Go big or go home

It could be a lingering fragment of festive goodwill – or maybe I’m just going soft – but there was a moment yesterday when I actually felt a bit sorry for David Cameron. There he was, suited and sitting up straight bright and early in the Andrew Marr studio, having to answer slightly mean-spirited and narrow questions about immigration and the EU. But he was probably just thinking: “I wish I was off for a nice walk in the country ahead of an extended pub lunch”. And who can blame him? The trouble is he’s Prime Minister now, and he’s got a serious job to do.

The back-to-school mood in yesterday’s interview was pretty depressing. I didn’t think the PM’s heart was in it either. But part of his problem is that he doesn’t come across as someone who has a particular purpose or goal in mind. He just likes being PM. Some critics (including in his own party) suggest that most of his political ambition was achieved when he crossed the threshold of No.10 as Prime Minister in May 2010. As for the rest of it all, well…whatever.

Ed Miliband is right to say that next year’s general election is a high stakes one. With hindsight, the 2010 election was a stop-gap moment, not a turning point. The inconclusive result pointed to that. But in May 2015 the country will decide whether it thinks the Tory approach is basically sound, or if something different is needed.

Hence the much-repeated phrase in the Labour leader’s office that the party must “go big or go home” next time around. Rise to the challenge of the age. Offer big not small politics, meaningful not feeble ambition. This matters. Party supporters and activists need a tune to hum and a story to tell. Voters need to see that something substantial is being presented to them. Why bother to change the government if nothing different (and credible) is on the table? A believable vision of a better future has to be put forward.

In his Christmas Day sermon the Archbishop of Canterbury used a phrase that should have attracted more attention, and perhaps would have done had most of us not been too busy maximising our calorie intake. Yes, he spoke of “misery and want”, and of the “greed and selfishness” which cause it, but that was perhaps to be expected. More significant was Archbishop Welby’s criticism of the very system we live in:

“Where people are measured in their worth only by what they can produce, what economic value they have…our own humanity [is] corrupted.”

That is not language that would play very well on the doorstep, or on Twitter. It is moral philosophy rather than practical politics. But it is also, I think, a direct attack on the “global race” rhetoric favoured by the PM and his chancellor. It is an argument that states there is something wrong with the way we live and work now.

That really is the size of the challenge. Should our political leaders just shrug, and say there is nothing they can really do about this thing called “the market”? That there is a global race going on in which we are doomed to take part, just not on our own terms? That things, to adapt a familiar phrase, can only get worse? There is something deeply pessimistic about the Cameron/Osborne prospectus, a resignation that we just have to put up with stagnant wages and longer working hours. That this weak and inadequate economic recovery is the only one we can hope to have.

During the Leveson process Tony Blair used an interesting phrase to describe his relationship with powerful media figures: “I took a strategic decision to manage these people, not confront them,” he said. That phrase could also be used to describe the last Labour government’s approach to the City and big business. But what the Archbishop, and so many others, are saying is that simply trying to manage some of the most powerful vested interests in our economy will not really bring about any useful change. We have to be brave enough to say that this economy is not working well enough for enough people, and that an intelligent, active state can help it work better.

It is that agenda – jobs and better training (especially for the young), housebuilding, reformed finance, affordable childcare – that can make a start on reshaping and rebalancing the economy in a way that the current government once talked about but has done little to achieve. It is a big and ambitious agenda, not a safety first option. But that is the offer that needs to be made between now and polling day on May 7^th next year.