What now for Labour? Attack the Tories on austerity, then tackle electoral reform
|
Version 0 of 1. The new government has been elected on the most anti-trade union platform in our history. If implemented, Conservative ballot proposals will make legal strikes close to impossible. More than a million unionised public service jobs in the public sector are under threat and Conservative ministers are certain to continue their mean and spiteful attacks on union organisation across the civil service and local government. Trade union members – whether or not they are in unions that affiliate to the Labour party – will therefore have a lot to say about why Labour’s challenge failed and how we ended up with a government committed to such extreme policies. The first thing is to recognise that there are no glib answers. There is no single reason why Labour lost votes to Ukip in middle England and Wales, was overwhelmed by the SNP in Scotland, and failed to take votes from the Conservatives in many target marginals. And if it had put forward the policies some have advocated in the past week, we may well now be asking why it had lost enough votes to the Greens to lose a different string of marginals. Other policy mixes might have lost more votes to Ukip. Related: Trade unions: in the next five years we have to unite like never before Nor did I see a campaign against aspiration or people getting on. The point about zero-hours contracts is not that so many people suffer from abuse that they can make up an electoral majority, but that they symbolise the worries many people have about their future and that of their children and grandchildren. The failure to build enough good homes for sale or rent is likewise all about aspiration. The millions locked out of the property ladder want decent homes precisely because they want to get on. And in hurried Conservative attempts to catch up with him in the runup to the campaign, we can see that Ed Miliband’s insistence that markets do not always work was spot on. The power of government should be used to intervene and shape markets so that they work for the common good and serve consumers. But Labour had a big problem too. Its central failure was an inability to rebut the Conservatives’ economic argument that the crash, and everything bad ever since, was due to Labour overspending. Metaphors such as the nation maxing out its credit card are powerful ways of explaining complex issues, and Labour abandoned that territory after the election, never sure whether it was against austerity or just wanted it done a bit more gently. After all, the economy was growing when Labour last lost, but shrank after the George Osborne’s first round of cuts. The current recovery started only once the chancellor started using spending cuts to pay for tax breaks, however unfair and badly targeted, rather than deficit reduction. Yet Labour ended up with the blame for the longest-ever hit to living standards. So what to do now? The worst thing would be to give the new government the opportunity to set up the economic debate as they did after the last election. The threatened deep cuts in spending and welfare would hit not just the recovery but social cohesion. This is a time when we need an effective opposition, both in parliament and in our communities. But neither can it be one more heave. The seismic shifts in Scotland change everything. Our constitutional arrangements no longer look convincing or can contain what is now a multiparty system. The seismic shifts in Scotland change everything Of course Labour and the Liberal Democrats must in the short term sort out new leaders and get stuck into the open goals that flow from a Conservative manifesto designed to win votes without ever being implemented. But there are bigger and more strategic questions at stake about the future of our democracy and constitution. Ironically for Nigel Farage, we have a party system that now looks a lot like the rest of Europe where four, five or six parties are in contention. The Scottish results may pull us towards a federal state. The new government will clearly continue to play that for party advantage, but that is not in the interest of the more than six in 10 voters who did not vote for them. This is going to be a big issue at the TUC’s next congress, with big unions putting electoral reform on to our agenda for the first time in many years. My own sense is that this is an idea whose time has come. Our two-party system – with an occasional walk-on part for a Lib Dem protest vote – may have worked in the postwar decades, but is now irretrievably broken. For those of us whose main commitment to civil society is not though party politics, the chance of a more serious national conversation can only be an opportunity for a more open and fair society. |