We are now over a year into this government and it, like the country it is attempting to govern, is febrile and unsure of itself. Complacency and cynicism jostled for position at Labour’s annual conference, and though the government reasserted its authority over the party, the country will not be so easily soothed.
The fissures in our party, such as those emerging in the deputy leadership contest, are incidental to the ones reshaping our country; minor skirmishes from an old era, near irrelevant in the new terrain. Cosmetic changes will not save Labour.
Labour’s landslide was loveless and its precipitous decline in popularity is not so much because of the specifics of any given policy than because the government has become a stand-in for a failed political class. It must prove that it understands the historical moment we are in so that it can rise to it, both expressing and responding to the discontent in the country.
In 1977, the Tory think-tank the Centre for Policy Studies published Stepping Stones, the document that laid out with absolute clarity the Thatcherite analysis of the 1970s stagflation crisis and what needed to be done. That they were able to withstand the early unpopularity of the Thatcher government, ignoring the pleas of Tory elders to U-Turn, owes much to the clarity and confidence of that document. Our country was reshaped in a way which we still have not recovered from.
The authors of Stepping Stones understood that in a country’s history there are times of continuity and times of discontinuity. In times of continuity, competent government is sufficient. Steady the ship, communicate clearly, deliver a few technical fixes. This is not such a time. This is a time of discontinuity, in which the “system itself starts to show signs of fatigue, instability, disintegration.” In these times, government must be willing to break constraints which were previously thought unbreakable: “It is not enough to settle for policies which cannot save us, on the grounds that they are the only ones which are politically possible or administratively convenient.”
The hour is late.
It is now akin to 1980, a year into a historically unpopular government. We don’t have our Stepping Stones, nor the intellectual or institutional resources that gave flesh to it. Neither an economic boom courtesy of North Sea oil, nor a moment of national unification like the invasion of the Falklands, seem imminent either.
But the task is clear: to reconstruct the national economy which Thatcher’s government began the process of dismantling, and in so doing to give meaning, dignity and purpose to every part of our country; to radically reduce immigration and restore social cohesion to our communities; and to restore the integrity of the state and its institutions. Without these changes, claims that Britain isn’t broken will ring hollow.
People feel that things have gone wrong, badly wrong, and they are right to feel that way. The basics of life are increasingly out of reach. Infrastructure is crumbling or non-existent and our town centres lie neglected. Energy is expensive and we do not produce nearly enough of it. Rent and house prices are eye-watering. There has been no meaningful increase in growth, productivity or real wages since the 2008 financial crash.
Utilities have been privatised, state capacity outsourced and industry offshored. The courts assumed ever more power and decision-making was transferred from the arena of democratic politics to distant bureaucrats and judges. Lacking political vision, politicians turned instead to mass immigration, the easiest lever to pull.
These are not just abstract policy failures. The primal matter of human life – the work we do, the places to which we belong, and our relationship to our country and those that we share it with – has been neglected.
The unprecedented changes in the economy and demography of Britain means that we must make the country anew. To undertake this task government must reconstruct a national economy which gives dignity to working people across the country, and restore the integrity and sovereignty of the British state and our democracy.
Labour must rebuild our national economy.
1. Britain must reverse decades of deindustrialisation, to rebuild working-class communities and secure our national security in a new era of global uncertainty. There can be no rearmament without reindustrialisation, and no reindustrialisation without cheap energy. We need cheap, clean energy to bring down industrial energy prices, industrial policy to support industries of critical national importance, and regional policy to ensure all of Britain benefits.
2. Austerity was a disaster that hollowed out our state capacity and left communities abandoned. Years of historically low interest rates were wasted by Tory governments who refused to invest in the future and we are now paying the price. Government spending has been tilted towards the short-term: more and more on handouts, less and less investment in the public realm. We should amend the fiscal rules, in which economic sense and democratic politics are subordinate to faulty OBR forecasts, and invest in infrastructure and the public realm.
3. Successive governments have sold off our public services and national assets and utilities, leaving us vulnerable and dependent on others. Privatisation has all too often led to extraction, mismanagement and waste. We should bring public services like rail, utilities like water, and critical industries like steel, back into public ownership.
4. Buying an ordinary family house has become a struggle for even those on good salaries, excluding many young people from adulthood and parenthood. We have not built nearly enough houses, while immigration has radically increased demand. Government must enable more housebuilding, especially social housing, with the explicit objective of reducing house prices and rent as a proportion of incomes.
5. Our tax system needs reform to reflect new realities, including that most value is tied up in land and assets rather than income. We should find ways to tax assets, and overhauling council tax to properly tax property wealth so that it no longer disproportionately hits those in poorer parts of the country.
Labour must restore the integrity of the sovereign nation.
1. Immigration is not a distraction or a culture war issue; it is the most fundamental of political questions, a cause of social fragmentation, and the basis of our broken political economy. We should drastically reduce immigration, reducing low-skill immigration by significantly raising salary thresholds; closing the corrupt student visa mill system; and ending the exploitation of the asylum system, if necessary prioritising domestic democratic politics over the rule of international lawyers.
2. Crime and antisocial behaviour are contributing to a sense that public order is breaking down, with working-class communities usually the victims. We must restore the trust and authority of our police force, clarifying its increasingly blurred mission, so that it can focus on the small number of repeat offenders who are responsible for the vast majority of crime.
3. We are proud of our multiracial democracy and we utterly reject divisive identity politics, which undermines the bonds of solidarity between those of different sexes, races and nationalities. We should legislate to end positive discrimination in hiring practices, sentencing decisions, and wherever else we find it in our public bodies.
Labour must restore the integrity of the state.
1. The government does not run this country. We have handed over too much control to unaccountable QUANGOs and increasingly powerful courts with the power to block government policy. We should return decision-making to parliament, limiting the endlessly expanding power of judicial review and reforming or closing QUANGOs which make decisions which properly belong to the realm of democratic politics.
2. The British state is bigger but less effective than ever. The prime minister is right that the civil service is sclerotic and needs reform, but we also need to end the scam of consultants ripping off the government and wasting huge sums of public money. We should restore state capacity by reforming our civil service and ending the corporate commissioning and consultancy racket.
3. As deindustrialisation and individualism undermined community ties and old systems of mutual aid, the state moved in to fill the gap. Too frequently it leads to services and investment that are indifferent to human agency and ignorant of local circumstances. National renewal must be about the restoration of society as much as it is about the state and market. We should trust local people and organisations to deliver services, wherever possible.
The first year has not gone well but there will be no second chances for Labour. National renewal begins with these three political tasks. Their achievement will define the government’s ‘decade of renewal’ and shape the future of the country.