What is Labour for?

By Andrew Lomas

There have been a couple of comment pieces in recent days predicting that Labour Party is sleep-walking to oblivion at the next election. Anatole Kaletsky in the Times states that Labour is undergoing “the longest assisted suicide in history.”

A few days ago, Oliver Kamm noted that:

“Tony Blair strengthened Labour after 1994 by abandoning the fiction of socialism and building a reformist coalition. But he simultaneously rendered the party unnecessary.”

Whilst I can sympathise with the views of many who despair and take the view that Labour is finished the trouble is, I don’t agree. Admittedly, things look bad; less than 16% in a national poll and an internecine struggle that makes the Borgias look like the Waltons. The question of leadership has been raised, but no-one seems ready (or able) to pull the trigger.

And this is where the problem lies; whilst leadership is an issue, the more fundamental problem for the party at the moment is the lack of ideas. Whoever is leader, we will still possess the same myopia having exchanged long-term vision for the chance to occasionally wrong-foot the Tories. Strategy has lost out to tactics.

But it shouldn’t be like this: ask a Labour party member what they believe in and you’ll get something along the lines of a building a fairer, more humane society where everyone has the chance to succeed and where suffering, poverty and ignorance are tackled head-on. Instead of being rendered unnecessary, the reformist coalition that Kamm talks about is a necessary as ever; the question is, where next?

The past few days has seen the party machine go into over-drive over Lansley’s ‘gaffe’ on the radio. The thing is, you can call Cameron Mr 10% all you like: Labour can’t fight the next election purely on the size of the public sector. We can’t pledge to spend ever more and hope to God the economy recovers in time; to do so would allow ourselves to be defined by public spending alone and rest our hopes on a recovery the nature of which we are not yet entirely sure of. Yes, investment in public services is important, but where’s the vision in shovelling ever greater sums into the public sector?

We need to make good the talk of empowering people. The current momentum towards some kind of constitutional change offers a golden opportunity to restore the power and prestige to local government that was shorn away under Thatcher. But we can’t stop there; there needs to be a radical decentralisation of power to individuals and communities, accompanied with a cultural change amongst the political class that recognises that people can be trusted with this power.

In a 2008 essay in Prospect called Liberalise or Die, Phil Collins and Richard Reeves contended that:

“The government has tested, often to destruction, the idea that a bigger, higher-spending state can deliver a better society. It has enjoyed some success in rehabilitating the idea of the state as an enabler. But Labour has reached the limits of what can be achieved through central-state diktat, and is running out of money.

For New Labour to survive, it must become new liberal. The key dividing line in politics is no longer between left and right, but, increasingly, between liberal and authoritarian. The Labour government too often finds itself on the wrong side of this divide. One of the lessons Labour ought to have learned from 11 years in charge of the state is to be humble about the limits of that power. Another lesson is that the demands of individuals for more say in how public services are provided and delivered are growing stronger.“

I couldn’t agree more. In short, we have to put people, not the crude machinery of government, at the centre of our politics. Until we do that, until we articulate a vision of what we stand for, I’m afraid that far from sleepwalking to oblivion we’ll be heading off a cliff with our eyes wide open.