession, and move onto the next one. It is strength they respect, not compliance.
Labour’s improvements to the NHS are nothing short of a miracle. The transformation of waiting times, the reduction of lists, the improving care for cancer patients, the falling numbers of avoidable deaths, and the growing approval ratings from patients: these things have come about because of Labour’s investment and reform in the NHS. They have been driven by successive reforming secretaries of state for health. I would identify three in particular – Alan Milburn, John Reid and Patricia Hewitt – who drove forward difficult, unpopular programmes of NHS reform. Their courage has paid off. Today we have a better NHS because we put the consumers of NHS services – patients and their families – first, and disregarded the siren voices of vested interests.
The point about NHS reform is that if you put your foot on the brake, NHS improvements don’t slow down, they go into reverse. It would be a travesty if Labour’s fourth term was marred by a relative decline in NHS standards, rather than ever-greater improvements in patient care.