Jonathan Todd

Some political realities need to be acknowledged if Labour is to move forward. These are:

First, Gordon Brown will lead Labour into the next General Election. The reaction (or, at least, non-resignation) of other leading figures in the party - particularly, Peter Mandelson, Alan Johnson and David Miliband – to James Purnell’s resignation finally confirmed this.

Second, as I have previously said, Labour has three options: 1.) Back Brown, 2.) Replace him, 3.) Allow him to continue without backing him. The third of these is the worst for Labour and choices of Mandelson et al have closed off the second. Thus, the first must be genuinely embraced by the party.

Third, in yesterday’s Guardian ICM poll, Labour only out-scores the Tories on one issue – better protecting public services.

Fourth, as Liam Byrne’s press conference earlier this week illustrated, Labour’s current line on future spending is not the strongest in the world.

Fifth, this is recognised by people. A new poll  on Politics Home finds that only 16 per cent of voters think that Labour is being most honest on tax and spend, behind the Tories on 37 and the Lib Dems on 28. Not even a majority of Labour supporters think Labour is being straighter on this than other parties.

Sixth, the government genuinely is providing real help now, as the tag line goes, to prevent this recession producing the kind of build up of youth unemployment that recessions under the last Conservative government witnessed in the 1980s and 1990s. Martin Bright recently noted: “There are still some potentially promising ideas knocking about. The Future Jobs Fund, which provides a subsidy for employers willing to take a 14-18 year old at risk of long term unemployment, and the Young Person’s Guarantee, which promises to find work for young people unemployed for over a year, are both attempts to tackle the unemployment tsunami about to hit Britain. The Graduate Talent Pool proposed by DIUS to match graduates to internships is the seed of a good idea and the proposals from the Communities and Local Government department to fill empty high street businesses with creative ‘pop-up’ shops and could also help”.

Sixth, the good work  on youth unemployment lacks co-ordination. Bright goes on to say: “Without coordination, (these policies) risk becoming just another set of eye-catching initiatives … One of the most useful jobs to be carried out by Tessa Jowell in the Cabinet Office or Lord Mandelson in his new Department of Everything would be to coordinate all the work being done to stimulate employment and tackle the recession”.

Ninth, while the economy undoubted still faces major challenges, it has started to grow again. Labour’s activism on tax and spend must have contributed towards this improvement.

Tenth, the British public are far from sold on David Cameron, as Michael White notes.

So, where does this leave us?

The first and second points tell us that Labour has no sensible option but to unite behind the architect of the 2005 General Election campaign: Gordon Brown. A key theme of this campaign was Labour investment versus Tory cuts. The third point might suggest that this strategy should be deployed again but the fourth and fifth points imply that this would not be credible. Instead, the government should build out of the support that it enjoys for protecting public services – the third point – to create support for what can be achieved through public services.

Our story on public services shouldn’t be about how much we invest in public services but about what we can achieve through public services. Our politics and policies should be focused on outcomes, like reduced youth unemployment, not inputs, which discussions about investment always constrain us to. Let us make a make a mission of the outcomes that we prioritise and let us be defined in these terms. The spending choices that we make should reflect these priorities, re-enforcing them both in the minds of Whitehall and the public. Which of our missions, for example, is satisfied by persisting with ID cards? The spending commitments that are not central to our missions should be subjected to the strongest scrutiny.  

The upturn in the economy – the ninth point – is beginning to give a taste of the outcomes that might be achieved when government targets its resources and energies on well-defined objectives and makes missions of them. Youth unemployment must be a mission. Thinking of the other things that should be missions makes me think of something Neal Lawson said recently:

“The story of the last thirty years has been the transfer of risk from the collective, the social and the community to the individual”.  

The risk of being left on the scrap heap of unemployment is not a risk that anyone, least of all the young, should have to face alone. The risks of growing old in an ageing society will be far larger than they should be for far too many people unless we collectively decide to make a mission of improving health and social care for the elderly. The risks of climate change are massive for all of us and can only be tackled by any of us on a collective basis.

