The power of teamwork

These could be the last days of the old politics. Labour has decided it wants to win the election next year. In Ed Miliband’s Hugo Young lecture last night, in the ferment of ideas around Jon Cruddas’s policy review, in speeches by Tristram Hunt and Liz Kendall this week, we’re starting to tell a clear story that can lead to victory in 2015.

And it’s all about power.

For the last thirty years we’ve been ruled by an idea of power that has no connection to the way things really happen. The cliché is that politicians promise things they don’t deliver. In reality, they have complete command over very little.

Politicians talk big. But they are nervous to talk about using power beyond the few instruments Whitehall has absolute control over: tax cuts and tax credits, new regulatory rules, a bit of spending here and cuts and more cuts there. We’re told election victories will create a better future. No one with any sense imagines a new Jerusalem can be created by the Audit Commission or Her Majesty’s Revenues and Customs, but that’s what politicians have asked us to believe.

No wonder our political leaders are so anxious and, we, the people are so turned off politics.

Democratic politics rest on a paradox. We, the people, have power. Yet we elect leaders to do things for us. For it’s first half century democracy here was sustained by a typically British kind of grumpy deference, in which voters chose which group of men claiming to be their ‘betters’ they wanted to rule them, and then quietly grumbled into their tea about the consequences.

Deference collapsed in the 1960s and 1970s, when we imagined we could choose how to live our lives. When they got used to the new public mood, politicians squared the democratic circle by treating elections as a mass act of online shopping. The voters were supposed to choose which ‘outcomes’ they wanted, then passively sit back as public services were ‘delivered’ through their letterbox.

It worked, up to a point, when there was money on the national credit card. But (and yes Labour needs to admit it) we maxed out, when our failure to realise that the conditions of prosperity can’t be ‘delivered’ in the same way as an online Sainsbury’s order, and tax receipts collapsed.

The Tories have stuck to the old story, what Ed Miliband called the ‘letterbox model’ in his Hugo Young lecture last night. It’s just that the package they’re trying to deliver is a particularly nasty repayment plan with a few goodies snuck in at the side. No-one believes it. But without a story about how Labour is different, it might have enticed an angry electorate into letting the Conservatives win.

The policy review is making a different argument. It’s this: the power to create a better Britain is not hoarded in Whitehall, but diffused through people in the cities and counties of Britain. The task of politics is not to fix everyone’s problems. Not even Sainsbury’s does that. It is to unlock the capacity that exists in the places we live and care about – families, our workplaces, our cities – for us to work together for the common good. When there’s less money, that’s the only way we can govern.

That means two things. First, a massive transfer of money and authority to the towns and cities of Britain. To local authorities, regional banks, mutual welfare providers run by people driven by the desire to conserve and develop life in the places we love. It’s a redistribution of power that Paddy Ashdown compares to the Great Reform Act of 1832.

But as importantly, we also need a change in how we wield power. Leadership is about teamwork, not the vain effort to command.

It’s this principle that underpins the approach to public sector reform outlined by Ed Miliband. Parents will have a right to challenge failing head-teachers. Patients will be involved in the conversation that closes a hospital.

But it’s the same approach we’ve been taking in the private sector. The organised power of labour needs to be a partner in negotiating the wages and skills demanded by different sectors of our business life. The best businesses are clustered where collaborative institutions are tied to the life of real places, as West Midland’s car industry shows.

It’s what Marc Stears, Ed Miliband’s chief speechwriter calls ‘everyday democracy’. Real power comes when institutions are ruled by a conversation where people with different interests are listened to. Real politics is about creating ways for people to work together to sustain our common life. Teamwork is the only way we’ll get out of our economic crisis. We can win in 2015 if we show how we’ll make it happen.

Make no mistake, this is popular. Opinion polls say people hate politicians because they don’t work together. They promise things they can’t deliver. We hate it most of all when they say things they don’t mean. A sceptical public won’t be persuaded just by speeches and policy pronouncements. But they will if we match words with action, and show collaborative leadership in practice.

The challenge comes from the anxious world that politicians inhabit. It’ll come from colleagues frightened about challenging vested interests. From journalists who assume redistributing power is a denial of responsibility. It’ll come from civil servants concerned that we want ‘outcomes’ you can’t count. We have a century of anxious centralisation to overturn.

The biggest obstacle comes from people who don’t get out enough to recognise the old model of power is broken. The paradox is it’ll take strong leadership to redistribute power, a clear sense of purpose, the capacity to build relationships with allies, and the guts for a fight.

But we’re on track. As anyone but the strange denizens of Whitehall know, the best way to get things done is through teamwork not trying to command.