We must rethink what the state is there to do

By Tessa Jowell MP

Political parties which fail to change and fail to come up with a new vision for the public, fail to win. That’s why I think the publication of the Purple Book is so important. It brings together long-serving politicians such as myself and Douglas Alexander with some of our best new MPs such as Rachel Reeves, Liz Kendall and John Woodcock. The book is not a manifesto, nor does it claim to cover the entire political terrain.

But for me, the crucial overarching theme of the publication is the need for greater decentralisation and a rethink of the role of the state.

Even if there were miraculously large increases in the amount of money for public sector spending in the next decade, there will not necessarily be the public appetite for the state to spend it. A study by Demos, which looked at the attitudes of voters who switched from supporting Labour at the last election, found marked dissatisfaction with the role of the state.

Almost one in five agreed that ‘central government interferes too much in local services’ while more than one in four of the voters that Labour lost said they saw government as ‘part of the problem, not the solution’. Only one in three former Labour voters considered government to be ‘a force for good’ improving their lives and the lives of their family.

Labour and the left more broadly needs to recognise that the public don’t respond to the old command and control state. We need to develop a new theory of government intervention. Government must move away from the ‘delivery state’ to what has been called the ‘relational state’: committed to developing people’s relationships rather than the technocratic language of outputs, targets, and value-for-money.

New Labour achieved a great deal which we should be proud of, but public investment changes the nature of public need. Then we measured success by numbers, now it is more appropriate to measure success through the quality of a person’s lived experience.

The clunky language of public service reform often obscures the fact that it is the relationships that people make with those who serve them and care for them that are among the most important in their lives. A more relational state would place more value on the relationships a doctor builds with their patient, a parent builds with their pupil, and a carer builds with the person they are caring for. There is a reason why patients cite the kind attention they receive from nurses as a key indicator of whether they are satisfied with their NHS experience, because it is the quality of human relationships that shapes their views of the success of the treatment

A relational state would prioritise giving power to individuals and communities for example by allowing local residents to commission their own services; giving local communities the opportunity to identify the priorities for local spending; or putting people in need in touch with local residents with skills and time to give.

In that way stronger communities will be built through stronger relationships, not through pseudo-commercial transactions between the provider and receiver of services. This idea speaks to Labour’s principles of solidarity, mutualism and collectivism.

We understand that the third sector has always played a complementary role to the statutory sector, campaigning and agitating for improvements, rather than just taking over failing services as in the Conservatives’ view. The failure of the coalition to pursue the ‘big society’ through progressive principles means that the bonds of community are likely to weaken over the course of the next parliament.

According to a recent NCVO survey of charity leaders, 55 per cent of charities plan to cut staff and 35% plan to decrease the amount of services they offer. These are hardly conditions from which a blossoming of community life and organisations will grow.

This is because the Conservatives’ stance is first and foremost ideological – you have either civic action or government support, but not both. They wrongly believe that the presence of local or national government intervention inevitably enervates flourishing communities. This doctrinaire obsession with a smaller state defeats the objects of the ‘big society’.

Labour’s mantra in its place should be ‘community where possible, government where necessary, partnership always’. We should become the party of local action, helping people to help themselves solve problems. Because if we don’t rethink what the state is there to do, we’ll have failed to show the public we’ve listened and learned and are ready to win again.

Tessa Jowell is Shadow Cabinet Office Minister and MP for Dulwich and West Norwood. The Purple Book is published by Progress and can be purchased here.