Blue Labour

New site

2011-12-30T10:54:00.001Z

Please note that all future posts will be made on the Blue Labour website, www.bluelabour.org.

Blond and Glasman: exclusive extracts from new book

2011-09-26T10:51:00.000+01:00

In these extracts from journalist Rowenna Davis's new book, Tangled Up In Blue, Blue Labour's Maurice Glasman and 'Red Tory' Phillip Blond speak about each other's work

Glasman’s frustration came to a head in a seminar with Blond in Westminster’s Portcullis House in the spring of 2009. Blond had been brought in to discuss his ideas with a set of left and Labour party activists, MPs and journalists. Glasman was clearly irritated by Blond’s presentation, but he was even more annoyed by the reaction of Labour party members in the room. Once again, no one seemed to be challenging Blond’s “corrupted” replica of Labour’s ideas. Instead, the audience seemed to be disowning their traditions by criticising Blond’s work on the grounds that it marginalised the state. As Glasman explains:

He [Blond] was talking and I couldn’t believe what I was hearing as a response, he was talking about friendship, solidarity, belonging and all the people on the left were talking about equality, diversity, basically the state, and not talking about the quality of relationships or most importantly, capitalism. No one on the left was talking about capitalism, which you will ﬁnd out if this goes ahead is a genuinely a life long obsession, so be aware that capitalism plays a central role in the story, and I remember sitting there and thinking sorry I got the wrong end of the stick, I think I remember saying I thought the Labour party was the party where people came together to resist the domination of the rich, I didn’t think it was some kind of welfare agency, you know, democratic welfare agency.

In one of the most unconventional but little-known friendships in political circles, Glasman ending up befriending the Red Tory himself, Phillip Blond. Although Blond had his own much grander apartment in North London, he took to coming around to Glasman’s crowded ﬂat in Stoke Newington. In a sign of genuine trust, Blond joined Glasman and his family on Friday nights. This was an intimate space where the family lit candles and ate together in honour of the Jewish tradition and rested after a hard working week. Several years later, Blond still refers to Glasman with genuine admiration, calling him a “deeply good man” and a “dear friend”. He used to call him up – only half jokingly – and ask Glasman to join the Red Tory camp.

This uncanny ability to form unexpectedly warm alliances in unexpected places was to become quite a trait for Glasman. There was an important political energy in this friendship; the two could make more noise together than apart. The two worked together in tension, going head to head in a public debate billed as Red Tory vs Blue Labour at Conway Hall, and publishing an email exchange in Prospect magazine. Later Blond went even further and said that he deliberately helped promote Glasman – whose name was at that time virtually unknown in Westminster – by participating in these joint debates. Blond had always had huge conﬁdence in the signiﬁcance of his ideas, which he believed would extend well beyond the Conservative party. There were good strategic reasons then, for supporting Glasman and his Blue Labour project. A “sister movement” would help push what Blond saw as a new political consensus:

I would only win and my ideas would only succeed if there was a similar movement on the left because we needed to create a new centre ground and that takes both sides to agree. Maurice and I genuinely differ which is right and proper and we differ most on markets, so it’s not like we agree but I think his insights are in authentic parallel to mine on the left and I know history and I know that to create a new centre ground you need two sides to agree.

Of course there were signiﬁcant differences in their ideology. Most notably, Blond thought that Glasman was too confrontational in style and too Marxist in substance. He believed Blue Labour lacked an appeal to a British sense of aspiration, and was unlikely to play well with the electorate as a result. Glasman for his part believed that Blond did not take the power of capital seriously enough. He also argued that Blond’s model for mutualisation was not sufficiently transformative because it didn’t include a range of interests. For Glasman, it was important to foster and encourage a diverse number of interests within any organisation. Handing over control of services to workers simply replaced a monopoly of the state with a monopoly of employees. Glasman’s model of mutualisation, in contrast, would encourage representation from diﬀerent groups to encourage pluralism.

It’s also interesting to compare the two men’s positions within their own parties. On a surface level, they were operating in a similar space. Both thought that their respective parties should change, but both lacked an official position of inﬂuence in their chosen institutions to achieve it. But although they were both party political insurgents, it would be a mistake to think of their positions as identical. Although Blond always had more resources than Glasman, he remained a much more isolated ﬁgure within his own party. He had none of the signiﬁcant and close relationships with the leadership that Glasman went on to have. Glasman could see that, for all the bluster, Blond’s project was a much lonelier one than his own. Talking to Glasman, it seems as if his affection for the Red Tory was tinted with a desire to look after him:

[Blond has a] very generous, gentle disposition to him and by far the best way of having a relationship with him was to embed him, for him to come over, he never has a cooked meal, he only has takeaways, was to come over have a Friday night meal, with children, it turns out he is brilliant with children, he gives them quizzes, he and Isaac, can you imagine have a kind of equality of ego, with a ﬁve year old child Phillip, he and Isaac can go completely head to head it’s brilliant and he’s very loving with children.

***

Others share this concern that Blue Labour might not be able to speak to the demographic it claims to represent. Phillip Blond of the think tank ResPublica, for example, argues that Blue Labour’s appeal to the working class cannot work because Britons no longer label themselves in that way. They are too aspirational, which means the brand won’t appeal to them. It is worth keeping in mind that over a third of Britain’s school leavers now go on to university, and with manufacturing industries still largely in decline, there is less respect associated with the working class label. Blue Labour, says Blond, hasn’t really caught up with this:

[Blue Labour] hasn’t really recognised what Blair was writing about and speaking to, Blue Labour still won’t appeal to the majority of British people, it still remains an appeal to a type of working class that is very much in the minority, that’s unionised, and low waged, there is no appeal here to small business people, or workers who wish to be high wage and high skill, no appeal to the modern structures that most people live in or desire.

Even if voters did accept Blue Labour labels, Blond does not believe that Labour would ever be able to swallow the socially conservative values it proposes:

I think Labour will always be hostile to social conservatism, or as I term it “social conservation”, it will always privilege Liberal autonomy above all things, so I never think it can be a radical party for that reason.

Although Blond does not rate Blue Labour’s ideas as they stand now, he does think they are underestimated by his colleagues in the Conservative party. Blond says that although current cabinet members do have Blue Labour “on the radar” they are not worried that it will steal capital C Conservative voters. This, Blond believes, could be a mistake:

I think they underestimate him [Glasman] and Ed Miliband, but if Ed keeps with the notion of squeezed middle, transmutes Blue Labour into that space and I think that’s a potent mix.

Tangled Up In Blue is published by Ruskin

Riots and the responsible society

2011-08-16T12:16:00.001+01:00

Luke Bretherton says irresponsibility at the top is just as much to blame for the riots as that of the rioters themselves

David Cameron said the rioters represented ‘pockets’ of society that were ‘sick’.

His analysis was both wrong and worryingly misguided. To say someone is sick is to suggest they are not responsible for what is happening to them.

Of course the use of medical analogies to diagnose what ails the body politic is an ancient one. But to understand what was going on in the riots we must turn to another ancient metaphor, one found in the stories of Cain and Abel and Romulus and Remus, namely, fraternal rivalry.

When my two boys were toddlers, if one had a toy, the other desired it and after a while, if he could not get it by legitimate means he would snatch it.

To add injury to insult, and with a certain frenzied and spiteful glee, he would then thump his sibling from whom he stole the toy. The anthropologist Rene Girard calls this process ‘mimetic rivalry’.

It is beyond simple envy. It is a deep desire sparked by copying what another has or does. In wanting what the other has, we seek to affirm our own worth and value.

The ‘shopping with violence’ we saw in the riots was the outworking of a consumer culture in which self-worth is measured by material gain and identities expressed through brands.

It is a culture where desire for what others have not only drives the whole economy but mediates social relations: what we gossip about, watch on TV and how we spend our leisure time mostly revolves around consuming and observing what others consume.

The rioters wanted to participate in what they felt excluded from and given the opportunity took it by any means necessary. But like all projects of self-justification, it is not enough to get what you want, there is a need to hit back at what made you feel bad, held back or deprived in the first place. Hence the arson and the attacks on the police. Mimetic rivalry eventually spins out of control, until it leads to violence.

But if this all sounds a bit over theorised, we should not forget that for some rioting is fun. Studies of early modern English riots – an equivalent time of rapid social change - suggests that among a range of factors, some of which included genuine grievances, was the fact that many taking part were bored young men looking for something to do.

Rioting was a laugh, a way to vent frustrations and circumvent the normal boundaries that limited their actions. Most riots were not proto-revolutionary protests but carnivalesque upsurges that made the fools kings for a day.

If the lists of those arrested are anything to go by, most of those taking part were foolish young men aged between 17-25. This is the same demographic who take the most illegal drugs, who drink to excess the most, and whom we send to fight our wars.

They are risk takers who don’t consider the consequences. It is the same high risk, short-term thinking and wantonly destructive behaviour we saw among the (mostly male) bankers who traded away our future and indebted us for a generation.

We are a society that rewards one ‘pocket’ of self-interested risk takers for privatising profit and socialising the cost, but is busy incarcerating another ‘pocket’ for the same actions.

But the identification of irresponsible and destructive risk taking in many sections of society suggests a further problem with Cameron’s analysis of the riots.

Alongside mimetic rivalry, Girard points to another social process we saw in the riots: scapegoating. As the righteous anger and fear erupted, society sought to heal the social fabric in the face of its violent rupture by heaping all the blame on certain groups: parents, feral youth, gangs, and in one particularly shallow, but nonetheless troubling case voiced by David Starkey, black youth culture.

Society could then form a solid phalanx, re-affirming its own values and innocence in contradistinction to the irresponsible actions of scapegoats who were condemned as outside of ‘normal’ behaviour.

Scapegoating seems to shape the government’s whole response to the riots. But in scapegoating particular groups, we seek to avoid taking responsibility.

And this gets to the heart of the problem: the refusal of all involved – rioters, government, the police and society in general – to take responsibility.

This is a profound malaise at the heart of our body politic. As Peter Oborne pointed out in one of the most perceptive comments on the riots, the riots were of a piece with the irresponsible actions of bankers, politicians, the police and journalists who think they can bend and break the law, acting with impunity and with no regard for the common life we all share and on which they themselves depend.

Those guilty of criminal acts must be made to take responsibility and be taught and set an example of how to act otherwise. But to do this we must all take responsibility for creating a culture that lauds as rational self-interest desiring what others have and using any means necessary to get it; treating others with contempt in order to get ahead; taking risks without considering the consequences for others; and not taking responsibility for polluting, destroying and desecrating our common life, on which all our flourishing depends.

Thankfully, we saw signs of an alternative culture to the one displayed on the streets of our cities and in the boardrooms of the City, one that is not hell bent on sacrificing all we hold dear to the maw of mammon.

Those who came together to clean up, support those in distress and defend their neighbourhoods from attack invested in building a common life before self-aggrandisement, took personal responsibility, and did not leave it all up to the state or the market to decide. Rather than hide away in gated communities, they valued cooperative action and mutual support.

They met public squalor with public spirit. These citizens point to the virtues and values we must foster if we are to heal our body politic and inhibit both low morals in high places and heightened immorality in ordinary places.

Toeing the line gets you nowhere

2011-08-13T05:00:00.011+01:00

Ed Pocock says that freedom of thought is the only way to keep the party faithful after years of the 'election machine'

Lords Labour whip Lord Liddle lays down the law, May

2011 - FRIENDS OF EUROPE

Throughout modern history, political discourse has been governed by the most dominant ideological strands of thought.

Prime Ministers, their cabinets and more recently the ‘Downing Street machine’ seek to quell any opposition that intends to adapt the policy initiatives they advocate.

This is achieved via the formulation of a party line, which is, in reality a rather uninspiring and unrepresentative depiction of the wider political party.

Indeed, David Cameron, like New Labour before him, can be seen to utilise only his closest allies (a tiny proportion of the political party) to articulate and assert policy.

True, compromises are made - but Cameron’s promise to take the Conservatives out of the centre-right EPP group in Europe, for instance, was simply a plea for allegiance from some of the more right wing MPs in his party.

The elite governing few argue that party discourse must be cohesive and convey unity to the public in order to ensure their trust and thus gain office. However, disillusionment with politics and politicians is rife.

Many of the electorate question the moral ambiguity of MPs, claim that their views aren’t appropriately represented in debate, and generally approach politics with immense trepidation. This disillusionment can only be effectively addressed by tackling the cause and not by accusing the public of undue scepticism and and an unfairly pessimistic outlook.

The idea that British politics can be defined by a few ‘major players’ and unelected representatives or advisors is proving both absurd and bemusing for the electorate.

They believe that the individual MPs they elect should directly represent the social and political landscape of their constituencies. However, the harsh reality sees individual MPs left out in the dark, exploited as dormant vehicles to push through policy.

This renders them unable to represent either their own views or the opinions of their constituents, and deepens the sentiment that politicians remain ‘out of touch’.

This system is defended under the pretence that ‘it works’. I concede it is easier for a relatively small group of people to formulate policy direction, and ensure the formal backing of the vast majority of the party through the gesture of a three line whip.

It also makes it easier to convey decisive action and a united front in the face of the media, other political parties and other state actors. Certainly, defying the party line attracts negative coverage from the media, who depict it as a blunder and often call for resignation.

However, the public perception of this is rushed policy, suppressed MPs, and underrepresented minorities. Labour must embrace and utilise the breadth of its ideological thought: only then can it re-establish itself as a progressive and forward thinking party who put the people first.

The adoption of multilateral rhetoric within a party does not inhibit unity and strength, but is rather evidence of a realistic party, proud of its range in ideological thought, and underpinned by notions of innovation and progression.

This allows a party to realise its true potential in constructing stronger and well thought out policy initiatives that have been subjected to increased internal scrutiny. This scrutiny also acts as a safeguard, protecting the party from ending up endorsing underwhelming policies.

In a self-proclaimed democratic and pluralist country, it is deeply ironic that political parties fail to convey a pluralist outlook with internal dealings.

A move to embrace a less rigid and more pluralist agenda will increase transparency and could lead to decreased public disenchantment, as parties are seen to debate issues internally and portrayed as more than a mechanic campaign machine.

This freedom could help to prevent confrontation and coups within the party as disagreements on policy become realised as a positive and respect-building phenomenon.

Suspending the material: what comes after liberal individualism?

2011-08-11T05:00:00.000+01:00

Jack Reid puts the case for religious organisation as a transformative force in our political culture

The clean-up begins in Hackney's Mare Street - EDUARDO

CARRASCO

Democracy, founded above all on the principle of equality, is struggling to function properly in contemporary Western societies, primarily due to the insatiable individualism that these cultures currently foster.

This observation is not new, having been discussed by a wide range of social commentators including critical theorists like Jurgen Habermas, Christian theologians like John Milbank, and more recently Blue Labour’s very own founding father Maurice Glasman.

In the process of undermining democracy's core ethos, the recent onslaught of neo-liberalism - an economic ideology that celebrates consumerism and individual autonomy - has forced us to recognize that even democratic regimes can degenerate into tyranny.

Contrary to the conviction of enlightenment figures, this regression does not require the prior influence of a strangling sacred ideology, but stems instead from an problem rooted within democratic culture itself.

The nature of the problem is curiously paradoxical. Democratic culture is fundamentally based upon the principle of equality of condition.

Yet equality of condition - or at least the type endorsed by neo-liberal philosophy - is in fact the fundamental enemy of democratic culture, having a doubly negative impact upon democracy’s potential for success.

First, the principle of equality of condition results in making individuals feel entirely independent, and has thus produced massive social atomisation. Every individual is primarily concerned with his or her own material interests.

As a result, the complete loss of social solidarity renders it impossible for democratic culture to flourish. At the same time, increased societal disunion makes it extremely easy for governments to deceitfully manipulate public opinion, mainly for their own gains.

More often than not, this manipulation centres upon atomised society’s fears. Democratic governments frequently use claims that the public need defence from the terrorist or the immigrant as an excuse for spurious measures, including the suspension of basic democratic tenets such as habeas corpus, free speech, freedom of the press and humane treatment. This opens the path towards petty autocracy.

An example of such a slide is illustrated through the case of Guantanamo Bay detention camp, created during the Bush administration by capitalizing on the post 9/11 climate of fear sweeping across the United States.

Second, in democratic cultures where everyone is equal in principle, the real exercise of power rests upon public opinion, the clearest expression of the will of a majority of citizens. However, there is no reason to assume that public opinion will equate to what is morally good, or that it will accord with the law.

This problem comes to the fore when a majority public opinion dominates that of a minority. Here, democratic culture runs the risk of imposing what de Tocqueville deemed ‘the tyranny of the majority’.

In the modern state, the democratic system is beset by a multitude of contrary interests, making it simply impossible for democracy to satisfy each individual concern.

There is no ultimate equality of views, only a competition of interests, and eventually democracy will recognise the interest upon which there is the most consensus. At this moment, the democratic ideal of egalitarianism is lost.

The November 2009 minaret controversy in Switzerland offers an example of the ability of majority public opinion to become oppressive. Following a referendum, a 57% majority of the Swiss general public voted in favour of a ban on the building of new minarets across the country.

The initiative, which has since caused international controversy, had been supported by right wing Swiss groups including the Swiss People’s Party and the Democratic Union.

Those groups offering the strongest opposition to the initiative included the Swiss government, NGOs and Catholic bishops, who had warned prior to the referendum that the proposal did not represent ‘the Christian values and democratic principles of Switzerland’.

In sum, it is evident that the crisis democratic culture finds itself in stems from the limited social parameters of neo-liberalism, which has brought with it massive atomisation, inequality and injustice.

With the failure of the secular creeds – socialism, communism – to challenge neo-liberalism’s social ills, it may at first glance seem that democratic culture, lacking an antidote to the corrosive effects of the neo-liberal virus, is doomed.

To rescue democratic culture from this irreversible slip into consumerist despotism, we must re-focus our train of thought upon a fresh openness towards religion, and the redeeming qualities it holds.

Primarily, religion promotes solidarity. This then, stands in direct opposition to the neo-liberal principle of discord. A solid community of individuals can operate as a strong social unit and does not easily become enslaved to tyrannical institutions.

Additionally, religion provides a source for morality and the moral guidance of people. Democracy can only function within a framework of tolerance, and the pursuit of truth and justice for its own sake.

Religion can influence public opinion and direct the customs of a community towards this ideal. As a result, religion can provide the moral soil upon which democratic culture can bloom.

Finally, in direct opposition to the fundamental aspirations of neo-liberal philosophy, religion deals in immaterial matters and centres the individual’s train of thought upon eternal issues not of this world.

Religion, then, can provide a remedy against the unrestrained, avaricious individualism that modern society harbours. In doing so, it might provide one of the only paths to democratic culture’s salvation.

New book on Blue Labour: a call to stakeholders

2011-07-27T02:00:00.004+01:00

Journalist and councillor Rowenna Davis seeks perspectives on Blue Labour in the run-up to this year's Labour party conference

I am writing a book about Blue Labour. It’s coming out soon, and I need your help.

The aim is to tell the story of the idea. How Blue Labour came about, where it’s going and what it could mean for the Labour party and the country. The book will not aim to advocate or denigrate Blue Labour ideas, but to explain them.

Since the brand was introduced to the mainstream just a few months ago, Blue Labour has gone viral, exploding into political discourse and causing fierce debate in the press. But very few actually know what it is or how it came about. This book would help to change that.

Understanding Blue Labour will help society join in the debate. It will give people a chance to hold its authors accountable for their ideas, accept what they like and reject what they don’t. It will also document the different nuances of opinion from leaders associated with the movement that were often lost by a media enchanted by the brand alone.

The book will capture these subtleties in narrative form. It’s a story that hasn’t been told that goes right to the heart of the Labour party. It has important insights to offer about the party’s leaders and their beliefs about what the party should be about.

So where do you come in? I’m interviewing as many people as I can to get as many perspectives as possible. I’m not just interested in hearing from leaders in the Labour party, but from rank and file party members, commentators, journalists and activists from left and right and inside and outside the party. If you have any input at all, please do get in touch via rowenna.davis@gmail.com. I’m happy to speak on or off the record.

Blue Labour Story, the Battle for the Soul of the Labour Party (provisional title) is due for publication in the next six months. It will be published by Ruskin Books, a publishing company founded by Derek Draper. Rowenna Davis, a journalist and Labour councillor, is working on the book with assistance from journalist Steve Richards, and retains full editorial independence. All profits will go to charity.

