The next 6 months are vital whether you’re a Labour person or not. As the Party’s Policy Reviews get into full swing, so does the need for a more progressive space to be created to ensure those policies are truly transformative. As Mary Riddell outlines, spaces are opening up and there is all to play for.
What we do now can influence how radical Labour is at the 2015 election and beyond. This is not about whether you are Labour or another party, or none. The change of direction the country needs demands a change of government. Working with others, Labour must play a big role in that and every progressive should push it to think and act differently.
To try and open up the space for more radical politics, we have suggested 4 guiding principles that we think the Labour Policy Review must take into account to make sure the values of democracy, equality and sustainability are at the heart of their policies. We want to know what you think!
Remember these are the principles that should guide action- not the policies or outcomes.
The way we see it is that Labour could offer a limited menu to the nation, play it safe on vision and policy and run a conventional centralised election campaign. Or they can recognise the unprecedented moment we are in and rise to that challenge with a transformative approach to vision, policy and campaigning.
So please let us know your thoughts on the principles below – just post your comments under this blog post.
The principles:
- Accountability – of all powerful institutions – the state and market
- Transformation – by reforming institutions and devolving power and resources to nations, cities, regions, localities and people
- Prevention – dealing with the causes of our economic and environmental problems, not paying for their consequences
- Co-production – enabling workers, users and citizens to help improve the services they work in and use and the communities they belong to
Your comments will feed into our work to create the space for a more radical policy review.
Retire the £374bn of outstanding government debt in the Asset Purchase Facility (“we have reduced government debt by 40%).
Stop issuing bonds to fund deficit spending (“we can invest in the country but banks not taxpayers should pay for this”). Instead Allow the Bank of England to fund government deficit spending. To prevent inflation raise policy interest rates as needed and increase the contingent capital requirements on banks (“no more government debt”-“balanced budgets”, “safer banks”, “on the side of savers”, “banks should pay for the privilege of creating money as debt from thin air”, “can’t allow banks to increase the level of household debt to unsustainable levels”).
Read up on positivemoney proposals and also Modern Monetary Theory.
I am sure that most Compass members will agree with these as broad principles. The challenge is how we translate them into practical policies that will hopefully find their way into the next Labour manifesto.
Ed Miliband is already being criticised for talking too much about abstract theories and generalities, and Compass is not going to get much traction with trying to promote these principles unless we can provide some concrete examples of what they could mean in practice.
So, for example, “Co-production” sounds like a marvellous concept, but how do we translate this into a set of practical policies we could realistically expect Labour to adopt. And are we talking about John Lewis style partnerships, co-ops, mutuals, or something altogether different?
Hi both. The reason we are starting with broad principles is that without them policies often become incoherent and contradictory. It’s also the quickest way to get most leverage over the direction of the whole review.
Danny – we’ve written a publication on co-production (find it in the library section. Its a bit old now but gives you the general idea.
I absolutely support the principle of prevention but this can only be delivered if budgeting cycles are increased to 5 years or more. Services planned without long term or even medium term visibility on their funding respond to crises, chase easy wins and choose false economies. Longer term visibilty incentivises smart investment and the forestalling of future liabilities. In a period of fiscal restraint, this allows for the rebalancing of expenditure even within the confines of a smaller envelope.
Providers can invest this year on fences at the top of the cliff AND spend on ambulances at the bottom and then save towards the end of the cycle when the preventative strategy has begun to reshape and reduce the patterns of demand. A need reduction strategy that can’t be done in a single year. Three years is still hard but with 5 year budgets different kinds of services and a different kind of society hove into view – early action provision and a society that prevents problems from occurring rather than one that, as now, waits for trouble and pays the price
This isn’t playing silly games with the numbers. Any intelligent enterprise anticipates future liabilities and off sets them if it can. Government does it already to a very small extent with, say, immunization programmes so why not also and far more extensively with, for example, the detached youth work that, over time, reduces rates of offending or , with the focused support on the early years which despite making such a huge difference to longer term life chances was actually reduced by 7.8% in cash terms in the most recent local authority funding settlement.
I do not think these so-called principles amount to much.
1. Accountability – of all powerful institutions – the state and market
Comment. Without specification this is completely meaningless. All powerful institutions produce annual reports and various other information items and they are required to do so. They can therefore claim to be accountable. I wonder if the Compass leaders are not getting caught up in the windy rhetoric of Ed Miliband.
2. Transformation – by reforming institutions and devolving power and resources to nations, cities, regions, localities and people
Comment. This is not only nonsense, it is harmful nonsense because this sort of rhetoric blocks intelligent debate. All devolution is not desirable. If it were we might as well pack up central government now and go back to self-governing villages (not that even they ever really existed!). Thus the idea that power in general, no specification, should be devolved to nations would mean dismantling international organisations such as the EU since they require a pooling of power in order to work.
