TMP Online

Leading members of the British centre-left urge Prime Minister Gordon Brown to put society first and to reach out to crucial bases of support, including black and ethnic minority voters, in this statement published today by pressure group, Compass.  The statement has been signed by the Compass Management Committee (of which TMP editor, Chuka Umunna, is a member), Jon Cruddas MP, Jon Trickett MP, UNISON General Secretary, Dave Prentis, and others.

British politics is suddenly in flux. The postponement of a general election that looked all but certain only weeks ago has sent shockwaves through Westminster and beyond. After a summer of soaring poll leads, Labour is facing a newly-energised Conservative Party. The Liberal Democrats are about to stage their second leadership contest in two years. Other rapidly-changing issues and events are only contributing to the sense of tumult. For Labour, this presents both threats and opportunities.

Gordon Brown needs to demonstrate that he is not the victim of events, but their master. To do so, he will have to show that the way he both acts and reacts is informed by a connecting narrative which guides the government through the chaotic processes which inevitably buffet any modern party. He and his government need to make sense of their actions, and provide an intellectually and morally coherent vision for his premiership. This, needless to say, is a matter of urgency.

Labour still holds the advantages of incumbency. It has made an admirably positive start on issues such as constitutional change and housing, while also appearing to change unpopular aspects of health and education policy. But the tactical blunder of allowing speculation to build about an early election, combined with mimicry of Tory policy on inheritance tax and non-domiciles, has rocked the party’s confidence. In retrospect, Labour’s sense of purpose has been further undermined by attempts to construct the kind of political Big Tent that serves to muddy the party and government’s essential identity, as with the courting of Margaret Thatcher and recent ugly rhetoric about migration (witness the conflation migration and criminality and the championing of “British jobs for British workers”), both of which have undermined the government’s progressive credentials.

Thus far, Brown has uneasily walked between the two poles of continuity and change. We believe that the new Government should now come down decisively on the side of the latter. That shift needs to be spelled out by ministers, so that the electorate has a clear sense of the government’s mission, and can connect the otherwise disparate and apparently random decisions emanating from Westminster. Unless this happens, events like those of the last two weeks will be repeated and the chance of winning a fourth term - let alone doing so for a purpose - will quickly recede.

Some Labour figures - people who only recently held leading roles and who never ceased to lecture the party on the need for unity when they had power - are already briefing in the dark. But their proposed return to the failed policies of the past would be a political and electoral disaster. Indeed, it was their decisions which left Labour 11 points adrift from the Tories at the end of the Blair era.

Brown has already had to defuse many of the political landmines which had been left behind by announcing plans to rejuvenate the role of the Commons, attacking the royal prerogative, apparently stepping away from the failed policy of marketisation of public services, halting the expansion of private treatment centres within the NHS and effectively starting to end the combat role of British troops in Iraq.

All of this we warmly welcome. And there is much in the history of this government since 1997 which progressives can be deeply proud of. But equally, there has been much that was both regressive and ultimately unpopular. Gordon Brown should now reject the siren voices calling us back to a past which was not an unmitigated success, and begin to set out a progressive agenda which joins up each initiative and shows how these lead us to The Good Society.

This, then, is a candid message from progressives to build the case and the pressure for meaningful change. Our essential question is this: what is the Labour government for? We are still unsure. There are competing elements, but too little that is coherent. The Prime Minister and his immediate circle travel light and refuse to be pinned down. Blair tried for years to make the third way fly, to no avail. We cannot hope to replace a failed third way with no way.

One strong aspect of the New Labour project is a rather dry economism that sees work as the solution to every moral and social problem we face. Clearly, the effective management of the economy is critical and in this respect, Brown has been successful. Our worry, however, is that too many of the government’s policy instincts still lead to the prioritisation of the market over society. This inverts the principle point of social democracy – to ensure society is the master of the market. It inevitably leads to the growth of inequality, social immobility, and social recession and leads to conflict with the imperatives of the environment. It also creates glaring tensions within the government’s own rhetoric and thinking, as with the idea that real equality of opportunity could ever be achieved without substantially greater equality of outcome.

Thankfully, there are other ideals and priorities to which Brown has recurrently given voice: the redistribution of wealth and the importance of investment in public services, and what the PM himself has called “values far beyond those of contracts, markets and exchange”. Unfortunately, the current market-first approach leaves him and his government trying to run up the down escalator, as social divisions are widened and private recurrently comes before public. Moreover, as the parties converge on this centre-right ground democracy is diminished as voters are refused a meaningful choice.

