Go Bold, and give power to people

‘Go bold or go home’ is Ed Miliband’s advice to the shadow cabinet. In his slow creation of a clear Labour plan of action from the wreckage of defeat in 2010, Ed Miliband has a battle on his hands.

The battle isn’t just with the forces of paranoia in our own party who want to ‘shrink the offer’. Those few small minds have been infected by a long British tradition of political inaction. It’s a trick our ruling classes learnt while running the empire. If we talk big and do little, we might hold a fragile grip on power. We can always take the credit if things turn out right. If they don’t, you can always blame someone else.

Go bold. It was inaction that created the concentration of power we’re struggling against now. We know what happened. Run by a small unaccountable few, the banks collapsed and needed to be bailed out. The newspapers ruined the lives of thousands. The energy companies increased profits and racked up fuel prices. Schools improve results but don’t help young people into work.

All this happened because we didn’t organize, didn’t challenge. Instead, we let big money push up the cost of living and keep wages down. Its no surprise people are so angry. It’s no surprise the anger is directed at politicians when they don’t act.

Go bold. The common sense of Britain calls for a transformation in the way our institutions are run, not a few tweaks.

Labour can only win if it makes a big offer to the British people. But that offer can’t just be a shopping list with things politicians will do for people. The days when a politicians can say ‘trust me, I’ll give you what you want’ are over.

Going bold means restoring trust in our institutions by trusting people. Politicians and civil servants have no power on their own. Political success, action that makes a real difference, comes from creating a partnership between the people we elect and an active citizenry. Our challenge is to tell a real, practical story about how we’ll create that partnership.

But it’s not as hard as many people think. Going bold starts by taking inspiration from trade union branches struggling to increase wages; from businesses that get people together to make things; from teachers driven by their vocation to teach not just meet targets; from churches, mosques, councils, Labour organisers fighting for the living wage.

It’s about a politics that builds on our common aspiration to get together to make life better.

It’s about challenging vested interests. Conflict is a necessary part of all change. But it’s about creating institutions where different interests are recognised, where people have the opportunity to talk and create relationships with one another, where tension is negotiated into action together for the common good.

The groundwork for this has been done. The thinking has begun and relationships are being built in the work Jon Cruddas is leading in the policy review. There are exciting ideas about challenging vested interests, giving people power and renewing institutions in our towns and cities in the details of policy documents. But that message needs to become the centerpiece of our Labour’s story.

Over the next six months, Labour can set out a plan for rebuilding institutions from the energy companies to councils so workers, users and consumers have power alongside owners, managers and bureaucrats.

In an election to be fought on the cost of living, this is the only way we’ll beat the Tories. They’d prefer inaction. But they’re not stupid. They have no ideological objection to using the power of the central state to regulate markets where they have to. They will match us freeze by freeze, cap by cap.

We can only win if we push them into places they can’t follow. And that means giving people real power.

So we need to say this:

We will freeze fuel prices. But we will break up the big energy firms, and build local mutual energy companies in every town and city. Local energy coops can reduce prices by organising peoples’ bargaining power with energy providers. We’ll only shift to low carbon energy if everyone feels they have a stake in the change.

We will create a new technical baccalaureate. But we will build a new generation of vocational colleges, run by businesses, unions and students working in partnership. They can offer apprenticeships to train people in the skills needed by energy coops to reduce energy consumption and generate renewable energy.

We will cap the cost of credit. But we will build a network of regional banks to make sure decisions about borrowing are made by people who understand our industries and our communities. It’s about keeping the money we earn and save in the places we live and work, directing capital into where the local economy can grow.

We’ll make sure government always pays the living wage, and campaign for it to be extended. But we will insist that workers and businesses negotiate minimum wage levels and skill standards in each industry.

We’ve promised to devolve more power to our counties, towns and cities. But that means shrinking the power of Whitehall. It means renewing the authority of our local civic institutions by giving them power over health and welfare, job creation and economic development. We will make sure our local leaders are accountable through open primaries.

The Tories will attack us for transferring power from the central state to people. But our answer is simple. You don’t trust the people of Britain to work together for the common good. We do. You want to keep power closed up in the City and Whitehall, as you’ve always done. We want to give it to people in their streets, their cities, their communities. You are the party of a narrow elite, we are the party of the people.

We don’t need vague slogans like ‘the Big Society’ for this. Our message is simple. It is what democracy was always supposed to be. It’s what Labour was founded to do: build the power of people. With the challenges Britain faces now, as Ed says, unless we go bold we might as well pack up and go home.

Jon Wilson is the author of Letting Go. How Labour can Learn to Stop Worrying and Trust the People. He is currently writing a history of the British empire in India, to be published by Simon and Schuster in 2015.