Ideas not personality should top Labour agenda

By Richard Darlington

The media are finally switching on to Labour’s leadership campaign. This week the BBC is running a series of films by Laura Kuenssberg and the Today programme is following the Daily Politics by interviewing each candidate in turn. After the disappointment of last month’s Newsnight hustings, the BBC bigwigs are addressing their coverage in a serious way.

The only problem is that this week has also been dominated by the Peter Mandelson memoir serialisation in The Times and political correspondents on other papers are slavishly reporting the psychodrama. Today programme presenters seem to find it impossible not to ask candidates to reflect on the New Labour soap opera of the last ten years.

Against this backdrop, Demos hosted the first ‘Hustings of Ideas‘ to discuss policy not personality and get a sense of the differences in substance, rather than style. Instead of hosting the candidates themselves, Demos asked their supporters to advocate for their ideas – Douglas Alexander for David Miliband, Hazel Blears for Andy Burnham, Kerry McCarthy for Ed Balls, Sadiq Khan for Ed Miliband and Kelvin Hopkins for Diane Abbott.

As the New Statesman’s Mehdi Hasan noted, it was a very different kind of hustings and drew out some important distinctions between the candidates, based on the agendas they have set out in their own words and in their own time. None has published pamphlets, books or even articles of significant length during the campaign, rather their advocates found speeches to be the best sources of ideas to draw on.

Douglas Alexander understandably argued that character matters because party leaders and Prime Ministers do not have the luxury of choosing the issues that they have to deal with. But having got that of his chest, he went on to argue a substantive policy agenda on David Miliband’s behalf. The Keir Hardie lecture is now the centre piece for his supporters, with its argument for “active steps to restore the primacy of reciprocity, solidarity and mutuality”. Not only was it a speech full of ideas, there was a well organised operation to get it noticed.

Sadiq Khan was able to draw on Ed Miliband’s social democracy speech with it’s focus on a more equal society, (in terms of class, income, wealth and power) a country where people can get good jobs at good wages regardless of background and a society judged by quality of life. This speech gave Sadiq Khan most of his arguments and a distinctive policy proposal on extending the right to request flexible working to everyone, not just parents and carers.

Hazel Blears used Andy Burnham’s idea of forcing employers to advertise internships as illustrative of his wider call for aspirational socialism. She was able to use Andy Burnham’s speech to the Local Government Association for the argument behind his two most distinctive ideas: a new National Care Service and new local authority powers of compulsory purchase to boost social housing supply.

Kelvin Hopkins was not exactly ‘on message’ with Diane Abbott’s defining soundbite of being the “turn the page candidate” in the “turn the page election”. Instead he advocated for her as a committed Keynesian. In an era when the ideas of Hayek and Thatcher are back in government, he said Diane Abbott was best placed to resist neo-liberal marketisation, return the country to full employment, decommission Trident and “return party conference to the days of televised division”, thus making it “a live political animal”.

Kerry McCarthy defended the controversial positions taken by Ed Balls on immigration controls and cutting the deficit. She also went even further than Ed Balls in saying that Labour lost its way during the second term with the ‘choice agenda’ advanced by Milburn and Byers because it treated people like consumers. Perhaps she had in mind the argument advanced by Gordon Brown in his speech to SMF in 2004.

In many ways, Ed Balls has been the centre of gravity in the ideas debate during the leadership contest because he has been the one most ready to distance himself from policy positions Labour held under Gordon Brown’s premiership. Ed Miliband has been most willing to consign the manifesto that he coordinated to the dustbin of history on the basis that voters rejected it and Labour needs a fresh start. Diane Abbott has drawn strength and distinction by arguing long held, consistent and traditional ideas. As the media defined front runner and outsider respectively, David Miliband and Andy Burnham started the contest more prepared to defend Labour’s record but in the past few weeks have become the most active in seeking distinction from new ideas.

There is another month and a half before any party or union member gets a ballot paper and the candidates still have time to flesh out their alternative policies and distinguish themselves further through the strength of their ideas. Less personality and more policy is what Labour needs because voters will ultimately judge an opposition party not by whether they like the look of the leader but whether they have changed their party enough to be trusted to govern again.

Richard Darlington is head of the Open Left project at Demos.

You can listen to the whole hustings here.