The left thrives on hope just as the right feeds on fear, and over recent years the British people have been fed a diet of relentless misery as austerity continues to bite. Labour desperately needs a new story that connects our values with people’s real concerns and the challenges of a rapidly changing world.
Jon Cruddas’ speech to the RSA attempts to do this. He observes that, while some people are well equipped to join the internet age and benefit from the new products, markets and opportunities for entrepreneurship it offers, too many others feel lost with outdated skills, struggling in insecure or low-paid work, living in hollowed-out communities, cut off from aspiration and losing their sense of belonging.
Labour’s challenge is to link those who are left behind with the opportunity that surrounds them. Jon, who leads the party’s policy review, is creating a narrative that is both compelling, connects with how people feel, and can bring together the various policy strands now starting to generate ideas for the manifesto. That includes the National Policy Forum, IPPR’s Condition of Britain report, the Local Government Innovation Taskforce, and work being led by the shadow cabinet. Jon delves into the party’s history to anchor his story in our radical values then applies them to the challenges of a rapidly changing world that has left many in Britain feeling so unsettled. This speech, poetic and romantic in the way Jon can be, makes his clearest case yet for why only bold and radical change will do, and why we need to be challenging our own conservatism as well as the variety found in the Tory party.
Labour can no longer cling blindly to institutions that were shaped for a different age and which can no longer cope with the challenges of a different world. Jon points to an education system that prizes conformity when the new economy needs creativity. He points to a health and care system that cannot handle modern epidemics like depression, dementia, obesity and the frailty of extended old age. We cling to a model of public services that tries to fit everyone into ready-made top-down solutions but cannot cope with the modern scourges of loneliness, cybercrime and family breakdown. And we hold on to a politics where politicians feed a decline in trust by pretending they have all the answers instead of showing they are prepared to trust people by sharing power with them.
Jon calls for a new political settlement based on creating and redistributing power. Power, of course, is central to politics, and redistributing power away from elites to share it more widely is a foundation of progressive politics. But the way we did that yesterday will no longer be effective enough in the world of tomorrow. Labour can never be conservative. Revolutions are about taking power, and Jon wants to put more power in the hands of ordinary people so they can use it to help find the answers to the challenges we all face.
Jon is using the policy review to lead a quiet revolution that aims to equip our country to meet the challenge of the age. He calls it radical hope, and in this speech he shows how, despite austerity, we can create the fairer society that has been Labour’s goal in every age.
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Steve Reed is member of parliament for Croydon North. He tweets @SteveReedMP
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