The closing session of Progress conference 2012 was a wide-ranging with a star line-up chaired by Simon Fanshawe: Jacqui Smith, Caroline Flint, Chuka Umunna and David Aaronovitch fielding questions from the audience.
Jacqui Smith gave pragmatic advice to anyone trying to make the most of being in power locally, and everyone seeking to win back power nationally. While the health and social care legislation is a political disaster for the government we can still do all we can to make the policy work in our areas. We may have taken an electoral beating nationally, but that can’t mean that we turn our back on people locally. Developing better alternative policies for the NHS will win us power more quickly than pure opposition. Jacqui was also pragmatic about the need to retain channels of communication with Liberal Democrats – while we always fight to win we have to be realistic about the choices we might have to make about a future coalition government. To win again, she told us that Ed Miliband was right to make points about vested interests, and our place on the side of ordinary people, not the powerful. The imperative is to build trust.
It was fascinating to listen to a panel including two News International employees and senior politicians work their way through a question about Rupert Murdoch. It was recognised that the current controversy has exposed some truths to the public gaze – networks between senior politicians and the media exist and links may be close. David Aaronovitch spoke about the mythology that has surrounded Murdoch for the Labour Party, with the Sun in 1992 becoming an alibi for Labour failure. The politicians on the panel set out the difference between informal conversations and the serious commercial and quasi-judicial decisions that had been made, and lines that had been crossed.
Caroline Flint told a questioner that policy around energy policy had moved on from kum-ba-yah and climate change to a dialogue about jobs and financial security. A low-carbon economy can promote jobs and growth, and all policy briefs need to address the central concerns of the British people around economic security. This tied in to her answer to the last question of the session, about the Labour USP in the next election. Caroline gave a great pitch about what the Labour party must always stand for: work so that people can look after their families themselves, responsibility from top to bottom and hope for their futures and their children’s futures.
Chuka Umunna spoke about how we move past the economic dialogue where we treated voters as consumers, and how we have a grown-up conversation between different sectional interests. His election USP for Labour was to maintain the marriage between economic competence and social justice. Labour is here for everyone, not just an established elite.
David Aaronovitch set out his USP for Labour as a party that delights in different things happening in different places, with openness to all things happening and experimentation. He called on us not to apologise for immigration, to be the one place where Britian meets, as the only truly British party.
Simon Fanshawe was an amusing chair, the questioners stuck to questions, not speeches, and in return the panel actually answered what they had been asked. A successful session to end a great conference.
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Rachael Saunders was the Tower Hamlets council cabinet member for adult health and wellbeing from May 2010, and now with an independent mayor in executive control in Tower Hamlets she chairs the health scrutiny committee and leads for the Labour group on health.
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As I asked USP question I will give you my suggestion: JOBS and HOUSES. Everything else is secondary, even Education (and even if read out three times it is mainly – though not exclusively – a means to better employment). As for housing, my daughter moved her family two years ago to south Sweden, because she could not foresee any realistic possibility of ever affording a nice place here. She exchanged a (nice but small) flat in King Street, Hammersmith at £1,000 p.m. rent for a better one in a Lund suburb at £400 p.m., fully equipped and heating, water, electricity included. When a baby came, the housing company at once offered them a bigger ground floor flat with a small garden at only a modest increse in rent. That is what ordinary people need in this country. I feel the Labour leadership has a fair handle on the JOBS bit, but so far, and going on the record of 13 years in government, they have not taken the HOUSES part of the proposition seriously. So try Harder! In the village where I live no house affordable by normal wage-earners, either to rent or to buy, has been built since 1984, whereas the sprinkling of council houses built a few at a time from the late 1920s onwards testify to the endeavours of the local authority to satisfy that ever present need.