Hitting the right notes

Josh Cook urges Labour to turn away from the value-free rhetoric of the Blair years to something more honest and appealing

Peter Mandelson advising former prime minister Gordon
Brown - DOWNING STREET

Blue Labour is bringing a breath of fresh air to a stale political landscape.

To continue this it needs to find new ways to talk, and new things to say. It needs to rejuvenate the way Labour communicates with the electorate.

The consensus seems to be that communicating with people can only be a bad thing, as the more you say the more there is to be disagreed with.

There needs to be a fresh approach, one that accepts that disagreement is inevitable and indeed positive.

Gordon Brown’s refusal to reveal his favourite biscuit until he had consulted his PR managers made it plain to see that the current way of speaking with people was deeply flawed.

The overly agreeable and overly compromising rhetorical devices that we have become familiar with have had their drawbacks in the past – and they are even less adequate now.

To recapture the public’s imagination and enthusiasm for politics and for Labour, we must appear to stand – and actually stand – for something. We must make statements with less regard for their media-friendliness, or the fact that not every demographic will find them palatable. Taking a strong stand for Fox’s chocolate biscuits is better than taking no stand at all.

Those who remember the days when far-left talk scared off voters and made the party unelectable might be cautious about such an idea. But the party has matured: it has no reason to be embarrassed about its principles, and every reason to stand up for them in the language it uses when talking with the public.

Trying to feed back to people what they already believe - the popular method since 1997 - does more harm than good in the long term.

It alienates Labour supporters who do strongly believe in the party and who ultimately form the core of our voters.

But focus group politics also alienates the public at large, who are looking for leadership from their politicians; leadership in ideas - and this is mainly expressed through what you say and how you say it.

Hiding your beliefs behind a veil of euphemisms does not constitute leadership. Labour should not be afraid to be disagreed with. Instead it should try to convince those who do disagree in an open and honest way.

Of course not everyone will be convinced, but I believe the show of leadership itself will have wide appeal, and will bring the party into positive light when contrasted with those political players who feel the need - perhaps for good reason - to use rhetorical trickery to disguise their core beliefs or interests.

The type of rhetoric borrowed from PR companies, who use it to mislead and tell half-truths, serves simply to sow seeds of mistrust in politicians in the public consciousness.

New Labour was particularly guilty of doing this.

Trying to have wide appeal by not having any opinion at all has not worked. An important example of how we can have opinions and be popular can be found in demonstrating the links between popular ideas and Labour’s fundamental values.

Patriotism and nationhood are things that have almost universal appeal, particularly in the traditional working class element of the electorate, and are things that have been ignored by the political class for years.

The values of socialism - broadly a sense of duty to your fellow citizens - can be expressed in this language of nationhood and patriotism, concepts which cause much less of a stir than the academic language of ‘collectivism’ so successfully tabooed by Thatcher.

This might seem disingenuous, and the very thing that should be avoided: the idea of hiding true belief behind rhetorical trickery. But it is not rhetorical trickery if you really believe what you are saying. Blue Labour believes that socialism embodies a kind of inclusive and positive nationalism, and so should work towards expressing socialist ideas in this way.

Labour should aim to inject more of the kind of strong, nationally-identified language and stronger political rhetoric in general into its communications, and consequently into the public consciousness.

If this is successful it will not only recapture the interest of traditional Labour voters, by offering socialism to them in language they identify with. It will also demonstrate a new preparedness for leadership; a break from stale political speak – something which everyone would appreciate.

Click here for some insightful lessons on rhetoric from a previous general election.

A new House of Lords: the Church as reformer and exemplar

Luke Bretherton calls time on the false radicalism of an elected Lords, arguing for a vocational assembly of all the talents

Lords leader Lord Strathclyde leads a tribute to clerk
Michael Pownall - UK PARLIAMENT

Nick Clegg’s proposals for House of Lords reform show a distinct lack of political imagination.

Like proposals for electoral reform in the UK, what is proposed is a technocratic solution that is unlikely to interest many outside the Westminster village.

And like the proposals for the Alternative Vote (AV), the actual impact on the quality of government and its representativeness will be marginal at best.

The existing proposals to refurnish the upper chamber will neither change the shape of the table nor alter the kinds of people who will sit around it. For all the high sounding rhetoric about ‘greater democratic legitimacy’, the end result is likely to be benches full of party apparatchiks submissively voting as directed by their whips.

A number of peers complain that a premonition of this eventuality can already be seen in the behaviour (such as filibustering) displayed in the House this year.

What is needed is a far more fundamental rethink of the second chamber. One way of finding a more creative approach is by beginning with the issue of Establishment: the formal connections between the state and the Church of England.

A report from University College London’s Constitution Unit concluded that no party would formally disestablish the Church of England. It would take up too much precious parliamentary time and not win any votes.

Establishment is simply too embedded in the fabric of Britain’s constitutional arrangements to be done away with overnight. However, what was found to be likely was a creeping disestablishment through bureaucratic misadventure and well meaning changes that eventually made Establishment unworkable.

For example, Gordon Brown’s well-intentioned removal of the prime minister from the process of choosing bishops in 2007 caused a host of procedural headaches for all concerned.

However, such a process assumes the Church of England will take a defensive position to protect its status.

An alternative approach would be for the Church itself to take the initiative, and reach out to a broad base of interests and institutions as part of reimagining not only the role of religion in public life, but also the place of the vocational and the professional in the governance of Britain.

The Church is the bearer of the deep memory of what a vocation and a profession were in origin: a calling or vocatio to service, manifested in a professio of faith embodied in particular forms of public action.

Contrary to popular parlance, monks and clergy were the first ‘professionals’, and a life of service – free from the demands of crown and commerce – constituted what it meant to have a vocation.

An echo of this original vision can be found in contemporary professions. As well as having specialist knowledge, they involve some kind of corporate self-governance and a shared ethos that sets limits on what either the market or the state can demand.

Yet under the twin pressures of managerialism and marketisation, the autonomy of most professions and the public service dimensions of their vocational commitments are being undermined.

We find parallel pressures on the aims and objectives of all forms of self-governing corporate life, from unions and religions to the Royal Society and the Women’s Institute.

The Church of England, as a paradigm form of this vocational interest, needs to take the initiative and build support for the proper representation of all vocational interests in the upper chamber - whether religious or not.

Instead of waiting for disestablishment by administrative error, the Church should use its established position creatively: to forge a new settlement in which civil society (of which all faiths are a part), vocational forms of life and professional bodies have an established voice in parliament.

This vocational interest stands at one remove from the necessarily short term and competitive nature of electoral politics. More importantly, these sectors have self-interest in upholding a commitment to the non-commercial and non-instrumental dimensions of our working and social life.

House of Lords reform that took seriously the need for the representation of vocational interests would genuinely change the shape of the table and who sat there.

It would generate real engagement among those outside the Westminster village, take seriously the civic dimensions of our vocational, professional and working lives, and bring the experience and wisdom of those directly affected to the business of scrutinising legislation.

If this all seems too far removed from what we know, we need only follow the footsteps of the Queen on her recent trip to Ireland and observe the Irish Senate, which has representatives elected by five vocational panels.

The panels are organized around agriculture, unions, culture and education, public administration and civil society, and industry and commerce. There are problems with how the Irish Senate is constituted, but there are a myriad of other ways of framing the representation of vocational interests. We just need the imagination to do it.

To reform the House of Lords based on a set of vocational interests, as a complement to the locational interest of the House of Commons, would be a simultaneously radical and conservative move - a blue Labour move.

It would forge a politics of the common good out of existing customary practices and traditions, in order to impose limits on the power of the market and the state: forces which both, left unrestricted, have the potential to undermine the things we care about.

Luke Bretherton is Reader in Theology and Politics at King's College London and author of ‘Christianity and Contemporary Politics’ (Wiley-Blackwells, 2010). He is currently writing a book on community organizing entitled ‘A Paradoxical Politics: Community Organizing, Christianity and the Future of Democratic Citizenship’.

Making sense of Maurice Glasman

Alan Finlayson on the father of blue Labour: ethics, institutions, religion and what money means... but is it any good?

Poultry Cross, Salisbury, Wiltshire - JIM LINWOOD

Having risen to prominence as a (possible) intellectual guru for the Labour Party, and as the most public figurehead of ‘blue Labour’, Maurice Glasman has been variously denounced as a “tool of apolitical centrism”, the advocate of a “socially conservative, economically liberal agenda”, and as some sort of fascist fellow-traveller.

Glasman himself urges Labour to attend to the common good through a “politics that brings together immigrants and locals, Catholics and Protestants, Muslims and atheists, middle and working classes”. It’s all a bit confusing.

