What Miliband is doing is welcome and necessary – but it is not yet sufficient

Labour keeps making pretty big, pretty good policy announcements but the polls keep narrowing. What do we do?

Ed Miliband has been on a roll and it’s been good to see.  Rent caps, regulating advertising to children, tenants fees reformed and keeping the door open to a public railway (surely one of the biggest no brainers to win votes at no cost), and before then energy price caps, to name but a few rabbits being pulled from the party’s previously shrunken hat. Following the recent barren years the state is now being offered as a servant of the people instead of the market. From having a  minimalist ‘retail offer’ we’ve gone to a shop front stocked with goodies. Campaigners will have something to talk about on the doorstep.

But those polls wont go away.  We know the Tories are going to bomb on May 22 in the face of Ukip and blood will be spilt. But only a fool would bet on them tearing themselves apart to a state of political incapacity. And only a fool will silently cheer any Ukip victory because it might enhance the possibility of  Labour winning more seats if in the process the national discourse just gets dragged to the right – our enemies enemy is not our friend.  The good economic news will keep dripping through. People will start feeling better off or become optimistic that they are about to be.  Not enough of them and not fast enough – but we cant deny or defy the laws of economic gravity forever.  As one commentator on Friday’s YouGov daily polling thread put it “Who is it that is not voting Labour now and is going to change their mind that way between now and 2015? But I can see switchers the other way if the economy continues to improve and people feel more cash in their pockets”.  Quite!

So what Ed and his team are doing is both welcome and necessary but its not yet sufficient to persuade the undecided or even enthuse the decided who still have to be motivated to turn out on polling day.  The policy announcements are keeping the party’s head above the water, and long may they come, but swimming against the tide for another year is a tough ask.  So what could sufficient look like for Labour?

The first thing we need is a better sense of vision. What do these policy announcements add up to? What kind of Britain can we expect to see at the end of a Labour term? Yes we want to solve the cost of living crisis – but we need more than bread – we need roses too. People are more than just their pay packets and are concerned about more than just their bills. To build excitement or even optimism, we need to be able to imagine how our quality of life, our communities and our society as a whole will change and improve under a Labour (or a Labour led) government. In his first party conference speech as leader Ed talked movingly about the creation of a good society. To me that’s a world where  there is more time for caring compassion and love, where  solidarity and creativity are celebrated alongside individual achievement, where the phrase ‘public sector ethos’ means something again, where equality and freedom are not mutually exclusive but reinforce each other.  I think that’s the kind of vision many people want to hear about and be part of.

Second, we need a greater sense of agency – how is all this stuff going to happen? Some of the levers an incoming Labour government will try to pull will work – but many wont.  As welcome as many of these policy announcements are, the tide is going out on socialism from above, but what is being revealed is a new potential for socialism from below. As the costs of knowing and doing are reduced to almost zero by the internet and social media, what we are witnessing is a renaissance of the ‘do-it together’ society that gave life to Labour and the unions in the 19^th century – only this time it can be joined up, scaled up and sustained.  So yes to energy price caps but why not community renewable energy schemes that create networks of citizens with an interest in a new progressive institution? The same with banks – yes to a challenger bank but what about peer-to-peer lending too? Ed said all this in the excellent Hugo Young lecture – it just needs to be weaved in – constantly.

And this helps us define the last element of Labour’s sufficiency, the need to look, feel and be in tune with the times we are living in. Labour always wins and wins big when it has a story about the future; 1945, 1966, 1997 all in their different ways were about the Party bending the trends in the world to its values.  The traits of the world to come are openness, empathy, letting go, trusting and providing the platforms and spaces for citizens to do things together. This is how Labour must look and feel.

When you are running out of road the best thing to do isn’t to keep your foot on the peddle but to take a new course. All the ideas and policies pumped out to date can still work –  but only if they are allied to a broader vision, a sense of agency and the glimpse  of a brighter future.  Then the polls might stop narrowing and start opening in Labour’s favour.