What it means

@LabourList Editorial

Never has a week been a longer time in British politics. It was only seven days ago – though in an altogether more innocent time for the Labour Party – that James Purnell resigned from government, with Caroline Flint alarming angrily in his slipstream.

What followed was a fast-moving but slow-burning period of peril for Labour in government. Coordinated conspiracies of the would-be assassins abound as ministers scented and shied from blood, too fickle or too feckless to turn either one way or the other. In the end, the coup of June 2009 dulled like the spark of soggy phosphorous.

Frankly and perhaps ironically, it was both symbolic and symptomatic of Labour in office under Gordon Brown’s leadership. The grandest plans have been applied tentatively where tenacity was required, while the most misguided ambitions have been stifled by indecision and half-hearted support.

The results of such wasted opportunity are simple: we have driven our voters away.

The political capital and credence presented to the Labour Party in 1997 have been largely withdrawn as whole regions of core Labour support have vanished. In Wales, Yorkshire and Lancashire we’ve allowed the Tories to win the argument, and – worse – we’ve allowed bigotry and hate to prevail.

If there’s one lesson to be learned from last week’s disastrous council and European election results, it’s that we’ve let people down – not just on the blind gluttony of expenses indulgence, but on policy, too. 42 days; the proposed 10p tax band abolition; the Gurkhas; ID Cards; Trident – time and again we’ve forgotten what it means to be Labour. So Labour voters looked elsewhere.

Fortunately, everything’s not lost. The Prime Minister still has the ability and the authority – just – to enact the type of change that will create a lasting legacy built on the promises of a swelling movement first recreated some twelve years ago.

The agenda for constitutional renewal is a start, but it cannot be the end of what Labour sets out to achieve with What’s Left of this Parliament. Instead, there must be a concerted and methodical progression toward the values and vision we professed as a hungrier movement, and that effort must bring with it a new chorus of ideas that will inscribe in our fabric that The Good State exists to benefit not just the few, not the just many, but the whole.

In that spirit we must begin to reaffirm – and to reframe where necessary – what it means to be Labour. We must reconnect with and reapproach those core values that were born in a movement of the People some 160 years ago, and set out a new Charter for social reform and social empowerment through more affordable and social housing for all, more jobs and family support for all and a more robust and controlled economy that sees People as the ends of our national wealth rather than the means to it.

Those values have too often been forgotten over the last two years. But it is time to pick up that moral crusade once again, because without it we are nothing.