This is the stuff of a positive case for government. It is in setting out this positive case that Labour’s best hope for the next General Election resides. This is a different kind of strategy from the 2005 campaign but one which needs to be embraced. It wouldn’t pretend that government can provide the answers to all our problems – this country still needs to have a more mature conversation about what government can and cannot do and what the responsibilities of citizens are and are not - but it would provide a coherent basis for Labour building upon the success which the beginnings of a turn-around in the economy represents. 

The anti-government reaction of the Conservatives to the banking crisis (e.g. opposition to fiscal stimulus, etc) suggests that they may be wrong footed by a strategy predicated on a positive case for government. From George Osbourne’s economic policies to Iain Duncan-Smith’s social policies, they still see government as more problem than solution. Let’s start, however, by building a positive case for what we can use government to achieve, rather than erecting unconvincing dividing lines on spending. 

The trend detected by Lawson implies that the Conservatives’ anti-government tendency is out of kilter with the times. This may explain – the eighth point – the fact that the public remain to be sold on Cameron. Labour successfully presenting a positive case for government over the next year may make him more politically vulnerable than he now appears.

The Sunday Mail reports that support for Labour has fallen to 23 percent – the lowest since opinion polls began in 1943. If Labour polled this badly at a general election, the party would lose 200 seats to the Conservatives, who would hold a massive, carte blanche majority of 220. The survey was also the first to record that the majority of voters want Gordon Brown to stand down now as PM.

These are desperate times, indeed, for Labour and while the expenses revelations “will hurt the reputation of all politicians”, argues Andrew Rawnsley, ”the damage is likeliest to be greatest to Labour at the next election”. Another poll supports Rawnsley’s view. There have been many highs and lows under PM Brown. But each low seems lower and more desperate than the last one. I didn’t think it was possible to go any lower than the McBride affair but recent days have probably managed it.

It may be that everything that has been revealed in recent days was “within the rules”. What McBride was up to certainly was not. Nonetheless, Brown’s response in both cases was to blame the rules and insist upon their reform. But people, especially public figures, have to take responsibility for their actions, irrespective of what the rules may or may not say. While the McBride affair was undoubtedly depressing in the extreme, there is something even more depressing about the expenses revelations because the people concerned are people who are widely respected and admired within the Labour Party, in contrast to McBride.

Of course, as I have heard Tessa Jowell and Ed Miliband say on TV, we should avoid making judgements on the basis of partial information and Ben Bradshaw and Phil Woolas also challenge the versions of events that have been reported about them. I am afraid, however, that, whatever the reality of the situation may prove to be, the damage has already been done and the dye has been cast for Labour. The party can now only, to mix metaphors, walk into the hurricane of public anger.    

What a prospect. It must make the most battle hardened Labour campaigner nervous about door knocking. Those lions have been lead to this by the expenses claims of the donkeys that lead them. Alan Johnson, however, doesn’t appear quite so donkey like. According to Rawnsley, he, along with Hilary Benn and Ed Miliband emerges ”as acmes of frugality who make modest and entirely reasonable claims for performing their duties”.

James Forsyth argues that this increases the likeihood of Miliband “winning the leadership after the next election”. But the question will increasingly be asked whether, if this were to happen, this would make him the next leader of the Labour Party. Even before the expenses story broke The Mirror did not seem disinclined to the prospect of the frugal Johnson, who has recently appeared to indicate more of willingness to take on the top job than previously, replacing Brown before the election. That frugality must have been good for his conscience at the time and now also appears a smart career move.

 Matthew D’Ancona speculates that he ”may yet be the first person to become Labour leader by going on television and radio repeatedly to deny that he is either capable of the job or interested in it”. These denials mean that Johnson is considered to lack a steely, Michael Heseltine or Brown like determination to accede to the very top. Given this and past experience – the lack of any challenge to Brown either when he became leader or last summer – D’Ancona seems justified in his view that “for all the sound and fury we can expect over the summer”, in terms of plots against Brown, ”the PM will still survive and fight the general election”. But D’Ancona was writing prior to the expenses story. Is this story a game changer? And, if so, how will the game end?

