Labour’s challenge for 2011

By Nan Sloane / @nansloane

Recently I watched the clip of Brassed Off in which Danny (the magnificent and lamented Pete Postlethwaite) tells it like it was about the Tory government. It only lasts a couple of minutes, but it’s still moving on several levels, and it also has something to tell the Labour movement about our task for 2011.

Brassed Off was made in 1996, as the momentum towards Labour’s 1997 victory was gathering pace. We’d had a spate of by-elections, many of which we’d won convincingly, and many of which had been fought in communities destroyed by a Conservative government that cared nothing for them. Since we were in opposition, we’d had to watch in helpless frustration as pit after pit and plant after plant closed and communities slid into dependent misery. Young and old alike lost jobs, and all too often a sense of self-worth as well. The young who could leave left; in some places whole streets were boarded up and derelict. Pit-heads were grassed over or built on, so that even the visible memory of what had been was gone. Steel plants were shut and demolished; some abandoned factories stand empty to this day.

The combined decline of the coal, steel and engineering industries was calamitous for South and West Yorkshire – so bad, in fact, that between 2000 and 2006 South Yorkshire qualified for Objective One funding, which was targeted from Brussels at the most deprived areas of Europe. Yet bit by bit and with support from (a Labour) government, Europe, and Yorkshire Forward (the soon-to-be-abolished RDA), communities have pulled themselves out of the abyss. But although regeneration in some areas has been genuinely impressive, unemployment is still relatively high – 9% – and whilst cities like Leeds and Sheffield have done well in many respects, the evidence still suggests that, like much of the rest of the north of England, Yorkshire’s economy as a whole remains vulnerable.

For instance, a recent study by the Work Foundation found that between 1998 and 2008, more than three-quarters (142,600 or 76.7%) of new jobs in the region were created in the public sector (mostly in health and education), as against 43,300 (23.3%) in the private sector. 29% of people in the region are employed in the public sector, many of them in low-paid and/or part-time jobs. It’s hard to see how the private sector could suddenly spring into action to mop up the looming losses – or that it would even if it could. And nothing I’ve heard to date about the Big Society suggests that it will be able to do much either. (Although, to be fair, it’s quite hard to tell about that, since I’m still not quite sure what it is.)

It is now almost axiomatic that the cuts about to be implemented will hit the north harder than the south, the public sector harder than the private, and the poor harder than the rich. When David Cameron talks about most of the ‘heavy lifting’ on the economy being done in 2011, he is not anticipating that it will be done by his own core vote. On the contrary – as was the case the last time they were in power – it will be done well away from them, in towns and villages and inner cities full of people they don’t really care about. When Danny in the film clip says that if the people of his community were seals or whales their treatment would cause an outcry, he was right. The tragedy is that he’s still right 14 years on.

Of course there are communities in the south that will suffer, but the north is going to be hurt again in a way that is all too familiar to those of us who’ve lived through it before. We know that families and communities are going to be impoverished, that unemployment will rise, that the unemployed will be demonised, and that the young will be deprived of hope. We know, because we have see it all before. We have seen what priggish, self-righteous, ideologically-driven Conservative social and economic policies can do, and the only difference this time is that now they’re being supported by Liberal Democrats who ought to know better.

So Labour’s mission is clear. Yes, we must take some thinking time, adjust to what has happened, be clear about our direction and focussed on our task. No, we should not be sniping at the leadership, grumbling on the fringes or allowing issues such as the AV referendum to distract and divide us. Yes we should be dissecting and attacking every regressive or repressive policy, every hand-wringing piece of hypocrisy, and every broken promise and pledge, and no, we should not be assuming that victory will just fall to us whatever we do. We will need to be strong, unified, disciplined and clear. We have done it before, and we must (and can) learn how to do it again.

But if we are truly to be a voice for besieged northern (and southern) communities, we must also learn how to take Danny’s rage from 1996 and translate it into a new voice for the coming times, a rallying point for the dispossessed and despairing, and a real promise of change for the future. Douglas Alexander (writing in the Guardian) is right that moral outrage alone will not be enough, and right too that there must be credible and effective policies. But we must also be able to communicate them at a visceral as well as an intellectual level. We must learn how to make our anger constructive, a positive passion for what we can make possible. We need to persuade people to believe in us again, and to do that we’re going to need full hearts as well as cool heads.

Can we do it? Yes, of course we can. The challenge of 2011 beckons.