The fact is that 'blue Labour' has created a framework within and against which Labour’s internal debate has been energised. It has done so whilst bringing various factions together (Progress and Compass, the Fabian Society and Soundings) - no mean feat and certainly a break from recent Labour traditions (although the non-involvement of the Briefing left is unfortunate).

If only for that reason it is, I think, worth taking time to work out what Glasman is all about. In response to Billy Bragg’s charge that he was ‘economically liberal’, Glasman wrote this: “Resistance to commodification through democratic organisation. That's the position”. So, let’s see if we can understand what he means.

From individual morality to ethical institutions

Glasman is what political philosophers call a ‘virtue-theorist’. For him, generalised moral rules make little sense. What matters is the quality of all of our actions in the context of the ongoing collective life of which they are a part; the extent to which such actions both contribute to and are rooted in a form of life in which individuals may flourish.

There is a fundamental difference between this and Blairism. For Blairism (as for neo-liberalism in general) the only moral agent is the individual, whom government should help to become self-reliant, responsible, law-abiding. For Glasman the community is also a moral entity; only if it is rightly organised can people flourish.

This is not a 'right-wing' position. In Glasman’s case it is also not a liberal one. Glasman thinks that liberalism treats values and principles in a way that extracts them from the communal and cultural contexts in which they have meaning and force.

In so doing, it drains the ethical life from autonomous communities and depoliticises virtue by declaring that ‘the good’ will derive from formal rules and procedures professionally operated and enforced by liberal lawyers, philosophers and politicians.

These are fundamentally concerned with specifying when the state can legitimately intervene into the lives of insufficiently liberal individuals. A consequence of this is that relations other than that between individual and state come to appear as having little or nothing to do with ethical and moral life; the most important of these is the economy.

To the liberal concern for constitutional justice Glasman wants to add economic justice. But he does not mean by this only that there should be a better redistribution of wealth. He means that the working part of our life should be about virtue and ‘flourishing’, just as much as every other part.

For that to be so, people should have some measure of control over their lives at work, and that work should have intrinsic value and meaning. That is why Glasman admires the culture of the mediaeval guilds and G.D.H. Cole’s attempt to invent a modern guild socialism.

It is also why Glasman opposes the Blairite project of inculcating ‘transferable’ skills – of the sort that float freely around the knowledge economy - and supports the cultivation of vocational skills rooted in craft cultures and traditions.

For Glasman what matters most is the maintenance of autonomous communal life within which virtue may flourish. He is thus particularly concerned with the forces that threaten such community.

For the right, traditionally, these threats are usually immoral individuals (single mothers, atheists, divorcees and so on). But for Glasman, not only individuals but also (and more importantly) institutions can be wholly incompatible with ethical life. And for him the most important of these is the institution of the market.

Money does not make the world go around

Glasman’s inspiration here is the economist Karl Polanyi, who sought to describe and explain the development of the capitalist market in England in the 17th and 18th centuries. Liberal economics often imagines the market as a wholly natural outcome of the interaction of human wants and interests under conditions of scarcity.

In contrast, Polanyi argued that it was the outcome of a political project. Surveying England’s history of enclosure and the forced mobility of labour, he concluded that “There was nothing natural about laissez-faire; free markets could never have come into being merely by allowing things to take their course…laissez-faire itself was enforced by the state.”

For Glasman political debate about the market should not be confined to the degree of legitimate intervention within it (as if it were a delicate natural ecosystem). His key concern is not how to ‘manage’ the economy or impose moral restraints upon unruly individual capitalists.

The problem is much greater than that. There is a fundamental opposition between ethical community and the market because the market entails the commodification of life, labour and nature; it pulls things out of the communal context within which they have meaning, by subordinating them to its one ‘universal’ measure of abstract value: ‘price’.

One part of the Labour tradition has seen its task as the use of the state to increase access to commodities: through organising to improve wages, state benefits and national economic planning.

New Labour was in this tradition; accepting that we now live in a free-flowing, global knowledge economy, it saw its task as helping people to acquire transferable skills which would help them to fetch a better price on the market.

This, incidentally, is what new Labour meant by social mobility. But Glasman claims that there is an alternative tradition for which commodification itself is the problem, and the role of the party is the creation of collective organisations which can resist it, entangling the market in democratic “regional, civic and vocational relationships”. His examples include mutual banking, “real traditions” of craft, co-operatives and so on.

This is a specific form of anti-capitalist politics. It identifies the core problem of capitalism not as inequality or class war but as commodification. The latter is thought wrong primarily because it undermines embedded communities.

Glasman’s politics, although shaped by realities of class, are not necessarily class politics: for him every community is threatened by the market and thus any community - national, regional or religious - has the potential to be part of the struggle against it.

Indeed, it may be that Glasman is not in favour of community organising because of its role in challenging capitalism, so much as opposed to capitalism because it challenges community organising.

Glasman’s critique of the commodity does not originate with Polanyi, and it predates socialism. The critique of the commodity first appeared in the West as a critique of the idolatry of money; a critique of the belief that money can produce things of itself, and thus in particular a critique of usury (and it is worth noting that one of Glasman’s campaigns with London Citizens was for a cap on interest).

That critique can be found in Aristotle (one of Glasman’s common reference points). Aristotle wrote of wealth creation that "The most hated sort and with the greatest reason, is usury, which makes a gain out of money itself and not from the natural object of it”.

This criticism overlaps with a religiously inspired critique of the belief that money can create something out of nothing (a power reserved only for divinity). Or, as Glasman puts it, “the pressure of commodification violates a fundamental notion of the sacred common to all the Abrahamic faiths concerning the integrity of the human being, the divine status of nature and the limits of money…”

This is why Glasman makes very particular reference to the challenge money poses to community life and why he argues that “Democracy, the power of organised people to act together in the Common Good, is the way to resist the power of money”.

Often he inveighs specifically against finance capitalism and has been particularly and powerfully critical of the City of London. It is not that Glasman doesn’t care about capitalism in general. Rather, the problems he finds in it are not sufficiently captured by pointing to its exploitation or greed.

For Glasman the problem of capitalism is that it enables the sovereignty of money over common life; that trade in commodities substitutes for real production carried out by real people making things that they care about.

In this respect, at its core, Glasman’s critique of capitalism is not in fact moral at all. It is ontological. To believe in money is to hold an erroneous view about the nature of the universe. Money is a false prophet.

The politics of religion and the religion of politics

In a lot of the comment on Blue Labour the religious dimension has I think, been both underestimated and misunderstood. Yet it is in this aspect of his thinking that Glasman is most dramatic and iconoclastic.

For most political thinkers in the contemporary West it is a given that a defining opposition in our tradition is that between “Jerusalem” and “Athens”: the city of faith, governed by a transcendent principle, and the city of politics, governed by whatever the people decide.

Glasman thinks that this opposition is false; that faith and citizenship can and must be reconciled. That is because today both are under threat from the same forces. The first, as we have seen, is the commodification of the world.

The second, is a form of pluralism so radical that it produces communities which, although they share a polity, cannot properly speak with each other. Consequently, there can be no conversation about the common good.

This brings us to what has been the most controversial aspect of Glasman’s politics – his critique of a liberal version of multiculturalism. Glasman thinks that when the state grants rights to communities it sets itself up as the arbiter of the rules that govern relationships between all communities.

In so doing it takes power away from those communities, subordinating them to the legalistic and formal rules of the state. To be sure, it does so in the name of “equality” or “fairness”, but it makes these abstract and thus empties them of real meaning; for such concepts to have value they must be embedded in real, practical experiences of relationships between people.

Thus he laments that “competition for scarce resources and state power between different groups is a far more realistic description of civic life than an active engagement between different communities in pursuit of a common good”.

His alternative is to try and forge a conception of a common interest out of an experience of collective political organisation. This is the view Glasman finds best expressed by the founder of community organising, Saul Alinsky, and which, I am sure, he sees as embodied in his own work with London Citizens.

This position, although it finds anyone without a community highly problematic, is, in the end, far more inclusive than anything the British left is really used to. For instance, Glasman thinks that one should try “to build a party that brokers a common good” with everyone, and that means that Labour should involve “those people who support the EDL within our party”.

He also has no anxieties about the incorporation of religious groups into politics: a position against the grain of secular liberalism but consonant with Glasman’s conviction that today the building of a new Athens and of a new Jerusalem are one and the same architectural endeavour:

“The Abrahamic faiths embody a range of institutions and values of far greater intensity and meaning, or in the language of political philosophy far thicker, than the state, as the collective enforcer of a singular law can allow. Concepts of love, brotherhood, mercy and community are difficult to reconcile with equal rights, respect for persons and neutrality”.