Why co-operative regions are better for growth

2011-07-07T15:52:00.002+01:00

Joe Sarling shows how co-operatives are a living, breathing part of some economies - and deliver better results too

Northampton Saints at Franklin's Gardens, Northampton,
East Midlands - BOB

In the last few months I've written about some key economic issues faced by regions up and down the UK.

There is a need for local enterprise within communities, the UK needs to shift its economic focus, young entrepreneurs should not be dismissed, ignoring local procurement is a false economy, and more local power can yield greater benefits.

These articles set the agenda and highlight the theory behind these new ideas. But now is the time for detail. If we truly want to rebalance the economy, and take the opportunity to reshape how the economy operates, we have to be radical.

Some of the lessons the UK should learn can be told by comparing two stories: those of the East Midlands and the Emilia-Romagna region of Italy.

	Italy	UK
	Emilia-Romagna	East Midlands
Population of region	4,377,435	4,413,206
Population of country	60,340,328	61,191,951
Proportion of population in the region %	7.3	7.2
Proportion of country's GDP from region %	9	6
National GDP per capita (€)	26,200	29,600
Regional GDP per capita (€)	32,200	25,800
Proportion of country’s patents from region %	15.1	7.4
Unemployment in region %	4.8	6.4
Number of co-ops	8000	261
Population in a co-op %	57	23

There are 8000 co-operatives in the Emilia-Romagna region, with over half of the regional population taking part in one in some capacity. This structure has contributed to a GDP per capita level higher than that of the UK average, with an enviable unemployment rate of 4.8%.

Whilst the Emilia-Romagna region has 7% of Italy’s population, it produces 9% of the GDP. Contrast this to the East Midlands, which has 7% of the UK population but contributes 6% of GDP.

And it is innovative too: the Emilia-Romagna region contributes 15% of Italy’s patents (in 2009) whilst the East Midlands contributes 7% of ours.

What has made this region a success?

After fascism’s defeat in 1945, co-operatives grew out of three national movements. The political left was represented by the Lega; the Catholic centre-right by ‘Confco-op’ and; the centre-left by the 'Associazione'. Whilst in their formation there was a political and religious influence, those differences have narrowed and cross co-operation increased.

Concurrently, the number of small-medium enterprises in the area increased as business clusters were created, promoting the sharing of information, research, technology and skills.

In order to formalise the role and importance of co-operatives, article 45 of the Italian Constitution states:

“The Republic recognises the social function of co-operation characterised by mutual aid and not private profit. The law promotes and favours the growth of these structures using the most appropriate means and guarantees that their character and purpose will be inspected accordingly.”

Co-operatives are encouraged by preferential tax rates (saving 40%) to encourage self-capitalisation, which has led to the idea of an ‘indivisible resource’ – a resource which exists to the benefit of future employees and members, thanks to the firm’s sustainability.

More recently, the law has been amended to require co-operatives to contribute 3% of profits in order to fund future projects of the same kind, which the regional co-operatives control.

This has allowed co-operatives to innovate and grow, increasing their ability to adapt to market conditions whilst maintaining an empowered and reliable workforce.

Reciprocity is clearly at the heart of these businesses.

Reciprocity between employee and employer. Between the firm and its region. In the collaboration of businesses in projects or in tenders for contracts. And in the trust and social understanding between members.

These structures are only possible if the local authority can wield a significant amount of power. The Emilia-Romagna region has a strong government and so is able to endorse the right SMEs, with their local knowledge and understanding of the region’s resources.

What can we learn?

It is clear that the region of Emilia-Romagna can offer important ideas as to how we can reshape our economy.

Promotion of SMEs, backed by regional funding streams (who have the knowledge and experience to assess risk) is absolutely key.

Incorporating co-operatives will increase worker representation and decrease inequality. Fostering the longevity of social capital which builds trust and co-operation will ensure these firms continue to grow and be at the heart of the local community.

Whilst GDP per capita may not be the best measure of society’s success, a strong and distinct co-operative structure can improve this figure whilst simultaneously enhancing more qualitative measures.

Blue Labour has relationships, trust and reciprocity at its core. This requires support from central government, but also a philosophy of localism and self-capitalisation, which brings the knowledge and expertise of local decision-makers to the fore.

Most importantly, blue Labour should lead the change in thinking on our regional economies. We need an alternative to the status quo, and international experience shows us that co-operatives are the way forward.

Learning to trust

2011-07-06T15:02:00.004+01:00

Jim O’Connell-Lauder and Jamie Audsley argue for a radical left vision of education: one that communities can really own

A pupil from St Bonaventure’s 6th Form, Newham, London
addresses the House of Lords - UK PARLIAMENT

Last year we met (Jim as teacher and Jamie as community organiser) while working together on a grassroots financial education programme with schools across the capital.

Our aim was to enable an emerging generation to better take control of their money and improve their powers of awareness and negotiation as the recession deepened.

A central part of our work with young people and schools was to spread their learning to parents and the community beyond.

However, as we worked with a wide range of schools, the lack of both local relationships and the involvement of parents quickly became apparent. Even more concerning was the real worry that many teachers had about involving parents and the community, as if this was somehow unchartered territory beyond the 'island' that was the school.

This got us thinking more deeply about the importance we place on trust between schools and communities. What follows is a discussion that aims to open up debate about our schools, Labour’s work with them and further thinking about reform across our public services. We’ll be writing more in the coming months and hope you get involved in the debate too.

As 'New' and 'Blue' Labour thinking begin to mix, the Blue principles of developing strong local relationships, connecting to local institutions, taking community action and recognising the limits of the state are desirable if we’re to regain the trust, hope and excitement needed to see Labour succeed again.

Labour’s approach to schools serves as a perfect example of an area where we can think about how these principles operate in practice.

Articulations of Blue Labour ideas often invoke friendly societies, mutuals and co-operatives, which are institutions that bring people together for political purposes. Whilst these provide great models of organising society in positive ways, they are no longer connected to the majority of people’s lives and day-to-day experiences.

Schools, however, are a universal element of public experience and can be centred at the heart of our communities.

Focusing on schools also allows us to develop thinking about the different roles for community action and new policy to effect change in our communities. As we move forward, policy alone isn’t going to be enough to reconnect.

Labour isn’t in government at the moment. This gives us an opportunity to develop policy for our return to government, but it also provides us with a Blue Labour moment: a chance to consider what is possible without control of the state.

Considering ourselves not just as a government-in-waiting, but as a social movement, allows us to question the supremacy of the state in delivering policy outcomes for citizens. It’s our contention that Labour should look to ordinary citizens to build the good society we seek.

Education, Education, Education, but for what purpose?

Recent Labour and Conservative governments have largely focussed on a narrow vision of neoliberal social efficiency.

Education reform has looked to drive up standards using centralised tools such as targets, monitoring (OFSTED) and top-down design of teacher practice and curriculum content. Government has also looked to raise standards through the introduction of parent choice (market competition) and the introduction of more independent state schools (academies).

These changes, and the lack of discussion of the principles underpinning the school system, have led to education becoming a largely technocratic question, rather than a philosophical, moral or democratic one for people to get involved in answering.

Looking through a Blue Labour lens at the good society, we see education as a tool of social justice, where schools and their communities (both within the building and outside it) work for the development of the common good.

Not only is there intrinsic good in building schools up as democratic institutions, capable of striving for the common good, there is also an instrumental good in making schools the arenas for democratic action, in that it will build people – parents, teachers and children – into democratic citizens.

With this approach we believe we have the opportunity to rework and regain belief in a comprehensive system where everyone is valued, and with all abilities, interests and backgrounds organised towards the raising up and education of all.

No longer will it be a frenetic competition to ensure the best for your child as a consumer within the marketplace of education, but a matter of responsibility to all our children, as citizens engaging with a system of the common good.

This, we believe, connects to the fundamental values of those who launched the comprehensive movement.

Policy

In order to achieve this, we need to embrace three policy principles for education.

Firstly, schools must be strong, democratic institutions. Secondly, they must be free to be governed by local, democratic coalitions. And lastly, they must conform to an ideal of accountability based on relationships between stakeholders, and not on compliance with central standards or parental ‘choice’.

Embracing these principles entails risking a comprehensive system that includes pluralism and difference. It is a risk we should be prepared to take to rework a vision that has in reality been largely gutted by both state and market. Boldly communicated, this could be the left’s vision for a truly 'free school.'

This should see us develop a model of the school as an institution at the centre of neighbourhood life. School should bring together teachers, pupils, parents, local residents and local government in a constructive relationship focused on the successful education of children.

Schools have huge potential to achieve this, because all the people in a given area are potentially active members of the school as an institution.

To some extent, this already happens. Governing bodies in local authority-controlled schools feature representation from all these groups, often including pupils. However, if we want to affirm local democracy as both a creative force and as an intrinsic good, we must renew and extend these institutions.

Creative local democracy in school has the potential to allow collaboration and innovation. Some of the best ideas we have seen in schools, such as plans for vocational work experience in diverse industries and education about the local area, have come from parents offering their own connections and professional expertise for the school to use.

Furthermore, ensuring parents are involved in their children’s education will help to move us away from a vision of parents as clients and consumers, towards one in which they are citizens with greater power and responsibility to create the educational system they want to see.

We would, therefore, advocate schools being run as organisations that include both unions (teaching and other staff unions too) and parent-teacher associations. In this way a school can become an institution with the capacity to develop a voice for their constituency, and relationships with the other groups involved in the school.

A place for teachers (organised as unions, or otherwise) will ensure that their expertise and concerns are not trampled by management, a practice that threatens to become an emergent trend in the government’s new academies.

Having a role for organised parents on the governing body will allow for parents to hold management and teachers accountable for their performance in educating their children, and by entering into a relationship with the other groups, this accountability can be reciprocated.

In this way, teachers can become democratic professionals that work with parents and children, as opposed to providers of a service that children consume.

New Labour based its system of school accountability on league tables, creating a kind of accountability that Warwick Mansell refers to as ‘hyper-accountability’. If a school has poor results in the league tables, they run the risk of parents choosing not to send their kids to that school.

So institutions do everything they can to make sure they get a good percentage of kids coming out with 5 A* -C grades at GCSE. We should question if this is the kind of accountability we want.

Proper accountability, that values what is important to families and communities, has to involve some sort of relationship. To both improve outcomes for the young and place people at the heart of deciding what is best for their pupils and children, we have to move away from a compliance culture in education towards a relational culture.

This relational culture can involve constructive conversations, where one party is able to say ‘I think it would be better if little Jonny did this…’ and the other can say ‘ok, let’s work together on that’. It’s simple, but it is easily overlooked.

Action

We have tried to show what a Blue Labour-inspired policy for schools might, in part, look like. Key to these ideas working in practice, however, is an understanding of the necessary forms of action that must go alongside them.

In order to maintain an institution as one capable of achieving its goals, people must be active and have an interest in being active within that institution. Anyone who has seen a social club, NGO or local political branch dwindle and die knows this, and recognises the fear of an empty room.

Crucially, policy can never make people be active. A future Labour government can make it easier for people to be active within their child’s school, but it cannot force them to turn up and be involved.

Therefore, if Labour renewal is to embrace ideas of mutuality, reciprocity and the importance of relationships, it must also embrace the idea that the state should trust citizens to take action only when it is important. What could be a better venue for this than childrens’ education?

Participative democracy is something that the Labour party needs to embrace. Marc Stears’ response to Jonathan Rutherford in the recent Labour Tradition and the Politics of Paradox ebook sends a powerful call for Labour to allow aspirations to be determined ‘by real people in the context of their real lives’.

When it comes to determining the education of children, this means democratic decision-making by parents and teachers who are involved in a school. Not only is this a worthwhile goal in itself, it is also something that we can actively work towards whilst in opposition.

The Child First Authority in Baltimore is a great example of what is possible through democratic collective action. Established in response to action by the BUILD broad-based community organisation, Child First goes through the process of bringing together different stakeholders that surround young people.

One-to-one meetings, house meetings and workshops build relationships between parents, teachers, community leaders and officials, prior to identifying the needs of a particular school and taking action to address these needs.

Child First demonstrates that people can take action to influence a policy response. This is firmly within the experience of Labour people. However, Child First takes the next step of responding to policy (the creation of the Child First Authority with its institutional resources and democratic mandate) with action (the organisation of people to support their schools).

The result is the capacity of people across the city to provide for their kids and the inculcation of a participative political culture.

Labour can learn from this example. We need to see the state and other policy-making bodies as enablers of action. And we need to see our party as active in trying to shape policy (by winning elections) and active in response to policy (campaigning, organising to strengthen institutions).

Schools provide an ideal example of how this could work. Imagine a city of Labour schools: schools that bring together parents of different backgrounds with other institutions in the community, empowered by their relationships and a culture of action to not only defend their schools but to innovate, experiment and learn from each other.

These schools would not be ‘free’ like the coalition’s free schools – free to be sold off to the highest bidder – they would be free in the sense the left should understand freedom. Free in that they are governed by local people acting together democratically.

The Labour party can and should take a lead in working for our schools both now and when we are in government.

Crucial to all this, however, is Labour being prepared both now and when we return to government to be comfortable with people organising themselves to take action that diverges from what the state establishes as normal.

It is only through unleashing the innovative power of local democracy – of citizens working together for a common good – that we will create the means for our children to realise their true potential.

Jim O'Connell-Lauder is a teacher and sabbatical officer at Oxford University Student Union, and Jamie Audsley is a former teacher and community organiser

Lessons from Inverclyde

2011-07-05T11:33:00.000+01:00

Joe McCauley asks how Labour can claw back its status as the dominant voice of working people in its Scottish heartlands

View from Gourock, Inverclyde - JOHN DAVEY

The recent result in the Inverclyde by-election was good news for Labour, but not great news.

Labour candidate Iain McKenzie won the seat with 53.8% of the vote, with the SNP on 33.0% and the Lib Dems on 2.2%.

Everyone who campaigned in Inverclyde should feel very proud to have held onto this Scottish Labour stronghold, especially after the recent defeat in the Scottish Parliament elections.

But I just can't help looking at the results and seeing the SNP vote increase of 15%.

I believe it is healthy for Labour members not to take this as a great victory, but to take a step back and question why the SNP made this large gain, while Labour went down 2%.

In my view the Inverclyde by-election has shown that within Scotland there is no longer one dominant working class party but two.

Inverclyde really was the campaign area of red and yellow, and more importantly the campaign was well organised and delivered. But on the doorstep the feedback I recieved from potential voters was that Labour was lacking in working class ethics.

I could not help but think of 'family, faith and community' while campaigning in the constituency, and particularly on the housing estates.

Port Glasgow and Greenock were both industrial hubs, but now this a distant past. For many there is a void, and not only the void of jobs: a void in my view of community spirit, and more importantly openess between neighbour and neighbour.

On the campaign trail a number of fellow activists agreed that the Scottish Labour party must reclaim our national flag; our saltire. Instead of people identifying the Scottish saltire as the SNP insignia, we must return it to its original status as the national flag of Scotland.

I believe that with Blue Labour many more members could feel comfortable about speaking passionately about their country without being called a Nationalist. Labour must regain an identity as Scottish Labour without being labelled London Labour.

Another dominant issue towards the end of campaigning was the accusation of Anne McLaughlin - the SNP canidate - that the local council, headed by Labour's candidate Iain McKenzie, was making compulsory redundancies. This claim was found to be untrue, although the SNP spread the fear of the threat of redundancies throughout Inverclyde.

In tackling this fear, a great reassurance to the public sector worker could have been Maurice Glasman's vision of the "running of public services shared between users, producers and those funding the public services".

This proposal, I am sure, would have reassured council workers in Inverclyde who questioned if Labour was on their side, since these employees have their own free voice within Blue Labour.

It was clear on the doorsteps of Inverclyde that Blue Labour ideas and values could just be the re-connection needed for local Labour supporters - an even better match for working class Scotland, perhaps, than Red Labour.

Joe McCauley is a student and Labour party activist in Glasgow Southside

Saving Sherwood Forest is only a fraction of the battle

2011-07-04T10:00:00.000+01:00

Guy Shrubsole asks how Blue Labour's conservationism and resistance to commodification might translate into policy

Climate activists in Blackheath, London, following a
clean-up of local woodland - FOTDMIKE

Is Blue Labour also Green Labour? The Blue Labour oeuvre hasn’t yet had much to say on the environment.

The Labour Tradition and the Politics of Paradox acknowledges that “in the decade ahead, all governments will have to act under conditions characterised by financial volatility, energy insecurity [and] environmental degradation, both natural and social”.

Yet as to how to respond to the biggest challenge of the century, the threat of environmental collapse, Blue Labour appears almost silent. Some commentators have already picked up on this conspicuous absence.

As Ben Little wrote recently on the Blue Labour blog: “While community organising and a radical social conservatism may be key pieces in the puzzle for the future of the centre left, it is how they connect with a more pluralistic politics, with issues of intergenerational justice and in tackling the possibility of resource scarcity, that will determine the durability of Blue Labour as part of the political landscape.”

So what might a distinctly Blue Labour approach to the environment be? Does it offer a new perspective on a profound set of problems, or point towards a new way of mobilising latent British environmental consciousness?

Maurice Glasman spoke briefly on this theme at a Compass meeting last month. Responding to an offer to re-name Blue Labour ‘Green Labour’ (he demurred), Glasman argued that some environmentalists suffered from the same problem that afflicted New Labour: a hostility towards real people and a penchant for technocratic target-based policies, rather than a desire to build a popular movement.

Instead, he suggested, the aim should be the formation of a ‘green populism’ that energises large numbers.

There is more than a grain of truth in this assessment. Leaving aside the charge of ‘hostility towards real people’ as a piece of Maurice’s trademark provocation, the tendency for environmental campaigners to focus on securing the passage of rarefied legislation rather than fostering mass mobilisation seems plain from the past decade of action.

Yes, some great strides forward were made with the passing of the Climate Act, progress that is being built on with the current raft of policies around Feed-in Tariffs, Renewable Heat Incentives, energy market reform and so on.

Yet even at the height of public interest in climate change during the Copenhagen talks, environmental campaigners never managed to muster more than 40,000 people onto the streets of London for a climate protest – a pitiful number by the standards of most marches.

Stop Climate Chaos, the umbrella body for climate change activism, mostly facilitated dialogue between the large NGOs rather than galvanising grassroots supporters; and though the series of Climate Camps and other direct action protests over the period were enormously successful, they punched way, way above their weight in terms of numbers participating.

But is it fair to lay this ‘failure’ to mobilise more people at the feet of the environmental organisations, who have striven for decades to raise popular awareness of the state of the planet?

Or is it rather a difficulty inherent to any attempts to convince people that it makes sense to act decisively on global warming now, possibly even enduring personal sacrifices, in order to prevent negative impacts to distant people and places at some point in the future?

Because that, in essence, is the scope of the ask we have to make of people when we seek to protect the planet from climate change.

It is clear, in other words, that simplistic demands for a ‘green populism’ won’t provide the magic bullet that many, many environmentalists have been seeking for a long time; namely, a way of inspiring large numbers of ‘Middle England’ to become politicised over green issues

It has certainly eluded the Green Party for forty years. Ed Miliband understood this problem too when he said at his acceptance speech: “The focus groups will tell you that there's no votes in green issues. Maybe not. But taking the difficult steps to protect our planet for future generations is the greatest challenge our generation faces... So we can’t be imprisoned by the focus groups.”

Still, he and Glasman are right to call on environmentalists to try to ‘build a mass movement’. But where Miliband has seldom offered any concrete ideas for how to achieve this alchemy, Glasman does drop a few hints. In The Politics of Paradox, he writes:

“The founders of the labour movement understood the logic of capitalism as based upon the maximisation of returns on investment and the threat this posed to their lives, livelihoods and environment… [They recognised] there was an ethical problem with unreformed capitalism, in that it exerted pressure to turn human beings and their natural environment into commodities.”

So through Blue Labour eyes, the cause of modern environmental ills – and the issue that should inspire a Labour (and popular) commitment to tackling them – lies in the commodification of nature: its reduction to a mere exchange value, ignoring its inherent worth.

This is a strong argument, and certainly worthy of more attention by greens. It clearly stems from Glasman’s inspiration, the works of Karl Polanyi, who wrote in The Great Transformation about capitalism’s inevitable tendency towards commodifying human beings, labour, and the environment.

Yet if a movement were to develop that strongly opposed any attempts to marketise and commodify the natural world, it would find itself up against quite a large number of environmentalists.

Modern environmentalism has developed within the era of ascendent neoliberalism, and as by far the junior partner in this abusive relationship, has compromised much of late in the direction of ‘market-based policies’ – policies, one hastens to add, much loved by the last Labour government.