3. Prevention – dealing with the causes of our economic and environmental problems, not paying for their consequences
Comment. Sounds good, if you don’t think about it. But of course there are radically different ideas of what the causes of our economic problems are at the various points on the political spectrum. Each of these is associated with different forms of “prevention”. So, this generalised “principle” is doesn’t amount to anything. It has no substance.
4. Co-production – enabling workers, users and citizens to help improve the services they work in, use and the communities they belong to
Comment. There could be the germ of an idea here but, again, it is so weakly expressed that it amounts to virtually nothing. Many workers and citizens are already regularly involved in trying to improve the service they work in and the communities they belong to. So what is added to this by using the word “co-production”? Nothing as far as I can see.
General Comment. My view is that this sort of enunciation of so-called principles is a poor substitute for real politics and real political analysis. It gives some people a feeling of being worthy and of pushing the boundaries but this feeling is entirely reliant on an illusory view of the current state of UK politics.
“The next 6 months are vital whether you’re a Labour person or not. As the Party’s Policy Reviews get into full swing, so does the need for a more progressive space to be created to ensure those policies are truly transformative. As Mary Riddell outlines, spaces are opening up and there is all to play for.”
At the Compass education Conference at the end of 2012 Jon Cruddas told us that the coming six months would be decisive in the formation of Labour Policy and that the basis for its election programme would be determined in that period. Now you are telling us nearly a year on that its the next six months that count.
Now we are told that “there is all to play for”. Does anyone really believe that? Or if this is just hype trying to give people a little enthusiasm for what is basically a hopeless task.
It is clear, in my view, that despite Miliband’s claims to the contrary (e.g. in last Monday’s speech) Labour just cannot wean itself of neo-liberal political philosophy. Even when it tries and talks about empowering people to make decisions this is, on the rare occasions that there is a hint of a detail, conceived in market terms. Education is a perfect example. Hunt’s mantra is “high quality teachers are required for high quality education”. Apart from the utter banality of this view its actual function in political discourse is to side step any issues of the structure (or the lack thereof) of our education system. Labour used to wriggle out of such considerations with the mantra “standards not structures”. That’s why we never had a comprehensive ‘comprehensive system’. Now we are supposed to imagine that we can have a one-nation education system with kids being divided up into private schools, religious schools, local authority schools, academies, academy chains etc. Labour will leave the basic Gove reforms in place while tweaking some of the inputs into the system. If you can see any sort of real opening for educational policy debate in all this then you can see something I can’t see.
Some people might see a glimmer of hope in Hunt’s recent talk of a new “middle tier” for education. I don’t. Blunkett has already made it clear that clear lines have been drawn as to what Labour will and won’t do even before his report has been delivered. For a start he has ruled out democracy in the delivery of education being based on the political structure of local democracy.
There really is no room for influence. Miliband and the Shadow Cabinet are a law unto themselves – and the suits that manage them. There is no democracy in any of this and they treat ordinary Party members with contempt in various ways.
One has to find ways of keeping one’s spirits up and it is not easy in the current state of UK politics and Labour politics. But depressing though the scene is I do not believe that it is helpful in the medium to long term to keep one’s spirits up by imagining that there are great opportunities and openings when in fact they are not there at all.
Thanks David, that’s very useful advice in how this translates into policy.
You surely can’t be serious? The Labour Party pursue a radical agenda? What planet are you living on? Surely not the one I or the rest of us live on. The reformist policy that the left has pretty much always pursued, is now, for sure, as dead as a duck.
It seems that what Compass et al, are trying resurrect is a long dead Labour Party of the (long dead industrial) working class. It’s the most extreme form of myopia I’ve ever encountered!
Isn’t it time to get real and think about creating a genuine left when the idea of ‘reforming capitalism’ aka 1945 is pure self-deception. The idea of Not Red Ed Miliband adopting some kind of ‘progressive’ platform because of what? Pressure from a non-existent left?
I despair.
As a Scottish labour voter I am looking for a radical revision of the present labour party principles. There are many labour voters who I am sure are voting for independence, because we never see any possibility of a labour party at Westminster that will truly represent us.
The principles you have set out look encouraging. My only doubt is that any of them will see the light of day in a labour party that feels it has to be at least as Tory as the Tories. It is very discouraging to hear apparently reasonable people having to parrot right of centre and extreme right of centre views in an attempt to attract Tory voters. If there is no clear light between the parties I fear that you will lose a lot of votes north of the border and an even greater level of apathy with non voters.
The Labour Party was set up to represent the trade unions, not the labouring class and it has never been the party of the class, except in arranging tactical reforms to keep the workers happy.
This is the Party which supported the three decade war from 1914 to 1945 when the imperialist states of Europe were squabbling over their share of the colonies.
This is the Party whose leader Clement Attlee in 1945 colluded with the US in the founding of Nato, in return for getting his capitalist welfare state established during the three decades of the new colonialism.
This is the Party whose leader Wilson in 1974 began the process of neo-liberalisation ready for Thatcher to put it into practice and for Blair to trumpet the virtues of capitalist, humanitarian, freedom and democracy – all through four decades of Nato Global War.
Change Miliband? Wake up.