It is a little over a week since I left Downing Street for the last time – to be followed by the supremely dignified departure of Gordon Brown. Now, with the Lib Dems camped out with the Conservatives in a coalition dominated by the right and a Cabinet stuffed with millionaires preparing to cut public services, a new political vacuum has opened up. If it has the courage, Labour can occupy the centre-left of British politics.
Without being seen to look backward to old Labour formulae, we must put an end to the years of triangulation. We must cease to be the party of the establishment and become the party of an insurgency against the vested interests which have so damaged Britain.
The collapse of the financial markets has increased a sense of insecurity about the future and a feeling that the growing inequalities in our country are unfair. The times we live in demand an active government; an end to the idea that markets are always right; enhanced social protection for the vulnerable; a rebalanced and reflationary economic strategy; and a socially just tax system.
These requirements cannot be fulfilled by a government of the right. They require a Labour Party which quickly regains confidence in our historic values.
There is a political crisis, too. A gulf has opened up between the governed and the elite. Every week, I attended Labour’s Cabinet and worked as Brown’s parliamentary private secretary. I have the greatest admiration for the former Prime Minister. But every week, too, I held my constituency surgeries and spoke to friends and family in Yorkshire. The disjunction between the two experiences was evident. During the election campaign, in hundreds of encounters with voters, I could sense their disillusionment. This was crystallised by the MPs’ expenses fiasco. But the roots of the crisis lay deeper.
The country was shocked to see a war approved by the House of Commons fought on a false prospectus offered by a Labour Prime Minister. And millions of people were profoundly uneasy at the way in which the European Union’s free-market culture, based on the free movement of capital and labour, was intensified and steamrollered through in the form of the Lisbon Treaty.
This made it much easier for multinational companies to move production and distribution units around the globe, accompanied by falling living standards, especially for manual workers. At a time of economic insecurity, this fed the fear of mass migration, which was being used by employers to drive down hard-won deals for better wages and conditions.
Britons continue to feel that the criminal justice system needs recalibrating in favour of the victim. Nonetheless, aspects of Labour’s excellent anti-crime drive had authoritarian tinges and gave the impression of an over-mighty state.
Labour needs to rebuild its relationship with its core demographic alliance of progressive and working-class voters. Our social base in both these groups has atrophied. Between 1997 and 2005, Labour lost four million votes. In 2010, we lost a further 900,000, almost exclusively manual workers.
We can only rebuild our party if we move beyond New Labour in three areas. First, our next leader must offer a new economic paradigm – the creation of a more heterogeneous base built around green industries rather than over-dependence on the City. We should espouse a clearly redistributive tax and welfare system. Serious steps need to be taken to offer social protection to people at work.
Second, we need to reassert the importance of public spending to achieve growth. The former Chancellor’s suggestion that Labour’s cuts would go deeper than those carried out by Margaret Thatcher rocked the confidence of millions. The public sector is what makes our country a civilised community. We should have sought to reinforce the public sector ethos of care and service, rather than introduce the ethos of competition and managerialism. In these matters, the voluntary and charitable sector and many campaigning NGOs will be allies and we should foster relationships with them. The trade unions – the biggest democratic civil society organisations – must be at the core of all this.
Finally, in order to resolve the political crisis, we should place ourselves decisively on the side of the governed and not be part of the elite. We need to support civil liberties and oppose the authoritarian state. We need to embrace political and institutional reform.
Our new leader must say that the war in Iraq was wrong and Labour will never repeat that mistake.
The coalition Government is not as stable as it claims. So Labour has no time to lose. The party must choose a leader who can learn from our mistakes and apply those lessons to the future. It would be best not to choose someone who was a minister at the time the decision was taken to go to war. The campaign for the deputy leadership gave a glimpse of the party’s thirst for change. We cannot duck it any longer. We must reject any continuity candidate and grasp the change the country wants, but which will not be delivered by the Tory-Lib Dem Cabinet.
This task is urgent. On behalf of the people Labour exists first and foremost to represent, we can’t afford to get it wrong.
