After the unravelling of the New Labour logic – that unregulated free markets could produce sufficient, redistributable wealth – this debate is profoundly important.
In government, genuine improvements in the living standards of the poor played out against the desertion of traditional supporters, fractured relationships with the trade unions and an alarming growth in inequality. But the loudest voices propose a break with Labour’s traditions or a return to a narrow set of values, both of which seem curiously out of date. This begs the question: can a renewed Labour movement have both roots and wings?
In recent months, advocates on the right of the party have published proposals ranging from the eminently sensible to the potentially damaging. Often these are based on the belief that Labour wins elections by responding to popular opinion yet the priorities at its heart curiously lack resonance. Care for the elderly, in-work poverty, poor housing, labour market insecurity and the reserve army of casual labour are pressing problems up and down the country, despite lacking prominence in the Westminster bubble.
Alternative priorities are often based on the belief that Labour will regain power by focusing on middle England, ignoring the collapse of support in the Midlands and traditional Labour heartlands.
Yet even where the debate reflects public concern, on issues such as crime and immigration, the lack of critical analysis has echoes of New Labour. In Wigan, immigration dominates on the doorstep but linger to ask why immigration is of such concern in a town with an ethnic population of less than 4 per cent, and poor housing, labour market insecurity and the poor prospects of the next generation surface.
Immigration is just one of many issues that matter; to overstate it is to understate others. The biggest barrier to finding the solution is to not properly understand the problem.
Maurice Glasman’s much discussed Blue Labour is superficially attractive in this respect, seeking to reassert strong communities and individual empowerment in the collective interest.
Under New Labour, the state became simultaneously too strong and too weak; faceless and bureaucratic, yet so subordinate to free markets it could not protect people.
But now is precisely the wrong time to try to sideline the role of a national state. A combination of public sector cuts, replacement of skilled professionals with volunteers, reduced pay, conditions and pensions for teachers, police officers and health workers and the introduction of virtually unrestrained markets into healthcare and education is destroying both public service and the public sector.
It is only a national state that can restrain the worst excesses of free markets, but while the failure of markets is evident – in the banking crisis and the collapse of Southern Cross care homes, to name just two – the role of the state has fallen off the agenda.
The history the Labour Party must reclaim is the history of a movement which harnessed the power of the state to mitigate the impact of capitalism. There are needs that markets cannot see and wants the state cannot respond to. Glasman is right that this gap can, and should, be filled by a variety of institutions. He is right that we should not neglect the space between the state and the market and right that getting involved matters. But ultimately it is only a national state, working in the national interest, that can protect people from the inequality and unfairness that capitalism produces.
The urgent task facing Labour is not how to bolster the excellent and important pluralist institutions that still exist in communities across the country, but how to save and reform the state so it is the friend, not the enemy, of the people. That is how we will combine the best of our tradition in a context that matters now, and how we will find both roots and wings.