So carbon is now commodified and traded on the EU Emissions Trading Scheme, whilst biodiversity – the panoply of life itself – is rapidly being compressed into cost-benefit analyses, the latest of which, the National Ecosystem Assessment, values the UK’s ecosystem services at a mere £30bn (a bargain at the price).

These developments, whilst roundly criticised by some greens, are heartily applauded by others, who see in them a way to placate the economists – regardless of the grasping, materialistic values such exercises promote. It has taken leftists like Glasman (and David Harvey) to call out this trend for the perversion it is.

That some environmentalists appear to support nature’s commodification should not deter the left from opposing it; but it is harder to see the public at large having much of a care for what remains a pretty academic and abstract issue. Certainly in terms of building the ‘green populism’ that both Glasman and most environmentalists seek, it seems unlikely to inspire millions.

However, a Blue Labour approach may offer one further answer to the question of building a green mass-movement. To Blue Labour thinker Jonathan Rutherford, “the future is conservative” – and if you buy this assessment, a form of environmentalism that stresses its essentially conservative character will do well.

From the Blue Labour tropes of nostalgia for times and places past, a desire to protect heritage and community against globalisation and markets, and a yearning for a stronger national identity, could come a ‘conservative conservationism’.

We perhaps saw the glimmers of such a political force with the recent campaign against the sale of English forests: an alliance of Shire Tories and traditional greens, united in their rejection of the privatisation – the commodification – of a common, natural good.

The forests campaign was brought to an impromptu end by the government’s swift U-turn, before it could flower into a full-blown movement.

But the scent of a ‘Blue Labour environmentalism’ is discernible in earlier periods of green protest: in the anti-roads movement of the 1990s, which saw Middle England rise up to block the developers, alongside dreadlocked hippies; in the enduring (and ever-increasing) popularity of the National Trust; and perhaps, going further back, in the curious blend of patriotism and early environmentalism displayed by interwar Woodcraft groups (see the Kibbo Kift Kin, for example).

Most promisingly, perhaps, this ‘conservative conservationism’ is implicit in the pantheon of largely apolitical but organised wildife and nature preservation groups, whose millions of members are now often ‘signed up’ as part of political coalitions but who seldom play very active political roles themselves in this process.

Robin Cook used to call environmentalism the ‘sleeping giant’ of British politics; perhaps it may yet be awoken through a green philosophy that blends the protection of Britain’s woods and commons with a weave of romantic patriotism. William Morris would be its patron saint, and Vaughan Williams provide its anthems.

Perhaps. Yet even if this latent goodwill towards the natural world could be converted into political action, there is no guarantee it would be directed at solving global environmental problems.

Just as likely, it seems, it would champion a range of ‘Nimby’ causes, opposing all developments that threatened local landscapes, regardless of their role in decarbonising the wider economy or satisfying our consumption: look at the current popularity of anti-wind farm protests, for instance.

If Blue Labour seeks to encourage conservative sentiment of this sort, it risks making a virtue out of parochialism at just the time when a greater consciousness of global ecological management is needed.

The bottom line is this. We are in a situation where the British environmental movement is in need of re-energising; the British left is seeking reinvigoration; and climate change and resource depletion are accelerating.

If Blue Labour is to have real relevance to the central problems of the 21st century, it needs a credible position on the environment and how the left interfaces with green issues.

So far, its hinted answers have proven intriguing, but they need far more detail before they can hope to meet the huge challenges posed by environmental degradation.

Guy Shrubsole works for the Public Interest Research Centre, researching climate, energy and economics.

Siemens' City fees or Bombardier's blue-collar jobs?

2011-07-02T09:00:00.000+01:00

Joe Sarling slams the Coalition's doublespeak on 'rebalancing the economy' as it turns its back on East Midlands industry

A worker in the Bombadier factory, Derby, 2008 - DARREN
SMITH

Derby, one of the epicentres of the industrial revolution for the UK, has a rich and proud tradition of industry and manufacturing.

Steeped in its history of textile production from the 18th century, as well as its automobile and locomotive manufacturing from the 20th century, this area has long held a strong work ethic with industry at its heart.

If we fast forward, the present day tells a different story.

The last remaining British train factory, run by Bombardier, has suffered a potentially fatal blow.

One of the biggest UK locomotive contracts, worth £1.5bn, for an order of 1200 trains to upgrade the Thameslink fleet, has been awarded to the German manufacturing giant Siemens.

The 3000 jobs at Bombardier could now be at risk as they have also lost out on a foreign contract, just weeks before the UK government’s decision to procure abroad.

Supporters of the Siemens decision will often cite (and therefore hide behind) the differentiation in quality of product and service being offered, EU procurement and ‘value for money’.

For me this fundamentally misses the point. Government should work harder to ensure that existing British bids are brought up to spec, rather than taking the easy route of bowing to ‘market forces’.

Why? Because contracts of this size have the potential to transform and secure the sustainability of an area. When domestic finance is taken away, jobs will be lost and there will be a greater strain on the welfare and retraining budgets.

On an economic level, the local economy depends on local jobs, local income and local spending. Such a loss cannot be internalised by this one firm; the negative effects for interdependent businesses will undoubtedly be felt.

Moreover, on a social level, the consequences can be substantial. Many of these workers will struggle to find a comparable job in the region, and as such the heart of a community will be ripped out. The breakdown of the community, the loss of social ties, self-worth, health and aspiration, to name a few, will all drive the area into further trouble.

Why lose industry to then spend vast amounts of money on welfare, retraining, healthcare and regeneration projects?

What of the passion and talent for these jobs? What happens to the tacit knowledge and experience which gets learnt, built upon and retaught?

This is a story repeated up and down the country.

We need to find ways to keep industry in the regions. If we don’t then our reliance on the South East will grow further and we will have missed the opportunity to genuinely rebalance the economy.

Regional banks would ensure that local entrepreneurial talent and capital are used for the benefit of the local area. The skills and experience could be retained and local industry could continue to grow and innovate.

In parallel with this we should genuinely promote apprenticeships and vocational training. The passing down of skills and ‘learning by doing’ is vital to the local economy and we should eradicate the stigma attached to vocation.

The process will also require legislative changes, to bring about a new attitude to procurement and workers’ representation on company boards.

We must work to recognise the deeply entangled and reciprocal relationship between the market and society.

It is precisely on these points that Blue Labour shines.

Labour stands for liberty and equality, but also fraternity

2011-07-01T09:00:00.001+01:00

David Lammy MP says Blue Labour's focus on relationships reminds us that we are not free-floating individuals

Fish on sale at Billingsgate market, London - SCOTTED400

Helen Goodman’s critique of Blue Labour is an important moment.

It brings out into the open a debate that has been taking place in private conversations and seminar rooms for months now.

The Blue Labour eBook, which I contributed to, was an attempt to provoke a debate that would contribute to the renewal of the Party. Helen picked up the conversation in her response and I want to continue it here in the same spirit.

Helen frames her response to the eBook around four anecdotes. I would like to start with a short story of my own.

It is of my mother – a quiet but inspirational woman who arrived in Britain at the tail end of the Windrush generation. Born in a small village on the banks of the Demerara River, Guyana, she was the first of seven children, raised solely by her mother who worked as a seamstress to make ends meet.

Aged 32, she landed at Gatwick in 1970 to a routine strip search. Swapping the calm of rural Guyana for the chaos of the London metropolis was a culture shock to say the least.

Just two years on from Enoch Powell’s ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech, Britain was far from a picture of racial harmony. Nor were the odds stacked in favour of a woman entering the workforce without much in the way either of money or formal qualifications.

My mother was not a political animal but she was a Labour voter through and through. At a time when comics would routinely insult black people on television, she relied on the Left to help her stand up to racists and bigots.

When my father left, she became responsible for looking after five children alone. The same people who fought against racism were those who also spoke up for single mothers. They were the counterweight to Tory politicians and their friends in the media.

Meanwhile, there were bills to be paid. At times mum did three jobs to get by and was, of course, a beneficiary of the Equal Pay Act, passed in the same year she arrived in Britain. Like countless others, she trusted socialists to stick up for her when the child benefit was frozen.

She relied on public libraries to nourish the minds of her children. She watched proudly as the first generation in our family was given the opportunity to go to university.

Later in life she was cared for wonderfully by the NHS, which treated her with dignity and compassion. No-one in our family needs reminding about the value of individual rights, or that the state can be an enormous force for good. As Helen says, 1945 was an historic victory, not a wrong turning.

Liberty, equality… fraternity

The question begged by Blue Labour is what this inheritance of social liberalism and a robust defence of the welfare state leaves out. What are its limitations?

For me the answer is that Labour stands not just for liberty and equality, but also fraternity. Something important exists in between the state and the individual – our relationships with one another.

When my mother arrived in Britain it was not just the state that stepped in to help her. A friendly trade union official from NUPE helped her into a course of learning that made it possible to find work that could provide for a family.

The local church provided a sense of fellowship and community. Friends and neighbours looked after her children while she juggled life as a single mother. When she was ill doctors in the NHS treated her illness, but Macmillan nurses also provided invaluable care.

As she grew older she relied more and more on her children, just as we had once relied upon her. All these relationships made the difference to her life. This is what Blue Labour is trying to get at.

The focus on relationships explains why, despite the overlap with strands of liberalism, Labour is not a liberal party. Unlike the Lib Dems we do not see people simply as free-floating individuals. Our politics is not orientated towards an unrealisable version of freedom where we can each do whatever we please.

Instead Labour politics is built on the idea that people are social beings, dependent on one another. We are not born free but dependent on our parents. As we grow older, a good life depends in large part on family, friends, neighbours, colleagues and strangers.

We never stop being mutually dependent. How we treat each other matters.

Because relationships are so important to people’s lives they must be important to our politics. Labour, for example, needs a story about the family. Of course we care passionately about women’s rights and children’s rights but that’s not the end of the story.

We have to seriously raise the volume and the focus more on the value of strong relationships between adults, good parenting and care for the elderly. We are at our best when we speak to that ethic of care, as well as a language of liberation.

We can’t be satisfied by talking about children in care and retirement homes – the workings of the state. There is just more to it than that.

In the workplace there should be the same emphasis. Of course we stand for workers rights – on pay, on leave, on flexible working and the rest. But if the conversation between employers and employees never gets further than the right to strike versus the right to sack an employee then we have big problems.

The reason worker representation on company boards is such a powerful idea is that it holds out the promise of constructive, respectful relationships based on give and take. Workers taking responsibility for the success of firms. Firms taking responsibility for the well-being of workers.

Again, it’s not just about the state telling employers and employees what to do. It’s also about the quality of the relationships between employers and employees within firms.

In other areas of life, the principle holds. We support free speech but that doesn’t mean we have given up on the idea of a society with civility and mutual respect. We support personal and religious freedom but we also understand the importance of an integrated and harmonious society.

Too easily a language of individual rights can regress into a shrill and anti-social individualism. Labour politics fails when these ties we have to one another fray. If families disintegrate, if workers do not have a voice, if neighbourhoods are divided and strangers fear and mistrust one another then our politics is stone dead.

We end up willing the ends for social justice, but the means are impossible. People retreat into their own lives and any sense of the common good disappears.

Blue Labour’s insight is that solidarity is both important and fragile. It must be constantly worked at. We can’t just wag our finger and demand that people be good to one another, we have to take seriously the things that make mutual respect more difficult than it should be.

This means listening to people and what they tell us. So when someone says that immigration is a problem in their area then the instant response cannot be to simply brand them a racist.

Our job is to question why neighbour is set against neighbour in the scramble for scarce homes, jobs and services. Rather than judging people for airing their concerns we should be interested in how to ameliorate the things that cause these tensions.

Likewise when someone says that the family has come under pressure since women have entered the workforce we shouldn’t simply shout them down. Rather, we should ask how we can help families adapt to a world in which women rightfully have the chance to pursue their ambitions and earn a living.

In particular, we might consider how we help fathers take on more of the caring at a time when mothers do more of the earning. Feminism and ‘the family’ don’t have to be at odds. We often slip into the same trap where faith is concerned.

When a person or an organisation draws their values from a particular faith then the reaction cannot simply be to dismiss them. We can disagree with faith groups on abortion but still join together to campaign for a cap on lending rates, or against the commercialisation on childhood.

There is, of course, still racism, sexism and religious bigotry to be found in Britain. The battles our party has fought against discrimination of all kinds have been historic and hard won and they are not over yet.

But when we decline the opportunity to enter into conversations about issues like the family, immigration or faith we undermine our own political project. If Blue Labour reminds us of this then it has already achieved a great deal. We are not the Lib Dems, let’s not act like them.

Big society… Big business

If one half of the coalition doesn’t understand the importance of fraternity, the other half forgets that it should apply in markets too. Helen says the catastrophic error of the Big Society is that it does not understand that the voluntary and public sectors often work in partnership.

Absolutely. Ask any Safer Neighbourhoods team. But this is only half the story. The other fundamental weakness of the Big Society is that it has nothing to say about the market place. ‘Big Society not Big Government’ says Cameron, leaving Big Business out of the picture altogether.

The Blue Labour essays are an attempt to address this. They are an antidote to what Ed called the ‘take what you can’ mentality in his speech on social responsibility.

Blue Labour stands opposed to anyone being used simply as a means to an end. That explains why employers should not treat staff as commodities to be exploited, but rather human beings to be respected. People should have a voice at work and be paid a wage they can live on.

It explains the opposition to loan sharks who exploit people’s poverty, enticing people into debt that they will never be able to escape from. It explains the offence at companies who target advertising at other people’s children, manipulating young girls and boys.

It explains why people were so angry at Jack Straw’s revelation that insurance companies are selling personal information to accident lawyers behind people’s backs. It explains why the public are so angry that the banks were able to hold the country to ransom.

This is what the Tories do not understand when they talk about people making ‘free choices’ in markets. A choice between eviction and a loan shark is no real choice. A choice between two bad jobs is no real choice. A choice about whether to let banks go down with millions of people’s savings, or to bail out the richest people in the country is no real choice.

None of these reflect relationships built on give and take: they are about the powerful bullying and exploiting the powerless. Helen is clear that none of this will change without a role for government. I agree, as I expect every contributor to the Blue Labour eBook would.

Collective action is how we stand up to those who profit at the expense of the rest of society. We do it together, through trade unions, cooperatives, consumer movements, civil society campaigns and of course, government at national and international level.

But collective action is not easy. Again we have to be careful how we build the trust and the solidarity and the momentum to take on those who abuse their power in the marketplace. Finger-wagging will not work here either. We have to find connections with people’s lives as they live them.

There is a national campaign for a living wage because, first of all, there was a specific, tangible campaign against certain firms in the City of London. Momentum grew from there as people joined the dots between excess in the City and poverty for those who cleaned the offices of the ‘masters of the universe’.

Stella Creasy is running a brilliant campaign not just against loan sharking in general, but also some credit companies in particular. It gives the campaign a sense of vibrancy and a practical orientation, while the Tories continue to vote measures down in the House.

The Billingsgate campaign that Jon Cruddas has been involved in is another good example. One response to the market porters would be to nod sagely and promise to do what we can at the next G20 summit. Another is to campaign for their cause at a local level, as well as pressing for international action.

In my own constituency I have been working hard to prevent Tottenham Hotspur from leaving the area. The more people get involved in that campaign the more the momentum builds for proper representation of fans on the boards of all football clubs.

In the local party we are campaigning against betting shops swamping local high streets and, despite the Tories and Lib Dems voting down my amendments to the localism bill, building support for a change in the law.

The point is that we shouldn’t be afraid of the particular and the local. This is where people live their lives. It is when discussions about justice and equality become abstracted from everyday life that they lose their persuasive power and political purchase.

Labour was founded as a movement to civilise capitalism – what Blue Labour reminds us is that this must take place in workplaces, in neighbourhoods and in civil society as well as rooms in Whitehall.

Labour traditions

Blue Labour is not a panacea. It has its weaknesses. Some worry that it is overly nostalgic about the past, rather than projecting something modern and forward looking. That it hankers for a world that has gone and isn’t coming back.

Others question whether it has enough to say about self-improvement – that it gives the impression that people should be satisfied with their lot, rather than encouraged to strive for something better.

These have to be taken seriously and worked through. But even here we should be careful not to repeat some mistakes from our recent past. Labour always needs a forward-looking agenda, but we lose touch with people when we fetishize change for its own sake.

When people see their job become more insecure, when they see their family less and when they feel they no longer know their neighbours, this doesn’t always feel like progress – and we need to show we understand that.

Similarly, nothing could be closer to my own heart than helping people from poorer backgrounds fulfil their goals and realise their talents. But there is a difference between ambition and greed. The CEO’s pay matters if they take home millions while their cleaners are not paid enough to get by.

We should stand for aspiration but not the pursuit of money for its own sake.

Nor should Blue Labour be feared as a Trojan horse for something else. The debate it has started is an opportunity to reconnect with some of the ideas our party was founded upon, after thirteen years in government and a political project that challenged many of the Party’s traditions and shibboleths.

We should take its arguments on their merits, rather than mistake it for something it is not, or dismiss it on the basis of an ill-conceived name.

In the foreword to the Blue Labour eBook Ed writes of Labour as ‘a party of overlapping traditions and tendencies’.

He is absolutely right. Labour itself has always been a coalition – of trade unionists, Fabians, Christian socialists, NGOs and local community activists, human rights campaigners, environmentalists, feminists and anti-racists. These traditions compete and coalesce with one another, enriching our party in the process.

Blue Labour has something important to offer, alongside our traditional defence of individual rights and a robust defence of the modern state. Let’s engage with it in that spirit.

Strong communities: free women

2011-06-30T11:45:00.000+01:00

Ivana Bartoletti argues that Labour must fight hard to retain an inextricable link between progress and women’s emancipation

Paramedics, Sydenham Road, London - BAHI

Last week Helen Goodman accused Blue Labour of sexism and of harking back to a “Janet and John” fifties era, and others are expressing concerns for the most provocative and conservative aspects of its proponents’ ideas.

I do believe the movement should be called ‘Blue Labour Men’ (I haven’t heard of a vocal Blue Labour woman yet!), and I do wish they had dismissed the word blue.

But I acknowledge that Blue Labour is as much conservative as it is radical, and I do believe that its provocations are good for the debate they are generating.

In particular, I agree with acknowledging that communities and relationships create a sense of belonging which people need to feel that their life is worthwhile, a feeling which appears to be lost in the jungle of a capitalist society.

Mutualism, cooperative trusts and housing re-establish dignity in economic relationships which is otherwise lost among the power of finance.

But I would like to focus on what Blue Labour would mean for women. Women will be the ones most affected by the reckless choices of the Tory-led government. Poverty, solitude, unemployment: these are realities for many women in this age of dishonest politics and cuts.

Winning the next election means, for Labour, interpreting women’s needs for a better society, and winning their votes.

The main matter of contention I see in Blue Labour agenda is the relationship between localism and universalism. The transformative power of the feminist movement has been in its affirmation of universalism.

It seems obvious now but, decades ago, rights were indeed universal – though only for men. ‘All men are created equal,’ runs the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Women quickly brought to public attention how universalism included them as well.

This was a massive revolution because it obliged nation states to create policies which extended rights to women. The socialist movement has had to come to terms with this as well, and it wasn’t an easy process.

Women fought to foster a relationship between feminism and socialism, which has allowed the creation of an inextricable link between progress and women’s emancipation.

No modern party can lose this link and forget that women thrive when their rights belong to them, irrespective of the community to which they belong, the religion they profess, or which family they grew up in.

Statistics tell us that, in Europe, women die more often as a result of violence than from accidents and disease. And every day women find that winning their struggle for emancipation relies on a government embracing the idea.

Progressive governments create welfare and work policies, instigate serious legislation to tackle abuse, and promote political participation and careers through quotas.

Women know that this would never happen if negotiations were left to the goodwill of the few. Unless there is a clear orientation, together with strong indications provided by the political centre, change cannot be achieved.

Blue Labour states that people get together to achieve a common good and, because they care for that common good, they negotiate to define it. But where does that negotiation take place and, more importantly, are women’s experiences and perspectives equally important in defining it?

Moreover, if the common good is open to negotiation, what are the non-negotiable values? Non-negotiable principles are essential for women: history reminds us that, even when established, women’s rights are always very tenuous, and are often the first to disappear.

One other issue relates to the role of the State. I agree that a local dimension allows people to be nurtured and therefore to thrive. But women know that sharing a community is not always a matter of choice.

Single mothers bringing up their children and worrying about their future know better than others that communities are often the result of segregation and poverty. Women know that some communities have better schools for their children, safer streets and better parks.

