Chris Leslie: ‘The temptation for the centre left is to step in and take control’
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Version 0 of 1. Over recent decades, Britain’s politicians have sought to woo a catalogue of symbolic identikit voters. They include Mondeo Man, Worcester Woman, Basildon Man, and most recently, within the Labour party, the John Lewis shopper. Labour’s new shadow chancellor, Chris Leslie, wants to add an extra character to the list: he believes the party must re-build itself by appealing to the readers of Which? magazine. In a calculated repudiation of the economic philosophy of Ed Miliband, who resigned in the wake of Labour’s devastating defeat at the polls last month, Leslie argues that during the election campaign the party failed to grasp the power of consumers. He says Miliband’s Labour too often strayed into a statist, command-and-control approach to economic policy, seeking to centralise power in Whitehall, instead of handing it to shoppers, homeowners and tenants. “It’s the Which? magazine strata of society that somehow we just didn’t understand,” he says. “They’re not necessarily always struggling; they may be doing OK. But they do want to do better, and they do want their families to do better, and they are consumers who want to be able to get a good deal.” On policies from the energy price cap to the mansion tax – what Miliband’s outriders called the “retail offer” – Leslie says the party allowed itself to be portrayed as too keen to step in and take over where the market was failing. “Part of the issue we always face on the centre left is the temptation to want to control and run what’s going on in a particular market,” he says. “All these retail policies in themselves were not so much the problem, but it fed into this question of whether we understood business and how markets work. And in turn, did that give people the sense that we were somehow a riskier prospect on the economy?” Leslie faces a tough challenge in taking on George Osborne: the chancellor will deliver his summer budget on 8 July, newly emboldened by the Tories’ outright electoral majority, while Labour is punch-drunk and locked in an introspective leadership campaign. He didn’t expect to be shadow chancellor. Or shadow anything. But when May’s seismic election swept away former shadow chancellor Ed Balls – as well as Labour’s chance of forming a government – stand-in leader Harriet Harman turned to Leslie, who has considerable experience on Labour’s Treasury team. He most recently shadowed chief secretary to the Treasury Danny Alexander – who was also turfed out by the electorate. The solution is supply of housing, not necessarily implying that landlords are all exploitative and opportunistic Leslie has taken over the Westminster office, as well as the title, of Balls, who had been a dominant figure in Labour economic policymaking for more than a decade before his defeat at the polls. The room still feels a bit unlived-in, like a university bedsit at the start of term, but Leslie is keen to show that he is cracking on with the homework Labour needs to do to win back the public’s confidence. And for him, that project has to start with a history lesson: he wants to see Labour relearn the lessons of 20 years ago, when Tony Blair fought off objections from the trade unions to redraft Clause IV of the party’s constitution, which had committed it to securing “common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange”. Leslie believes Miliband took Labour into the election on a prospectus that suggested the party was pining for the days when Labour’s aim was to nationalise the “commanding heights” of the British economy. Not only did that frighten off business leaders – they were made anxious by Miliband’s combative talk of “vested interests” and “predators” – but it suggested the party didn’t really understand how markets work. Rival Labour leadership candidates Andy Burnham and Yvette Cooper have both sought to downplay this in recent days, with warm words about wealth creation and the spirit of enterprise. “This is where I think there are some real challenges for our leadership candidates,” Leslie says. “We’ve got to make sure that we show a proper analysis of what’s happening in the economy, and that we understand the economy, and markets in particular. “The housing market’s a great example. It was reasonable to talk to people who were renting and say, ‘we understand your anxieties.’ But actually the solution is supply of housing, and not necessarily implying that landlords are all exploitative and opportunistic.” He believes buy-to-let property-owners, many of whom are well-meaning pensioners trying to boost their retirement incomes, felt demonised by Labour’s approach. Instead of capping rents, he would bring in a “Help to Build” policy – in contrast to Osborne’s Help to Buy scheme – that would underwrite loans to small construction firms, thereby kickstarting building projects and constraining prices. And instead of cracking down on lettings agencies, he would encourage local authorities to use digital technology to establish an open marketplace for rental properties. “I personally feel that it’s got to be about consumer information, about blasting some transparency through these markets.” He says this applied to a whole series of policy areas. In rail, Labour’s pledge to allow the state to bid for franchises strayed too close to nationalisation. In banking, its pledge to impose limits on individual banks’ market share smacked of clunky state intervention. On the mansion tax, he says, the principle was fine, but the details of the policy were too sketchy, suggesting that Labour hadn’t done its homework. “The reality was very crude,” he says. It didn’t help either, Leslie argues, that Labour initially appeared reluctant to focus on the need for continued deficit-reduction. “For the public, it came too late in the day: I think we should have had a consistent message from the start on the deficit and debt.” Miliband’s mauling at the hands of the Question Time audience during the campaign – when he refused to accept that Labour was too profligate in the runup to the financial crisis – turned out to be more revealing about voters’ mood than the opinion polls, which consistently pointed to a hung parliament. Leslie says: “The primary problem was the banking crisis, and if you’d had the foresight that the banking crisis was coming, it stands to reason you could have braced yourself more for that crisis – and that obviously applies in fiscal terms, too.” Neat and softly spoken, 42-year-old Leslie knows what it’s like to lose a parliamentary seat: elected to Westminster in 1997 at the tender age of 24, for the seat of Shipley, in West Yorkshire, and served as a junior minister from 2001. But he lost his seat in 2005 and spent five years running the New Local Government Network thinktank before returning to Westminster in 2010, for his current constituency of Nottingham East. It is not clear whether Leslie will hold onto the plum job of shadow chancellor after September, when a new leader will take up the reins. But he insists that even in this post-election postmortem period, it’s not too soon to start laying the foundations of a new Labour economic policy, which he says must focus on rebuilding British productivity, which has stagnated since the crisis: “This isn’t for me just a period to tread water.” And while the opinion polls may have allowed him and his colleagues to cherish the hope that they would be ensconced in the corridors of the Treasury by now, he concedes that as the election campaign got under way, “in our hearts we knew there were things that hadn’t been properly gripped and addressed”. |