Martin Bright is right think to that there is a “distinct possibility that (it may end with) the Labour Party (going) into terminal decline as a credible political force”. He argues that the best way to avert that outcome is for “the younger generation of Labour politicians … to take control now”. Who can he have in mind? I don’t think Johnson or Harriet Harman, another potential successor to Brown, can be considered part of the younger generation. But James Purnell and Jon Cruddas could. Allegra Stratton has them down as a ‘dream ticket’.

“Why don’t James and Jon grow some balls and get together and challenge GB”, a “Labour grandee” apparently recently told her. The “grandee” will presumably hope that the expenses story has made these balls grow. At this stage, however, I am not sure whether it is certain that Purnell, nor Ed Balls or Yvette Cooper, either of whom (but surely not both?) might well consider standing in any contest that featured Purnell, is out of the expenses wood - though, this is far from the only question that might be raised about the supposed dream ticket. They are usually considered, for one thing, to be on opposing wings of the party. David Miliband – another member of the younger generation with leadership ambitions – certainly hasn’t come out of the expenses story as well as his brother or Johnson.    

If Brown can be prised from Downing Street – and that definitely remains a big if – then the number of names discussed here (Johnson, Harman, Purnell, Cruddas, Balls, Cooper and both Milibands) would seem to open up the spectre of an unseemly scramble for Number 10 – if they all were to grow balls, as it were - at a time when we face challenges so grave that Frank Field has been talking about the need for a national unity government. Peter Mandelson may insist that Brown is focused on these challenges, not his cleaner, but polls of 23 percent cannot fail to darken Labour’s mood music. It may now be the Tories turn to hold the expenses spotlight but David Cameron senses enough weakness around Brown to be edging towards a confidence vote, via the Royal Mail vote.

The chances are that Brown will avoid a confidence vote by giving enough concessions to Labour backbenchers to win the Royal Mail vote with Labour votes, while losing Cameron’s support for his Royal Mail plans. But how many concessions can Brown give without losing the support of the responsible Minister, Mandelson, a potential Geoffrey Howe in this drama if ever there was one? It’s bizarre that Brown has ended up in a position of such dependence upon his old foe – The Sunday Telegraph speculates that Brown may reduce this dependence, in respect of the Royal Mail vote at least, by moving Mandelson to the Foreign Office, “a post he has long coveted”. How these once bitter rivals play their cards on the Royal Mail vote may go some way to determining whether everyone’s favourite ex-postie, Johnson, ends up as PM. The Sunday Telegraph also suggests that Brown may try to prevent this happening by making Johnson Chancellor and, thus, “binding him in” to Brown. This creates the risk, however, as Peter Hoskin notes, that Alistair Darling will play Howe.

All of this, however, is just fluff and hot air – or “sound and fury” to use D’Ancona’s term. Not only is it fluff and hot air, it is fluff and hot air at a time of crisis. Shuffling deckchairs on the Titantic is the right expression. Martin Bright correctly grasps the depth of the crisis facing Labour. The worst thing Labour could offer now (and I have stopped assuming that things can’t get any more desperate, as that assumption has proved sadly, too unrealistic) is more fluff and hot air. That is to say more talk of a challenge to Brown. Talking about challenging Brown but not actually challenging Brown, i.e. not growing balls but pretending to, is the worst of all Labour worlds. It is worse than growing balls and challenging Brown. It is also worse than not growing balls and supporting Brown.

This is a crisis of fluff and hot air in a deeper and more dangerous sense than this, however. Brown promised the country a vision but, frankly, this only came into view with the credit crunch. This gave his government a sense of purpose that it otherwise lacked. Once a government and a party becomes so lacking in purpose that it needs a global crisis to give it one, it is little surprise that the public have little sense of what the party’s purposes, motivations and convictions really amount to. I fear that those battle hardened Labour campaigners, who are newly nervous about door knocking, would struggle to give a convincing answer as to what the point of a fourth Labour term would be, if asked on the doorstep. These lions have again been let down by the donkeys that lead them. And just as badly let down as they have been in respect of expenses.

