Governing through a coalition with the British people

Compare Labour’s manifestos in 1997 and 2015, and there’s one important way our politics has changed for the better. 1997 opened with that big photograph of Tony Blair, and six paragraphs that began with the first person singular pronoun – ‘I believe’ and ‘I want’. Perhaps it was necessary, to rebrand Labour as a movement led by a moderate and charismatic man who, then, people could trust. But Ed Miliband’s shorter, sharper forward to our manifesto this year begins with a better word – we. ‘We are a great country’. We can do better this this. ‘We will build a better future for Britain’.

The great myth of contemporary politics is that politicians achieve anything on their own. The ‘I’ delusion led Tony Blair, a politician who began imbued with ideas about recreating new forms of collective action, down the blind ally of increasingly centralised control and eventually, his lone decision to participate in war.

Our present-day politics is in a mess because too many of our political leaders believe in their unique, lone power, just as Blair did in Iraq. Voter apathy and support for unlikely saviours from Nigel Farage to Natalie Bennett isn’t caused by the corporate capture of the political class, but the fact that the myth has reached the end of the line. It is now obvious that only politicians capable of leading a team will can tackle the cumulative crises of British life, from the total collapse of industry, the shrinking of worthwhile sources of work for any but a small elite and the complete absence of affordable housing for young people in many parts of the country.

As I’ve argued many times before, the limited powers to spend and ban at the disposal of politicians in Westminster can stop the worst but can’t build a better Britain on their own. Ending zero hours contracts is a good thing, but it won’t create good jobs. There’s only so much you can do with tax breaks. Change will only come if there is energy lies with new, local forms of collective organisation, and that can’t be created on its own from Whitehall.

On the eve of this election the soul of Labour is still too divided. Increasingly the campaign has become a test of Ed Miliband’s personality, a test Ed has passed well. But our natural diffidence speaking against the idioms of contemporary politics has meant there’s been too much focus on Ed as I. Ed ‘is ready’, our best election broadcast said. Sometimes it does sound as if he’ll do it all on his own. But the manifesto, many of our policies, Ed’s more informal tone recognise that the power to do anything worthwhile lies dispersed in people organised throughout the country, in businesses and community organisations, councils, clubs and families. On our best days, we recognise that Labour doesn’t just need to get out of Westminster to listen. It’s the action of people throughout Britain which counts.

Over the last thirty years, we’ve seen a massive redefinition of the meaning of politics. It used to be about coordinating the otherwise disparate actions of people who had their own interests and forms of organisation. Balance and relationships were critical, in for example the back and forth between workers and businesspeople, or teachers and schools for example. The job of politicians was to intervene with authority in situations where people did their own thing, to resolve disputes, create new institutions, offer funding to create new ways of working. Politicians didn’t delude themselves they could make things happen on their own (Let’s not forget that the creation of the NHS created no new hospitals, it only offered a new funding mechanism for already existing institutions).

We live now in a political world ruled by the fiction of unmediated action by our political leaders. It is as if Ed Milband can reach off our computer screen and transform our lives. The result sadly, is that politics seems to be dominated by a strange class of men and women, who think they have to project an utterly deluded sense of how things actually happen. The closer they get to the centre of power, the more politicians speak as if they are possessed by a weird form of narcissism.

There’s a good chance Labour will win next week, and if we do, we can change all that. Labour in opposition needed to project the decisive character of its leader. In power, we can put what Ed values most, consensus and collaboration, at the centre of our way of working.

We can begin by recognising that our new ministers and their Whitehall teams won’t have all the answers. Let’s publically govern by creating project teams, drawing from different interests, sectors and institutions, to tackle our biggest challenges. Housing, for example: lets get representatives of councils and homeowners, tenants and housing associations, developers and land trusts together, with the minister chairing, and ask them to come up with a plan their members can sign up to meet our target of a million homes in a short space of time. The kind of ‘common good conversations’ a group of Christian leaders have recently piloted would be one place to start. Education, skills, welfare – the same approach should be tried, a series of deliberative councils where people with expertise and an interest bash out a practical answer.

We’ve done this before, in fact. London Challenge, created by Estelle Morris and Stephen Twigg, rapidly improved standards in the capital’s schools. It worked because it relied on focused collaboration, on teamwork involving practitioners and people with an interest at stake in education. The project deliberately broke out of the civil service hierarchy, involving practitioners from the start, and local actors, most importantly London local councils. But it didn’t create shiny new quangos, instead getting existing institutions to work together better. The project wasn’t afraid to hear but also wasn’t afraid to challenge different interests. It wasn’t just a talking shop. London Challenge created a plan by bring together people with different perspectives who were ruled, above all, by high collective ambition.

The point is we quickly need to transcend the idea of the saviour politician, the lone leader able to do good from on high. Labour in power needs to shift from its currently ambivalence about how to rule and govern an idiom of practical collaboration. Politicians set the priorities, outline the general direction, and then roll up their sleeves and chair discussion between people who know what they’re talking about. But its only when teams of people with interest and expertise from beyond the world of Whitehall and policy-wonkery (and the usual business suspects) invited into government that we’ll sort things out.

If we win next week we will, almost inevitably, need to rule in some sort of coalition. If we rely on the narrow expertise and authority of our new ministers alone that will get fractious and difficult. But if those ministers are confident enough to rely on other people, to creatively build teams instead of thinking they can act themselves, we can change how government happen and achieve our ambitions. We’ll get things done better if we try to build a practical coalition involving people beyond the current political class.