Government-led programmes for equality might have failed in the past, but the reason is not in their being led by the state, but in their inability to acknowledge the inherent nature of Capitalism: its difficulty in combining distribution with equality (which is exactly the fight Labour ought to win, with new ideas and tools).

I believe a great deal of Blue Labour’s premise is good. It’s with some of the consequences of their discourse that I have a problem. In ‘The Labour Tradition And The Politics Of Paradox’, Jonathan Rutherford provocatively states that a ‘patriarchal social order’ has now been ‘fragmented and disrupted by… the growing independence of women.’

Technically, this is true, as it always happens when an existing order is disrupted: women have changed a lot and family life has changed with them.

But if women have evolved, men haven’t, and the society hasn’t changed enough to accommodate women’s claim for true equality.

The answer to this is not to go back to how we were but to step into a more radiant future, as Marc Stears acknowledges.

Our current world is dominated by international finance and international institutions, created by men and mostly run by them, with their constant gambling on short-lived money and little or no care of the consequences (as the recent Dominique Strauss Khan case demonstrates).

This state of affairs should place women at the forefront of Labour’s regeneration of values, symbols, missions, methods, practices and language.

This is certainly the opposite of locking women back in their domestic function to preserve traditions and values: it’s about change and, for Blue Labour, it should be about using its radicalism and provocative work to influence a progressive future for women.

Ivana Bartoletti is a Human Rights and Equal Opportunities specialist currently working for the NHS. A member of the Fabian Women's Network committee and a Hackney Labour Party observer and activist, prior to moving to London was a Policy Adviser in the Romano Prodi Government and Head of Human Rights of the Italian Democrats of the Left. Ivana has worked on communities’ development for many years as part of the global social forum movement.

These attacks on blue Labour are hollow

2011-06-29T11:14:00.000+01:00

Marc Stears argues that Labour's new ideas look forward: to a future based on a spirit of mutual responsibility

Father with pushchair - JOHN KEOGH

"Britain's past was rotten and blue Labour wants to bring it back."

That is the essence of an extraordinary series of recent attacks on Labour's new thinking. Rarely can such a short political argument have been as wrong in as large a number of ways.

Even those who know nothing of blue Labour should recognise that the attack can't be true.

To start with, our past simply wasn't all bad. It is true that terrible things happened in our nation's history. Slavery and empire were all too real. Women were excluded from our politics. Sexual minorities were oppressed.

But as there were oppressors, so were there people who came together to struggle against their oppression.

Britain's cultural inheritance is one of openness and toleration, and of courageous campaigns for social equality, at least as much as it is of exclusion and domination. We have great heroes to celebrate as well as enemies to condemn.

Those who are aware of blue Labour will also recognise, though, that the second aspect of the argument is wrong too. Blue Labour is not about the past, let alone about bringing it back. It is, instead, focused firmly on the future.

Blue Labour aspires to release a spirit of mutual responsibility in Britain. It is founded on one simple principle: that our lives go well only when they are lived in sustainable relationship with others.

It is the quality of our human relationships, rather than the size of our bank balances, that give our lives their meaning. It is the question of what we owe to each other that should shape our moral lives.

This isn't a backwards-looking idea. Our friends, families, neighbours and work colleagues aren't any less important to us today than they were in the past.

It may be harder to spend time with some of them than it used to be, especially if our pay rates are so low that we have to work two jobs, one day and one night, or because we are separated from our parents by vast distances. But they are still what matter most.

Nor is it a Conservative idea. We all know that our personal relationships improve as our common life improves. And we know that our common life improves when we have schools, hospitals and parks that are open to all, when we feel valued at work, and when we feel secure on our streets.

As Maurice Glasman has said many times, blue Labour is a radical, democratic, Labour politics that enables people to come together to forge a common good.

Why, then, have so many people argued otherwise? For some, the scepticism is the product of a long-standing academic debate, of interest only to scholars.

There has always been a suspicion of the politics of relationship among a certain kind of leftwing intellectual, those who believe that such prosaic, everyday concerns detract our attention from the more crucial questions of state and economy.

As the great feminist historian Sheila Rowbotham once put it, this kind of thinker possesses "a horror of cosiness, as if cosiness were almost more dangerous than capitalism itself".

For others, though, the motivation is not as innocent. In the last few weeks, Ed Miliband has begun to sketch a new and compelling vision for Britain's future and he has placed mutual responsibility right at its core.

There are those, even in the Labour party, who would prefer that Miliband did not succeed. These critics would prefer him to stay locked within the broken paradigms of Blair and Brown. There seems little doubt that this is why the Mail on Sunday turned on blue Labour this week.

It is fortunate for Miliband and for Labour, then, that the attack is such a self-evidently empty one. Miliband knows that an approach to politics that seeks to improve the ways we relate to each other, a politics that goes far beyond the bottom line, is forward-looking not backward-looking.

And he knows this for one simple reason. Such an approach does what no other can. It provides the answer to the most fundamental question that we can ever pose in politics: what kind of country do we want to leave our children?

Attack the Tories by mutualising public services

2011-06-25T17:24:00.000+01:00

Jon Wilson on the blue Labour challenge to the government's slash-and-burn public service reforms

David Cameron at the Big Society Conference, March
2010 - CONSERVATIVE PARTY

Labour faces a tough task fighting Conservative plans to dismantle Britain's public services.

As ever Tory tactics are dastardly. They hope we'll respond to their attack by defending the 'big state' in all its guises.

They want to say we're on the side of meddling bureaucrats and public sector union bosses so they can claim it's only they who are in touch with real people's lives. In fact, they're anything but.

We need hard thinking about how we can challenge these arguments. That means a clear idea of the kind of state that Ed Miliband, as Labour prime minister, would preside over - an authentically Labour approach to government which connects to the lives of citizens.

On blogs like this, the debate has started. So far, it has involved an argument about how we can be true to the history of our movement - what Labour did in the past matters to how we think about Labour now. The first majority Labour government of 1945 has turned into a crucial battleground.

Against criticisms made in the Soundings e-book The Labour Tradition and the Politics of Paradox, Ben Folley suggests we need to stand up for the way the 1945 government created a state that intervened in people's lives.

But when Ben talks about 'the gains made for working people' by that state he gives the game away. What about the gains made by working people?

The Labour movement was founded by ordinary people to protect their lives and livelihoods from the rapacity of the free market, and the power of elites who used (and still use) the state to protect their gains from it. Much of what happened in the Attlee government was in that spirit.

The election of a Labour government was a magical post-war moment of solidarity, when communities came together to protect what mattered to them.

Attlee's government did a lot which was fantastic. The idea of taking institutions which we now recognise as vital public services out of the hands of the market was right. The way it did so wasn't.

In practice, the 'nationalisation model' which Maurice Glasman and others have criticised took power away from an elite concerned only with making money.

But it gave it another elite that thought it knew what the people wanted but didn't bother asking. We need to celebrate the spirit that created it. But we shouldn't celebrate the culture of bossy centralism that was its long-term consequence. As Glasman reminds us, in 1945 there were other Labour ways to challenge the market.

The idea behind nationalisation is that people's lives are only improved if everything is controlled from the centre. Defending such an idea now plays into Tory hands.

When it's tried it doesn't work. A 'postcode lottery' in NHS care happens in the public service that has tried to be the most centralised.

But the state is already a lot less 'national' than defenders of centralised state intervention argue. A lot of 'state' services are delivered by local councils, or quasi- autonomous bodies, schools for example, which are accountable to local governors and the council as well as Whitehall.

The reality is we already have a far more diverse and localised 'state' than Whitehall or even many public service workers imagine. Headteachers, school governors, council leaders, health and social service managers make decisions that matter.

Good local leaders connect with the community. But because they're always looking over their shoulder to see what Whitehall is telling them to, many don't involve local citizens. They forget that the most important relationship is with the people who live around them.

The answer is for Labour to increase the role of workers and local citizens in the ownership and management of local public institutions.

We should go back to our roots and make schools, hospitals, SureStart centres, surgeries and universities into democratic mutual institutions. Each should be run by a partnership of employees, local 'service users' and local and national government.

The process of mutualisation needs to be gradual. It should be based on a slow process of strengthening relationships between workers and users, locality and centre. But it would be radical nonetheless.

Mutualising public institutions won't lead to a smaller state. But it would change the way the public sector is run, bringing people into the state and saving it from Tory attack.

It would oppose the ridiculous lack of substance in the 'big society', making them look like hypocrites every time they opposed our plans. It might even make what the Labour party has always called socialism into a reality.

The mutualisation of public services would need central government to play an important role. But it would finally recognise the limited power every national government actually has, and be far more realistic about what central governments can do.

Apart from taxation and some welfare payments government departments don't 'deliver' anything themselves. But the idea - the myth - that state power is centralised means government mistrusts local service providers, and tries to regulate and coerce rather than persuade local institutions.

It's time we recognised that a better public sector needs strong, trusting relationships between the centre and locality. The job of central government is to lead and coordinate. It'll only get anything done by recognising that public institutions need to have their own, local ways of being accountable to society.

When I listen to people defending central state intervention, I hear an argument against trusting people to manage the services that make a difference to their lives. It's not a very Labour voice. We are the party of the people, not the state. We'll only defeat the Tories if we remember that fact.

'Yes we can' wins, but 'how can we?' governs

2011-06-24T13:07:00.002+01:00

Ben Little argues that for Labour to get the most from emergent 'blue' thinkers, it needs to untangle its two core themes

New Jersey voters enthuse about Obama's campaign,
2008 - BARACK OBAMA

In amongst the furore over blue Labour has been a palpable sense of relief.

The Conservative party had stolen a march by thinking beyond a frame of individual choice and the markets, and mitigating the ravages of globalisation through the two-tier communitarianism of red Toryism and the big society.

So it was not until the emergence of Maurice Glasman et al that the Labour party seemed to have something concrete to offer beyond the formula of a liberal economy plus modest redistribution.

People on the left are excited because it appears that there might be some life left in Labour yet. Whether it is the right sort of life seems to be the issue now.

There are two quite distinct parts to blue Labour.

The first is finding a new understanding around identity and values that can work towards a majoritarian politics to challenge neo-liberalism and win elections.

The second is about how to rebuild and renew the party.

This is perhaps a crudely reductive distinction, but it is important to draw it out, as the current elision of these two strands has the potential to seem totalising and misrepresent the importance of both parts individually.

Jonathan Rutherford provides the clearest expression of the majoritarian project when he states that: ‘For Labour to achieve electoral victory in the future it must win over conservative-minded voters - the middle classes in the south and the working classes in the north. It must achieve this by telling a story about the future which unites them in a common sense of national purpose.’

This strand of thought attempts to break through the traditional Labour-Tory divides of North/South, Town/Country, public sector/private enterprise by refashioning the language of the left around identity, work and responsibility rather than individual rights, inequality and efficiency.

By changing our perspective and challenging leftist assumptions of universalism, we can start to see a shared sense of common interest that crosses all of these historic divides.

This thinking is electoral, for example it accounts for the different challenges of Scotland (‘Labour’s future in England is conservative’), but it is also ethical.

It involves taking people’s ideas about the world at face value and not simply seeing us all as dupes of a reactionary media or reducible to polling statistics and guaranteed to vote one way or another if you throw us the right policy bone.

Likewise the second element, re-organisation, puts the real convictions of people at the centre of what the party should be.

Jon Wilson and Marc Steers summarise: ‘The democratic spirit demands that the Labour party become a living movement before it gains office again. Throughout its history, Labour has offered a home to those who wish to come together collectively to overcome the difficulties that face them and to help each other realize their own goals. At its best, Labour is a party which does not claim to know the answers in advance, but where people organise together to shape their own political destiny.’

This is a rejection of the sort of focus group led, swing seat politics that characterised New Labour. What is being suggested is not simply an expansion of the membership, but of a new role for the party at both national and constituency levels.

Labour needs to do more than win elections, it needs to be an important part of people’s lives and draw its priorities from a broad base within society. It needs to become a party of the people, not simply for the people.

This issue becomes one of purpose and infrastructure, of governance and leadership. Key to its resolution is rebalancing the influence of local parties and the parliamentary party. The suggestion here is that the function of local parties will shift dramatically.

This process has been started by the formation of Movement for Change, a community organising wing of Labour that draws upon the techniques of civil society pressure group London Citizens.

Born out of work done by Maurice Glasman with David Miliband, it is potentially a huge asset to the party. It has the potential to revolutionise the way the CLPs operate.

Nevertheless, in his appeals for a politics following the faith based organising that London Citizens practices, Glasman seems to be suggesting that the Labour party could embrace a philosophy lead by the values of the pressure group.

In this way, he more than any other member of the emerging blue Labour group bridges the divide between retelling the political story of the party and its re-organisation. He links ‘the story told with the story lived’ as communication theorist Pearce Barnett would frame it.

The problem is that his might not be the most useful synthesis of these two strands in the blue Labour debate.

While Glasman’s interpretation of Labour’s history is inspiring, his indictment of the managerialism of Labour compelling, and his condemnation of financial capital and the City of London Corporation righteous, the organising approach is insufficient for an overarching party strategy.

Even M4C state as much on their website: ‘Community organising is not the single answer but it can be part of the solution to some of the challenges Labour faces’.

Glasman’s promotion of faith derived action is useful to a point, but the London Citizens model of creating relationships between civil society institutions to make demands of elites, is more effective in the hands of London Citizens than as part of the Labour party.

Alinskyan organising is a process that enables the powerless to make demands of the powerful: it is not designed for running a country.

Saul Alinsky himself was anything but dogmatic, but his philosophy is immovable on one point: its adherents’ constant struggle to improve the lot of those who have the least.

He describes being a community organiser as akin to climbing a mountain where: ‘We see a top, but when we finally reach it, the overcast rises and we find ourselves merely on a bluff. The mountain continues on up. Now we see the ‘real’ top ahead of us, and strive for it, only to find we’ve reached another bluff, the top still above us. And so it goes on, interminably.’*

This is not a philosophy for government, but for making irresistible demands of governments: once you get to the top of the mountain, you’ve got nothing left to do but enjoy the view.

Obama’s supporters learnt this lesson when a populist, grass-roots campaign inspired so profoundly that power itself became an anti-climax.

The Labour party cannot go through the painful task of re-organising itself and rethinking its narrative only to find that the manner of returning to government paralyses it when it comes to effective use of parliamentary power hard won.

Thus we can and must unpick these different strands and appreciate that a way forward can bring together different elements of this thinking, but not necessarily in the combinations they have been presented in so far.
Glasman and the other blue Labour thinkers have created a space for genuinely different and challenging thinking to emerge in the Labour party.

They have slaughtered some of the sacred cows of liberalism and put complacency and the crude calculus of marginal seats on the back foot.

But while community organising and a radical social conservatism may be key pieces in the puzzle for the future of the centre left, it is how they connect with a more pluralistic politics, with issues of intergenerational justice and in tackling the possibility of resource scarcity that will determine the durability of blue Labour as part of the political landscape.

*Saul Alinsky, Rules for Radicals (Random House, 1971) p21.

Ben Little is lecturer in media and cultural studies at Middlesex University, and editor of Radical Future: Politics for the next generation

Blue Labour is just the fight. Labour is the prize

2011-06-21T11:05:00.004+01:00

Jon Cruddas tells Patrick Macfarlane that Labour must give a voice to those the party has “taken the piss out of”

Jon Cruddas - DAVE TETT

“Everyone’s going round saying it’s really good that Labour hasn’t descended into factional fighting.”

“Well actually, arguably you could say it’s not good that Labour’s descended into listlessness.”

For Jon Cruddas, Dagenham MP since 2001, blue Labour “is an attempt to actually kick up a bit of dust, to tip over a few tables, to force people out of their comfort zones, in terms of the scale of the crisis facing Labour.”

“Empirically,” he says, “this is worse than 1979. So the solution is not to say: steady as she goes, this Coalition might collapse and it’s game on. That is the dead zone for Labour.”

As far as Cruddas is concerned, for the last 15 years politics has been “all about a mythical middle England where everyone has a sort of emptied out aspiration… a very specific consumer-led thing, rather than a sense of aspiration for their family or community or neighbours.”

What Labour must work to reclaim, he argues, is “that sense of human flourishing; self-realisation, rather than simply widescreen tellies.”

Cruddas believes that the party helped to denigrate the everyday experience of ordinary people, letting the “relentless forces of commodification” and the “celebrity dynamic” create an atmosphere in which individualism and materialism were the only means by which to secure others’ respect.

Meanwhile Labour “became the party of gangs, of tribes around Blair and Brown, around a recidivist New Labour liberalism versus a middle class cosmopolitanism, and that’s just not enough.”

“Dylan Thomas would say that Labour at its best was parochial and magical, which is a brilliant way of looking at it. Parochial and magical, rather than remote, liberal, condescending.”

For Cruddas the key question is: “How do you give voice? Re-enfranchise people – who we’ve taken the piss out of? Because if Labour becomes simply a party of the metropolitan elite, it will die.”

He offers a bleak prognosis of the consequences of failing to re-engage voters: “If you do not think that you’re being respected, in terms of your grievances – and that they’re being drowned out by other grievances – then you’re going to have something to say about it.”

This, he argues, can find powerful, destructive outlets: “It can lead to a tribal competition around patterns of physiological appearance, and race and identity.”

“And that is exactly what’s happening now: if you look at the Searchlight survey a few months ago – it was a brilliant piece of work, on fear and hope – it tells you a story of people increasingly considering stories of economic security, belonging and their own role, the future of their families, through a prism of race and identity.”

“Now that,” he says, “is very dangerous for the left. Unless you reintroduce elements of class, and reintroduce a politics of identity and belonging, and place and community, then it’s very dangerous.”

“And this is difficult – even uncomfortable – for people, and obviously it’s especially uncomfortable if you just think the electorate is wrong, and your self-righteousness means you don’t have to do anything.”

But “Labour has to inhabit these spaces, because if you don’t, you allow other, more pernicious political forces from the right to operate in them. The question blue Labour faces is trying to navigate through them in a more nuanced way that has otherwise been done so far.”

For Cruddas, winning the debate around race and identity is “not a simple thing of being hard or weak on immigration.” It is about “challeng[ing] the economic orthodoxy of neo-liberalism” that lies behind, for example, free movement of people within Europe.

“You need to separate out and confront the liberal economics that lie behind some of the ways we’ve used immigration for macro-economic outcomes, in terms of pay and growth,” he argues.

“And at the same time you must face up to your responsibilities: that is, your agenda in terms of regularising migrants, and choking off the spaces for unscrupulous employers to abuse them, [as well as] building as many houses as you need.”

The need to reclaim political issues from the right is one that Cruddas clearly feels strongly about. On welfare he says that the party cannot “hit the rewind button back to the last days of the last Labour government. Because no-one will vote for that, and neither is that appropriate.”

“So we have to be bold. But what we cannot do is trade off fundamental principles.”

“We’ve lost that notion of compassion in the welfare system, and we need to get hold of [it], or else – through the way the poor are being re-presented in the red top newspapers – support for the notion of the welfare state will continue to drain away.”

“The trouble with that is we’ve allowed the right to disfigure this debate,” he says. “I voted against the Tory welfare bill, because what we’ve done, through this work capability assessment, is we’ve collapsed issues of illness with issues of worklessness.”

“Unless we boldly defend a modern notion of welfare, built around the generations that went before us, in terms of their sacrifice… you cannot defend the notion of helping people who are more vulnerable.”

Achieving these aims is no mean ambition, and Cruddas argues that the agitational character of blue Labour is key to generating the ideas that Labour needs to do it.

“You have to have different poles of debate that are being deliberately controversial,” he says. “And that should be an ongoing process.”

“Because the fundamental problem for the Labour party is about character; it’s about definition, about what it is. … The search for a deeper sense of political DNA.”

“You have to realise that without this kind of agitational politics, there is no political vitality. Even if you disagree with it, it is a sign of vitality. And in turn, without a sense of political vitality, there isn’t a sense of hope.”

The route back to power: blue Labour's 'hands-off state'

2011-06-17T10:21:00.000+01:00

Jim Murphy MP argues that the whole Labour movement must again embrace blue Labour's 'people first' agenda

Crossing the Wearmouth Bridge, Sunderland - DKODIGITAL

Rooting ourselves in people's lived experiences must be the core component to our renewal, since it is here that we did not go far enough in government.

We did not devolve power sufficiently and too often change became a principle in itself, sometimes overlooking those unable to reap the benefits of our globalised societies and economy.

