Next Labour
Peter Mandelson helped create New Labour before I joined the Labour Party at 18. During my 30th year, Mandelson declared “New Labour is dead. Long live New Labour“.
Mandelson remains a polarising figure within the Labour Party. Blairism and Brownism, as much as New Labour itself, are, by turns, contentious and meaningless terms. I don’t want to get bogged down in them. I passionately want to move on from them. Perhaps paradoxically, however, some reflection on what Mandelson said in his obituary/proclamation - now, sadly, behind the Times paywall – may help to do this.
First, having written my M.Phil thesis on Tony Crosland, I consider myself a Croslandite. I would be delighted to see the Labour Party, under new leadership, embody the revisionist, social democratic tradition. This is a tradition concisely defined by Roy Hattersley: “The only ends of socialism are justice and equality; everything else is means”. Wonderful stuff. But, at the moment, Labour would be helped both by a renewed sense of clarity about our ends and a surge of innovation about our means. Without descending into navel glazing and talking to ourselves, rather than the wider country, I’d like a bit more of this clarity (which, for the most part, is about revisiting our values and traditions and thinking through their contemporary meaning) and innovation (which, largely, is about opening our minds to the best ideas wherever they may come from).
Second, while we live in an age in which temptations towards division are great, Labour’s best instincts avoid sectionalism. Of course, bankers made awful mistakes but banker bashing cannot be the basis for a Labour economic policy. Yes, our country remains a family with the wrong members in control, particularly so long as David Cameron remains Prime Minister. But we must be a party relevant and appealing to all family members, not one declaring class war. Mondeo man is now largely irrelevant to this appeal, however. Proving ourselves to be a party capable of governing for the whole country is far more challenging than reheating the lines and techniques of the 1997 ’New Labour coalition’.
Third, a party that seeks to carry all sections of the country with it on a permanent evolution towards justice and equality must be governmental. Which means never shirking tough choices. And we live in times that are awash with nothing but tough choices. The Tory-Lib Dem government, most particularly in their handling of the deficit, will approach these choices in ways that will, rightly, merit outrage. But, while our outrage should fire and sustain us, a governmental attitude is never one simply of outrage. This attitude must be discerning, rational and pragmatic; and always clearly seen to be so. If outrage is all we are, we won’t be able to be those things. We won’t be able to show that we would be able to deal with the deficit, but in a fairer way than the coalition; that we are the party of economic growth and wealth creation; that we have a worked-out sense of Britain’s place in a world of intensifying globalisation; and that, in short, we offer an alternative, but superior, more judicious and humane, government.
The Tory-Lib Dem government will certainly do some terrible things. They were quick, for example, to pull Building Schools for the Future (BSF) funding out of west Cumbria: again damaging a part of the world that I grew up watching being damaged by the last Tory government. But it would be complacent and dangerous for the Labour Party to assume that these terrible things alone will be sufficient to return us to government. Given the scale of our General Election defeat, this is especially true. We need to think through the causes of this defeat, of our successes and failures in government and how we best re-make ourselves as the engine for the justice and equality that defines us as a party and movement.
This means facing up to the challenges that I’ve discussed: thinking through and articulating a clearer sense of our ends; re-energising and re-imagining the means we deploy towards these ends; remaining a party that seeks to govern for all parts of the country; and being a credible, alternative government.
I want to do what I can to help Labour rise to these challenges. This website and blog seeks to share some ideas on how we might do this.
