Labour must urgently change the game

By Neal Lawson and Gavin Hayes

Parliament is back but for Labour and the wider centre-left it feels like nothing has really changed. Certainly the opinion polls haven’t. Labour urgently needs to change the game and in this context its own party conference can only be seen as another wasted opportunity.

Faced with the looming prospect of a Conservative Government, the response of every minister has been to read a list of government achievements and declare the fightback has begun. The list – as we heard in Gordon Brown’s conference speech – is impressive and contains a lot of achievements that have made Britain a better place: tax credits, the minimum wage, devolution, Sure Start the list can go on.

But as a campaigning device outside of Labour’s narrowing ranks it simply doesn’t work. There is a tumbleweed moment as ministers on platforms or the media go through it. There are a number of important reasons why it’s so unpersuasive: voters take government action for granted; there are too many inconsistencies such as the 10p tax debacle; much of it was done by stealth; few trust what Labour says anyway because of all the spin (not least on Iraq); there is little idea of what overarching vision it adds up to; there is no “forward offer” and crucially no sense that the people themselves were ever part of it. It’s not their list.

Ultimately it’s not whether Labour ministers or even Compass declare that it’s a good list and makes the Party worthy of re-invention – it’s whether people feel it is and communicate that belief to others. The problem with the New Labour project was it never built an enduring progressive coalition of believers, activists and supporters.

This is all a bit frustrating, to say the least, because something has changed in the last few weeks. The Tories have now revealed themselves as a party that is not agnostic about the state but hostile. David Cameron’s whole conference pitch was against ‘big government’ – to be replaced not by better government but by either much smaller government or preferably no government at all. Public spending would be slashed not just because of the deficit but because government is bad per se. We know this because the other theme of his speech was the role of individual responsibility as a replacement for the state.

This is where Labour should be tearing the Tories apart. It was not big government that got us into the economic mess but reckless companies – namely big banks – led by people with scant regard for their wider responsibilities to society, driven solely by self-interest.

Last year Cameron talked of a day of reckoning for bankers, but with no real action even this big talk rings hollow. Where is the bankers’ responsibility to their customers facing rip-off interest rates, or the cleaners in hospitals who will now lose their jobs or have their pay frozen?

Let us be clear the Tories are getting away with murder: Britain is not bankrupt, the deficit – caused mostly by the bank bailout and reductions in tax revenues – does not have to be paid off now (indeed it is worth noting that our debt as a percentage of GDP is lower than both France and Germany and significantly lower than Italy and the US); Britain is not a highly taxed nation and the financial crisis was not caused by big government – it was caused by big banks, those very same banks that would have gone bankrupt without government intervention. Therefore it is particularly disappointing that in recent days Labour appears to have capitulated to the Tories on the debate over public spending and the need to cut the deficit.

With Britain still in recession the government should be loudly and clearly making the case of the need for more, not less government action. With unemployment expected to continue rising for some time and the catastrophic state of youth unemployment in particular – worse now than under Thatcher – why aren’t there bolder moves to invest vaster sums in a Green New Deal to help create new jobs for the future? Why is there no move to equalise the minimum wage for our young people? With over 5 million on the housing waiting list, why is the government instructing local authorities to sell off land at the bottom of the market, instead of using that land to build the new homes so desperately required and creating construction jobs in the process? Bailing out ordinary working people, securing and creating new jobs for the future should be Labour’s top priority.

Despite all the opportunities, Labour is struggling to fight back. It was Labour’s regulatory regime that allowed the banks to be so reckless in the first place, providing the framework that fostered an economy over-reliant on growth in financial services. At the same time the state has not been modernised; rather it’s been centralised and privatised.

And Cameron was able to land a hammer blow on Labour by telling us that Britain is a more unequal society now compared to 1997 – because shamefully it is. Of course things would have been much worse under the Tories and will be if they get back into power – but it is Labour’s fault if the nation is not persuaded of that and reading out the list of past achievements in a louder voice without spelling out any clear vision for the future isn’t going to change any minds.

We must be under no illusions the stakes are now very high. It’s not just that Labour might lose the next election and all that entails for our people, our planet and our democracy but this could be the very last Labour Government – as revealed in the report we published last month.

If they win, the Tories will reduce the number of seats in Parliament and their election could trigger Scottish independence with the loss of even more Labour MPs. This, combined with new rules on party funding, could destroy Labour’s chances of effective recovery.

That is why the decision not to hold a referendum on changing the electoral system on election-day was such a huge mistake – both in terms of principal and tactics. It is a major issue that puts Cameron on the defensive and can inspire progressive voters to get out and swing back to Labour.

Compass will campaign to keep the Tories out and help Labour present itself in a way that rebuilds a winning electoral coalition. The Conservatives present no answers to the problems facing our country and they must be stopped from gaining power. That is why we will:

* Take the fight to the Tories – exposing how wrong and weak their thinking and polices are.

* Carry out a report on how to re-socialise banking with a research project that in part our members helped pay for.

* Fight for a referendum on election-day on the introduction of electoral reform.

* Launch a major report on taxation and spending before the Pre-Budget Report.

* Continue the campaign for a High Pay Commission – to ensure that never again can greed at the top turn so quickly into pain at the bottom.

* Present an alternative manifesto of policy ideas that would transform our country – making it more democratic, equal and sustainable.

* And continue to shift the terms of debate about a good society in which we collectively become the authors of our lives.

This article was also published on the Compass website.