The Guardian view on how Labour should sort out its policy

http://www.theguardian.com/global/2014/jun/29/labour-policy-miliband-cruddas

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Sir John Armitt, Mike Wright, Sir Michael Lyons and Sir Richard Leese. Four names united up until now only by having done something or other a long way from Westminster – and yet in the coming weeks each will supposedly tell us how Labour would approach different aspects of economic policy.

Labour's slow-rolling uber-review under Jon Cruddas must somehow knit these meditations of many minds on infrastructure, manufacturing, housing, and the regions into something coherent. It would be tough at any time, and is made even tougher by a mood of scepticism, which extends well beyond a jittery Labour party, about bright ideas and grand plans. No wonder, then, that Mr Cruddas was caught venting frustration by a hidden mic sneaked into a Compass meeting. Some of his words about "the dead hand of the centre" were taken as a slight on Ed Miliband, but were as much a reflection of Cruddas's pluralist yearning to bust out of the constraints imposed by Westminster's power-hoarding orthodoxies and the media's hyperactive demand for daily novelties. Today's eye-catching nugget of conventional wisdom from Ed Balls – about retaining rock-bottom corporation tax rates come-what-may – underlines precisely the problem.

The unintentionally public Cruddas view that good ideas are routinely "parked" by Labour is deeply embarrassing, both for him and for his leader, but frustration is the lot of the intellectual in politics, as Tony Blair's one-man brains trust, Matthew Taylor, affirmed yesterday. The other side snatches your popular ideas, he said, while arresting notions with less appeal end up hung round your neck. Parties must always tack with public opinion, and so manifestos read less elegantly than the purist prescriptions of writers and academics. The concern is not with this inevitable messiness in the policy detail, but with whether or not there is an overall sense of direction.

Opposition always evolves by review; the best are quiet, serious and about real change – the classic case being the back-office work of Rab Butler's Conservative research department in reconciling the Tories to the Attlee settlement. Neil Kinnock's 1980s reviews were higher-profile affairs, a process partly about being seen to be changing, but there was also a genuine element of facing up to realities here. In the run-up to 2010, in what experience has proved a more naked rebranding exercise, the Conservatives handed different problems to different brains. The briefest scrutiny of (say) John Redwood's zealous deregulation report and Zac Goldsmith's environmental agenda pointed to a serious misfit, and very little of it led anywhere. The real worry for Labour would be if its own multi-headed reviews reflect a similar failure to get clear on the basics. Voters uninterested in opposition positions are unlikely to catch individual notes which do not add up to a tune.

Mr Miliband hopes "responsible capitalism" can be his winning refrain: it does have promise. But there is nervousness about moving from all the reviews into an overarching economic programme. Whitehall has not attempted one since Harold Wilson's National Plan ran aground on intransigence on both sides of industry 50 years ago. Economic governance lurched first to stakeholder crisis-management, and then laissez-faire. In opposition, politicians – including George Osborne and Vince Cable – always bemoan the maldristribution of investment and unbalanced growth. In government, they shy away from addressing these things systematically, because of doubts about their own capabilities.

Sometimes these doubts are justified: the historical record of regional policies and industrial boards is just as mixed as that of the market. And, as Mr Cruddas is always at pains to stress, if Whitehall seeks to impose one-size-fits-all solutions from the centre it will fail. But in straitened times, all the reviewing will not persuade anyone that the promised building, rebalancing and growth will arrive unless there is a semblance of an overall plan.