For Glasman the point of politics is to maintain the ‘community’, because being in community is the ‘end’ of humanity; its goal or purpose; the place within which love, brotherhood and mercy can flourish.

He does not speak the legalistic language of secular liberalism (essentially the language of individual rights) but, rather, the language of faith communities and of faith in community (essentially the language of civic participation).

Glasman is a true believer in civic politics, and just as the ancient religions were really all about organizing peoples against their adversaries, so is Glasman’s political religion about organizing communities against the threat they face from the market and the state: “Resistance to commodification through democratic organisation. That's the position.”

But is it any good?

Glasman has certainly sparked controversy. I do not find him advocating a uniform national culture of the sort that Tories sometimes talk about. Nor do I find him expressing an ethnically exclusive politics. But I can see why people think this.

Glasman privileges a politics of collective action over a legal order of individual rights, and this makes it hard for many left-liberals to fit him into the political spectrum. Furthermore, English political culture lacks a common vocabulary for talking about race, class and religion in political terms (our history is one of bitter struggle to de-politicise these) and Glasman has been insensitive to this cultural context.

That is unfortunate, because he and blue Labour are trying to speak about things new Labour was embarrassed by: ethics, class and the British socialist tradition. These are things we need to talk about together.

Ultimately, I suspect, blue Labour’s success will be limited, not unironically, by the conservatism of the Labour Party. Labour’s is an insular culture much more at home with the processes of official politics (producing candidates, harvesting votes) than with the unpredictable force of social movements and community organisations (especially ones that are religious or ‘ethnic’).

In their heart-of-hearts the question which Labour members ask when evaluating political ideas is not ‘is it right?’ but ‘will it get us elected?’

Those who think that Labour lost in 2010 only because it was soft on immigration, and that one wins in politics by moving to the centre rather than moving the centre towards you, are now regrouping under the label of ‘Purple Labour’ where they will leave Glasman behind. Others will find provocative talk about Englishness and religion difficult to cope with (as, to some extent, do I).

There are also conceptual problems. At its core, Glasman’s thought is animated by the power of political movements - the energising and consciousness-raising effects of political and community action as well as the ethical experience they make possible.

That’s fine, but such a politics, thriving when opposing the forces that threaten it, tends to find it harder to specify how official, government power should work, how the relations between persons on a macro-level can be administered. That generates unclarity about the state.

For most social democrats the state is precisely the means through which communities protect themselves from markets. Glasman is critical of the ‘big state’, because he thinks that it weakens ethical community.

That is not a ludicrous position to hold, but a traditional social democrat would respond by saying that this is why democratising constitutional reform is so important. Some might feel that this defence has a practical clarity lacking in the general demand for community organising (although Labour itself is usually not much interested in either).

Secondly - and this point is made very well by Sally Davison in her contribution to The Labour Tradition and the Politics of Paradox - while overturning the idea that the market is natural, Glasman seems to fall back on the notion of natural community.

Mainstream Liberals will respond that, since not all communities are the same, there must be some more general criteria for distinguishing between the really ethical ones and the rest. The more radical will respond that all communities are also political constructions, often serving the interests of the few, and that politics should oppose this too.

More importantly, from my point of view, in Glasman’s thinking organic community acts as a kind of deus ex machina in the struggle against commodification. Somehow, outside of the forces of capitalist enclosure, community remains, awaiting only organisation into the right form to carry out its redemptive mission.

But that faith, I think, hinders deeper analysis of the balance of social, cultural and economic forces, the tendencies within them and the possible directions in which they might take things.

Glasman may be right, and there is evidence for the claim, that the next phase in the history of political struggle will be centred on religious and other ethical communities united against the relativism of commodity capitalism. But I need more than an invocation of faith to convince me of this.

It seems to me that one of the things which Blue Labour has inadvertently proven is just how hard it is in England to think beyond the assumptions of the liberal tradition. Probably, many think that a very good thing. But while the answers are not all there, Glasman has at least posed the challenging question of the common good.

Belief that this question has an answer is what distinguishes ‘the left’ from everything else. The efforts to answer it constitute a tradition that needs to be remembered, and in which Glasman may yet find his place.

Originally published on openDemocracy, 27 May 2011

Can the Labour party remember the land of its birth?

Eddie Bone holds his breath as Labour becomes the first party to edge towards recognising the UK's constitutional deficit

England supporter - FAISAL ZAIN

The three main political parties of the UK have an urgent decision to make. Do they embrace and harness England’s sense of civic existence, or do they ignore the rise in English nationalism in favour of the moribund British status quo?

The choice they make will clearly determine who is in power after the next election, as the first party who realises that actions - not just words - are required to regain English affection will be the easy electoral victor.

What is more, the first party leader who faces up to the reality that the UK is in a constitutional mess will win the prize of leading the biggest country in an emerging federal UK. That brave and thoughtful leader will watch the others follow in envy as he or she determines England's future.

Currently the Campaign for an English Parliament (the CEP) is holding its constitutional breath, as it has noticed one of the main parties starting to pull itself out of its decade of English cultural denial. It looks as if the Labour party or more precisely, a blossoming part of Labour called blue Labour is starting to express the fact that England needs a political voice.

The struggling class in England can only hope that this growing powerbase instils courage back into Labour’s culturally weak heart. For this change of thinking to be successful it has to come from within the Labour Party - it has to be an organic process.

If Labour returns to the roots of its history then it will know that its growth came first amongst the people of England, not within the British political elite. The English flocked towards the Labour Party because it was able to express their mounting protestation and fears.

Labour spoke their language of struggle and inequality; Labour had a radical tradition. England once again is struggling for equality - this time democratic equality. The CEP asks: will Labour express those concerns as blue Labour hopes, or will it allow another party to emerge as England’s saviour?

England has a significant history of working class uprising when official suppression becomes too intense. The Peasant’s Revolt should warn the Coalition that a breaking point can be quickly and unrepentantly reached if people’s livelihoods are damaged.

But that breaking point will not be direct taxation this time: it is likely to be suppression of English identity and the unfair Barnett formula. Labour would also do well to remember what the Tolpuddle Martyrs accomplished when the English stood together.

If Labour is to find its way back into the fabric of English life then it needs to look back at those examples and examine why the English created and embraced the Labour movement in the 19th century. Once it realises that ‘England’ and ‘English’ are not dirty words, but the very midwives of its birth, then the Labour Party will outflank the Conservatives be swept back as the natural party of England.

Although this is early days, blue Labour might be able to map the route away from the pain of losing Labour’s Scottish bastion to the joy of regaining England. The time is fertile as the English nation has grown tired of being leaderless.

Its communities are fragmenting, becoming dysfunctional and the struggling class is worried! The glue of a collective Parliamentary voice has been taken away and 13 years of unbalanced devolution has left the English in dire need of a leader that understands the unique problems they now face.

If Labour champions and embraces an inclusive and positive Englishness, expressed through an English government, they will find not only redemption. They can look forward to a generation of power.

Eddie Bone is chairman of the Campaign for an English Parliament

Finding Labour's feet in the south west

Philip Hosking reminds Labour supporters of English self-government that their nation contains multitudes

Walkers on the Lizard peninsular, Cornwall - BRYONY
STOKES

The constitutional imbalance caused by devolution under the last Labour government is finally being recognised. But England itself is not a homogenous nation.

The following suggestions are made based on the assumption that the Cornish are one of the naturally occurring nationalities - historic nations - found within the UK. It is a fact that within what is considered England, Cornwall is the only territory where significant numbers of people self-identify as other than English - as Cornish - for their nationality and/or ethnicity.

Cornwall already receives recognition via European groups such as the European Free Alliance and the Federal Union of European Nationalities, and - due to its poor economic position - benefits from convergence funding from the EU. We need to hear more from domestic politicians.

Of course, unless they can be worked into a larger package of UK-wide reforms, policies adopted by Labour that only target Cornwall clearly aren't going to win over the rest of the UK.

But why shouldn't Cornwall be part of the discussion if we're beginning to talk about devolution for England? With this in mind please find below my four suggestions for debate that could help Labour win back the region.

The coalition government has launched an assault on Cornwall's ancient territorial integrity via their reform of parliamentary constituencies which will result, for the first time, in a constituency that crosses the boundaries of Devon and Cornwall.

Apparently the territorial integrity of the Isle of Wight counts for much more than that of a historic nation, and the homeland of a national minority. Labour must promise to revoke this madness and ensure that all MPs for Cornwall are elected wholly within Cornwall.

