Attack the Tories by mutualising public services

By Jon Wilson

Labour faces a tough task fighting Conservative plans to dismantle Britain’s public services. As ever Tory tactics are dastardly. They hope we’ll respond to their attack by defending the ‘big state’ in all its guises. They want to say we’re on the side of meddling bureaucrats and public sector union bosses so they can claim it’s only they who are in touch with real people’s lives. In fact, they’re anything but.

We need hard thinking about how we can challenge these arguments. That means a clear idea of the kind of state that Ed Miliband, as Labour Prime Minister, would preside over – an authentically Labour approach to government which connects to the lives of citizens.

On blogs like this, the debate has started. So far, the debate has involved an argument about how we can be true to the history of our movement – what Labour did in the past matters to how we think about Labour now. The first majority Labour government of 1945 has turned into a crucial battleground. Against criticisms made in the Soundings e-book The Labour Tradition and the Politics of Paradox [link], Ben Folley suggests we need to stand up for the way the 1945 government created a state that intervened in people’s lives.

But when Ben talks about ‘the gains made for working people’ by that state he gives the game away. What about the gains made by working people? The Labour movement was founded by ordinary people to protect their lives and livelihoods from the rapacity of the free market, and the power of elites who used (and still use) the state to protect their gains from it. Much of what happened in the Attlee government was in that spirit. The election of a Labour government was a magical post-war moment of solidarity, when communities came together to protect what mattered to them.

Attlee’s government did a lot which was fantastic. The idea of taking institutions which we now recognise as vital public services out of the hands of the market was right. The way it did so wasn’t.

In practice, the ‘nationalisation model’ which Maurice Glasman and others have criticised took power away from an elite concerned only with making money. But it gave it another elite that thought it knew what the people wanted but didn’t bother asking. We need to celebrate the spirit that created it. But we shouldn’t celebrate the culture of bossy centralism that was its long-term consequence. As Glasman reminds us, in 1945 there were other Labour ways to challenge the market.

The idea behind nationalisation is that people’s lives are only improved if everything is controlled from the centre. Defending such an idea now plays into Tory hands.

When it’s tried it doesn’t work. A ‘postcode lottery’ in NHS care happens in the public service that has tried to be the most centralised.

But the state is already a lot less ‘national’ than defenders of centralised state intervention argue. A lot of ‘state’ services are delivered by local councils, or quasi- autonomous bodies, schools for example, which are accountable to local governors and the council as well as Whitehall.

The reality is we already have a far more diverse and localised ‘state’ than Whitehall or even many public service workers imagine. Headteachers, school governors, council leaders, health and social service managers make decisions that matter. Good local leaders connect with the community. But because they’re always looking over their shoulder to see what Whitehall is telling them to, many don’t involve local citizens. They forget that the most important relationship is with the people who live around them.

The answer is for Labour to increase the role of workers and local citizens in the ownership and management of local public institutions. We should go back to our roots and make schools, hospitals, SureStart centres, surgeries and universities into democratic mutual institutions. Each should be run by a partnership of employees, local ‘service users’ and local and national government.

The process of mutualisation needs to be gradual. It should be based on a slow process of strengthening relationships between workers and users, locality and centre. But it would be radical nonetheless.

Mutualising public institutions won’t lead to a smaller state. But it would change the way the public sector is run, bringing people into the state and saving it from Tory attack. It would oppose the ridiculous lack of substance in the ‘big society’, making them look like hypocrites every time they opposed our plans. It might even make what the Labour Party has always called socialism into a reality.

The mutualisation of public services would need central government to play an important role. But it would finally recognise the limited power every national government actually has, and be far more realistic about what central governments can do.

Apart from taxation and some welfare payments government departments don’t ‘deliver’ anything themselves. But the idea – the myth – that state power is centralised means government mistrusts local service providers, and tries to regulate and coerce rather than persuade local institutions. It’s time we recognised that a better public sector needs strong, trusting relationships between the centre and locality. The job of central government is to lead and coordinate. It’ll only get anything done by recognising that public institutions need to have their own, local ways of being accountable to society.

When I listen to people defending central state intervention, I hear an argument against trusting people to manage the services that make a difference to their lives. It’s not a very Labour voice. We are the party of the people, not the state. We’ll only defeat the Tories if we remember that fact.