When I announced my candidacy for the Labour leadership in Gedling last week, I said that this election is a great opportunity for our party, but also a time of real danger.
We cannot afford to just have an internal debate. And we must stay focused on our number one task – being a responsible and effective opposition and once again becoming a party that can win.
Campaigning in the Thirsk and Malton by-election last Saturday, I was struck by how shocked many people were by what the Liberal Democrats have done – posing as a progressive party but then putting the Tories into power.
Far from representing some kind of “new politics”, the David Cameron-Nick Clegg deal is a stitch-up of the political elites. It has no roots in local communities. It is not based on principle. And already they are trying to gerrymander our political system to prop themselves up in power.
That’s why it’s so important we seize this chance to renew the Labour Party from the bottom up. Political parties neglect their base at their peril: in our early years in office, there were endless stories that we were considering ending the historic trade union link and at times we seemed to denigrate the vital role of local government and councillors.
So to win again we must use this leadership election to build and strengthen our own new coalition, reconnecting with the communities we serve and people who supported us in 1997, 2001 and 2005.
But it is not just the Cameron-Clegg Government’s style of politics that gives us an opportunity. On policy, too, we saw this week why we cannot look inwards and let the Tory-Liberal Democrat Government off the hook.
After spending the whole general election campaign agreeing with us that spending cuts this year would put the fragile economic recovery at risk, the Liberal Democrats have changed their minds and put power before principle.
They have rejected our fair and balanced plan to halve the deficit over four years – with a mix of fair tax rises, spending cuts and promoting growth. Instead we saw a reckless plan that will take money out of the economy just when it needs support, undermining growth, risking higher unemployment and a bigger, not smaller, deficit in the longer term.
These aren’t just savings on advertising, IT and travel – savings which, of course, should and were being made. These are real cuts to the very things we need to promote growth: support for businesses and manufacturing, university places and tens of thousands of jobs for young people.
All of us recognise that the deficit must be brought down steadily, so we must not oppose every cut. But the coalition Government’s plans to cut the deficit faster with spending cuts this year is a return to the austerity of the 1930s Treasury view and is completely out of step with international opinion.
This is a new neo-liberalism for the 21st century – a merger of Thatcherite neo-Conservatism and Orange Book Liberals which believes that getting the state out of the way is the road to a stronger economy and fairer society.
But I believe they are drawing the wrong lessons from the global financial crisis, which has not only required unprecedented intervention to stop recession turning to depression, but underlined the importance of our defining philosophy: while markets are powerful drivers of growth and innovation, there is a vital role for the state in making sure they work fairly and in the public interest.
Our challenge is to strike a careful balance: recognising that markets should be servants not our masters and that there is a vital role for government in delivering long-term economic strength and social justice; but also recognising the state can sometimes be part of the problem as well as part of the solution.
We did not always get this balance right. Who can now doubt that, despite the tougher measures we brought in, financial regulation was not tough enough? On public services, the Government talked a technocratic language, using words like “contestability”, and seemed sometimes to suggest that private sector solutions were always better – when public services users just wanted guarantees of good schools, hospitals and policing.
What we did get right over the past few years is that you cannot have a strong economy without the right role for government. That means regional development agencies and a new industrial policy to support growth in every part of the country, and also a minimum wage and proper protections for agency workers – all vital for fairness in the face of new global economic pressures. And we must always remember that our radical vision must be credible – based on sound financial discipline and a determination to continue to take a long-term view.
I think we need a leader who understands these big global economic forces and how we need to respond; who has the strength and resilience to do the job; who doesn’t just listen, but hears, acts and takes people with them; and who speaks the language of people, not politicians.
Above all, we need a leader who knows what he or she stands for, is rooted in the values of the labour, co-op and trade union movements, and who understands that being a tough opposition, putting together a credible and radical programme for government and rooting our politics in the communities we serve are the three vital ingredients we need to win again.