Labour kicked off devolution but never got to finish the job. Whether we respond to the west Lothian question with an English parliament or not, England remains highly centralised. The artificial regions used by Labour have proved unpopular with the public, and the coalition has wasted no time in dismantling them.

For devolution to work, amongst other criteria, regions have to have a strong coherent identity. In 2002 Cornish campaigners gathered a petition of 50,000 signatures calling for a Cornish assembly. This followed opinion polls putting support for a Cornish assembly at around 55%.

We want greater autonomy, so why not take the opportunity to push power down to a territory that wants it? Currently the Greens, Lib Dems, Mebyon Kernow and various independent councillors support devolution to Cornwall.

Why not join these progressives and help build the consensus for change? For some interesting reading that compares the campaigns for devolution in the north-east and Cornwall try The Dark Side of Devolution (pdf). Could Cornwall be worked into a package of devolution to England's natural regions?

Whilst in power Labour started the long overdue process of modernising the UK's human rights and equalities provision. As part of this the government worked alongside the Council of Europe on the ratification of their Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities.

Labour gave recognition to the Cornish language under the Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. Why not now promise to complete this by recognising the Cornish as a national minority within the scope of the convention? This would ensure fair funding for Cornish culture and a place for a distinct Cornish curriculum in our schools.

Finally and most thorny of issues - there is something deeply undemocratic about the Duchy of Cornwall and the power it holds over people's lives. This original research by solicitor and Cornish law expert, John Kirkhope, should be enough to convince you that this feudal institution has outlived its purpose: A Mysterious, Arcane and Unique Corner of our Constitution (pdf).

As part of the modernisation of the UK's constitution, we ought to give the subjects of the Duchy a full and open investigation into the constitutional position of Cornwall, followed by a referendum on its future.

Unlike Wales, Scotland and the north of England, Labour has never found its feet in the far south-west. In part this has been due to a failure by Labour to engage with the Cornish, particularly in a positive, civic fashion. Is it not time for this to change?

Redefining redistribution

Daniel Sage puts forward the 'blue' perspective on redistribution: endowing civil society, not handing out credits

Law students at Warwick University - MW ERIKSSON

Labour leaders, from Atlee to Blair, have all favoured a form of income redistribution as a means of building a fairer society.

While the Labour leaders of old were more open - sometimes infamously so - about redistribution, New Labour was much less candid, favouring a controversial strategy of redistribution by stealth.

Although the New Labour approach was quite successful in boosting incomes at the bottom, its problem was its inherent deviousness. You can’t win an argument on fairness if you don’t allow the public to debate in the first place.

Moreover, there has always been a deeper problem with Labour’s commitment to redistribution, linked to the perceived purpose of what redistributing aims to achieve. In striving for a straightforward, linear redistribution from the pockets of rich to the pockets of the poor, there appears to a somewhat uninspiring moral vision.

And here’s why I think this is: redistribution, argued for in the name of fairness, tacitly accepts the nature of the society we find ourselves in. In other words, it is silent on the type of society which should be built and what a good society might look like. Progressives thus tend to agree with conservatives about the nature of how we live; we simply believe that some people should have more money to spend than others, as a matter of fairness and greater freedom.

However, when it adopts this approach, Labour ceases to articulate a vision of the society it wants to build. Redistribution fails to be an architectural tool to build a different society, instead it is a mechanical process, tinkering with what exists, rather than seeking to transform it altogether.

This is not an argument for abandoning redistribution as a policy aim. Rather, it is rethinking why we want to redistribute at all. Do we want to redistribute to correct for market unfairness, as Labour has argued in the past? Or, do we want to redistribute because inequality is damaging in another way, in how it estranges people from each other and makes us lead increasingly separate lives?

So while Old, New and Blue Labour would all support redistribution to build a more equal society, the policy consequences of a blue, communitarian programme would be qualitatively different. In the past, the social democratic understanding of the purpose of redistribution led to policies of a slight tax increase here, more tax credits there and perhaps a change in how we uprate benefits.

However, the aim of altering income distribution, and leaving it at that, ignores the real fallouts from a neo-liberal, Conservative society: individualism, decrepit community life, urban homogenization, the ascendancy of market morals and civic discord. While a fairer tax-benefit system is a noble endeavour, it does not address these problems on its own.

So if Labour wants to be Robin Hood, it should no longer simply seek to take from the rich and give to the poor. Yes, we should continue to argue that it is right to take from the rich, but instead propose to use the bounty in a different way. Rather than tampering with the tax system, we should offer a bolder claim on redistribution. As the philosopher Michael Sandel says, we should use redistribution for a:

"Consequential investment in an infrastructure for civic renewal: public schools to which rich and poor alike would want to send their children; public transportation systems reliable enough to attract upscale commuters; and public health clinics, playgrounds, parks, recreation centres, libraries and museums that would draw people out of their gated communities and into the common spaces of a shared democratic citizenship.”

So there it is. Redistribution to invest in the institutions which would build a shared, cohesive society with stronger relationships and better communities. I think most of us would agree that this offers a more convincing and powerful rationale for redistributing wealth than the arguments which the left has become accustomed to - and has espoused for far too long.

The enduring legacy of William Morris

Jon Cruddas investigates the life and work of of a radical, traditional and inspirational figure for the English left today

William Morris stained glass, Birmingham Museum
- KOTOMI

William Morris is possibly the most extraordinary figure in the history of the English left; possibly - with the obvious exception of Karl Marx - one of the true greats of the left itself.

A strong statement to begin with, so let's take a step back.

Think about the relationship of Morris to Wimbledon and the radical traditions of that part of London.

In 1881 Morris moved his factory to Merton Abbey Mills in south Wimbledon and for the next 15 years his designs were produced there.

After his death in 1896 both factory workers and followers helped purchase William Morris House, opened by Arthur Henderson on 30th September 1922 - or as it was initially entitled, William Morris Trades and Labour Hall.

Morris and Co continued to operate at the mills until 1940.

I want to start by acknowledging the pride that exists for this radical tradition, and people's respect for Morris and his work.

In today’s Labour party tradition is often seen as a reactionary force; it holds back our ‘progressive’ instincts. I disagree. For me, to paraphrase Somerset Maugham, ‘tradition is a guide and not a jailer’.

We as a party must retain our collective memory; not through ‘ancestor worship’ but through a continuous re-evaluation and self-education.

Never more so than during times of political crisis for our party. The solutions to our problems of today lie deep within our own history. This is not nostalgia but memory and tradition. It is how we can rediscover our voice, our warmth and compassion; our romance and our obligation as a party. William Morris is key to this.

For Morris was a visionary; a maker of language not policy; a romantic not a scientific socialist. Precisely what Labour needs today.

I'd like to talk about the contribution of Morris within our political culture. I admit this a very difficult task. Morris remains a curiously elusive figure in terms of left politics. But I want to search for the core of Morris and his significance to Labour.

Everyone, literally everyone, claims allegiance to Morris; but what is the essence of his political legacy?

Think for example about buildings: I've referred already to Wimbledon. I could equally have picked Hammersmith's Kelmscott House, or Morris's place of birth in Walthamstow and the William Morris Gallery in that borough, or the Red House in Bexleyheath, or one of the many, many other buildings inspired by Morris across London and beyond. Not least the countless pubs called ‘The William Morris’.

The many buildings signal the devotion in which he is held. But what are we actually devoted to; who or what do we cherish?

We could talk about him from a host of concrete perspectives - places, bricks and mortar - yet he remains almost physically elusive.

The basic questions

So let's start with a couple of questions. Who was William Morris? And what was his role in the Labour Party? These are not easy to answer.

Why? To begin with, as a person he was beyond any simple characterisation, and indeed was never an actual member of the Labour party.

He died in 1896, four years before the formation of the Labour Representation Committee; some twelve years after he set up the Socialist League. Earlier he had been treasurer of the National Liberal League before joining what became the Social Democratic Federation; he subsequently left after falling out with Hyndman. On leaving the Socialist League in 1890 he preached the virtue of socialist unity.

These different allegiances reflect the political turbulence of the times: the ILP, the Fabians, the SDF, the Socialist League and many others were all created in this period. People swarmed in and out of these organisations, reflecting the tempo of the times: embryonic socialist movements prior to Labour itself; an intense capitalist period; an economic and social furnace.

Morris's links to Labour as a party remain spartan. We should state a local link however. On April 6th 1918 when the ‘Wimbledon, Merton and Morden Labour Party’ was established, founding members included workers from William Morris’s factory.

