Where is the left’s response to the Government’s attack on collectivism? Over the past few weeks, we have seen an attack on the principle of universal services – such as child benefit and Sure Start – that underpin the welfare state. I write in advance of the Comprehensive Spending Review where we expect to see more of the same. But the left’s response to these attacks has so far been disappointingly divided and incoherent.
Those who allow the coalition to undermine universal services are wrong. They are wrong primarily because universal services work. Sure Start was able to reach the poor precisely because it was open to all and did not have the stigma of services reserved exclusively for the poor. Similarly, the beauty of child benefit paid directly to the mother ensured that every child could expect a minimum standard of help regardless of what the family’s main breadwinner chose to do with his (or her) earnings.
And universal services work for another reason. The welfare state simply cannot survive unless the middle classes feel they have ownership of and buy in to it. It is why, despite its problems, the National Health Service remains one of the best healthcare systems in the world. The most empowered in society – the wealthy and the educated – have a vested interest in sustaining and improving health services for all. Take them out of that system and the system falls.
That is why the mixed response to the attack on universal services from the left has been beyond disappointing; it is a betrayal of the very ideals that led to the creation of the NHS, comprehensive education and universal benefits.
One of the disappointments of New Labour was that, despite a raft of progressive and important policies, the principles that underpinned our policy platform were weak. Notwithstanding its relatively recent formulation, the phrase “by the strength of our common endeavour, we achieve more than we achieve alone” was, and remains, one of the most important guiding principles of the labour movement.
Yet in government, with policies like the introduction of university tuition fees, the Labour Party failed to recognise the importance of that principle. My chief objection to tuition fees has always been that asking students to take on responsibility for payment, with no assurance they would be able to pay it back essentially asked them to pay at the point of need. It hugely disadvantaged the poor and remains a fundamentally wrong approach.
But with the notion of a graduate tax we must not accept the idea that it is the individual who receives the benefit from education and so it is the individual who should pay. That shift, from the collective to the individual, is also wrong.
Education is a social good that benefits us all. As it is right that those individuals who benefit should also contribute, so should businesses who benefit from their skills. The University and College Union’s proposal for a business contribution makes perfect sense in that context, as does a contribution from wider society. By equipping the most talented with the highest of skills, regardless of their background, the economy grows, wealth is redistributed and we all gain: that should be Labour’s vision.
It wasn’t hard to predict that the Tory-Liberal Democrat coalition would produce a very different vision of a strongly individualistic, atomistic society in which we don’t stand or fall together, but instead are pitted against one another, jostling to stay afloat. It is the worst strain of liberalism, without the best.
The challenge for the Labour Party is to match this with a collective vision of society in which we rise and fall together. This sort of social solidarity has been missing from mainstream British politics for most of my lifetime.
I supported Ed Miliband for the Labour leadership because I think he understands that it is important. The Labour Party needs a policy platform urgently because there are people who care passionately about university access and child benefit and are looking to us to defend them. But we need to build those policies on solid foundations. To do that, we must go back to our founding principles or we will run the risk once again of losing our moral compass.
Lisa Nandy is Labour MP for Wigan
