Let go or lose. Labour can’t win unless it redistributes power

We have, at last, a real battle within the Labour party.

It’s not between left and right. It’s about something far more important. It’s about the state of British politics, the nature of power in British society and, above all, whether Labour has any interest at all in winning the next election.

In his blog here on LabourList yesterday, the usually very right but this time catastrophically wrong Luke Akehurst summed up the position that would be electoral suicide. The purpose of the Labour party, he argues, is to seize as much power as it can, to ‘capture political control of the machinery of government and use it to improve people’s lives’. Ordinary people, ‘they’, the vast majority who aren’t interested in politics, ‘just want things to work’. They want to elect other people, councillors or MPs, to run things for them, letting them get on with their jobs and caring responsibilities, apart from that single momentum of decision every four or five years when they can turf us out.

It’s a frightening vision of an electoral dictatorship, in which power operates with mechanical efficiency on the lives of people who have no means to influence what happens to them in between every half decadal vote. Fortunately, it bears absolutely no relationship to what actually happens in British politics.

The idea of ‘captur[ing] political control of the machinery of government’ is a fantasy dreamt up a century ago by academics and policy-wonks with no real connection to how government works, then, and definitely not now. In reality there is no ‘machinery of government’ which can be controlled. There are civil servants and council officers, who can be persuaded to persuade other people to do things, sometimes with the added incentive of money or the threat of law. But when they act, they do so with other people – teachers, job centre workers, business leaders, workers. Those millions have whose ideas and interests that need to be recognised, and who need to be part of the conversation that shapes our society. If they’re not, things go badly wrong. That’s what democracy means.

The reality of course is that these voices already shape what happens in the best schools and hospitals, councils and businesses. In reality, as a Hackney councillor, I’m sure Luke listens to what his constituents tell him. But the best councils are those that give those voices a public place. Whether it’s Lambeth’s youth services commissioned by young people or Durham’s participatory budgeting, it is Labour councils that are pioneering the involvement of people in the conversation that shapes the places we live. The leaders of neither council think involving people making decisions reduces their power, quite the opposite in fact. Both are far stronger leaders than they’d have been otherwise. It’s just that they recognise that effective power comes not from capturing the machine and then bossing people around, but creating a conversation where people can collectively agree a common course of action.

The idea of ‘captur[ing] political control of the machinery of government’ is electoral suicide, for two reasons. First, it goes against the grain of the extraordinary anger people feel about politics trying to hoard power. It might have worked in the 1970s, when Britain was a far more deferential society. But now, most of us think political leaders are arrogant and out of touch, who talk big but actually do very little. In this political climate, the idea that a political elite can be trusted to make sure everyone’s interests are looked after simply won’t wash. The only way people will trust politics is if politicians find ways of trusting people to make decisions.

That doesn’t mean devolving power to the pushy middle class, as Luke fears, but it does mean intelligently crafting institutions so every interest is part of the conversation: ensuring workers voices are heard along consumers and users and vice versa, for example. Ordinary people don’t get involved because they don’t think it’d make a difference. When there are real decisions at stake, not some fake consultation exercise, people get involved. The first big experiment in participatory budgeting, in the Brazilian city of Porto Alegre, saw a big increase of the involvement of the poor.

Secondly, it prevents us from persuasively attacking the Conservatives. This coalition is a domineering, centralising government, continuing the job of concentrating power in Britain with a tiny group of bureaucrats and corporate interests that Margaret Thatcher left off. Their strategy to win the next election is to divide, and build: to polarise middle class against poor, and then use a few big infrastructure projects (HS2, Ebbsfleet) to show how bold and competent they are.

As the energy freeze and home-building prove, the Conservatives will try to match us, announcement for announcement, when it comes to using ‘the machinery of government to improve people’s lives’. What they can’t and won’t do is transform our polity to give people real power: but that’s the only way the condition of Britain will improve.

We know that living standards will only rise if workers have more power negotiating with managers Credit will only flow to small business if we build local financial institutions. People will only be housed if house-building is organised by councils and other organisations rooted in our communities. The unemployed will only be helped into work if the organisations offering advice and training understand the local jobs market.

But with an overly centralised view of power, and the belief that the views of financial capital always represents the public interest, the Conservatives won’t put workers on the boards of companies, create local banks, or build houses in our communities which people can actually afford, or replace the work programme with a scheme that actually works involving local businesses. Each of these is a big vote winner. But, with potentially catastrophic consequences for them, the Conservatives won’t do them because they want the right to boss us around. But we can only capitalise on their limitations if we tell a convincing story about redistributing power.

The argument for redistributing power is being made by the Policy Review that Jon Cruddas is leading. It’s the argument Ed Miliband articulated in his speech on public services in February, and which was made in that letter to the Guardian, in which the most unlikely list of allies said Labour could only win by ‘giving away power and resources to our nations, regions, cities, localities and, where possible, directly to the people.’

These arguments are rooted in the experience of frustration that millions of people have for the way our public and private institutions work. Yes, they need more detail, but that’s coming with the policy review. They are still a lot more real than meaningless metaphors like ‘the machinery of government’. What’s needed above all is a clear story about what power to people means. That story needs to told with clarity and discipline. It needs to have real examples, about what Labour in government will change, about what real things people will be able to influence that they can’t now. To get there will take strong leadership, and a willingness by Ed and his allies to challenge those pockets of the Labour Party that imagine power is something that needs to be hoarded not spread. But, the strongest Labour leaders have been those who’ve been willing to fight and win battles within their own party.

Jon Wilson is a historian at King’s College London and author of Letting Go. How Labour Can Stop Worrying and Learn to Trust the People