In 1997 new Labour understood the real positives and negatives of the then configuration of market and state, embracing the former and designing policy to counter the latter. Doing the same, by listening and learning, is the route to power.

Lord Maurice Glasman, the British uncle of blue Labour, is right to argue that the 2008 crash was a crisis of corporate governance and exposed the inherent volatility of capitalism, and that new Labour was complacent about its regulation.

Many would question, however, the wisdom in interrogating Crosland's revisionism to proceed now with the notion that ‘capitalism is based on the exploitation of human beings and nature'.

This would unlearn some key lessons of the 1980s, namely that through a careful embrace of a market economy prosperity and social justice can be both generated.

I believe in a market economy, but things can never be the same again.

Our future success can be based upon markets with a soul. Britons are entrepreneurs ambitious for ourselves, our loved ones, our country and community, but many too often feel under-equipped to influence their own futures or help protect themselves against forces beyond their control.

In future we must better prepare people to participate in the undoubted opportunities of globalisation as well as be protected from its inherent threats. We need markets which better offer both opportunity and security.

There is a crying need for modern Labour responses to problems like a third of working people facing poorer job opportunities, stagnant living standards and growing insecurity.

Part of the solution is a market economy with a much deeper sense of responsibility that touches everyone from the CEO of a global corporation, the branch bank manager and the union shop steward.

That must mean greater private sector growth across our country, industrial activism which provides people with vocational skills and nurtures the industries of the future, fair wages at source and a modern trade union movement which helps develop careers.

A reformed, sustainable financial services sector must remain a key part of the UK economy - even now it employs over one million people and contributes to over 10 per cent of UK GDP.

As for the blue Labour charge that global markets corrode identity, I say yes but only in part. Globalisation can be contradictory - the spread of information brings knowledge but also culture clashes; trade brings wealth but can disrupt communities and traditions.

A market economy cannot become the catch-all whipping boy for a complicated world of contradiction and change. Indeed, a dichotic position of markets undermining communities overlooks the very fact that if we get the balance right the financial opportunities brought by markets can help strengthen and inspire community.

Blue Labour is right that many of the bonds which once brought people together and were the source of solidarity - local high streets, faith, the workplace, class, family - have been dispersed or diluted and the institutions that once bolstered identity and civic patriotism are weaker rallying points.

But that is not to say that associations are not being formed or that communities are inherently weaker. Communities do exist and are changing shape.

Much which once provided a sense of place competes with new lifestyles dominated by technology, busyness and individual interests, and new associations, whether football clubs, reading groups, afterschool clubs or Facebook dominate people's lives.

It is vital that Labour, be it red or blue, is ever-present in communities, and that demands a fusion of traditional forms of coming together, whether through credit unions, housing associations or faith networks, with real engagement in the new forms of community people themselves have created.

To ignore our communitarian traditions would be to jettison a part of Labour's engrained identity which can help restore and sense of belonging for those who left us. We won't regain power, however, by appearing trapped in a sentimental civics.

Aneurin Bevan's comments on 'ancestor worship' being 'the most conservative of all religions' are a warning against a retreat into the past. We cannot and shouldn't try to turn the clocks back (except for an hour in the autumn - but that's a different debate).

While Blue Labour is right to highlight markets and community as themes where the new Labour approach requires rethinking, it is most insightful in its claim that we were 'too hands on with the state'.

Many of the principal sources of wellbeing and meaning in people's lives are beyond the remit of where the state most effectively operates.

Family, friendship, love, happiness and the daily routines and small shared experiences that constitute a common life are all essential to people's sense of identity, and all come from within the human spirit itself.

If Labour is to put people first we should challenge ourselves and others about the limits of state influence. Alongside policy answers we need to ask what solutions people themselves can be a part of.

Strong local networks, where people know each others' names and families interact, can help reduce antisocial behaviour. Greater knowledge and choice should enable people to reject unhealthy lifestyles. Integration of new arrivals should be a shared experience and joint responsibility.

The path back to power will involve new ideas, organisation and policy, but it will begin and end with people. We mustn't make the mistake Tawney identified eight decades ago of offering too much and demanding too little.

Glasman writes that the goals to be pursued are 'preservation of meaning' and 'democratic egalitarian change'. I would add to this empowerment to fulfil the ambition of oneself and others. That is key to both protecting and strengthening Britain's promise, which Ed Miliband has powerfully argued.

Only by recasting the balance between state action and personal responsibility can we again find a Labour language and culture which belongs to the society out of which it grows.

First published on ProgressOnline, 16 June 2011

How Labour got welfare wrong - and how it can put it right

2011-06-16T09:39:00.002+01:00

Jonathan Rutherford decries Labour's opening up of the welfare system to profiteering and unaccountable corporate power

The speeches by Ed Miliband and Liam Byrne begin to frame Labour's approach to a new social settlement.

Within Labour there is a growing debate about how the party got welfare wrong while in government. The assumption is that it wasn't conditional enough.

As the debate develops about the kind of social settlement Labour wants for the future there are three problems with the welfare reforms that Labour in government implemented that need to be addressed.

Labour has to first get a hearing in the country and then crucially it has to transform the terms of debate about welfare.To do this requires confronting some home truths.

First, the methodologies which underpinned much of Labour's argument about welfare reform are questionable. In 2008 David Freud was interviewed by the Telegraph weeks after he'd started as an adviser on welfare reform to the DWP, a subject he admitted he knew nothing about.

Despite this, Freud claimed: "There are about 3.1 million people not working, I think we can get about 1.4 million back to work". The number appears to have been plucked out of thin air. It was never corrected in public but it was eventually reduced to 1m.

This new figure was the product of research at Sheffield Hallam University. In a 2010 paper the researchers explained their methodology which led to their claim that approximately one million on incapacity benefit were "hidden unemployed". The majority live in former industrial areas and poor working class areas of the country.

How did they arrive at this figure?

They claimed that this figure is the number of IB Claimants who might reasonably be expected to have been in work in a genuinely fully employed economy. They are not shirking. "Their benefit claims are legitimate and their health problems and disabilities are real." But if they had lived for example in Surrey they would certainly be in work.

How do the researchers know that this would be the case? The answer is that they don't know, because the research does not address the issue of health. It takes no account of regional and class inequalities in health.

It ignores the evidence that inequality creates illness and it ignores the detrimental impact of poverty on mental and physical health. It also fails to take into account the high numbers of people with limiting long term illness. The figure of 1 million fit to work is unproven.

The first problem with Labour's welfare reforms was that they effectively removed the issue of limiting long term illnesses from the debate in favour of the spurious concept of a "dependency culture". Labour's welfare reform which is being implemented by the coalition misjudges the levels of chronic illness that actually exist.

Not only is it causing considerable suffering, it is also going to be very expensive as people who are unfit to work are pushed off IB onto Job Seekers Allowance where they will either fall by the wayside, be caught in a revolving door of employment and unemployment or end up claiming ESA again.

Second, the Work Capability Assessment (WCA) introduced by the 2009 Welfare Reform Bill is poorly designed and does not accurately assess a claimants everyday incapacity over time.

People who are mentally ill, parents of adult children with an Autism Spectrum Condition, and literally hundreds of thousands of others with complex and intermittent illnesses who want to work but know that they cannot in the way expected of them by employers and the state, know the WCA is not fit for purpose.

Medical expertise is not central to its functioning and decision making. It is a tick box computer programme run by ATOS employees which lacks the capacity to pick up complex illnesses, particularly mental health issues and Autism Spectrum Conditions.

Policy consultant Steve Griffiths has used tribunal data and estimates that since the introduction of Incapacity Benefit in 1995, "at a very conservative estimate" 500,000 people have been wrongly disallowed Incapacity Benefit, or more recently ESA.

More than 300,000 have had their benefit restored at huge cost to the tax payer. Many never reach a tribunal. Richard Thomas, Chair of the Administrative Justice and Tribunals Council has said that the cases heard by tribunals are probably the "tip of the iceberg".

The second problem, which was a consequence of the first, is that Labour ended up with a harsh and punitive approach to people who were sick and disabled.

Third, Labour has opened the door to the private sector and so introduced into the welfare system the commodification of people who are sick and disabled. It will prove to be a costly mistake. The Work Capability Assessment is a case in point.

In 1992 the giant US insurance company Unumprovident was brought in by the then Secretary of State for Social Security, Peter Lilley to help tighten up access to Invalidity Benefit. In April 1997, when the new All Work Test was introduced, the company launched an expensive campaign.

One ad ran: "April 13, unlucky for some. Because tomorrow the new rules on state incapacity benefit announced in the 1993 autumn budget come into effect. Which means that if you fall ill and have to rely on state incapacity benefit, you could be in serious trouble."

At the time Private Eye pointed out the conflict of interest involved in the company's advertising campaign. The company denied it but its chairman, Ward E. Graffam, did acknowledge the "exciting developments" in Britain: "The impending changes to the State ill-health benefits system will create unique sales opportunities across the entire disability market and we will be launching a concerted effort to harness the potential in these."

Meanwhile in the US the company was involved in large scale malpractice and was subject to investigation and an increasing number of class actions. It changed its name to Unum and here in the UK retained its connection to the DWP.

It continued to help shape the argument for welfare reform, sponsoring conferences, paying for research, funding a centre at Cardiff University where former DWP senior personnel wrote the framework for the Green Paper for the 2009 Welfare Reform Act.

Unum has been a principal mover in constructing a new market in income protection through its lobbying activity and involvement in tightening up the various tests. It has been a long term strategy that it is now exploiting.

And it clearly has longer term ambitions to see the wholesale marketisation of health and welfare. When the national roll out of the new ESA began in April, Zurich insurance company was advertising its income protection scheme. Zurich's income protection business is owned by Unum.

The third problem was that Labour opened the welfare system up to profiteering and unaccountable corporate power.

The old system of welfare could not cope with the social catastrophe created by Thatcherism, deindustrialisation and globalisation. But Labour confused the sick and disabled with the unemployed.

It underestimated the enormous difficulty getting people people who are chronically sick into a worthwhile occupation. It was naive about the corporate interests that are staking out new markets. The Coalition is now implementing Labour's welfare reforms and they are a social policy disaster in the making.

Labour has to face this and acknowledge what it got wrong and then it needs construct a more democratic, compassionate and relational approach to welfare.

A covenant around welfare begins with a contributory insurance principle that protects everyone against the risks of unemployment, illness, disability. It is the best chance of sustaining a public universal welfare system in which everyone has a stake.

It has to be a system that is based on responsibility and compassion and it must support those who are unable to contribute due to disability or long term illness without subjecting them to a punitive regime of endless testing and sanctions.

A social insurance system does not resolve the massive inequalities in income, wealth and opportunity that divides the country and so a new welfare settlement has to be part of much broader economic reforms that distribute capital, decent jobs and productive wealth creation across the whole country.

Ed Miliband's speech points in this direction and it is the way we need to go.

Originally published on the New Statesman's Staggers blog, 15 June 2011

Compass debate: what is blue Labour's economy?

2011-06-15T11:47:00.000+01:00

The Compass Annual Conference, the Institute of Education, 2 Bedford Way, London WC1H 0AL | 25 June 2011 | 1.30pm

What is blue Labour's economy?

- Lord Glasman

- Frances O'Grady (TUC)

- Paul Everitt (CEO, Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders Ltd)

- Duncan Weldon (Npen)

Tickets available here.

Who will own the future?

2011-06-14T12:16:00.000+01:00

Jonathan Rutherford takes a long hard look at how the current political settlement is crushing the values of our communities

Playing cricket in Saddleworth, West
Yorkshire - JIM GRADY

Labour is out of touch with the country, and this is not just about politics.

Its members and supporters tend to be different in their cultural and emotional responses to modernity and change.

There’s an argument that this doesn’t matter too much because we can forge a progressive alliance of like minds to win an election. Labour success can be measured by the number of Liberal Democrat voters we can win over. They’re people like us, they just need persuading.

But there is no liberal progressive majority to be had either in England or in the other nations of Britain. A strategy aimed at winning over fellow travellers will be an exercise in talking to ourselves.

For Labour to achieve electoral victory in the future it must win over conservative-minded voters - the middle classes in the south and the working classes in the north . It must achieve this by telling a story about the future which unites them in a common sense of national purpose.

Cameron and the Conservative party have not been able to do this. The right do not fully understand the mood that has been taking shape in the country over the last decade.

The Labour party as a national political force is in danger of terminal decline, but this is not a big-c Conservative moment. Three years after the financial crash, the new political and sociological landscape of Britain is beginning to reveal itself.

While Labour in government championed the aspirations of earning and owning, fundamental shifts in popular feeling were taking shape across the country around the issues of identity, belonging and a sense of place.

Labour’s promotion of immigration and a flexible labour market, in the name of increasing levels of GDP, showed that it did not recognise these changes and how they were undermining its electoral support. It had accommodated itself to the neo-liberal Thatcherite hegemony and was not attuned to its externalities.

These externalities are often cultural and psychological. The new structure of feeling is a conservative response across classes to the decades of intensified individualisation and globalisation driven by liberal market capitalism.

A combination of predatory capitalism and complicit government policy has undermined people’s financial and social security, fractured social ties and caused a significant shift in the burden of risk from the state and business onto the individual. This applies as much to the middle classes as to the working classes.

Labour must now confront the popular reaction to its brand of technocratic and utilitarian modernisation, and do so in the unfamiliar realms of emotion and culture. Two examples are immigration and crime.

Labour has begun to acknowledge that it made mistakes on immigration and to admit it did not recognise the fear and insecurity caused by the undercutting of wages.

However this rational economic argument misses the fact that many people’s opinions about immigration are formed through a deep sense of loss of a cultural identity and sense of belonging. Culture is where people create a sense of meaningfulness and forge identities of connection, but Britain’s culture is disorientated.

A disorientated culture throws up questions like 'who are we?' and 'what is our life about?' without being able to answer them. Cultural difference, transient neighbours, press images of illegal immigrants and the ebb and flow of foreign labour give form to often unspoken anxieties.

Labour also struggles to understand people’s fear of crime. Its solution of a harsher penal code to assuage populist demands for security and retributive justice make some kind of sense as a short term political fix but do not diminish the fear and rage.

Despite significant reductions in crime, parents fear the abduction of their children, and older people fear burglary and mugging. Public spaces feel threatening even if statistically speaking they are not.

But statistics and official pronouncements make little impact on anxieties generated by an anomic society with its tenuous social bonds, diminished sources of informal policing and a weakened civic culture. The young fear the humiliation of mugging and bullying and the older fear moral decay and the collapse of social order. The criminal justice system will not resolve the dilemma of our insecurity.

Social groups who once embraced the forward march of global modernity are no longer so confident about the benefits of progress. The pioneers of cultural and economic transformations bought the New Labour message of greater consumer choice and freedom.

Today, like the poorest in society, many are experiencing the financial insecurities, psychological stresses and existential meaninglessness of capitalist modernisation. The system does not have their interests at heart, and now it is no longer delivering the incomes and rising asset prices that provided compensation.

The future is no longer so bright. What matters is to live in the moment.

Those for whom the risks of globalisation outweighed the benefits have experienced cultural devastation and moral confusion. The traditions they once held dear feel smashed to pieces, and their values trashed.

Those who were once skilled are de-skilled, those who once carried authority are reduced, those who had pride in their work and status have lost it or fear losing it. Alienated and humiliated the past looks like a better place, and for some it often was.

The Coalition holds the present, the defeated hold the past. Who will claim the future?

It will be won by the politics that starts engaging directly with people’s anxieties and speak to what matters to them, which is not politics, but the love and relationships of family and friends, a sense of belonging, a belief that we are worthy of the esteem of others, and meaningful work.

What matters is that we are valued and that the place in which we live reflects back to us this value. This does not mean being bound into a community - the ethic of self-fulfillment lies deep in our consciousness - but the feeling that we are at home in the world.

Such a politics must be able to connect the sentiments of pride in place, love of family and personal esteem to the larger purpose of rebuilding the country.

This politics of the common good is grounded in institutions that mutually reinforce benevolence and responsibility to others and which optimise a high synergy between individual ambition and the public good.

Social security and an equitable production of wealth and resources encourage individual self-realisation and more durable and varied forms of aspiration.

The future is conservative - but it will be so in one of two ways. If the Tories succeed in mobilising areas of affluence and economic growth it will be brutal, reactionary, and divisive, organised around a temporarily revived predatory capitalism.

Or if Labour succeeds in reconnecting with people, it can be a future that is democratic, decent and valuing of human equality, organised around the common good and a reformed model of capitalism. Labour must lay claim to this future with the promise of a new covenant of protection and security across generations and classes.

It is a politics that will require Labour to begin what the New Right did so brilliantly in the 1970s and 1980s and facilitate the groundwork for a new decades long hegemony of the centre left.

Though Labour is in dire trouble and the economy teetering on the edge of recession, the historical conditions exist to begin to forge a new hegemony. What it needs is the determination to see it through.

If you want to get tough on crime, start with inequality

2011-06-13T11:15:00.002+01:00

Ejos Ubiribo asks where blue Labour should go after the failure of ASBOs and tough talk

Mural, Waterlop - DAVE KNAPIK

A decade after 10-year-old Damilola Taylor was stabbed to death in a stairwell in Peckham, by children not much older than him, serious youth violence is still a grave problem in Britain.

The causes are multifaceted: absent role models at home, fear that masquerades as hyper-patriarchal masculinity, moral decay, inadequate early schooling and high exclusion rates, high unemployment. But at the root of it is a problem that no government has got to grips with: inequality.

The existing multi-agency approach understands the complexity of the problem, but will not have lasting effectiveness until we re-prioritises existing resources. We can no longer afford to ignore the fact that inequality leads to crime. Not when children are killing each other.

Of course there are plenty of examples of young people from poor communities who are law-abiding with bright prospects, and much can be learnt from them, as well as adults who have made something of themselves despite their impoverished background and a system rife with racial and class inequality.

However, the bleak reality is that in deprived inner cities across the UK, there are children living in poverty and fear. In this context, vulnerable victims easily turn into violent perpetrators. Most of these young people say they are in gangs and carry weapons for protection.

The coalition government, like the last Labour government, and the Tories before them, are failing to consider these factors in their plans for reducing youth offending.

Take the coalition’s recent strategy to tackle gang-related violence and crime. Gang injunctions, first introduced by Labour in the Policing and Crime Act 2009, give police and local authorities the power to use the civil courts to impose a range of intrusive and punitive injunctions that are claimed to disrupt gang-related violence.

And now gang injunctions are to be extended to 14-year-olds through the Crime and Security Bill. Like ASBOs, these injunctions are ineffective, short-term solutions that criminalise young people by the back door, as breaching the order can result in a two years prison sentence or a fine.

Giving young people criminal records is not any kind of solution. I am not suggesting that those who act violently should not be punished; I believe that they should be held accountable, but the fact is our current prison system doesn’t work.

Rather than rehabilitate, it sets a lot of young people on a path of criminality for life; evident in our high recidivism rates for youth offenders. And it certainly doesn’t act as a deterrent.

For my 2010 article Still the Enemy Within, Josiah, 17, told me that prison was “nothing.” He said: “If I get caught what are they really going to do to me? What send me to prison? I’ll look at the judge and I’ll be thinking is that all you got for me?”

Meanwhile the need to make ends meet, coupled with a dearth of aspiration and opportunities, means that crime often seems like a necessity.

Dumi, 29, who was born in Nigeria and grew up in North Peckham, told me of his grim childhood marred by abject poverty. From the age of ten, knives, guns, gangs and crime were common features in his life, and by his teens he had cultivated a ruthless reputation and he was feared and respected.

While the violence of his youth is a thing of the past, crime is not. He agrees that selling drugs is “an occupational hazard”, but even so, he’d “rather go out there and take the risk than be broke; I might as well be in prison”.

It is disgraceful that in 20 years, young people’s experience in Peckham has remained largely the same – inter-generational downward mobility and black people over-represented amongst the poor. Today one in three young people are unemployed in Peckham, compared to one in five last year.

Sadly this is mirrored in poorest places across the UK. In northern English and Scottish cities, white working-class boys and girls are engaged in serious violence. Faced with a programme of cuts which the IFS has shown will hit the poorest harder than the well-off, what hope do these young people really have?

This is where blue Labour can make a difference. If we are to turn things around the government must introduce radical policies that prioritise equality.

Reducing the wealth gap in terms of income differentials will see a long-term benefit from increased social mobility, and the prospect of decent jobs and a better quality of life in deprived communities.

Until then we are back where we started - imprisoning more black youths.

