A sort of despairing pessimism pervades national politics, a gloom on the one hand embraced and nurtured by the coalition, which argues there is no alternative, no matter that much of the shadow cast is of its own making, while on the other the centre-left looks ahead – with one hand covering its eyes – at the uninviting prospect of things being almost as bad were it to take charge.
This fatalism has provoked different responses from those on the left thinking hard about the future. Last month Compass relaunched itself with a nifty new website and an op-ed by chair Neal Lawson communicating the bad news: ‘While our economy is still in crisis, and those who contributed least are paying the highest price, and more crucially, our environment is heading towards monumental disaster, how is anything ever going to change?’ Compass’ answer falls just short of Pseuds’ Corner calibre, but does accurately reflect the guns it has stuck to since its post-2010 positioning of opening up beyond the Labour party: ‘Formal vertical parties are not only going to have to work together but they must find ways to embrace the energy and idealism of the new (and not so new) informal bottom-up politics if transformative change is going to happen … The defining political trait of the future will be an “open tribalism” … Compass relaunches to build the space for a new politics of hope – where formal and informal politics meet to make the impossible become possible once again and a good society more than a slogan.’
Meanwhile, last month Progress released The Politics of Solutions, edited by Labour MPs Alison McGovern and Phil Wilson, and with contributions from fellow Labour parliamentarians and representatives from IPPR and the TUC, and our contributing editor, Hopi Sen. Sen opens the pamphlet by quoting Labour’s 1945 manifesto: ‘The Labour party makes no baseless promises … It is very easy to set out a list of aims. What matters is whether it is backed up by a genuine workmanlike plan.’ In May’s Progress Jonathan Todd went even further back in time, reminding readers that ‘the key section in Labour’s 1922 manifesto was not entitled “No austerity” but “How to find the money”.’ Now that the Labour leadership has publicly accepted the gloom will persist, the focus for Labour rightly shifts to what we would do differently – an immeasurably tougher task than swaddling ourselves in the comfort blanket of ‘Labour nice, Tories mean’. The Politics of Solutions makes a series of useful proposals, from Pat McFadden’s ideas for banking reform, to Liz Kendall outlining Labour’s strategic vision for healthcare, and McGovern on improving the quality of intervention in job centres. But most important is the spirit of the piece – a concerted search for Labour answers within the constraints of the age. In the last edition of Progress, our columnist, The Progressive, made a similar point, arguing that Labour should match fiscal prudence with ‘constitutional abandon’, finishing off the job of constitutional reform too often untackled for over a century – a distinctive, ‘workmanlike’, Labour attack on the old established system which could galvanise the party and its supporters.
Finally, there is no shortage of thinktankers linings up to make proposals for reforming welfare – or ‘social security’ as Labour spokespeople have switched to calling it: Demos has released Something For Something: Restoring a Contributory Principle to the Welfare State; the Social Market Foundation proffers Facebook Welfare, part of its Beveridge Rebooted series; the Strategic Society Centre’s answer is to break up the Department for Work and Pensions. All contain interesting insights. Yet none is quite as striking as the solution, if it can be called that, proposed by Mark Littlewood of the rightwing Institute of Economic Affairs, who sees the future in ‘uploading to a website each payment handed out, along with the name and address of the person claiming it’. This, if nothing else, goes to show how much ideas that do not cost much nevertheless go a long way in revealing, as The Politics of Solutions argues, that ‘it is in our solutions that we truly demonstrate our values.’
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