Clear thinking and avoiding gobbledygook

Through sustainable co-production and devolution to stakeholders, we must take a long-term holistic approach to the governance of active citizens, as one nation.

Am I the only person who cringes when I read this sort of fashionable political discourse? Where the writer appears to say nothing at all, despite no shortage of words. It is a peculiar phenomenon that has infected all parties, to a greater or lesser extent. However, I do think the seeds of this problem are in the soil of New Labour.

There are a number of important, distinct roles in politics. Often the same people do more than one of these roles, but what is vital is that the roles should not be conflated. There are political thinkers and visionaries: the ideas people. In the Labour Party today, they should be engaged in describing what Britain would look like after ten years of a Miliband government. Then there are the political strategists, who come up with the policy ideas that can make that vision a reality. There are also the media strategists who need to find a way to sell those policies and ideas to the public.

When you read Alistair Campbell’s diaries it is always rather surprising how much of a role the media strategist had in the vision and the policies. That in itself is not a problem (people can wear more than one hat) but New Labour’s tragedy was that policies – and even big ideas – began to be arrived at by dint of their saleability. A generation of New Labour “policy wonks” (for want of a better word) grew up in an environment where those three important roles had no real distinction at all. It had a perverse impact: part of a marketing role is to offend as few people as possible (“New Labour, it’s our blandest Labour yet!”) Even the visionaries began to pile up equivocation upon equivocation; to state ideas that almost everybody would agree with but hardly anybody could get excited about. Remember those “Partnership into Power” surveys we used to get sent? They would ask questions like “do you agree we should take a stance on global issues?” without actually suggesting what stance we might take.

The disease swept across all parties. Your “big idea” could be something that meant different things to different people.  Who could dislike the idea of a “big society”? Who can have a problem with “one nation”?

So we find ourselves in a situation where the advertising slogan arrives before the vision or the political strategy.  Then almost any policy agenda can fit the bill.  What makes an economic policy or a welfare policy “one nation”?  There are answers to that, of course, but ones that could justify almost any realistic policy proposal.  I remember going to a workshop at a Young Labour event (many moons ago) about communitarianism.  The activity was to use communitarian arguments for and against a range of policies. Thus people argued for and against fox hunting, a smoking ban, tuition fees, all using communitarian arguments.  Clever, I guess, but what is the value of an idea that can justify anything?

So come on Labour’s thinkers! What’s the vision? What will Britain look like after ten years of a Miliband government? Excite us, not with talk of “one nation”, but with tangible and realistic ambitions. And come on strategists: what policies can we put together, practically and realistically, to make that vision a reality? Finally, to those engaged in public relations, you have a tricky job, but you’ve got to help us win those arguments and sell those policies to the public. The days of the message driving the vision should have died with New Labour in 2010.