Any cursory look at his life, his work and political legacy reinforce the elusiveness of the subject matter.
Despite this, his revolutionary socialism, writings and art have inspired many of the greatest Labour figures of the last 130 years- RH Tawney, GDH Cole, Laski, Keir Hardie, Lansbury, Crossland, Attlee, Barbara Castle and even Tony Blair amongst then.

Morris also remains an icon of the revolutionary left outside of Labour, whilst being simultaneously lambasted as a nostalgic conservative influence within it. Everyone appears to claim allegiance to him and his political legacy. He is an amorphous figure.

Moreover, he remains a key influence on the so called New Left after the Second World War– of so called ‘socialism and new life’ traditions; heavily Communist Party inspired attempts to identify an authentic English communist history. And yet he is also a pin up for certain Trotskyist variants of the creed, oddly standing alongside other mainstream Labour Party ethical traditions.

For example, Tawney once wrote that: ‘it [the Labour movement] is the child, not of Marx… but of Robert Owen, of Ruskin and of Morris’.

So William Morris appears as an icon across literally the whole of the left - across all of the left factions - in and outside the Labour Party - up to and including Tony Blair. He is a hero to both the conservative and the revolutionary.

Intuitively, that is not quite good enough. How can we bring William Morris into clearer focus?

William Morris

Let's begin at the end: his death.

EP Thompson wrote: ‘If he failed to bring unity in his life, yet in the moment of his death the whole socialist and progressive movement stood united in sympathy’.

As it is now, so it was at his death: everyone had a slice of him; all varieties of socialist owned him. Not least because it was our ideology that killed him.

His family doctor with ‘unhesitation’ stated that on the 3rd October 1896, aged 63, ‘he died a victim of his enthusiasm for spreading the principles of socialism’.

But what a 63 years it was.

Designer and artist. Primarily textiles and furnishings: carpets, tapestries and wallpapers, furniture and fittings. Architect and planner. Poet: even considered for laureate. Writer of classic texts like News From Nowhere, The Pilgrims of Hope and The Dream of John Bull. A historic socialist figure, yet fundamentally a poet and creative meaning-maker.

Owned by everyone claiming an allegiance to the socialist movement- a revolutionary and a revisionist; progressive and conservative- or to bring it right up to date: red, new and blue Labour.

So we are not getting very far in discovering his individual creed.

Let's start again. What is Labour? What is socialism?

The question of who is William Morris is a question of what is the left itself, and consequently, what is the Labour Party.

Labour and socialism

One central question has plagued Labour through the ages- what is it? What does it stand for? This is also a contemporary question - what is the Labour Party for in 2011?

One easy answer is to say it depends. Tawney wrote that ‘socialism is a word the connotation of which varies, not only from generation to generation, but from decade to decade’.

So socialism is contingent? But what can the essential essence of socialism be if it is so dependent on circumstance; time and place?

What is socialism? 

The modern socialist movement can be traced back to the 1848, and the Communist Manifesto of Marx and Engels. Yet arguably its origins go back further - to Gerrard Winstanley during the period of the English Civil War of 1642-1652; the True Levellers; the Diggers.

We might also consider the French Revolution, the ‘Conspiracy of the Equals’ and indeed French and English utopian socialists such as Owen and Fourier in the early part of the 19th Century

Moral issues are central. Utopian socialism carried the sense of a total social transformation, without the revolutionary role of the working class identified by 1848. In contrast Marx and Engels saw socialism as the product of the laws of history; in short a negation of capitalism. For Marxists socialism is a transitional period in the emergence of communism.

All of this is pretty abstract. So let's bring the story up to date with the classic ‘revisionist’ socialist text: Tony Crossland’s Future of Socialism, which swerved around issues of definition to suggest that socialism was about equality; a ‘strong’ rather than ‘liberal’ approach to equality

It also emphasised the means: not singularly driven by questions of ownership, so as to encompass issues of freedom and democracy, planning and growth. In this classic text Crossland identifies 12 summary socialist doctrines that he thought existed before his own ground-breaking book.

Three of these were driven by the value theories of the classical political economists: Mill, Ricardo and Marx. The fourth was a Fabian tradition owing much to Mill, Ricardo and Jevons. Next, a ‘planning’ tradition emerging after the soviet revolution and its resultant ‘five year plans’, together with a ‘welfarist’ or ‘paternalist’ tradition owing much to - but separate from - fabianism.

He also identifies an early 19th Century ‘natural law’ socialist doctrine in terms of commonly held land. Next a syndicalist or ‘guild’ tradition of industrial democracy, in contrast to state socialism. Ninth a doctrine labelled ‘Owenism’- a utilitarian approach to economic cooperation. Next an ethical Christian Socialist tradition and then a not dissimilar ILP doctrine built around a notion of fellowship.

Finally, he isolates the tradition of William Morris and anti-commercialism.

So, we can identify Morris’s socialism as one of 12 types that have influenced Labour before Crossland. Does this take us any further? We are in danger of suffering from a white noise of various ‘socialisms’. Let's look at it another way.

An alternative approach is to consider socialism - according to Tawney - in terms of its objective of resistance to the market and its constraints to private profit. Two approaches can be identified: ethical and economic.

The economic route is driven by socialised ownership so as to produce alternative allocations of resources to redress poverty, homelessness etc. Here we might place the three value theory types identified by Crossland as well as the ‘Fabian’, the ‘planning’, ‘Owenite’ and ‘welfarist’ traditions.

It encompasses various rational approaches to issues of economic organisation and distribution, driven by science and calculus. Socialism is about resource allocation.

In contrast the ethical approach is based around the search for solidarity and fraternity; stopping the commodification of our lives, our labour and relationships. Returning to Crossland, we can here group the ‘natural law’ and ‘guild’ solidarities, alongside the socialism of Morris, that of the ILP and of Christian Socialism.

So we can detect a general socialist fault line - between rationality and relations; economic law and ethics; allocation and alienation.

Let's drill a bit deeper into this ethical tradition to discover what Morris was really about.

The New Left, Ruskin and Morris

After the second world war, parts of the so called ‘New Left’ in the UK sought to focus on Morris and his work as part of a general rehabilitation of a perceived historical socialist arc - a tradition we might describe as authentically English and communist. This owed a profound debt to English romanticism: anti scientific and artistic in orientation.

EP Thompson’s work- which pivots around his biography of Morris - is part of a distinct political project within the Communist Party to identify a specific English radicalism - a politics of virtue - in the character of Morris himself, but also that of the broader emerging working class itself. Just think of the sub-title of Thompson’s biography of Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary.

Raymond Williams, in his classic text Culture and Society, defines a political, artistic and cultural tradition from John Ruskin, through Morris, to the modern New Left.

Starting with John Ruskin, he focuses on his resistance to laissez faire society though artistic criticism where ‘the art of any country is the exponent of its social and political virtues… the exponent of its ethical life’.

What is vital is the way that what we value in life is taken out of the realm of political economy - of supply and demand, and calculus - and instead relates to the virtue of the labour itself - seen as the ‘joyful and right exertion of perfect life in man’.

Within Ruskin, the notion of wealth and value, and indeed labour, are used to attack 19th Century liberalism for its cold utilitarianism, and instead promote a society goverened by ‘what is good for men, raising them and making them happy’. To live a virtuous life; to become wiser, compassionate, righteous, creative. What it is to become a ‘freeborn Englishman’.

What is of value is not the notion of ‘exchange value’. It amounts to a radical critique of political economy; of economic transactions.

For Williams, Morris is the critical link, as this form of socialist thought is attached to the political formation of the emerging working class in the late 19th Century - he goes beyond the ‘medievalism’ of Ruskin through his political activity.

This turbulent period of class struggle occurs alongside a ‘neo-classical’ economic revolution; removing value away from labour itself into the scientific realm of individual rational preferences. This still dominates today.

The socialism of Morris is still grounded in the emancipatory conception of human labour and creativity. It links into a romantic, anti-scientific and anti-rationalist perspective where science might substitute for art. Art constitutes a politics of resistance to life being commodified. Socialism is not some technical solution or an equation; more a form of resistance to this commodification of life.

‘The cause of art is the cause of the people’, Morris tells us. One day, he says, ‘we shall win back art, that is to say the pleasure of life; win back art again to our daily labour’. For Morris it is the ‘province of art to set the true ideal of a full and reasonable life before him’.

This was not - as is often assumed - backward looking or anti-technology. This is a crass misreading of Morris: to pitch him as against civilisation. Rather it is built around the creativity of human labour, its possibilities and the need for real choice over the use of machinery. It is a continuous struggle, not just against capitalism - given its alienating effects on human creativity - but also left-wing utilitarianism and Fabianism.

