We mustn’t let our fear stymie our ambitions

By Emma Burnell / @emmaburnell

When people feel that what little they have is threatened, their focus narrows. They focus not on what the best of all possible outcomes could and should be, not on how we achieve the best that we can be, but how to fight the loss of what we already have. Their ambition, at least in the short term, is to fight for nothing more lost and nothing more than that.

This is – of course – completely understandable. Most of us are fighting the Condems on more than one front. We’re only a year in and we’re tired. We also know that while Labour was better – so very much better – we didn’t get it right all the time. For many of us, the fight to get government to understand the need for doing the things we care about better, to listen to experts and to stop listening to the Daily Mail for just long enough to prove them wrong didn’t start last May.

We have stopped trusting anyone to get it right including ourselves. We don’t promote a vision anymore for fear of being seen to be unrealistic. We don’t fight for best practice, but to save the better practices that we had. This may feel realistic, but it is profoundly depressing and deeply dangerous.

It is depressing because in the end, after another bitter few years of having the stuffing knocked out of us by the inevitability of parliamentary arithmetic (we stopped thinking we could ever count on the Lib Dems to do the right thing some time ago) we will have less energy and less fight than we do now. We will not have put together a vision to offer the people beyond a reversion to systems they believed not to be working.

We may be able to prove to people that things have got worse. People may feel that things have got worse, some will vote for us because of it. But what will our mandate be for? For more tinkering at the edges? Or a pack of lies at election time and hope it all works out over five years like the current lot? That’s not an attractive prospect to me as an activist, so I have no reason to think the electorate will go for it.

It is dangerous because this lack of ambition causes consensus which are unchallenged until things go disastrously wrong. Look at what happened to the global economy.

It is equally dangerous on domestic issues like welfare. Labour handled welfare badly. Our policy was not run by people who grasped the complexities of the causes of worklessness or incapacity, but understood well the politics of welfare and the need to talk tough. This has left Labour with a legacy that damages our reputation with vulnerable groups, but far more insidiously, has damaged our ability to talk about our ambitions for those groups.

I want as many people as possible in the country to work for a large portion of their lives. I want that to be the ambition for our people. I’m a member of the Labour Party and we value the things work gives us beyond the financial. So I will not stymie that ambition to only the able-bodied. I will not reduce it to only those who have the habit of working. I will not restrict that ambition to those already in work and leave the rest to it.

But to achieve my ambition Labour must change. We must have an honest discussion about what it means and what it costs to move to a society where this is possible. But every time I try to start this conversation I am cut off. Cut off by well-meaning people who believe that by stating that goal I am in fact merely seeking to deny the rights that those who are not working have now; cut off by terrified people who seek to reassert the rights they have now and the wrongs done to them by Labour and have no fight left in them to talk about any ambition loftier than simply getting by; and cut off by the bean counters, worried by the upswing in short term costs that such am ambition brings with it, understandable politically unconvinced by the long term savings that can and should be realised by the different type of nation I ask Labour to deliver.

I understand that anger and resentment, that terror and those worries. But I’m sorry, this is too important not to talk about.