One Nation Labour: time for definition

The debate over One Nation Labour has reignited and not before time. Ed Miliband’s speech last September was successful in uniting the Party, but that can create problems as well as solve them. The danger is that suddenly everything becomes a One Nation idea – one nation parking permits and bin collections. The idea now needs some definition.

Part of this must mean explaining what One Nation rules out as well as in. New Labour was a lesson in this. It found definition partly by explaining what it was not: neither the Old Left nor the New Right. Many of New Labour’s key tenets – social justice allied with economic efficiency, tough on crime and the causes of crime, a hand up not a hand out, rights and responsibilities – were established by finding points of differentiation with what had gone before.

One Nation Labour does not have this yet, but the intellectual foundations are there to create it. It has a clear goal: to heal divisions in society. It has a core belief: that good relationships between people emerge when neither side has the power to bully or exploit the other. And it has a methodology: that this must be brokered by institutions where there is a balance of power between different interests.

The interests and institutions that this applies to are varied, from men and women in families, to bosses and employees in workplaces, users and professionals in public services, consumers and companies in the marketplace, people who want to build new homes and the people who will have to live next to them – and so on. The idea is that there should always be a sense of dialogue, negotiation and compromise. No-one will ever have it all their own way – and that is the point.

This framework can give One Nation the definition that it needs. As James Purnell and Graeme Cooke put it, New Labour was ‘too hands on with the state, too hands off with the market’. For all the good things done by the Blair and Brown governments, Britain ended up with a government that was too bossy and a marketplace that allowed for employees to be underpaid, consumers to be ripped off and the taxpayer to foot the bill for a financial crisis.

From this framework flows some of the policy implications. In the private sector, One Nation Labour should resist the temptation to rely on direct regulation, considering instead how laws ensure different interests are properly represented. It should copy the German idea of codetermination in the workplace, usher in a new era of competition and transparency for consumers and build on its proposals for more shareholder engagement.

In public services, a One Nation approach should offer people not just a choice between institutions like schools or hospitals but a much stronger voice within them. This could mean changes to governance structures to give service users a say in how things are run, more open data to provide clear information and different inspection regimes that rely more on service users and less on outside ‘experts’.

If some of this sounds comfortable then the logic of One Nation has some difficult implications for Ed Miliband too. People don’t just feel bossed around by their own government. This applies to the EU and the sense that people can no longer have their say on immigration policy. It applies to concerns over judicial activism and human rights law. When UKIP complains about these things it is not ‘anti-politics’, it articulating a view that decisions should be make by people who are accountable.

Similarly, One Nation Labour must confront the reality that it is not just in the private sector where people can feel exploited. That can apply too to a welfare system that does not feel reciprocal enough to many and is haemorrhaging public support. And it can apply to crime when people feel perpetrators are not punished properly alongside rehabilitation programmes.

In his speech last year Ed Miliband argued that the One Nation framework was not a way of avoiding tough decisions, but rather a means of confronting them. For it to be successful that has to be true. So far the One Nation idea has worked within Westminster, but for it to travel beyond SW1 it needs the clarity and definition that come from much sharper edges.

Duncan O’Leary is Deputy Director of Demos think tank