The Labour Party, whoever leads it, desperately needs a stronger sense of direction. Until the party rediscovers, re-imagines and revivifies its purposes, it cannot complain about these purposes being unclear to the electorate. The most encouraging thing about the latest ‘date‘ between the ‘dream ticket’ is that it occurred at the launch of an exciting new Demos pamphlet. The Liberal Republic is a great publication by Richard Reeves and Phil Collins, which is likely to appeal to Alan Milburn, a name sure to be mentioned among the plotters. The likes of Milburn, Purnell and Cruddas are intelligent and bright enough to think through the thoughts that will need to be thought through for Labour to really rediscover its sense of direction. They should have the balls to do so and not to get distracted by the fluff and hot air. Only one of these pursuits, ultimately, will make a real difference. We were promised vision and we were promised substance. That is still what is required, whoever leads Labour.

“While government cooperation has declined”, writes Paul Collier in a fascinating article in the RSA Journal, “there has been an acknowledgement that global problems can only be addressed by common responses”. Gideon Rachman provides illustration of this decline in government cooperation in today’s FT. “If you look at Mr Obama’s top priorities, you get a sense of just how little the Europeans are prepared to give him. More help in Afghanistan? Most Europeans will do the bare minimum. A co-ordinated fiscal stimulus? Sorry, Europe is out of cash as well as troops”. If this really is the “most pro-American European leadership in living memory”, as Gordon Brown recently told a joint session of Congress, they have a funny way of embracing “the president that Europeans hoped and prayed for”, as Rachman correctly describes Barack Obama. It seems to me that European leadership presently provides more support for the thesis of Collier than that of Brown.

“Fortunately”, however, as Collier writes, “while the ability of governments to cooperate has declined, the ability of citizens to cooperate has increased. The Obama campaign was a spectacular demonstration of this at the national level, but there are examples internationally. It may be that cooperation at the level of civil society can be a substitute for that between governments in introducing common responses to global problems”. The Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI) is an example given by Collier to support an argument that has much commonality with David Miliband’s thinking on the – apologies for the jargon - ”we can” generation. Essentially, this is about citizen-centric policy on a global scale, which is all very exciting, but apologies for layering jargon upon jargon.

The historian Peter Clarke distinguishes between the “moral” and “mechanical” reformers. Perhaps, I can escape charges of jargon by switching to this terminology. Collier is more optimistic about the potential for moral, rather than mechanical, reform. However, “moral and mechanical reform have to go together”, as Miliband has noted. The point here is that global problems seem so vast that we cannot be sanguine about the decline in the capacity of governments to cooperate. The development of a global citizenry is certainly to be welcomed but governments must also raise their game. This week at the G20 would be very good place to start.

Richard Reeves is typically thought provoking in the current Prospect. He quotes an interesting line from a recent Liam Byrne speech. Labour’s “mantra should be really simple. We want a country of powerful people”. Given his excellent biography of John Stuart Mill, I wondered whether Reeves also found this line evocative of a famous line from Mill: “with small men no great thing can really be accomplished”.

“On the one side” of the Labour Party, argues Reeves, “stand those for whom the economic crisis demonstrates the need for a more muscular state; on the other, a diverse group”, including Byrne, “who want to use the state to give more power to individuals”. Similarly, Jesse Norman has previously divided Labour into Trimmers, Romantics and Deniers. Remarks from Matthew Taylor and David Miliband are said to define the Trimmers. “Instead of a Government-centric model of change in which we assume our rulers should be given the blame for what goes wrong and the responsibility for making it right”, claims Taylor, “we need a citizen-centric model in which we reinstate ourselves as the authors of our own collective destinies”. In other words: we want powerful people.