Labour pays a political price for this. The party has become too distant from crucial bases of support, including public sector workers, trade unionists and black and ethnic minority voters, but it has also failed to energise the progressive middle class. It is neglecting all kinds of issues that impact on millions of lives - from our threadbare public transport, through the casualisation of thousands of workplaces and deepening concerns about the anxious state of modern childhood, on to rising and personal debt and an all-pervasive feeling that our lives are running out of control.

Across our society, there is a sense of grievance that has to be addressed. Working hard and playing by the rules isn’t paying off. Anxiety abounds. Contrary to some of the more optimistic talk from the political class, there is no “new politics”. The world is being run by a rich elite beyond political control and is reverting to the kind of widening divisions and increasing insecurities that the post-war march of social democracy promised to wipe out.

Underlying everything there is a dual fear: that there is little we can do to manage globalisation and that we inhabit a conservative political culture which will not tolerate progressive politics. Both are wrong. What we make in the form of global markets we can remake. And we believe that the British people have within them the capacity and commitment to be caring, cooperative and compassionate. It is the job of political leaders and progressive forces to encourage such traits just as Thatcherism promoted their polar opposites.

So what is to be done?

We think Brown has already sketched out the answer but has failed to act on it. At the 2004 Compass conference he made a speech centred on The Progressive Consensus, an idea we need to concertedly return to and belatedly develop.

The progressive element of the speech was that the centre-left must be fuelled by a different vision of society. We share a vision in which people take control of their lives. It is bound up with a meaningful freedom via which they are actors in shaping their world. To be realised, this requires two things: first, that society becomes more equal, because people need more fairly-distributed resources to achieve that freedom. Second, people have to possess the means to act collectively and not just individually. We can only do the big things together. When we do, we can replace rising anxiety with optimism about the society and world we can create.

The consensus element requires the need to build alliances that can surmount the vested interests that oppose such a free and equal society. This means going beyond Brown’s charmed circle, and beyond the Labour Party – although the latter remains crucial, and desperately needs to be re-energised. But the party also needs to reach out to NGOs, trade unions, progressive faith groups and campaigning organisations, and forge a lasting historic block of common social purpose- not just to win an election like 1997, but to build and sustain a new Britain. Brown has rightly talked about the politics of aspiration, but this cannot just be private and personal. Labour also needs to nurture people’s aspirations to be social citizens who fully shape the destiny of their own lives, communities and country.

The two aims dovetail together. The democratic, empowered society we want will be created by democratic movements. Reaching out will enable Labour to win for a purpose by addressing both its core constituencies and the anxious prosperity of the middle class. Both face collective challenges and the daily struggle of time and money that ultimately stem from the contamination of society by the market. Greater equality would create the more cohesive and harmonious society which both elements of Labour’s support would welcome. On that basis, the party can win by offering reassurance from a radical position – the formula that defined the two great milestones in post-war British history, in 1945 and 1979. We believe people want social security rather than more economic anxiety, and an enthusiastic majority can be won for such a vision. But it needs urgent leadership.

Brown has said he wants to deepen democracy, and he has worried aloud about growing inequality. He aspires to end child poverty, match private sector education spending per pupil and maintain a world class NHS. Within such aims, we believe there is an underlying recognition that the political centre has been shifted far to the right. Our job is to pull it back. The choice is simple enough: neo-liberalism can be entrenched or social democracy renewed.

Labour’s dominance of British politics is recoverable. Cameron’s Tories, after all, have built their ambitions on sand. They cannot renounce the Thatcherite inheritance, which is the key cause of most of society’s current ills. Labour, by contrast, must decisively break with it. It can be new and Labour, modern and left, principled and in power – but society must come first.

The Compass Management Committee
Neal Lawson, Chair, Compass
Jon Trickett MP, Parliamentary Spokesperson, Compass
Jon Cruddas MP
Lynsey Hanley, author and journalist
John Harris, author and journalist
Dave Prentis, General Secretary, UNISON
Billy Hayes, General Secretary, CWU
Tony Woodley, General Secretary, Unite T&G section
Professor Ruth Lister CBE
Professor Richard Sennett
Tony Robinson, actor and Labour activist
Baroness Helena Kennedy QC
Professor David Marquand