Beyond critique and defence of New Labour

By Adam Harrison

The Progress Political Weekend at Stoke Rochford Hall in Lincolnshire – a familiar venue to many trade unionists and student activists – was kicked off by the first keynote speech from shadow defence secretary Jim Murphy.

He was introduced by Progress chair Stephen Twigg who reflected that in previous periods of post-government, the party in the country and the party in parliament fell out with each other. At the moment there is clearly a determination this shouldn’t happen again. Progress helped play that role in government, but it is even more important now in opposition. Looking at the current situation we can be cheerful for a number of reasons: our poll leads; by-election wins; and a party membership which has risen since the general election by more than 50,000. He thanked activists of Usdaw and Community the Union attending the weekend.

Some of the main things to tease out and discuss in a forum like the Political Weekend include learning organisational lessons – how we set ourselves up as a winning party; asking what kind of reform the party needs to win in 2015; and – our biggest single challenge – restoring our economic credibility. Current polls are encouraging, but our polling on the economy shows the scale of our challenge. When YouGov asked which party would be better at running the economy, 38% said Tories but 28% said Labour. This is 15 points below our topline score. That underscores the challenge. So fixing that economic challenge is one thing. Moreover, the general election results showed we can only win again when we win nationally, across all the regions.

There had been discussion and fear about what might happen to Labour post-election defeat. That has not happened but the danger instead could be that we are beguiled by poll leads. There is a long way to go and we cannot simply hope that government unpopularity will bring us victory.

The full text of Jim Murphy’s speech can be read here. Today Murphy argued that two competing arguments about New Labour – its critique and its defence – both sentamentalise it and hinder the drawing of lessons about it. Instead of juxtaposing ‘tradition’ and ‘modernisation’ we must not simply romanticise one and attack the other, or vice versa:

“Tradition is part of who we are, but it’s not an absolute moral standard. If we make that mistake modernisers put ‘tradition’ in a box marked ‘conservative’ and traditionalists put ‘modernisation’ in a box marked ‘Tory’.”

New Labour set itself up in opposition to ‘Old’ Labour and defined itself against it. Murphy critiques this, but warns too that, in turn, ‘it is important that we don’t define ourselves against New Labour’s achievements. The quick sand of continual apology does not benefit us or those we aim to serve.’

Modernisation is no end in itself, he says, but a ‘value-driven pursuit’, keeping pace with society as it changes and responding to it.

On defence, Murphy is clear: this should be natural Labour territory, not least because of solidarity that sits at the heart of our armed forces, but because politically we cannot be simply the party of the NHS and the Tories that of defence, because at the moment they are becoming the party of neither. Failed states exist in the world, but the ‘State of Ambivalence’ that the government has found itself in thanks to its reductive approach to foreign affairs – now faced with a genuine crisis of democracy in Europe’s backyard – reduces the UK’s stature in the world.

As he did at the Progress rally at Manchester conference last year, Murphy warned of the danger of voting Labour in southern England becoming as countercultural as it has become to vote Tory in Scotland. He reiterated the warning first made by Joan Ryan in her article for Progress, highlighting the extent to which seats that Labour lost in 2005 have now slipped almost hopelessly out of reach. The same cannot be allowed to happen to those we lost in 2010. The Milibands’ Movement for Change is a part of keeping our momentum as a movement.

“There is a simple lesson which binds these themes”, he concluded. “New Labour, Labour history, Labour values and Movement for Change – Labour wins when we modernise and are the leaders of change.”

Questions from the audience came thick and fast, from Community and Usdaw union activists asking about cuts to services for the disabled. From one Community member from Devon: what more can Labour do to protect these services? From Northwest Norfolk CLP, activist Alex Kemp explained how she and others were campaigning for some council wins in May and has set up a Labour Pensioners’ Group in the area to reach out to that group. Phillip Ross of the Labour Small Business Forum raised the importance of small business as a potential Labour-supporting constituency-in-waiting.

On liberal interventionism, Murphy noted that ‘We don’t want to create Hampshire in Helmand, but we don’t want Helmand to come to Hampshire’, but went on to say that there has been a dearth of discussion about Afghanistan which had kept the public on the outside of the ‘Westminster beltway consensus that what we’re doing in Afghanistan is right’. He went on to note that ‘There is no Labour-Tory debate and nor from the Liberals now they’re in government, but that means there’s no attempt to engage the British public in it’.

On the need for Labour to rebuild its economic reputation, Murphy re-emphasised the absolute importance of this:

“The argument is of this magnitude. My Tory opponent in 1997 ran on the Winter of Discontent. Be under no illusion, the Tories will want to do the same with the economy come 2015.”