Ejos Ubiribo is a freelance writer, social activist and a member of the Trident Advisory Group (TAG), which provides Trident Operation Command Unit with independent advice in tackling gun crime, as well as interaction with and policing of the black communities in London.

Listening, not shouting down: how to beat the EDL

2011-06-11T13:24:00.000+01:00

Joe Sarling argues that to really re-engage with the public, Labour must understand why some of them sympathise with the EDL

The EDL in Luton - MARTIN SPOONER

Blue Labour hasn’t shied away from provoking debate within the Labour party.

One issue in particular which has caused friction is that of the movement’s role in reengaging with what Lord Glasman correctly calls ‘EDL-sympathisers’.

At this point, I would like to stress that a sympathiser is not the same as a member.

Previous articles on the subject have often confused and interchanged these two words, and as such it is important to emphasise this difference.

Other commentators have gone down the route of dismissing engagement with such groups on the grounds of prejudice, racism and intolerance.

While these qualities may or may not have been accurately attributed, this article doesn’t seek to discuss the content and beliefs of such groups, but will look at why and how they have grown in popularity; why the sympathiser base has increased.

It has been clear over the last couple of years that the EDL has grown in stature. It has become, for some, the key outlet through which to get their voice heard and to show their frustration with their current situation.

People living in areas where the EDL is on the rise suffer from a shortage of jobs, lack of opportunity and benefit dependence. After the initial surge of support for Labour, driven by raised aspiration and hope in the early Blair years, this group has become increasingly disenfranchised and feel they have lost their voice.

As with any demographic group or issue, if people feel that more moderate representatives are not listening then they either completely disengage or become louder and more extreme.

It is here that the EDL has managed to capture the imagination of some, and has created – not necessarily in a way that provides answers to these voters’ initial objections – a scapegoat for their concerns.

Certainly, a common theme that blue Labour and EDL-sympathisers share is that of nationalism, but it comes from very different places.

At the core of the former is a nationalism which is positive and attaches pride, as opposed to a nationalism which acts as barrier or discriminatory force, and this is what we should use to connect with the electorate.

Yes, a greater level of education and understanding has a role to play in shifting attitudes, but it will fall on deaf ears if we lack legitimacy.

This legitimacy comes from engagement and ensuring that voters’ concerns are heard. It will partly come from the new ideas that blue Labour brings, as well as meaningful interaction, and the ability of the public to change how the party is run.

What the EDL stands for is up to its leaders to communicate and for the electorate to decide. What is key for (blue) Labour is to understand the concerns and problems people face in areas where the EDL is popular, and why people could warm to it over moderate parties.

With this knowledge, blue Labour can turn from a political philosophy into a movement: one that seeks to listen, and not just to garner support.

Oxford's 'no confidence' points the way for UK universities

2011-06-07T12:12:00.003+01:00

Jonny Medland suggests that Oxford and Cambridge provide an enduring model for sustaining democracy in higher education

Today we hear that the Commons Public Accounts Committee is raising the prospect of student numbers at universities being cut, confirming suspicions that UK higher education policy is out of control.

The white paper on the future of higher education was originally due out last year, and is now set for release at some point this month.

But while the government is rightly being criticised for its short-sighted, incoherent vision of universities, it’s deeply unclear what view Labour should be offering.

Although Ed Miliband supported a graduate tax during his leadership campaign, it’s still unknown whether this will formally become party policy going into the next general election.

Just yesterday, Labour’s higher education spokesman was commending “the initiative” of the philosopher AC Grayling for planning to start an £18,000-a-year university dedicated to the humanities.

Not – I believe – a sentiment that many in the Labour Party share.

This lack of clarity fundamentally stems from uncertainty within Labour’s thinking as to what values should underpin universities.

As David Barclay reminded us on this blog recently, the last Labour government was clear on this. The intent of both Tony Blair’s 2004 university reforms, and the 2010 Browne Review, was to unleash a market based on price into UK universities.

This view was largely endorsed by the institutions it affected. The Russell Group of ‘research-intensive’ universities such as Oxford, Cambridge, LSE and UCL all called for higher fees, often without an upper cap on undergraduate fee levels.

And yet to what extent were these universities truly calling for the raising or abolition of the undergraduate fee cap, with all the consequences that this entails? Recent events at Oxford & Cambridge have shown us the benefits of democratic renewal at Britain’s two leading centres of learning.

Unlike virtually every other university in the United Kingdom, Oxford and Cambridge are ultimately governed by their academics. Both have a ‘council’ consisting largely of elected or appointed members of academic staff.

These consist of between 20-30 members, and have oversight of the financial and academic strategies of the university.

But both also have a congregation (in Oxford’s case) and a regent house (at Cambridge) that contain around 4,000 academics and support staff each, and can overrule their respective councils.

In many ways, Oxford and Cambridge are two of the most prominent worker-owned and run organizations in the UK, if not the world.

These unique governance arrangements explain two events unfolding now at these institutions. Today, Oxford’s congregation will debate – and almost certainly pass – a motion of no confidence in David Willetts that was brought by over 170 academics.

Given that the university’s council is not formally opposing the motion, it’s a world away from the endorsement of unlimited fees to which Oxford signed up last year. Oxford’s actions have now triggered similar efforts at universities including Cambridge, Warwick and Goldsmith’s.

At the same time events are unfolding at Cambridge which are receiving less coverage but are still instructive. The role of chancellor at UK universities is largely honorary, with public figures such as Lord Patten, the Prince of Wales and the Archbishop of Canterbury currently holding the role at different universities.

A vacancy at Cambridge has seen the nomination of Lord Sainsbury, from the university body responsible for making recommendations on the chancellorship.

But since the final vote on the choice lies with the Cambridge senate – consisting of many alumni of the university – a Cambridge grocer has been nominated in opposition to Lord Sainsbury. He’s standing on a platform of opposition to a Sainsbury’s opening in the local area.

What does this have to do with blue Labour? The Labour party is in desperate need of a vision for Britain’s universities. Our universities are disproportionately strong in spite of the internationally low levels of investment in British higher education.

Blue Labour’s values of ‘radical conservatism’ fundamentally tie in with how Oxford and Cambridge are governed. John Rutherford, one of the leading lights of the movement, has argued for “the primacy of democracy over capital, society over the market, and human relationships over commercial transactions”.

A model of the university that is ultimately guided and run by its workers is entirely in keeping with such a vision. Indeed, Lord Glasman has been explicit about worker representation on management boards and has spoken about the managerial trend in British universities.

Recent events at Oxford and Cambridge point to a democratic renewal at these institutions. Through the revitalized use of Oxbridge’s democratic processes, members of the university community are shaping their institutions once again.

This trend needs to continue. Had these attitudes existed throughout the last decade, then many of the excesses of government policy towards universities could have been avoided.

Jonny Medland is a Masters student in Social Policy at Oxford and an Executive Officer of the Oxford University Student Union.

A blue Labour approach to gender pay

2011-06-06T12:44:00.000+01:00

Alexandra Kemp asks if blue Labour's relational approach to social change could help to close the remaining gender pay gap

John McTernan insightfully critiques 'blue Labour' as compelling in its analysis of citizens caught between powerful markets and a not-responsive-enough state but - and it is a big but - he could go much further in recognising that, far from offering "very little idea of what might be done" it already has a proven record and relevance to today's society and to tomorrow's workplace.

So does blue Labour have any part in the equality debate? Or do its provocative subtitles of family, faith and flag effectively locate it firmly in a past idyllic for some, less so for others?

Blue Labour in its incarnation as London Citizens' Living Wage Campaign has boosted the pay, employment status and terms and conditions of thousands of women and ethnic minorities in low-paid jobs, up to the Joseph Rowntree Minimum Income Standard, the level to sustain life and social inclusion; more than this, it has convinced companies to bring workers back in-house restoring their status as employees, facilitating future work progression.

New Labour's national minimum wage was a huge success but it is not enough to live on without the supplementation of tax credits from the state. People prefer the dignity of fair pay through the pay-packet to hand-outs from the state.

Relational and one-to-one, a coalition of trades unions and faith and community groups, blue Labour takes the politics of personalisation and persuasion straight to company board-rooms and AGM's and speaks there in a quiet collective voice about the redress of social and economic inequality.

As such is it is an effective strategy against gender and BAME inequality and undervalue, against insufficiency of pay and economic exclusion.

Yet in a parliamentary democracy, we put our faith in law as the agent of political change. Does the direct action of the Living Wage Campaign complement or subvert representative democracy? With a gender pay gap of 19.3% and an escalating age-related gender pay gap even with the existence of an Equal Pay Act for the last 40 years, legislation is demonstrably only part of the answer.

Where law on the statute book fails to win hearts and minds in the boardroom, the relational approach can complement what can be achieved through legislation. But can the Living Wage Campaign ever be more than a scratch on the industrial surface, its achievements small scale, individualised, piecemeal, one firm at a time, a trailblazer not a panacea?

A metropolitan-based organisation, London Citizens is able to speak directly to bosses who set the pay for firms nationally so it makes waves right across the UK.

Yesterday's Observer confirms that two-thirds of Britons do not like the extent of the pay gap between higher and lower earners (Pay gap is too wide, say two-thirds of Britons) and would approve government action to address it. Recent polling shows that voters are intimidated by the power of markets but lack faith in the centre-left's ability to protect them. The High Pay Commission shows that as a nation the divergence of pay between lowest and highest levels is taking us back to the levels of inequality of a century ago.

We will always need the overarching protection of equality and employment law to set social norms and legitimise goals - the Coalition government's current plan to water down TUPE protection of outsourced workers' jobs is a step in the wrong direction and will increase inequality, poverty, disempowerment in the workforce. Blue Labour, though, as a champion for the rights at work of the least-paid, has a secure place in a multi-strategic approach for creating the good society.

Alexandra Kemp is chief executive of the West Norfolk Women and Carers' Pensions Network

Originally published on ProgressOnline, 6 May 2011

The time is ripe to stake out a position on higher education

2011-06-05T11:21:00.001+01:00

David Barclay argues that Blue Labour will find willing allies among students and academics with no confidence in the coalition

A student protest in Manchester, 2011 - but what's the
alternative? - STUART GROUT

The idea of ‘Blue Labour’ has captured the imagination of the Labour party in a way that seemed barely possible just a few months ago.

From a fringe group of academics and back-bench or former MPs holding small seminars in the wake of Labour‘s general election defeat, the movement has grown in scope and influence to the point where Ed Miliband has now proudly contributed a foreword to the recent publication of the e-book ‘The Labour Tradition and the Politics of Paradox’.

Just like the Labour leader, however, the thoughts of Maurice Glasman, Jonathan Rutherford and co have been criticised for being too high-flown, abstract and vague.

If Blue Labour is to become the flesh on the bones of Miliband’s calls for ‘a positive, patriotic mission for our country’, it has to find a way of articulating clearly how its values would become policies. The battle over markets in higher education might provide the opportunity to do just that.

The heart of the Blue Labour ideology is what adherents have described as ‘conservative socialism’ or ‘radical conservatism’.

Rejecting the monoliths of state and market which have dominated British political discourse since the second world war, Rutherford and others argue that their movement “is above all about the primacy of democracy over capital, society over the market and human relationships over commercial transactions”.

The problem with such an approach for Ed Miliband is that it seems to lend itself to what are in essence relatively small-scale policy solutions.

Blue Labour seems to have much to teach the party about developing leaders, building strong communities and devolving local power, but these things by themselves will not help to convince the British public that Labour is once again ready to govern a nation.

As Ben Jackson has said in criticising Glasman, “we have to find a way to combine the politics of the movement with the politics of government”.

That’s where the imminent white paper on higher education comes in. The coalition has limped through its battle with students over tuition fees, suffering the casualty of Lib Dem credibility along the way.

But the now infamous scenes of protest were in reality only the first foray in a sustained campaign by the government to introduce a fully-fledged market into the UK university system. David Willetts’ recent ideas on ‘off-quota’ places, which promised back-door entry for the rich and last-minute bargains for the poor, were foretastes of the way the coalition’s upcoming white paper will seek to make real the effects of a marketised system.

As the universities’ minister proudly announced in a recent Times Higher Education article, “the force that is released is consumerism”.

As abhorrent as it must surely be to the ideals of Blue Labour adherents, the idea of a market in the world of education is neither a new nor a Tory one.

It was Blair’s stated intention with the creation of top-up fees in 2003 to see universities differentiate themselves based on price, while Peter Mandelson’s white paper ’Higher Ambitions’ in 2009 referred to students as “the most important clients of higher education”, whose “choices and expectations should play an important part in shaping the courses universities provide”.

The Browne Review, now almost universally reviled in British universities for its crude understanding of education as solely an economic good, was a Labour creation.

All of which means that a Blue Labour take on universities could not be more timely. If Glasman and others want to chart a new path for Labour in a way that will also point to a distinctive style of national governance, they could do no better than by starting to articulate a vision of a higher education system free from the insidious effects of the market and restored to its true relational and communitarian nature.

They would surely find willing allies. In Oxford, where the students protests first kicked off in earnest last October, academics have now joined with the Student Union to bring a motion of no confidence in Willetts’ plans to the institution’s governing body, the famous ‘parliament of dons’.

At the same time they are kick-starting a project to re-imagine the student-teacher relationship in the 21st century without resorting to the kind of transactional models which have led to the crude market system we are now slipping into.

Given that many of Blue Labour’s biggest names have their roots in Oxford University, it would surely be an important step to see their creative engagement in such a project leading towards a coherent national vision for higher education.

In this way it might be possible both to give shape to Rutherford’s ideals and to allow Ed Miliband some concrete plans to take his ‘positive mission’ rhetoric to a level at which it might truly start to resonate with a wider audience.

David Barclay is president of Oxford University Student Union

Labour must redistribute power internally before it can nationally

2011-06-03T12:58:00.000+01:00

Jon Wilson and Marc Stears urge Labour to stop arguing about the state - and start arguing about democracy instead

Arguments about the state just never seem to go away in the Labour party. When the party was born in the late nineteenth century, some socialists threatened to tear the nascent movement apart if it did not reject the bourgeois democratic state.

A few decades later, guild socialists such as GDH Cole tried to convince the party that it needed to be more democratic and local, less authoritarian and centralised. Still later, in the 1960s, the New Left demanded Labour turn away from its almost total occupation with the welfare state and nationalisation.

Now, Tim Horton thinks that these anti-statist arguments have come back. Connecting the work of Philip Collins and Maurice Glasman, Horton sees a New and blue Labour nexus that seeks once again to demonise the state.

With all of their talk of “localism” and the “dispersal” of power, Horton insists, New and blue Labour have become obsessed with political means and have forgotten to focus on political ends. Just like their redundant predecessors from Labour’s past, an irrational hostility to central government has blinded them to the fact that the state is capable of great good.

If the rhetoric of “redistributing power” that is so popular today really were just a rhetorical blind designed to undermine the achievements of Labour’s past then Horton would be right. But it is not.

The blue Labour debate has not resonated so widely and deeply because it is a cover for a Blairite attack on the welfare state. It has done so because it reminds us that the Labour party is at its best when its democratic spirit burns at its brightest.

This democratic spirit requires that we find ways of renewing, rather than undermining, the reforming state. This is why a campaign for the redistribution of power is crucial. The public institutions that we all love – the BBC, the NHS, the universities - would be stronger, not weaker, if the people who use and work within them had a greater ability to shape them on a daily basis.

The democratic commitments that lie at the very core of the Labour tradition tell us that public services get better when people organise to improve them; they don’t get worse.

More immediately, the democratic spirit demands that the Labour party become a living movement before it gains office again. Throughout its history, Labour has offered a home to those who wish to come together collectively to overcome the difficulties that face them and to help each other realize their own goals.

At its best, Labour is a party which does not claim to know the answers in advance, but where people organise together to shape their own political destiny. Labour is not the centralising party. That is the Conservatives.

This call for a new democratic spirit is far from just an intellectual movement. It motivates the efforts of constituency Labour parties across the country, from Edgbaston to Greenwich to Trafford, who are fighting to revive the tradition of Labour as a local community movement as well as an election-winning machine. It shapes the new endeavours of Movement for Change. And it will define Ed Miliband’s leadership.

The task of giving life to this new democratic spirit in the Labour Party, let alone in the state itself, won't be an easy one. We live in changed times and unseen difficulties no doubt lie in the party’s path.

But one thing is certain: Labour won't return to the heart of British life if it turns its back on the language of redistributing power.

Labour shares the blame for this mental illness tragedy

2011-06-02T11:28:00.001+01:00

Jon Cruddas and Jonathan Rutherford decry cuts but also Labour's failure to distinguish between the unemployed and the sick

Marchers against the abolition of Disability Living Allowance,
Carers' Allowance and Income Support - HELEN 2006

The unfolding tragedy of mentally ill people, described by Paul Farmer et al in The Guardian's letters page is being caused by the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats but it is also a consequence of Labour's 2009 Welfare Reform Act.

There is a growing argument in Labour that it got welfare wrong. Gillian Duffy's comments to Gordon Brown during the 2010 election campaign exactly captures the paradox about public attitudes to welfare:

"Look, the three main things that I had drummed in when I was a child was education, health service and looking after people who are vulnerable. There are too many people now who aren't vulnerable but they can claim and people who are vulnerable can't get claim."

Labour made the mistake of not listening to this point of view. But Labour risks making a similar mistake by not listening to Duffy's concern for the vulnerable. Polling shows that people value the role of the state as the protector of the vulnerable; there is no public appetite for inflicting suffering.

We need to address some home truths about the Labour government's welfare changes because they did not make a proper distinction between the unemployed and the sick. As a consequence, they have seriously eroded the protection of disabled people and those with limiting long-term illness. The methodologies that underpinned much of our argument are questionable.

In 2008 David Freud was interviewed by the Telegraph three weeks after he'd started as an adviser to the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP). He said: "I think we can get about 1.4 million back to work." The number was then reduced to 1 million. This new figure appeared to come from research at Sheffield Hallam University, which calculated approximately 1 million on incapacity benefit were, in fact, "hidden unemployed".

This figure is the number of incapacity benefit claimants who might reasonably be expected to have been in work in a genuinely fully employed economy. They are not shirking. But if they had lived, for example, in Surrey rather than in the former industrial regions they would certainly be in work.

Social policy expert Steve Griffiths argues that this research does not address the issue of health. It takes no account of regional and class inequalities in health, nor the way inequality creates illness, nor the detrimental impact of poverty on mental and physical health. The figure of 1 million fit to work is unproven.

The conditionality built into Labour's welfare changes failed to take into account the high numbers of people with limiting long-term illness. It treated them as if they were simply unemployed and so made a serious misjudgment about the levels of incapacity that actually exist. It informed the design of the work capability assessment (WCA) introduced in the 2009 act. The WCA is not fit for purpose. It is a source of fear and deep anxiety for people who are mentally ill, parents of adult children with an autism spectrum condition, and literally hundreds of thousands of others with complex and intermittent illnesses who want to work but know that they cannot in the way expected of them by the government and employers.

Medical expertise is not central to the functioning and decision-making of the WCA. It is a tick-box computer program that lacks the capacity to pick up complex illnesses and particularly mental health issues and autism spectrum conditions. Paul Gregg of Bristol University, who devised the structure and conditionality of Labour's revised welfare system, and Malcolm Harrington who recently reviewed the work capability assessment, have both expressed concern that the government is rolling out the test nationally before it has been properly reformed.

More alarming still are the DWP's statistics that show the WCA passes 64% as fit to work month on month. The lack of variability in the monthly figures is statistically unlikely. It suggests a quota system is in place. Whether or not you are fit to work, the quota will decide you are.

Labour has to come out fighting in exposing the cruelties, injustices and humiliation being inflicted by this government on the most vulnerable of our society. It means owning up to its own past mistakes. So be it, let Labour be its own best critic. Labour's best tradition is reciprocity – do not do to others what you would not want done to yourself. In reciprocity lies the source of our moral outrage when pain is inflicted on those who cannot defend themselves.

Originally published on Guardian Comment is Free, 1 June 2011

Jowell: what blue Labour means to me

2011-06-01T06:00:00.002+01:00

Tessa Jowell tells Patrick Macfarlane about her optimism and uncertainty as a new chapter opens for Labour – and Britain

Tessa Jowell campaigning in West Norwood, 2010 -
JOHN BLOWER

“I think this is one of the most exciting periods for the generation of new ideas,” Jowell begins, “about progressive politics and progressive policy. From blue Labour on the one hand, to the purple book on other, and then there are other strands as well.”