Norman associates Jon Cruddas and Tony Woodley with the Romantic tendency. “They regard New Labour as a tool of neo-liberal capitalism, which has deliberately betrayed its working class roots in order to appeal to the middle classes”. Polly Toynbee and Ed Balls are offered up as Deniers. “They argue that the growth of the state under Gordon Brown has been benign, and should be continued and extended”. If we collapse the Deniers into the Romantics, then Norman’s characterisation of the Labour Party exactly parallels that of Reeves. To mix the terminology of Taylor and Norman, the Trimmers favour a citizen-centric approach, while the Deniers and the Romantics advocate a Government-centric model; precisely the distinction proposed by Reeves.

Certainly, Toynbee – “the high priestess of Denial” - appears to continue to defend what might be described as a Government-centric model. While Neal Lawson and John Harris, both closely associated with Compass, like Cruddas, recently argued that “the government’s responses to changed times have been either too timid or, on the few occasions ministers have still affected to be radical, based on the very ideas that are now part of history … running through the supposed remedies for the financial crisis is a discredited belief in light-touch regulation”. Thus, Deniers and Romantics unite behind ”a more muscular state”.

This side of the argument, observes Reeves, has “the upper hand, and understandably so. The government is bailing out banks, car firms, homeowners and charities … A new corporatism is being hailed”. Compass are certainly keen to move UK politics on from the “ideological vacuum” that Howard Davies sees it as being played out in. “Both Labour and the Conservatives need to find a new way of talking about the government’s role in a stumbling market economy”, contends Davies. The left’s response to Davies’ call for “a British version of Gaullism” might come from the likes of Compass, while the right’s may come from Phillip Blond’s red Toryism.

Davies hears that “within government a debate is under way between those who wish to present the state’s new role as a regrettable short-term necessity and others who think a positive long-term redefinition is required”. The Deniers and the Romantics offer up the positive long-term redefinitions of the left, as the red Tories provide the positive redefinitions of the right. At this stage in the economic and political cycles, all of the energy – the “big mo”, as Americans say – is behind these redefinitions. Those who prefer citizen-centric models to a positive long-term redefinition of a more muscular state, such as Trimmers on the left and compassionate conservatives, like Norman, on the right, now lack the big mo.

“Compassionate conservatism”, argues Norman, “seeks social renewal through the devolution of power and responsibility to people and local institutions, through greater personal freedom from bureaucracy and regulation, through breaking up state monopolies to improve public services, and through a renewed emphasis on the rights of the citizen and the rule of law”. This was very trendy in the early part of David Cameron’s leadership but red Toryism seems more in vogue as concern has shifted from “social recession”, once a key concern of compassionate conservatives, to economic recession, now a massive concern for everyone.

Broadly speaking, compassionate conservatives offer a citizen-centric model that demands a much reduced role for the state and Trimmers provide a citizen-centric model that requires a smarter state. But citizen-centric models are offered from the right and the left; just as the Gaullists – Compass and the red Tories – offer competing Government-centric models from the left and the right. Some future trends point towards the Gaullists continuing to hold the big mo but others point in the opposite direction.

The Gaullist ascendency seems confirmed by the inevitability that Martin Wolf now attaches to banking nationalisation. “In 1978, Alfred Kahn, an adviser on inflation to President Jimmy Carter, used the word “depression”. So angry was the president that Mr Kahn started to call it “banana” instead … We are painfully learning that the world’s mega-banks are too complex to manage, too big to fail and too hard to restructure. Nobody would wish to start from here. But, as worries in the stock market show, banks must be fixed, in an orderly and systematic way. The stress tests should be tougher than now planned. Recapitalisation must then occur. Call it a banana if you want. But bank restructuring itself must begin”.

However, the warning from Steve Bundred of the Audit Commission to brace ourselves for huge public spending cuts augers against the Gaullist ascendency. If Wolf thinks that bank nationalisation is inevitable, then it must be a very real possibility. Equally, who am I to argue with Steve Bundred? And what conclusions should be drawn from the conflicting implications for the Gaullist ascendency offered by Wolf and Bundred?