Socialist change is not simply political and economic change - the ‘machinery’ of socialism - as he called it - but heightened consciousness that aims to realise a person’s true capacities. Self realisation.
I would suggest that it is here we can begin to see the true significance of Morris.

He is the key historic figure in translating a romantic approach to life and art into heightened political activity, in the cauldron of 1880s England. It was a politics built around a resistance to human commodification, involving knowledge, art, relationships, culture and society. A search for an authentic human life and growth. The struggle for a society that releases other human virtues.

This period was one of profound change and economic rupture; major political realignment and struggle. Socialist responses divided between rationalist and romantic ones; Morris stands as the key figure on one side. Fabianism, utilitarian and various socialist scientific or economistic strands stand on the other.

He once said: ‘political economy is not my life, and much of it appears to be dreary rubbish’. So returning to Tawney and Crossland: arguably the real divide within socialism and labour is between the rational and the romantic; in short hand between the economic and the ethical. Can we not see the whole history of socialism and labour through this prism?

The bridge between the romance of socialism, labour and political struggle is provided by Morris in what we value. It is therefore no surprise that he was both artist and activist. It is no surprise that his workers were employed creatively. Space, architecture, form and labour are critical.

Moreover, in what is generally a forward-looking socialist and Labour culture - about progress and change - Morris provides for a sense of loss. Lost labour and creativity; lost fellowship and beauty. Everything with a price; losing what we truly value

Turning Again to Labour

Morris is long dead.

Who are the great heroes of Labour? Who embody that sense of human creativity, hope and cultural struggle?

Think of the early years: who were the great figures? Who dominated the first three decades of the last century? Who stir the passions? Are they scientists and planners or are they different types of visionary; romantics even? Where lies the emotion and the energy in Labour’s history?

Go to the three great prophets of Labour: Keir Hardie, Ramsey MacDonald and George Lansbury. Three quite incredible men driven by a profound sense of human fellowship, forged alongside Morris in the 1880s.

Keir Hardie, ‘ a latter-day Jesus’, formed as a rebel in the Ayrshire coalfields in the 1880s. A founder of the ILP in 1893. An illegitimate miner reading Carlyle and Ruskin. A spiritualist and sentimentalist; of passionate religious convictions who disliked economics. Socialism was the creed of ‘the Christ to be’. Hardie cited William Morris as the ‘greatest man whom the socialist movement has yet claimed in this country’.

Ramsey MacDonald, who joined the ILP in 1894. Essentially a utopian pacifist who was especially pronounced in his opposition to the First World War. Extraordinary. He had a unique popular appeal; and charisma.

David Marquand puts it this way: ‘Many Labour men and women had been inspired as much by a revulsion from the ugliness and materialism of late nineteenth century industrial society as by a hatred of poverty and injustice. It was partly because he spoke to and for this strand of British socialism, the strand that produced the ILP Arts Guild of the middle twenties and which looked back to Walter Crane and William Morris, that Macdonald was able to capture the imagination of the Labour movement in a way that a narrowly political leader would have found it hard to do’.

George Lansbury. ‘the most lovable figure in British politics, and involved with the ILP and SDF. Morris’s last political speech was to second a motion put up by Lansbury at Holborn Town Hall. Twenty five years later Lansbury wrote from his prison cell in south London: ‘in the columns of commonweal, in pamphlets, lectures and speeches [he] made me realise that there was something more to be thought of than Acts of Parliament and State Bureaucracy…surely what we strive for is a society of free men and women bound together by ties of comradeship and communal wellbeing as pictured by Morris in his wonderful book News from Nowhere’.

All three were towering romantics in the Labour tradition. With Bevin’s removal of Lansbury as party leader in August 1935, Labour turned the page on this tradition. It lost its romance as it embraced rationality.

From 1935 it is the planners, scientists, organisers and the economists - Dalton, Morrisson, Bevin, Jay, Gaitskill, Wilson, Attlee, that won out. The rationalists that won out, backed by the unions, who retreated into the party structures. Mechanistic, centralising remedies. Where are the prophets from 1935?

Webb's mistake, according to Morris, was to ‘overestimate the importance of the mechanism of a system of society apart from the end towards which it may be used’. The question of human virtue becomes at best residual.

The romantics lost. Sure, from time to time a few creep through. Bevan with his focus on the aesthetic of council house production. His ‘emotional concern for human life’. Deeply artistic, he held a libertarian belief in the capacity of all humans to flourish. He could make socialism sing. A ‘sensual puritan’ as described by Michael Foot.

Indeed Foot himself had elements of the tradition, alongside Kinnock and very early Blair, with his search for a ‘modern patriotism’. It crashed and burned.

It is William Morris that lies behind the romance of socialism. Its possibilities. Its hopes. The sense of a creative life we could all live: that is our shared humanity. It also talks of what we have lost as we commodify our lives and our relationships; our children, our culture.

The fault line between romance and rationalism accounts for why socialism and Labour retains such hope and such disappointment. Morris will always be contemporary. He retains a timeless humanity because of the possibilities that he reminds us exist within us and our children.

Following the economic crash, many people are looking for renewed meaning in their lives; to search for and to live a virtuous life, beyond consumption and commodities. Labour should return to William Morris to rediscover our own vitality and language. To quote Raymond Williams: ‘to be truly radical is to make hope possible rather than despair convincing’.

I will finish with two great radical artists who I think of when I think of Morris.

First, pacifist and socialist Vaughan Williams. It was once said of him: ‘his ‘nationalism’ was rooted in a love of the underdog ‘whose day was to come’. But his radicalism was of the William Morris kind (as was that of Dearmer, Sharp and Holst), which rebelled against contemporary conditions in the interests of a fuller, deeper and more beautiful life for the individual’.

That, I would suggest, should be the centre of Labour’s message for today. It might even be fun.

I will leave you with this quote from across the Irish Sea. From WB Yeats, who wrote this of Morris: ‘No man I have ever known was so well loved… People loved him as children are loved. I soon discovered his spontaneity and joy and made him my chief of men’.

If the man from Sligo says it, it has to be right.

Labour should own him again.

Originally delivered at the William Morris Society, 19 May 2011.

Miliband: The change we need 'goes to the heart of blue Labour'

Ed Miliband sets out his vision for the future of the Labour party at the Progress Annual Conference

Ed Miliband - AIDAN BYRNE

Friends, let me tell you today how we are going to win the next election.

Three moments in the history of our party when hope defeated fear: 1945, 1964, 1997. When Labour took office with a sense of national mission.

Establishing that national mission; persuading people of it - that is our task.

To do that we need to be honest about where we are as a party, and how tough this is going to be. Frank about our successes and failures at the recent elections. Clear about the condition of Britain, and what needs to change.

We need to reject some of the easy answers that people will tell you are out there.

Instead we should start to explain what our national mission for the country should be, and how it contrasts with the narrow pessimism of the Conservatives.

Let's talk about what we heard on the doorstep at the elections. Some people are still unwilling to come back to us. We all know what their concerns are: from immigration to bankers to welfare to waste.

But other people, who couldn't look us in the eye last year, are now willing to listen again. They agree with us that the government is going too far and too fast on the deficit. They wanted a voice in tough times. And we were that voice.

But from everybody I met, I heard something else. People wanted more from us. People wanted more from our politics - and we saw that in our election results on May 5th. We have started to win back trust, but we have many more people to convince.

The progress we made in the East and West Midlands, where we had some of our worst general election results, matters. But of course we need to do better in the South.

It is essential that we won back the Liberal Democrat voters we did. They felt betrayed by their leadership, and recognised we had the courage to change on difficult issues like Iraq and civil liberties. But Conservative voters do not yet feel the same depth of betrayal with this government or yet sufficient confidence in us.

That's the reality of the results.

And friends, let's avoid the old Labour disease of setting out a false choice. That we must either conclude that the elections were a triumph or a disaster. We made progress in these elections. But people want more from us. That we need only ex-Lib Dems or only ex-Conservatives.

We need both.

So let's leave the false choices where they belong: in the past.

What about our results in Scotland? I don't need to tell you they were terrible. On the living wage, on jobs, on the NHS, we had good pledges. But the lesson of Scotland is this: our opponents won a bigger battle, because we did not succeed in providing a clear vision of Scotland's future: a national mission. People wanted more from us.

And let's be honest about the last general election too. Our message, too weighted to fear over hope, stopped the Tories getting a majority, but it was never enough for Labour to win - because we did not own the future.

Indeed none of the parties met the standard that voters deserved. David Cameron won on what you might call the away goals rule of politics. And we must recognise that the reason the Conservatives failed to win a majority was that they did not inspire. They failed to provide a national mission for our country.