It is clear that she really does regard the coming months as a once-in-a-generation opportunity to reshape Labour’s agenda, admitting that the current spirit of debate “was rather lacking in the last three years [of government].”

Despite her enthusiasm, though, Jowell only seems to have so much time for some of these ‘other strands’. I ask her what she thinks about the idea, being mooted in some circles, of making additional state borrowing – to fund, for instance, a mass house-building programme – part of the Labour manifesto in 2015.

“I think we should not allow ourselves to reach for the conventional answers, and the conventional solutions,” she says. “Because I think that if we do that, we will staunch this flow of creativity. So I would like us to focus very much on ideas and solutions.”

She pauses, and then adds, for clarity: “Policy beyond the state.”

Jowell adds that the left-wing economic historian RH Tawney “was right when he said – loosely quoted – how surprising it was that only Labour encouraged its people to seek more from government and do less themselves.”

“I think this is one of the things that blue Labour reflects… I was doing one of my regular community meetings on Saturday, and we had a long discussion about how, beyond the reach of government, you might create more affordable housing,” she says.

“And it generated a lot of really interesting ideas about what might be the incentive to encourage people to move out of their homes that were too large (the perverse effect of the single person discount) and so forth.”

Given this apparent move away from Labour’s agenda towards the end of its time in government, I ask if she still has the same degree of affection for those years, or whether perhaps subsequent developments have made her think about the period a little differently?

“I still have tremendous affection for those years,” she asserts. “I think one of the most dangerous things is to have a kind of ‘Year Zero’ approach to what we did in government, because a lot of the pain that people are suffering now is that they’re losing the sources of support and services that were part of that time.”

I am puzzled. How does this square with a desire for ‘policy beyond the state’. Jowell’s answer, it seems, reflects an acceptance of a very changed economic landscape:

“I think experience suggests that we have to get used to slower rates of growth than perhaps was the case ten years ago,” she says.

“The key thing is to be much more perceptive about policies and decisions that are right at particular times. And the policies of 1997 and 2001 are not the policies of for now, any more than the policies of now will be the policies for 2015.

“That’s part of the dynamic nature of government: that the very act of being in government creates change, and creates change to which subsequent governments must be able to react.”

And her praise of New Labour’s record is not unqualified. When I ask about its approach to the financial services sector, she agrees that “deregulation has to take account of the broader public interest – and actually, neither Gordon Brown, nor Tony Blair, factored the public interest and the degree of public cost into the banditry of the banks.”

So a distinct shift from neo-liberal orthodoxy, although it isn’t clear how Jowell sees civil society filling the gaps that the state will leave. And what about blue Labour’s take on communities, relationships and national identity?

I ask her what she thinks of Labour supporting and celebrating an element of moderate nationalism: “If moderate nationalism is patriotism,” she replies, “an understanding of what it means to be British, and the obligations that being British creates; that it doesn’t turn us into little Englanders who are xenophobic and suspicious of the rest of the world, then I think it’s fine. But I would, frankly, tread very carefully.”

She urges Labour to “take account of the Britain of today, rather than the Britain of thirty years ago. … I regard my Carribean; African; Asian constituents, who have the right to remain here, as every bit as British in the contributions they make, in the aspirations they have, as people who’ve lived here all their lives. And I think that the thing about a lot of this language is that you have to be very careful about the code.”

Jowell says that she knows “there is a strong feeling against the scale of migration”, and that “people should feel at liberty to talk about it”, but “the facts about migration are part of the answer here, which is that migration tends to be cyclical. And that at a time of growth, we’re an attractive country for people to come to; at a time of recession we’re much less attractive.”

She also argues that Labour must “provide a better answer to explaining the upsides of [immigration] to people”. The “paradox” of the 2000s was, she says, “that people were both delighted to be able to get Polish plumbers to come and mend their lavatories and their leaking sinks, while at the same time feeling deeply embittered that those Polish plumbers are taking the jobs that their sons might otherwise take.”

I put it to her that attitudes are greatly affected by where people are on the income scale, with those at the bottom (who faced a net negative impact on wages and employment from the accession of the eight new European Union nations) having more antipathy that those at the top, for whom migrant workers were a source of cheap labour that helped to keep their own salaries high.

For Jowell, “skills quotas are an important part of the discussion”. But “to lay it out in all its brutality,” she adds, “our economy would be fatally weakened if we weren’t a member of the European Union, with access to the markets – the trading markets – of the European Union, that account for something like 70% of our exports. So there you are: that’s the complexity.”

I end by asking her about the “national mission” espoused by Ed Miliband in his speech to the Progress Annual Conference: what does she see as filling that need? What can people unite behind when Britain is demonstrably losing economic and cultural influence in the world?

“I certainly think that a combination of the Queen’s diamond jubilee and the Olympics will give that sense; a sense of optimism and of national pride,” she says. “Will it last? No, it won’t last. [But] we’ll be a different country after the Olympics, and I think that just for a while afterwards, cynicism will be held at bay.”

I’ve been struck by how little Jowell has had to say about the coalition; about the impact of its policies on people’s finances, and whether or not they risk making our woes significantly worse. But her outlook on the future seems to be based on an awareness that the ‘bottom line’ will be only part of the equation for any future Labour government.

There is, she says, “a contemporary longing for traditionalism, for small-c conservatism; the celebration of a sense of place; the importance of identity; the importance of reciprocity and the sense of belonging.”

And Tawney’s musing on Labour, she says, “is a profoundly provocative and stimulating challenge; one that I’m giving, myself, quite a lot of thought to at the moment, as we look at redefining the relationship between the state – whether national government or local government – and communities and individuals.”

“Get[ting] people to think about their own solutions… that’s a richness that we really haven’t mined for a very long time.”

Hitting the right notes

2011-05-31T13:21:00.002+01:00

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

2011-05-30T11:22:00.000+01:00

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

2011-05-27T16:58:00.001+01:00

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?

2011-05-26T08:00:00.003+01:00

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

2011-05-25T13:09:00.000+01:00

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

2011-05-24T08:00:00.001+01:00

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

2011-05-23T12:53:00.002+01:00

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'

2011-05-21T15:36:00.005+01:00

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

2011-05-21T10:48:00.003+01:00

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.

Looking again at blue Labour

2011-05-20T15:22:00.000+01:00

Patrick Macfarlane invites party members from both left and right to judge the movement on its merits

To many on the ‘Compass side’ of Labour, Tuesday’s publication of the blue Labour ebook will only have served to inflame their indignation that a zombie-like image of Blair was being re-animated – by people who should never have been in the Labour party to start with.

Meanwhile in the Progress camp, we can imagine hands being rubbed together gleefully at the idea that, finally, someone has come up with a way to make the party ‘relevant’ again, with a strategy sure to be beloved of red-top ‘political editors’ and Worcester Woman alike... and then glimmers of apprehension about these pesky economic ideas.

But the truth is that blue Labour isn’t going to fulfil the fears of - or be absorbed by - either of these groups. For a start, its economics don’t fit easily into any of the traditions which have become dominant in Labour over the last half century.

It balks at the idea that its social outlook might be hijacked by neo-liberals wishing to carry the legacy of Thatcher into yet another decade.

It decries the managerialism and bureaucracy that characterised New Labour during the latter part of its time in government, stripping away the David Brent-style gobbledegook to reveal working practices that have pleased neither patient nor practitioner, teacher nor troublemaker, civil servant nor contract cleaner.

And yes, it also suggests that a welfare system based entirely on achieving equal results does not chime with people’s conception of fairness. That recognising both desert and need is crucial to achieving equitable justice, and not – as those on the right would have it – a means of state coercion.

And on the social front, its beliefs could not be further away from a mere ‘strategy’ to woo the squeezed middle. Blue Labour people aren’t just out to spin an attractive narrative for the electorate; they feel the same way themselves.

They are angered and saddened at the intrusion of market priorities into our common lives: at the steadily increasing working and commuting hours of our workforce, at the social isolation - particularly between generations - that now characterises our communities, at the contempt that politicians have shown for the associations and identities that give life meaning - unless they embrace a vision of unceasing and extravagantly pointless change.

Blue Labour has some way to go before the problems it identifies with the way that the party was can be translated into concrete policy - but the publication of these essays has marked the first step.

In the meantime, I hope that people from all parts of the party will give its ideas a fair hearing. Blue Labour is neither as threatening - nor as pliable - as some would have you believe

Originally published on CompassOnline, 20 May 2011.

The Labour tradition and the politics of paradox

2011-05-19T15:16:00.000+01:00

Ed Miliband opens a new chapter in Labour politics with his foreword to this radical collection of essays on the party's future

Edited by Maurice Glasman, Jonathan Rutherford, Marc Stears, Stuart White, with foreword by Ed Miliband.

Download a pdf of the booklet here.

This new text asks some fundamental questions about the condition of the country and the predicament of Labour following its defeat in the May 2010 general election. Out of this work we begin shaping a new story for Labour for the decade ahead.

Contributors:
Stefan Baskerville, Hazel Blears, Phillip Collins, Jon Cruddas, Graeme Cooke, Sally Davison, Maurice Glasman, Ben Jackson , Mike Kenny, David Lammy, David Miliband, Duncan O’Leary, Anthony Painter, James Purnell, Jonathan Rutherford, Marc Stears, Jon Stokes, Andrea Westall, Stuart White and Jon Wilson.

Published by Oxford London Seminars in association with the Christian Socialist Movement, Compass, The Fabian Society, Progress and Soundings journal.

Winning with blue Labour

2011-05-18T08:00:00.000+01:00

Alexandra Kemp says blue Labour's revitalisation of Labour traditions could bring back the party's five million missing voters

The Royal Norfolk Show, Bawburgh - KEVIN MILLICAN

First of all, blue Labour-style localism, respect for individual voice and sense of collective identity and civic pride, is a real channel of communication with voters whose backgrounds did not chime with the New Labour intellectual and managerial ethos.

North West Norfolk Labour won back nine seats - all from the Tories - in this month's borough Election.

Labour's success owed a great deal to its practical, informative, listening campaign, harnessing the local zeitgeist, giving people not normally politicised the opportunity to take ownership of the most momentous decision affecting the community for decades.

My motion on the local executive committee in summer 2010 brought Labour on board against the Tory plan to build a mass-burn incinerator next to the town centre and our most deprived communities.

I took out teams of new Labour members, talking to people on the doorstep, leafleting, collecting signatures to Labour's petition.

The campaign resonated as the voice of a small community against the power of a multinational - People against Corporate Power. It was about the conflict of interest between a rural area and a geographically remote county council - People against Top-Down Government.

It was about political engagement as against political apathy. It was about building bridges for the greater good of the community and future generations, about love of place and the local environment. It became a debate about democracy itself. It led to the first local referendum.

Labour and Greens, Independents and Liberal Democrats, doctors and farmers united in a new democratic consensus. This challenged the local Tory hegemony which appeared high-handed, unlistening, hidebound. I headlined our election campaign, Vote Labour for a Strong Voice for Lynn.

Secondly, blue Labour and Maurice Glasman's initiatives for the living wage, for fair public procurement and the right balance between wages and profits are the way Labour can win back the squeezed middle and working poor.

Cosmopolitan, universal, and metropolitan strands of New Labour's outlook were experienced in rural areas like North-West Norfolk as the insecurity of globalisation which alienated sections of the Labour vote who felt unconsulted, disempowered.

Migration wrongly acted as an unofficial wages policy as local manufacturing downsized its permanent workforce just because it could, unions were weakened and fear and apathy reigned - and still reign- in the workforce.

So voters stopped voting Labour and some thought about voting BNP. It was our job this Spring to listen to people on the doorstep and acknowledge people's pain and need for empowerment in the workforce, as we persuaded them back into the Labour fold.

It is also thanks to London Citizens' victory with a well known supermarket, that local people in West Norfolk who work 60 hours a week as contracted-out cleaners on the minimum wage will be now able to afford to spend more time with their family.

First published on ProgressOnline, 17 May 2011.

Labour's vision for 2015

2011-05-16T13:10:00.000+01:00

Daniel Sage explores the options for Labour as it begins to position itself for the next general election

Progress, the New Labour think-tank, recently announced a forthcoming publication called The Purple Book. As far as I can tell, it will be a collection of essays arguing that, in order to win in 2015, Labour must cling on to and revive the path set by Tony Blair.

As well as presumably being committed to the New Labour policy mix of marketised public services, welfare conditionality and neo-liberal economics, the Purple bookers state their logic that New Labour is the only governing philosophy to win a general election for two decades.

While this might be true, it is simultaneously true that New Labour - as a 'governing philosophy' - lost the 2010 election. The logic that a political philosophy should be maintained after his failed, simply because it was once successful, is utterly flawed. Thatcherism once rode the high wave of British politics, yet the Tories only became re-electable once they tried to ditch the association.

Importantly, there is a deeper lesson in this for the Labour Party. Throughout post-war history, political parties have consistently been punished for 'ideological hangovers'. For a while in the 1980s, Labour promoted policies which had been roundly defeated at the polls. Similarly, by focusing on traditional Tory themes of Europe and immigration, the post-Blair Conservatives committed themselves to a self-induced electoral wilderness.

While political parties don't win if they commit themselves to old ideas, no matter how successful, nor do they win by marginally repositioning a policy message. Kinnock's defeats in 1987 and 1992 can be seen in this light, as can Cameron's failure to win outright in 2010.

Rather, true success comes when a completely fresh vision and message is offered to the electorate. This doesn't mean dumping on the past, but accepting that history's ideas can't win the battles of the future.

Ed Miliband thus has three options: (a) to take the Progress approach and revive New Labour; (b) to shift away from New Labour and abandon some of its policy proposals; or (c) to offer the public a completely new 'governing philosophy'. While option (a) seems very unlikely, my worry is that we will end up with (b), when what we need is (c).

Of course, developing a new philosophy is not an easy political or intellectual task; the only attempt at it thus far is Blue Labour. Whilst I have written on Blue Labour and am sympathetic to it, it is clear that intellectually it is still disparate, without a totally coherent structure or message. Similarly, it has come across a tide of political opposition within the Labour Party, with many striving to bury it.

Still, it persists in gathering interest and, until I see an equally original proposal of where Labour should go, I think it offers the best hope for winning in 2015. As Chuka Umunna wrote last week on Left Foot Forward, Labour has to offer a vision to the electorate. The problem at the moment is that Labour's 'vision' consists solely of a moderately different deficit reduction plan to the Coalition's. This is not the stuff of winning elections.

Originally published on Knowledge is Porridge, 12 May 2011.

Blue Labour debate: does Labour have an English problem?

2011-05-16T10:53:00.002+01:00

The Progress Annual Conference, the Congress Centre, 23-28 Great Russell Street, WC1B 3LS | 21 May 2011 | 2.30pm - 3.45pm

More than Southern Discomfort: does Labour have an English problem?

- Chuka Umunna MP, Treasury select committee

- Cllr Sharon Taylor, leader, Stevenage Borough Council

- Greg Cook, pollster

- Jonathan Rutherford, editor, Soundings Journal

- Patrick Diamond, author, 'Southern Discomfort Again'

Chair - Steve Race

Tickets available here.

The case for a left conservatism: care and the common good

2011-05-15T13:17:00.000+01:00

Drawing from a series of recent seminars on re-founding Labour, Jonathan Rutherford explores new currents in the party's future

King's College London prepare for a match against the
Royal Veterinary College - E01

The basic argument that Labour should develop a more conservative politics is based on a few painful facts:

A long period of market-driven economic transformation has nearly trebled our GDP, but it has been divisive, unequal and ultimately destructive.

Labour is close to catastrophic electoral defeat, particularly in England.

Britain’s productive capacity is in an anaemic state, while we face a deficit reduction programme that will change the nature of the country.

We continue to have an irresponsible and unaccountable financial sector which has failed to channel investment into productive wealth creation.

There has been a relative decline in Britain’s global status, and it now has a vulnerable position as an indebted over-consumer and under-producer in the global economic order.

There is a clear need to re-think ideas of consumption, production and our notions of prosperity in the face of the threat of global warming and resource depletion.

All these observations lead us to ask: are we in the final act of the neo-liberal hegemonic order, or is this just the third act following Thatcherism and New Labour?

Alongside this there are questions about the role English nationalism might play if there is pressure to continue the process of devolution and strengthen the political centres in Northern Ireland, Wales and Scotland. The SNP victory in Scotland puts this in firmly on the agenda.

The need for relational politics

In the final years of the Labour government, New Labour’s political language lost its usefulness. We need to start asking different kinds of questions and so re-shape who we are and what we do.

Labour needs a more emotional, relational language and a politics organised around deepening and strengthening democracy (all the way down and all the way up), so as to be in step with a changing public mood towards both the economy and society.

This mood is centred around insecurity about the economy, distrust of the political class, and a society that has become internally disconnected.

What do I mean by conservative?

The Labour tradition grew out of an historic counter movement to defend society and preserve human good, during what Polanyi’s describes as the ‘middle passage’ of the industrial revolution and the rise of laissez faire capitalism.

Socialism is as much about defending, preserving and sustaining places and relationships as it is about radical change.

Ethical socialism stands alongside the Fabian tradition as a major influence in Labour’s politics. It shares antecedents with traditions of Toryism - a concern with the land and with place, and a recognition of the human need to have a sense of belonging and community.

Meanwhile, modern day neuroscience provides the evidence for the necessity of good relationships and social connections for individual wellbeing.

So a contemporary Labour politics can create a new language for itself, drawing on the traditions of ethical socialism and radical Toryism.

It can choose a social politics rather than a progressive politics

The progressive tradition

New Labour described itself as progressive.

It based its legitimacy on the promise of progress, which became defined as individual aspiration, the dynamic of a market economy, globalisation, and technocratic efficiency. This is only a partial description, but it encompasses the themes that came to dominate.

The Coalition is also radical and progressive, albeit drawing on different traditions. Its aim is to permanently destroy Labour’s claim to the progressive centre ground.

But instead of contesting this, Labour could profitably give up the idea of 'progressivism' and so reconfigure the centre ground of British politics.

Progressivism shares Hayek's contempt for conservatism, something he describes as ‘a fear of change, a timid distrust of the new’. Liberalism, he says, is based on courage and confidence, on a preparedness to let change run its course even if we cannot predict where it will lead.

Hayek’s progress puts its trust in ‘uncontrolled social forces’. This brand of liberalism is central to the coalition of Clegg and Osborne. It is a product of Enlightenment rationality and neo-classical economics, and it is the ideology of liberal market capitalism.

The progressive reaction of the left – dominated by the Fabian tradition but also shared in parts by Crosland and New Labour – has been a state administered politics that seeks to create productive order, and docile citizens.

This politics is the other side of the Enlightenment rationalist coin. Both market liberalism and the administrative state have been agents of industrial modernity, treating individuals as either commodities or measurable units.

The social tradition

There is another, counter-cultural tradition that has grown out of reactions to the Enlightenment; that champions self-help, reciprocity and mutualism.

It seeks a radical shift of power from the state and the market to the individual, the local, the association; to civil society institutions and the wider community. It is resistant to the ‘uncontrolled social forces’ of change.

On the right, Michael Oakshott argues that change is a threat to identity and every change is an emblem of extinction.

On the left, ethical socialism argues that change created by the uncontrolled forces of capital destroys both the commons and the individual’s capacity for self-realisation.

Both suggest that change that is done to people destroys meaning and results in the loss of culture, esteem and identity, and brings with it powerlessness, humiliation and increased levels of self-destructive behaviour.

What might this left conservatism be?

Left conservatism embodies a concern with the ethics of care and reciprocity, and a language of creating, repairing, building and recovering institutions, associations and ideas which value what is shared and held in common.

These ‘commons’ include the common life, common good, common law, common wealth, the commons of the earth, ecosystems of flora and fauna, public spaces, knowledge, cultures and living matter.

The commons is the basis of society, which is the connection of individuals to one another and the recognition of their interdependency. It is expressed in culture as a way of life. It is not fixed but contested.

A left conservatism defends the commons against commodification and exploitation by broadening and deepening democracy, such that economic, political, social and cultural power and capital is more effectively held to account and much more widely distributed.

It promotes an ethical economy organised for productive investment, and wealth creation aimed at common prosperity. Its principles are equality, technical innovation, recycling, durability and ecologically sustainable wealth creation

Not a smaller state but a democratic state that plays a major role in investment and infrastructure development, and provides a guiding hand for a new green industrial revolution and for the development and regulation of new markets.

A state which distributes power, capital and wealth across society and the economy through partnerships, mutuals, different forms of ownership and greater employee control of companies.

Thus the means for defining and achieving the good society lie in relational and associational life, and in democratic institutions that create synergies between individual ambition and the common good.

