Is there life beyond the crisis?

By Nick Palmer

There’s no doubt from canvassing that people want us to focus on the economy right now. I keep having the entirely novel experience of constituents who usually pursue me on the state of the pavements or the need for more police or the number of immigrants from Paraguay saying, “The issue I usually raise with you isn’t that important – solve the economic crisis first.” And the polls, unhealthy though they are this month, make it clear that we’re roughly level pegging with the Tories on the crisis. There’s a good dividend to be harvested if people ses that we’re getting them through.

That said, we also need to be the party that shows it’s thinking about the future after the crisis is over. What encouraged me most about the recent announcements was not the immediate steps on the banks, important though they are, but the help for additional apprenticeships and adult training, with the explicit recognition that Britain is going to look different when the hurricane has blown itself out.

Some jobs are just not going to come back. Does anyone expect MFI to rise from the dead, or Corus to open new steel plants in Britain? Do we want to restore the full extent of the City culture that got us into the mess? Conversely, there are skills which we’re seriously short of. Why is French EDF leading the nuclear programme? Because they’ve got the expertise and we haven’t. Why is the wind farm boom being led by Vestas in Denmark? Because they have the technological lead. The time for innovation and new enterprise creation is precisely in the middle of a recession, when creative and intelligent people take redundancy packages and look around for a fresh start. If Labour can show we’re on their side, we’ll do both Britain and ourselves a favour.

But it’s not just jobs, it’s culture too. For the first time since the Thatcher years, I think there is now an absolute majority of voters who sympathise with the basic social democratic proposition, that too much competition and too much acquisitive greed destroys the soul of our society. If we set out a coherent picture of a more cooperative, more ethical Britain – even if it means that in good times the most successful of us get a little less spectacularly rich – we will find an echo in the electorate. And if that means admitting that we’ve acquiesced a little too much in the culture of greed that we inherited from Thatcher – well, people will appreciate that too.