All David Cameron was offering then, and all he is offering now, is a shrivelled, pessimistic, austere view of the future. Now I have absolutely no doubt that reducing the deficit is vital for our future, but the real difference between us is this: he plans to cut the deficit and see what is left of Britain at the end.

Instead, we should start with our vision for the country and cut the deficit in a way which supports it. Even Michael Ashcroft recognises this. He rightly asks of the Tories "what is the end to which deficit reduction is the means?"

That's why I say people want more from us; why people want more from our politics.

What kind of country will we leave to our sons and daughters? How am I going to make ends meet when my living standards are being squeezed? Why do I always seem to work longer and longer hours for the same money?

Where are the Tories on the big questions people are asking? Nowhere. And they have nothing to say.

I say politics can be better than this. Our country can be better than this.

How do we answer people's yearning for something more from us, for something more from our politics? We must root our national mission, not just in our values, but in our understanding of the condition of Britain. We need the honesty to admit that the challenges facing Britain did not begin with this government (although they are making them worse). They are deeper than that.

People see a new inequality that our country faces between those at the top and everyone else. We should have the humility to acknowledge this was there under Labour - but also warn that this Government is making it worse.

People worry about the erosion of what I call the promise of Britain - the expectation that the next generation will do better than the last, whatever their birth or background. This concern is part of a deeper long term trend - but again, this government is making matters worse.

And while people struggle to make ends meet and worry about their children, they feel that what really matters - family, friends and the quality of community life - is being put under strain. Again, it did not just start with this government - but they are making matters worse.

For me these three issues - the new inequality, the promise of Britain, strengthened communities - are the challenges to which the next Labour government must be the answer.

Given the scale of these challenges - the desire for more from our politics - it will never be enough for us to simply take the traditional paths of oppositions.

There will be those who say it is enough for Labour to hunker down and benefit from an unpopular government. I hear it quite a lot: let's be a louder, prouder opposition. Maybe somehow people will then remember what a good government we were and re-elect us next time.

The Conservative government is unpopular; they may become more so. And we are showing, and will continue to show, that we can be an effective opposition. But to think that is enough is to fail to understand the depth of the loss of trust in us, and the scale of change required to win it back.

We must recognise where we didn't get things right, and we must show that a changed Labour Party can again be trusted. It's not about dumping on our past, because I am proud of our record in government, but it is about being honest about what we got right and what we got wrong.

The cardinal mistake of opposition is to conclude that it's the voters, not us, that got it wrong. It was a mistake we made in the 1980s. We cannot afford to make it again.

Then there is a second strategy - a Cameron style detoxification. I hear the advice to follow this path: find the equivalent of hug a hoodie - or even a huskie - and that will do it; that will get us back into power.

Now we must be honest about mistakes that lost us trust, on issues like immigration, welfare, or banking. I have done that in the past months, and I will continue to do that.

Because the public will not return to us until we show we get it. But restoring trust cannot simply be an exercise in dealing with the negatives. These issues matter in themselves, and we must address them.

Not superficially, but in a way true to our values. Rooted in our understanding of the condition of Britain; the challenges we face; the challenges our national mission must address - starting with the new inequality.

Inequality is no longer an issue just between rich and poor, but between those at the top and those both in the middle and on lower incomes.

Since 2003, those at the top have seen their living standards continue to rise at extraordinary rates, while those of the rest have stagnated. For most, flat wages, rising prices, longer working hours, and the burden of debt and insecurity are increasingly being placed on them and their kids.

This is about the middle income people in the south of England and elsewhere who don't consider themselves rich even though they may be higher rate taxpayers, like the mother I met in Gravesham during the election campaign, worried about the loss of child benefit, who said she would never vote Conservative again.

It is about the squeeze not just on living standards but on time. People working fifty, sixty, seventy hours a week and not having enough time with their children.

Frankly, I don't need to meet other people to know how that feels and know we have to change it.

And it is through this squeeze on the middle, this new inequality that we need to understand issues like immigration and responsibility. Eastern European immigration did place downward pressure on wages; people can argue about the extent. We were too relaxed about that.

People felt particularly angry about those they felt could work, but didn't, as making ends meet became more and more of a struggle. We were too relaxed about that too.

And people saw those at the top making off with millions they didn't deserve. We were far too relaxed about that as well.

So the old social contract - the one which said, if you work hard, you will do well for yourself, have security at work and be able to provide stability for your family - has broken down. The Conservative answer is to exploit people's fears but to do nothing to solve the problem.

In fact this Government is making matters worse - VAT rises, cuts in Child Benefit and higher tuition fees - the Government is not simply cutting the deficit, but privatising it. The way it is cutting the deficit loads more and more of the financial burden onto those who are already struggling.

The truth is that we cannot create a society that is equal to the aspirations of the British people in a world of wide and growing inequalities - a world in which there are bailouts for bankers and austerity for the rest. We need to get away from the notion - I hear it quite a lot - that we have to choose between supporting aspiration and tackling inequality. It is another false choice.

Because the great irony is that one of the biggest barriers to aspiration in this country, and in this time, has been inequality.

Not just because I believe that inequality makes us poorer as a society but because when incomes stagnate, people borrow more to keep up: that fuelled the rise in personal debt. So our answer must be different: to construct a new social contract.

Because it should be clear to all of us that we cannot move forward as a country simply by getting back to business as usual, as if the financial crisis never happened. Indeed, the lessons of this have still not been properly absorbed.

In power after 1997 we did something that few countries managed to do - stem the rising tide of inequality. We did this by redistributing through the tax and benefit system, leading to cuts in child poverty. This was a significant achievement.

But having the courage to change means facing up to the limitations of this approach. Asking more of our economy, good jobs and wages, means asking less of the state. At times, we hung on to a picture of Britain in which people were either poor, and desperately in need of our help, or affluent, aspirational, and doing okay.

We failed to understand that for millions of people in the middle, life was becoming more and more difficult. In the future the Labour offer to aspirational voters must be that we will address the new inequality by hard wiring fairness into the economy.

This is not the easy path, but it is the right one. Because people want more from us. We know some of the things which will make a difference: a living wage, a new industrial policy, proper reform of finance so it works for the wider economy. Responsibility at the top, and at the bottom.

This is the path I see for us. People want an economy with fairness and social responsibility built in, but we are only going to get that by thinking radically and building a better capitalism - one that is true to our values as a country.

Building a stronger, fairer economy is vital to our second challenge - the kind of country we leave to the next generation: this is what I call the promise of Britain. Ask any parent what they want for their children and they will say the same - to have better chances than they had.

But ask people today, and the gap between that aspiration and the reality is wider than it's probably ever been. People just don't know how their kids are going to get on; how they are going to afford the rising cost of a university education. How they are going to get their feet on the housing ladder. How they are going to finds jobs that provide security and opportunity.

I saw it too as I went round during the local elections. I saw it in the eyes of the grandparents I met in Leicester. I saw it in the faces of the students at DeMontfort University where Nick Clegg had made false promises a year earlier. I heard it from parents the length and breadth of the country.

It didn't start under this government - but they have made it worse.

They seem to accept it as inevitable. Because they make the deficit both the judge and the jury of what is right, they have made short-term choices, posing as long-term ones: on Education Maintenance Allowances, tuition fees; on all the issues that matter.

People want more from us. People want more from our politics. What is the lesson for us?

That equality is not just a concern within generations: it is about what happens between generations. That the easy path is to take short-term decisions which don't properly understand the importance of this issue. And if we really do care about the next generation, we will have to show it in the decisions we make - from housing to the environment, from education to the kind of economy we create.

The third is to understand what really matters to people. It goes to the heart of what Maurice Glasman calls blue Labour.

Some have presented this as a nostalgic vision of the past - the Labour equivalent of warm beer, leather on willow and bicycling maidens.

I think this is to wholly misunderstand what this is about.

It starts from what we see in our country. A sense of people being buffeted by storm winds blowing through their lives. A fear of being overpowered by commercial and bureaucratic forces beyond our control. And a yearning for the institutions and relationships we cherish most to be respected and protected.

You see it in the concerns people have about what is happening to their local high street, post office and pub. The sense of loss in Birmingham from the takeover of Cadbury's. The football supporters fed up with billionaires who see their clubs simply as financial assets. The campaign to stop the Port of Dover being sold off to the highest bidder. The justifiable suspicions people have about the Government's real agenda on the NHS.

We can't save every pub. We don't want to preserve every high street in aspic. And we can't stop the takeover of all British companies.

But let's face it: our apparent indifference to some of these issues told people a lot about us.

It made us seem like remote technocrats who defended the market even when people wanted protection against it, and it spoke to a deeper sense about us. Were we really people who cared about or defended traditional British institutions?

