In defence of Ivan Lewis and the Purple Book

By Luke Akehurst / @lukeakehurst

I have a confession to make. I reacted intemperately to the news this April that the Purple Book was being written. I didn’t like the name as I thought it would disconcert grassroots activists, and I didn’t like the way it was spun as an implicit criticism of Ed Miliband’s leadership.

Since then, I have heard much that has reassured me. Soon after the initial press coverage we learnt that Ed had in fact agreed to write the book’s foreword. Whilst not every idea in the book will be agreed with by Ed, I have been reassured to hear that people around him have been kept informed about the book’s contents. I take at face value the assurances I have had from some of its authors that it is intended as a genuine, positive contribution to the policy review Ed commissioned from Liam Byrne (he is one of the contributors) not a manifesto for an alternative to Ed.

Very few people have seen a copy yet but the authors I have spoken to have implied that it is refreshingly free of the narrow focus on the marketisation of public services that some Blairites seem have become trapped in, and instead focuses on the redistribution of power.

Not everything in it will appeal to me or to every Labour member.

But we need to get over the kneejerk urge to destroy every contribution to ideas and policy-making that we disagree with. The way in which Maurice Glasman, a well-intentioned academic trying to float solutions to Labour’s disengagement from the working classes with his “Blue Labour” theories, and doing so in a clumsier way than a professional politician would, has been on the receiving end of a political kicking, is likely to deter others from ever floating ideas to Labour.

This weekend Ivan Lewis trailed the contents of his Purple Book chapter. Ivan is a thoughtful politician and if anything, far from a reassertion of Blairism, the quotes from his chapter suggested to me an intelligent critique of excessive modernisation, and an attempt to synthesise New Labour with Glasman’s Blue Labour concerns about identity and belonging. The clash between the two is in any case exaggerated, as Glasman’s main themes about the family and patriotism could have been written by Tony Blair and Alistair Campbell.

In response, vitriol came his way from anonymous briefers with the book described in the Times as “lazy” and “idiotic”.

If we carry on like this we are in danger of creating a party culture where no one ever expresses new or dissident ideas. That’s a sure-fire route to being a party that is intellectually dead.

Personally I’m nearer ideologically to an older, pre-Blair social democratic tradition on Labour’s right, but if anyone thinks there is a way of running a sensible and electable Labour Party whilst ignoring and excluding the talents and ideas of the people around Progress, they are on a fast track to division and defeat. That’s why Liam Byrne is leading the policy review for Ed, and Jim Murphy and Douglas Alexander hold key frontbench positions – just as Attlee and Wilson, leaders from the centre of the Party, used the talents of party rightwingers like Gaitskell and Morrison in the case of the former, Jenkins and Healey in the case of the latter. There are few enough people who are serious about Labour’s re-election as it is, without us being subdivided and factionalised us as we have been for the past 17 years into Blarites and Brownites.

Where I read it and disagree with bits of the Purple Book I will try to do so in a way that is comradely, measured, proportionate, critiques the idea not the author, and does not deter others from speaking their mind about what is needed to make Labour electable again. I would counsel others to do the same.