As the waters of conference season begin to ebb and flow, we thought we’d take this moment of calm to reflect on the movement of Labour in the past year – the strengths, the weaknesses and what the party really needs to work on.
Successive reports have painted a sorry picture of the state of British democracy and political engagement. In fact it is well documented that people are increasingly disengaged from politics. This would be worrying at any time but it’s particularly troubling that in such a tough economic moment, politics is not seen to be there for people when they need it most.
But does Labour have a specific problem? Labour was overwhelmingly rejected at the last election and, despite a partial recovery in opinion polls still seems as out of tune with the mood of the times and popular sentiment.
While this might, in part, but down to the fact Labour held office for a long period of time and oversaw the worst financial crisis for generations, with many still holding the party responsible for the ensuing recession and deficit, is there actually a deeper issue, related to the way Labour does politics?
If we go beyond the usual issues, we can focus on something less definable but perhaps more fundamental: people’s gut instinct towards Labour. Is there something about the tone of Labour politics that drives potential Labour voters into the arms of other parties or makes them join the ever-growing group of those who don’t vote?
We’ve commissioned a range of Labour MPs and others to look at issues of tone, culture, style, organisation and language and to investigate precisely what prevents Labour’s political messages being heard, in order to make recommendations about how the party can re-engage with the electorate.
What one thing about the Labour party would you change in order to re-connect with voters?
You must junk your blind belief in neo-classical economics that caused the double dip recession and making it worse. You need to offer hope and promising more and deeper government cuts is not the way to do it. There are lots of ways of improving things which would be more effective; a more tax inspectors to make the rich and multinational companies pay the tax they should with country by country reporting, a general tax avoidance principle, forcing open the tax havens, using QE for capital infrastructure like houses. railways etc is stead of enriching the bankers. You must stop privatisation of the NHS and reverse rail, water, electricity which did nothing but enrich the 1% at our expense. Look at Tax Research UK or the money reform party and other modern monetary theory.. Finally please look at the scientific investigation on the bad effects of large bonuses.
Labour is often seen as the ‘big’ party – of the big state, Old Labour as big unions and New Labour as big business. A new focus, which is in part already to an extent underway is to make us the people’s party, to support cooperatives, credit unions, small business, and take a page out of Obama’s book to encourage funding through mass grassroots action.
Ironically, considering the word’s immense devaluation in British politics these days, we need a progressive focus ala Teddy Roosevelt, one of trust busting and standing up for the little guy. Things like breaking up the big banks so ‘too big to fail’ is no longer an economic threat, creating a confederate credit union network, new social housing, bringing democracy into utilities by supporting community green energy programmes, a land value tax to weaken property speculation and remove tax burden by abolishing things like council tax and stamp duty.
Nationalised and the mutualised rail service is the epitome of this angle. We break both with big state monopoly and the flaws of PPP by giving control to employees and consumers – buy an annual rail card and get dividends, plus a say in how services run. This would be very popular with the public according to decades of opinion polls and encourage more people to use public transport.
Labour need to make a sharp move to the left with some of their policies, such as taxation and government spending. A policy of cutting VAT and paying for this by taxation on the wealthier in society (£250,000p/a+). The conservatives are disenfranchising those who don’t earn great deals of money, making their living conditions harder. Labour lacks direction and these people are switching off from politics because they can’t see anywhere else to turn. Labour needs a sharp turn towards its base, which is the only way in which it will win the next election, by mobilising the disenfranchised that the conservatives are quite willing to ignore and, in some instances, punish, because they do not believe they will go out and vote.