It seems that there may well be some areas of policy – banks, most obviously – where Government-centric models are unavoidable. This does not mean that Gaullist delight should be unconstrained, however, as the finite nature of public funds means that the more public funds are consumed in these areas of policy the more citizen-centric models become unavoidable in other areas. Put simply: Government-centric models, by definition, tend to make larger calls upon public funds, which reduces the level of public funds available to use on other areas of policy, requiring more attention to focus in these areas upon citizen-centric models that typically make smaller calls upon public funds.

The realities of public budgets are not, though, the only reason for advocates of citizen-centric models to have heart. Let’s consider the full quotation from Mill that Byrne brought to mind. “The worth of a State, in the long run, is the worth of the individuals composing it – a state which dwarfs its men, in order that they may be more docile instruments in its hands even for beneficial purposes – will find that with small men no great thing can really be accomplished”. We all wish that Fred Goodwin has long ago been made a docile instrument but no real solutions to climate change, anti-social behaviour, obesity and much else besides are likely to be offered by either docile instruments or the state – no matter how benign or enlightened – that renders them so.

Instead, argues Taylor, “for society to progress relies on citizens acting more often in ways which match their values and aspirations and doing more for each other than simply obeying laws. To have the society we want, we need to agree to give more back. This is particularly obvious” – even after the credit crunch and the Gaullist ascendency – “in relation to four current public priorities: protecting the environment, improving public services, living together as strangers, maintaining a sufficiently strong democracy and civil society”. Responding to climate change requires citizens to change the way that they live; not simply change in government policy. The NHS needs active citizens to take responsibility for the future health of themselves and their family; not simply a reaction from NHS staff after a health issue has developed. The response to youth crime includes citizens volunteering at youth centres, as well as government initiatives like anti-social behaviour orders. And, ultimately, citizens get the politics that they deserve. Cynicism about politicians is the default position of our times but if the best citizens do not bother to stand for election, where will this leave democracy?   

As much as all of this stands against the Gaullist ascendency, it seems rather trite and common-sensical. Citizen-centric models, as with so many things, perhaps move further beyond the realms of glib cliche when concrete examples are provided. Here I volunteer personalised budgets. Of their application to adult social care, Demos report: “it changes people’s attitudes towards themselves and their role in the service. People who were recipients, whether passive or complaining, became participants in planning and commissioning the services that support them. The service users that we interviewed said that they became less isolated, depressed, dependent and more optimistic, energetic and confident”. They argue that “this participative approach delivers highly personalised, lasting solutions to people’s needs for social care, education and health at lower cost than traditional, inflexible and top-down approaches”.

In short: making people powerful delivers better and fairer outcomes at cheaper cost. I can’t argue with this. Equally, I draw more Gaullist in relation to the banks with every passing day. Yes, I feel citizen-centric in relation to some things and Government-centric in relation to others. Does this make me a bad or mad person? I should hope not. But call me a cross dresser, if you want. Call it being it favour of what works, if you insist.

The debate about the proper role of the state is certainly getting more interesting. But the least helpful response to this debate is to offer the same answer in every context. Just because bank nationalisation seems more inevitable, it does not follow that Government-centric responses are right in all contexts. Nor does the success of personalised budgets in adult social care mean that citizen-centric models are always the best approach. The challenge is when to go Gaullist and when not to.

Saturday 20 September, Labour Party Conference Diary

Train heave on to Euston”, once sang one of Manchester’s favourite sons. My reverse journey began with a blizzard of Cabinet Ministers: Hilary Benn, suited and booted, and seemingly fretting about his ticket; John Hutton, relaxed in both dress and in his ability to emerge from a long queue at W. H. Smith’s with a newspaper in time for his train. He may have read the Mirror editorial proclaiming that Labour faces “one of the most important conferences in its proud history”. Many of the pivotal moments in Labour’s history have been forged in the fiery furnace of conference. So the journey north was charged with anticipation and occasion.

Morrissey called upon arrival in Manchester. This was Helen, my CLP Secretary, not Stephen Patrick, with a tip on navigating the secure zone. First I had to contend with a taxi journey to my B&B which was extended by “the loonies marching,” as my driver put it. I was content to take this focus group of one as the authentic voice of Manchester’s working class.

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