Of course, the record of these Conservatives is already far worse. At times they show an almost Maoist contempt for any institution that doesn't conform to their ideological beliefs - in their case that everything can be turned into a commodity and sold to the highest bidder.

That's why they tried to sell off our ancient forests. It's why David Willets saw nothing wrong with the suggestion that the wealthy should be able to buy their way into university.

What does this mean for us, for our future? It means showing we are people who understand the value of things beyond the bottom line.

We do want local people to have more of a say about local retail development, because sometimes another local supermarket chain isn't what people want. We do celebrate and value institutions like the BBC and the NHS.

So these are the three deep challenges Labour's national mission must address: how we can enable everyone to get on, how we can protect and enhance the British promise for the next generation, and how we preserve the things people value.

Let me end with this thought about the journey we are on together.

There is a prevailing idea that this is a Conservative country. That there is little we can do apart from accommodate to that fact. I think the people who believe that are wrong.

Not just because the majority of people at the last election voted for parties other than the Conservative party, but because I know that voters want something more than this government can provide.

Just as we should not accept a politics of pessimism for our country, so we shouldn't for our party either. But to deliver that better, optimistic politics requires ambition for our future, for what our politics can achieve.

We could accept a politics of decline and pessimism - but we cannot let the Conservatives' pessimism stunt our ambition for our country or our party.

I say: we have always been at our best when we have lifted our horizons and acted on our desire to make Britain better and stronger.

We the Labour party. We the country.

We reject the defeatist mantra that "there is no alternative". We can create a fair society in which wealth and opportunity go to those who deserve them. We can build an economy that reflects the best of our values as a country. We can secure for our children the opportunity to lead more prosperous and fulfilling lives. We can have the confidence to stand up for the things we really love about Britain.

Because the public want more from us. The public want more from our politics.

Let's make it happen.

England and a national economy

Jonathan Rutherford examines the economic agenda needed to re-empower England and give purpose to its workforce

Whelk fishing in Exmouth harbour - SUZAN ALMOND

The recent elections in Scotland saw SNP leader Alex Salmond linking together culture, society and the economy in a story of Scottish hope.

Labour was placed firmly on the side of reaction and backwardness.

Meanwhile in Wales, Labour held its own in an uncertain climate, and in England it took control of an additional 26 councils.

It was enough to temporarily stifle the argument that it is in danger of becoming the party of the liberal middle class and a client-ist public sector. But Labour as both a unionist and a national political force is under threat.

This is not a temporary setback, but part of longer-term trends. First, historical forces - end of empire, devolution, the EU, globalisation, the rise of the BRIC countries - are weakening Britain's unitary state.

Second, Labour has lost its cultural moorings. It has never been a class-based party, but one based on particular communities and occupations. With de-industrialisation, many of these have disappeared. New forms of production and consumption are transforming the cultures and structures of class. Who and what does Labour stand for?

Labour's has to understand these sociological and cultural changes, attune itself to their moods and become the party of national renascence in each country of the union. It needs to be a genuinely federated party that champions a new settlement of nations and devolves power from Westminster.

In England we need an English Labour Party, and we need to start a debate about the democratic representation of England, and the issue of English votes for English laws.

England is a country defined by an empire and an open trading economy.

We have spread ourselves through the world and in turn the world has come to our shores. We are a country of many roots but without a clear sense of national identity.

Where do we fit in and belong? Who are our people and who will watch out for us?

Anxieties and conflicts around identity and culture are a reaction to the insecurities created by three decades of global economic transformation. The cultural devastation caused by de-industrialistion and unemployment has meant for many the loss of our grandparents’ ways of life. People are faced with the cultural differences of mass immigration and many live alongside strangers; their own families distant.

During the boom years, the externalities of 'neo-liberal' capitalism were contained by rising living standards and easy credit. People of the middling sort gained through asset inflation. But the financial crash has brought those gains to an end and exposed the heavy social costs that neo-liberalism has inflicted on large sections of both working and middle classes.

Economic insecurity, falling living standards and a belief that our national culture is under threat resonate powerfully in public life. These are 'pre-political' structures of feeling and they erupt into public political life as rage against immigration and 'benefit scroungers'. Fear of crime rises because it threatens to shatter a fragile sense of order.

Labour fears the intolerance and racism of this populism. It has ignored it, morally condemned it, and tried to emulate it. Each tactic has revealed its political weakness. Labour's national renascence depends upon confronting the causes of social insecurity – and seizing the politics of identity and belonging – from the right, in the name of the country and the common good.

The task is hampered by a cosmopolitanism whose abstract universalism is dismissive of the insecurities of perpetual change and of people's desire for familiarity and for home. It has stigmatised the solidarities of ethnicity, community, and local place.

In turn, third way social democracy has recoiled from the visceral politics of belonging and the pain of social death and cultural devastation. Its promotion of liberal individualism and market choice has undermined the value of society and relationships, and left people to fend for themselves against powerful economic forces.

It has ended up in a transactional approach to politics that favoured those who were most able to get what they wanted by individual action. Across Europe its traditional supporters reacted to its utilitarianism and meritocracy by deserting it. Many turned to the xenophobic social movements which combine ethnic absolutism with a promise to look after 'our people'.

Labour needs to respond with its own vision of England. Nation and culture are the places where people make meaning, and where they create a sense of belonging and identity. But there is also something more at stake. 'The national' must be won politically, culturally and socially, because it is key to rebuilding the economy and creating a common prosperity.

In his 1933 essay on 'National Self Sufficiency', Keynes confronts the 'decadent international but individualistic capitalism' that caused the Wall Street Crash. Its 'self-destructive financial calculation governs every walk of life', he writes. 'It is not just, it is not virtuous - and it doesn't deliver the goods'. But what, he asks, shall we put in its place?

Today we face the same dilemma. A second phase of 'neo-liberal' globalisation has resulted in economic crisis. Britain has a failed open economy and a state-supported system of capitalism. Its private sector is anaemic and its financial sector dominates like an imperial cantonment which takes and takes – and gives nothing back. A selfish elite has embraced a cosmopolitan global culture, while across the country people face the loss of national purpose. What is England's role without an empire?

For Keynes the question was an opportunity to forge an English cultural renascence. His economic theory is grounded in the idea of an economic community; a shared set of national cultural values drawn from the conservatism of Burke and Coleridge.

Shared traditions provide the language of collective experience and belonging, which create a bulwark against the ideology of laissez faire. Keynesian economic theory was in part a re-imagining of English national culture. This cultural re-imagining has continued with E.P. Thompson, Raymond Williams and Stuart Hall. Labour needs to delve into its own traditions and take up the baton.

A Labour politics of national renascence depends upon macro-economic policies that can 're-nationalise' the economy. US economist Dani Rodrick argues that transnational regulatory institutions such as the Basel Committee, the WTO, IMF, and the Group of 20 are important but remain weak. The nation state remains the political unit best equipped for managing globalisation and rebuilding the national economy.

Labour needs to create policy spaces of democratic deliberation to restructure and diversify the economy. Keynes wrote in his 1926 essay, 'The End of Laissez Faire' that the ideal size for the unit of control and organisation of the economy is the semi-autonomous body that lies between the individual and the state, and whose criterion of action is the public good. These intermediary institutions can bring together the public sector, the private sector and the third sector in the English tradition of a 'balance of powers'.

Three themes underpin re-nationalising the economy. First, ownership matters. Keynes argues that 'remoteness between ownership and operation is an evil in the relations between men.' Unlike our economic competitors the UK has failed to keep control of its key industries. Sir Alan Rudge, in a paper given to Civitas in 2010, argued that we are well on the way to owning virtually none of our key economic assets.

Second, investment matters. The British economy is suffering a lack of capital investment. Re-nationalisation requires a national investment bank and radical reform of the banking sector - no bank should be too big to fail. Regional banks can contribute to spreading wealth creation, and a system of community banking will help to capitalise localities. A cap on interest rates will reduce personal indebtedness and undercut loan sharks.

Third, protection matters. Britain has one of the least regulated labour markets in the rich world. The flexible labour market has not realised the economic gains promised by its advocates. Reform of European regulation can end low-pay, low-skill and casualised labour, and create a level playing field for both migrant and indigenous workers. Strong trade unions are the best defence against exploitation. A living wage would improve the lives of over-worked, time poor families.

The last time Labour was confronted with this kind of political crisis was during its 1931 electoral rout. It had tenaciously clung to economic orthodoxy at the expense of its own traditions and good sense. As Tawney despaired, it 'crawled slowly to its doom'. Sometime soon Labour will need a little boldness of purpose.