The Guardian view on Labour’s leadership race: words aplenty, arguments scarce
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Version 0 of 1. Aspiration, opportunity and empowerment. Britain’s half-forgotten pre-crisis political buzzwords are back with a vengeance in the Labour leadership contest. Tony Blair himself was too good a communicator to rely much on such abstractions, but his favoured thinktanks never stopped pamphleteering on “enabling”, “contestable” and “consumer-orientated” policies. And those who hope to lead Labour now seem to be agreed on one thing: that the path back to power will be paved with talk about aspiration. Even in New Labour’s heyday such chatter was rarely heard beyond the shadow of Big Ben, and yet the likes of Liz Kendall and Andy Burnham can be forgiven a little linguistic nostalgia. Although there are multiple and contradictory lessons to absorb and reconcile after Ed Miliband’s drubbing, including how to deal with angry northern deserters to Ukip and dispossessed Scottish Nationalists, the single most urgent requirement in altering the dismal electoral arithmetic in 2020 is more familiar: persuading Middle Englanders who sided with the Conservatives this time that they would do better next time to take a chance on change. Through the frenzy of jargon, you can pick out a justified howl of mourning for the lost days when Labour was seen as helping people get ahead. The all-important question, however, is what can credibly be done to bring about the “rising social mobility” that the rhetoric has promised, without any discernible consequence, right through the Blair, Brown and Cameron years. In their haste to jettison the Miliband manifesto, without having thought about what to put in its place, the Labour hopefuls risk creating the impression that the opportunity society is the society that gives to those who already have. Yvette Cooper has had a post-election conversion to George Osborne’s latest tax cut for big firms, while Mary Creagh and Mr Burnham have both soured on the mansion tax, the latter trashing it as emblematic of “the politics of envy”. Ms Kendall would have Labour embrace the Cameron-Osborne consensus that 50% was too high for a permanent top tax rate. At the other end of the scale, she also endorses the dubious Tory logic that deems it appropriate to cap benefits for whole families, no matter how large, in line with what the average individual happens to earn. After the terrible defeat that Labour has suffered, the party cannot allow any detail of a losing manifesto to be sacred. Every policy must of course be looked at again. But for anyone who is serious about not only fairness, but also social mobility – or, if you insist, aspiration – certain problems cannot be ducked. Dreams of getting ahead are not thwarted when the taxman takes a small cut of unearned and unexpected riches in an unhinged housing market. No, what really thwarts ambition is when a promising child fluffs up exams because her family can’t afford anything more than a cramped flat where there is nowhere quiet to study. Likewise, the faith that hard work can take you anywhere will not be undone by the requirement to pay five extra pence in the pound on the top slice of pay after you’ve arrived in the boardroom. If the sense that work pays has been knocked, that is much more likely to be because an unprecedented squeeze on salaries means that it often doesn’t. And for as long as patterns of earnings, employment and property ownership, not to mention university fees, conspire against the young, that old third-way anthem – Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow – is bound to ring hollow. It is now a settled political fact that Mr Miliband’s platform didn’t hold up. Too many voters took it as an appeal based on conscience alone, as distinct from conscience mixed with self-interest. Too few discerned any overarching sense of where Labour wanted to take Britain. The detail of individual policies may have contributed to the lack of a story – the mansion tax looked more arbitrary and gimmicky than it would have done if it had been attached to a wider plan for property tax reform. But – as is affirmed in two new books by two of the world’s best economists, Anthony Atkinson and Joseph Stiglitz – it is the prosperity of the middle as well as the poor which has suffered because of what has been going on at the top. If Labour’s would-be leaders lose sight of that, then they truly will have stopped thinking about tomorrow. |