The economic sphere

The immediate political future and the election of 2015 will be decided by the economy.

Labour's policies around the deficit and future growth are crucial, but alone they will not achieve electoral success.

Labour needs to recognise that the issue of the economy is hegemonic and not simply about management and technical competence. A much broader political approach encompassing culture and society is necessary.

There are three key themes of this political struggle:

First, the economy itself. The failure of productive investment and wealth creation, the unaccountable power of finance, and the problems of the distribution of wealth production, work and worklessness across regions and localities.

Secondly, family life and the unequal burden shouldered by women, as well as the changes in authority and role of men and fathers in society. The current dominance of an instrumental/functional approach to children’s development, and schooling. These issues constitute the vital ground on which society reproduces its normative social relations, values, civility and order from one generation to the next.

Thirdly, identity and belonging, and their importance in making meaning within individual lives, as well as in constructing collectivities and political agency. The significance and role of nation and cultural difference in constructing an hegemonic order.

Achieving change

I’ll end on the issue of process - how do we find new ways of describing politics and work out what we are doing?

Marx was the father of progressivism. As a young student in 1837, he wrote a letter to his father: ‘There are moments in one's life which are like frontier posts marking the completion of a period but at the same time clearly indicating a new direction.’

Idealism is the way of thinking that has shaped his generation. He knows it does not describe the changing world he is living in. It does not help him understand it better. He is seeking a way out of it, but he can't find it.

He reads Hegel. He wants to establish a relationship between thinking and the material conditions of existence, but he doesn't know how to.

The more he seeks an escape from the limiting knowledge of his time, the more firmly he is bound to the order he is trying to escape. This is the predicament he describes to his father

In 1935 John Macmurray wrote about Marx's letter:

Marx is deeply conscious of the time in which he lives as a turning-point in world history. He has to make a new departure in thought, and he sees his own intellectual decision in and through himself.

His task is to carry philosophy beyond the point to which Hegel had brought it. He has made several attempts to do this but ends up where Hegel began. The question that faces Marx is the question, 'After Hegel - what?'

We know the answer, which is historical materialism: an idea of progress that is a product of Enlightenment rationality and industrial modernity.

Today, we are faced with a similar question: what follows on from New Labour?

Marx persisted in working his way out of his interregnum, but the danger is that we will not. We could do worse than trust in his own methods, and allow ourselves to experience the social forces around us.

Out of our experiences we can develop a dialogue together and create a story for these times.

After losing Scotland, can Labour be the party for England?

2011-05-14T11:00:00.000+01:00

Eddie Bone asks if Labour will learn from the Scottish Parliament elections, and heed a resurgent sense of English identity

England flag - JUKKA1

The Campaign for an English Parliament (the CEP) believes a tipping point has been reached in the devolution process.

Tuition fees, prescription charges, funding cuts to the NHS in England, consolidation of power by the Welsh Assembly and an SNP majority in Scotland have all come at once.

This has meant that English apathy is quickly melting away as people now realise that English interests are no longer at the centre of British politics.

Over the last decade many in England have just accepted the widening gulf between the nations of the UK and the reluctance of the British government to discuss the genuine concerns expressed about national inequalities.

However, in opposition it now appears that a number of Labour MPs such as Jon Cruddas, Margaret Hodge, John Denham and Frank Field have decided to talk openly about finding a new way to re-connect with the people of England.

This is encouraging because when the Labour Party rushed through devolution, the British identity was intertwined with an English sense of community and belonging.

New Labour ignored the fact that the English also had a strong collective national identity, and most people who discuss the legitimacy of an English Parliament and devolution accept that it was New Labour who unfortunately created the current unstable and unbalanced Union of nations.

Times have changed and we now await Labour's new dawn under Ed Miliband. Recently the Labour leader has made some highly encouraging remarks, especially when discussing the selling of England’s forests.

He captured the nation's mood when he deplored “the sale of the physical heart of England, of irreplaceable national assets”, and he showed insight into national concerns when he asked: “Which principle is there that applies in Scotland but not England?”

For too long the Labour Party has relied on Welsh and Scottish interests to bolster the Party's heart. It has not needed to rediscover itself in England, yet England is home to the largest part of the UK and is arguably the power base for establishing real change and influence.

Time and time again the Campaign for an English Parliament has heard that the Labour Party needs Scotland and Wales to be in power but this just isn’t true; it’s the opposite, Labour needs England.

Devolution didn't just fail England; it failed all the nations within the UK, as it has created an unstable Union. You only have to have a slight interest in UK politics to notice that the SNP are now positioned as the dominant force within Scottish politics and that Plaid Cymru now have the confidence to openly question Labour’s lack of interest in correcting the Barnett formula.

Yet their increased power is a golden opportunity for the Labour Party, because the people of England are looking for a party that speaks for them.

This central position could easily be Labour's if they embrace a civic English nationalism that is linked with real democratic accountability and equality, and it is refreshing to hear Lord Glasman openly encourage debate and stimulate conversation about traditional values within England.

We all know that democratic accountability has to be protected and the current situation has to change. Advocating an English Parliament is the simple solution, however Labour’s current denial of the need for a positive, inclusive voice for English concerns will rob us all of stability and democratic cohesion.

With Labour out of government the party now has the perfect opportunity to take over the old Conservative ground of expressing English concerns. What's to say that if more Labour MPs started to engage in meaningful debate on the subject, the people of England wouldn't embrace them and their party again?

The coalition, (perhaps an emerging Liberal Conservative Party), is alienating the people of England with their unfair implementation of cutbacks and the asset stripping of England. The Coalition has missed this new public awareness of Englishness, and as such Labour has a second chance to win English hearts by showing that they understand their legitimate concerns.

As the coalition procrastinates about what to do regarding the English Question, a wise Labour leadership should be able to step in and become the voice for English democracy.

If the Labour Party waits too long this golden opportunity will be missed. Already traditional Conservatives have started to realise that after the last election they had a clear mandate within England. The error the Cameron-led Conservative Party initially made was to go for the easy route of Liberal Democrat support in Scotland which has disappeared.

Labour needs to be honest about its past mistakes, because the public have had enough of empty words and the wounds of unfair partial devolution have cut deep. If Labour starts expressing England's mood, they will not just win back the people of England but they will consolidate a new UK.

Many academics and MPs are privately saying that the English Question needs a solution, and that the public wants a simple strategy to restore political faith. AV is not the answer. A national federal system is a much simpler way to restore political faith and it gives long-term stability for the future of the UK.

Let Labour boldly campaign for an English Parliament and they will find that 26 opinion polls are correct when they state that over 60% of the English want their own parliament. That would mean a lasting future not just for England and the UK but for the Labour Party.

Eddie Bone is chairman of the Campaign for an English Parliament.

Blue Labour's localism can deliver more than AV would have

2011-05-13T20:54:00.001+01:00

Joe Sarling urges Labour Yes campaigners not to feel too disheartened: their aim of local empowerment lives on

Voters at Liscard, Wallesey, England - RUTH W

The local elections on May 5th delivered a key blow to the junior coalition party, the Liberal Democrats. To add further to the dejection, the public voted a resounding 'no' to changing the electoral system to the Alternative Vote - a system they championed.

The two results did not come as surprise. There was always going to be a severe backlash for the Lib Dems, as Tory voters expected and received major cutbacks.

Similarly, in a campaign marred by abuse, accusations and contempt, the AV result was always going to be 'no' - although whether this is 'no to AV' or 'no to electoral reform' is often confused.

But the significance of the results is not in the Lib Dems' wane, nor in the rejection of AV, but how segregated the United Kingdom has become.

Scotland has major SNP support. Votes were taken from both Labour and the Lib Dems - not on the back of an independence referendum promise but because their spending plans appealed to the electorate. While free subscriptions and university education seem unbelievable promises in the current financial climate, the electorate sent a clear signal to Labour.

It was a better night for Labour in Wales, holding half the seats as people came back to the party, with Plaid Cymru and the Lib Dems falling behind.

Labour also picked up key councils in Liverpool, Manchester, Sheffield and Newcastle but made little progress in the South.

The South and home counties are still dominated by the Tories. One of the most interesting results was that the Tories did very well, with Cameron probably feeling the happiest of all leaders.

So when was the last time that Britain was this divided - Scotland (SNP), North and Wales (Labour) and South (Conservative)?

More importantly, does this not indicate large imbalances within the economy, and the disparity in hope, aspiration and opportunity?

And how can we address this in the run-up to the next general election?

Advocates of AV would suggest that the tribal nature of politics has become apparent and people have moved back to their traditional strongholds.

They would also state that with AV, the likelihood of such a result being replicated in the next general election would have been severely curtailed. It would have made MPs work harder (through fewer safe seats) and ensured that a wider range of opinions were heard in each constituency.

People would have felt empowered and understood that their multiple preferences could make a significant change.

As far as re-connecting with voters in every part of the nation goes, however, I do not see AV (or indeed any electoral reform) as a panacea. Our most important strategy lies in rebalancing the economy.

Localism, community and mutual responsibility could have larger and more significant benefits than AV in this battle. Give people more local power and responsibility for the community, and more people will engage.

This larger engagement will force constituency politicians to be more aware of people they are representing, as their power and legitimacy comes from the community.

Encouraging local business, through asset transfer or tax breaks, will facilitate the rebuilding of those social and community roots, further reducing the power of professional bureaucrats and placing it in the hands of the community.

Stronger community ties combined with more local power and decision-making will make constituency MPs far more accountable.

A rebalancing of the economy is clearly needed in a geographical and industrial sense. The local election result has gone someway to highlighting how disillusioned people are and how tribal the country has become.

The answer is not electoral reform; it can play a part but is not the catalyst. I see the key driver being local community, local power and local opportunity which are all key aspects of blue Labour.

This will make any representative politician in Westminster far more cautious before making decisions; instead of personal or party interests, they will be led by the community it represents.

The answer to the political malaise at the last election was not AV. The answer lies with blue Labour and its localism.

Blue Labour - new economics?

2011-05-09T02:00:00.025+01:00

Joe Sarling investigates the economic agenda needed to take blue Labour values from committee rooms into communities

Fishmongers at Borough Market, London - BRIAN BOYER

The blue Labour agenda has certainly stimulated debate. Whether it is a debate on etymology or its core values, blue Labour is the first successful foray into new thinking that the Labour Party so vitally needs.

Now its profile has risen and started to form a critical mass, it is apparent that the movement needs to start stating specifics more readily. For an economist, blue Labour is extremely intriguing as it offers the opportunity to redefine how the economy should work.

I believe that a central feature of the blue Labour movement is to change how the economy is viewed, as well as recognising what the Labour Party had got wrong.

"Do people really want, or indeed care about, an increase in GDP per capita or improvements to the Gini coefficient?"

I believe we need an economy that works for society and not vice versa. We therefore need to understand what people want and need from policy and marry that with what we can ensure the economy delivers.

Do people really want, or indeed care about, an increase in GDP per capita or improvements to the Gini coefficient? Yes, they are important and are vital macroeconomic indicators but they should not be the sole drivers of policy.

People want job security, work-life balance, job opportunities, decent wages, affordable housing, communities rebuilt, individual risk that does not lead to system risk, and local businesses championed - to name a few.

They want to hold dear key social values such as responsibility, community and loyalty without risking or jeopardising their individual economic needs.

"There is very much a need for big business within the economy, but it certainly should not be to the detriment of local communities."

To supplement this change of focus we need to recognise that the central state has become too large and is often cited as a ‘nanny state’; it has too many explicit responsibilities and has eroded the key individual and mutual responsibilities that society should bear.

Light-touch regulation and over-emphasis on big business led to large economic issues: systemic risk stemming from individual risk, and a Tescoisation of towns and cities across the country.

There is very much a need – and a significant role – for big business within the economy, but it certainly should not be to the detriment of local communities, local opportunities and local power.

Rebalancing the economy is therefore key – a rebalancing in the sense of geography and industry but also of ethos. Mutuals, co-operatives, social enterprises and small orthodox business should set the landscape for towns and communities – it will enhance and rebuild those key social ties.

"We need to ensure that workers have power and feel part of the decision-making process."

Therefore we need policies such as tax breaks and cutting the amount of red tape for start-ups; business guidance and training to start up businesses in the local area; and social enterprise promotion to involve community members in businesses which deliver for its common cause.

We need to ensure that workers have power and feel part of the decision-making process – co-operatives are absolutely integral to this cause.

It is important to recognise that we should not banish big business. To maintain our global competitiveness and to ensure that the UK is viewed as a good place to do business (which will bring in capital and knowledge), we need these large companies.

The issue is how to ensure that big business works for the UK and can flourish - but not at the expense of local business and therefore local communities. Furthermore, unilaterally stifling large companies in favour of small enterprises would send a clear protectionist signal, and would harm the economy.

To ensure that big business works in harmony with local enterprise we need a change to the financial sector. To regulate individual risk taking and consequent systemic risk, we need a system which works for local communities.

"We need to give the correct level of financial support through co-operative and/or state banks."

We need private banks to generate returns but we should also have co-operative and state-run banks. These co-operative and state banks will have local representation at board level, with local knowledge which, in turn, decreases the risk of loans.

These banks will therefore be restricted by geographical location and solely work with local enterprise and residents. With support from the state, the risk across the regions will be spread whilst being a key driver of local growth.

I believe we need to harness the power of the economy and ensure it works for society.

We need big business for global competitiveness, job creation, and knowledge and capital transfer. We should not be so foolish as to abandon it.

However, we also need the correct level of regulation so it does not pose systemic risk. Furthermore, it needs far more representation of workers at board level, which will go someway to ensuring a change in ethos.

From this, local communities can rebuild their social ties and individual sense of belonging through social enterprise, co-operative and orthodox business promotion.

To facilitate this we need to give the correct level of financial support through co-operative and/or state banks, we need to incentivise through tax breaks, offer key business training, and we need to cut back where the state was interfering via excessive red tape.

This is by no means a small change, but one which movements such as blue Labour should not shy away from.

Blue Labour should be associated with new thinking - and new economics.

Adapting to blue times: how social democracy applies today

2011-05-08T11:00:00.000+01:00

Reema Patel argues that to achieve New Labour's aim of meritocracy, we must understand the context in which it happens

Family gathering - KAI CHAN VONG

Yesterday I found myself watching Rimsky-Korsakov’s rather brilliant (but completely obscure) opera, the Tsar’s Bride, at the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden.

The plot revolves around the Tsar’s selection of a bride from a line up of women who are intricately involved with other men. We never see the Tsar throughout the four act opera, but you do see the effects of his state, his right hand men, his police force, his impulses, upon the intense personal lives of those he rules – to compelling and tragic effect at the end.

"We need to go back to first principles... and place them in the context of modernity."

On the way back from the opera I was reading Blair’s autobiography, which got me really thinking about the future policy direction of the Labour Party.

Blair convincingly argues that we need to go back to first principles – social democratic values – and place them in the context of modernity (whatever that is) to engender a distinct ideology or brand that reconnects a political party with the public.

Electability is all about reconnecting with the public.

So far so good. Ed Miliband has certainly voiced his desire to reconnect with the public – but the brand is yet to emerge and is the subject of heated debate within Labour Party circles.

"Is the New Labour comfort with middle-class aspiration to wealth... consistent with [blue Labour]?"

Some think that the party will go for Maurice Glasman’s blue Labour – small ‘c’ conservative Labour that hearkens back to the old days of working class values – of ‘faith, family and flag’. The question of whether this is to be contrasted with the Blairite notion of New Labour is an interesting one and one that will be touched on in the upcoming discussion next week at the House of Commons.

Is the New Labour comfort with middle-class aspiration to wealth, and comfort with the movements of the ‘filthy rich’ (as Mandelson referred to it) all that consistent with this new approach?

And how is this conception different from the rather different Big Society brand advocated by the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition?

"Blue Labour is about recognising that the individual cannot be atomised from all of the various external social factors that affect a person’s aspirations, desires and opportunities."

I argue that blue Labour is absolutely consistent with New Labour, but that it recognises that in order to create true equality of opportunity, more needs to be done in terms of connecting the state with the individual and with the community (hence the motto of ‘faith, flag, and family’).

New Labour was (going back to first principles) about creating a meritocratic society – and not condemning people who aspired to achieve more or to become socially mobile. In this sense, it was universal – applying to individuals regardless of their background, society, their concept of what it was to be British, or their family.

How this is to be done is, as Blair recognised, through policy that needs to be adapted to the times and especially to the economic situation.

Blue Labour is about recognising that the individual cannot be atomised from all of the various external social factors that affect a person’s aspirations, desires and opportunities.

The New Labourite language of equal opportunities is entirely consistent with the blue Labour language that recognises that a person’s roots and identities have a significant impact on the way in which they perceive their opportunities – and on their personal values.

Some might argue that blue Labour is little more than the Big Society reinvented. I demur from this. Blue Labour is also about building the capabilities of individuals within their communities to achieve and to help each other mutually – not just making the most of the capabilities they have.

"I see blue Labour as the ideology that... facilitate[s] not just community, but the growth of community."

Blue Labour is about recognising and reacting to the events of the past by understanding that the financial markets failed the British electorate (and also recognising that to a degree, the state’s reliance on the markets failed the electorate).

Its answer to this is two-fold – to make the state understand increasingly what it is the people want and need (smarten the state up); and to make the markets increasingly accountable to the people for decisions which will invariably affect them (see the movement towards mutualisation of Northern Rock, for example).

The Big Society, by contrast, is about a smaller state that devolves responsibility to the individual and to the communities that already exist in Britain.

"Blue Labour, like New Labour, is essentially person-centred."

I see blue Labour as the ideology that recognises that we must have social democratic values that encourage working and middle-class aspiration, that facilitate not just community, but the growth of community and identity rooted in local place and local issues, and that is focused on understanding absolutely all it can about its citizens in order to deliver this.

The size of the state is irrelevant – what is relevant is instead the work it can do and its ability to maximise what it has to secure fair, equal and liberal outcomes for people.

This is about working alongside individuals and communities; it is about a smarter state, one that recognises that what needs to be done to facilitate access to good education or job opportunities might well be very different in the North than in the Home Counties, or for Muslims rather than atheists, or for gay people in Essex rather than gay people in London.

Blue Labour, like New Labour, is essentially person-centred, but realises that in order to effectively be person-centred it needs a state that is intelligent enough to understand what motivates the individual within the local area and community they live.

"It needs to be recognised that humanism and faith is distinct from religion as a theistic concept."

This is what the New Labour/ Sir Michael Lyons’ dictum of place-shaping reiterated, but failed to extend out far enough. This is what the Big Society tries to do, but in implementing it alongside a cuts programme, the Con-Lib Dem government are “killing at birth”.

Lately people have expressed bemusement at the appearance of ‘faith’ into an ideology where a significant portion of society is secular, and we (in practice at least) adhere to the separation of church and state.

Again, the roots to this can be found in New Labour – where Blair articulates that religion for him was inseparable from the way in which he did politics. He argued that for him, religion was about understanding humans, and having an appreciation of our common humanity.

However, blue Labour allows for the development of this thought that took root in New Labour. It needs to be recognised that humanism and faith is distinct from religion as a theistic concept – you have faith in humanity, and its ability to act collectively (co-operate) and to empathise with people, without any reference to a theistic belief – although for you as a person this may well include religious and traditional values.

"Blue Labour recogni[ses] that the person is not so easily extricable from their community."

Indeed, in the book which defends the key social democratic principle of co-operation and ‘Mutual Aid’, it is precisely the principle that humans are best off when they are (and as a matter of fact are instinctively) co-operative, that the writer Kropotkin defends as essential to the evolution of the human race.

As a ‘faith’ based ideology, blue Labour is about far more than policy reviews or strategy – it’s about reconnecting with the public – who are increasingly (in the light of the expenses scandal and Con-Lib Dem bickering) apathetic towards politics and policy.

Faith is actually humanism, and seeing that real politics is the politics that touches the day-to-day life of a person.

What’s the Tsar’s Bride got to do with all this? He would have made a better Tsar, I thought, if throughout that opera, he had actually taken the time to connect on some level with those his decisions touched – he would have understood the complexities of the deeply personal problems affecting them (shaped by their communities and the relationships between individuals that they lived with).

Perhaps fewer people would have died at the end. Blue Labour takes a recognition that the person is not so easily extricable from their community and recognises that to provide truly equal and fair outcomes requires understanding these differences rooted in faith, flag and family.

This is the key point upon which blue Labour breaks new ground and diverges from New Labour.

Originally published on The World is Round, 3 May 2011.