Next Left

Why we need Social Europe

2012-02-13T17:24:00.000Z

Ahead of the Fabian Society's Social Europe conference on 25th February, Ivana Bartoletti, Editor of Fabiana and former policy advisor to Romano Prodi government in Italy, writes for Next Left on why a social agenda must be at the heart for Europe

European social policy comprises a variety of interventions, which take place mainly through the so-called Open Method of Coordination. The outcome is an amalgam of legislation, financial aid, cooperation and soft law mechanisms such as guidelines, benchmarking, and best practice.

In recent years, soft law mechanisms have become the preferred route to promote innovation in social policy. They are embedded in the Lisbon Strategy, which was adopted in 2000 with the aim of turning Europe into a socially inclusive and competitive, knowledge-based economy by 2010.

However, in the past ten years the idea underpinning the Lisbon Strategy — that economic and social goals must be closely connected — has been slowly abandoned. By 2005, the focus of the Strategy had shifted from considering social policy as a key factor for growth, to simply ‘growth and jobs’, without any mention of it. This didn’t happen by chance, but has been the result of the swing to the right, which has occurred in many countries over the past ten years.

Such a shift in the political agenda has become clearly visible in the way the EU has decided to deal with the current crisis. European countries, almost all run at present by conservatives, seem to believe that austerity is the only way forward to tackle the crisis. Whether true or not, this has had the effect of making citizens feel that Europe cannot provide any social protection, thus disenfranchising them; this belief can lead easily towards nationalism and protectionism.

Political and economic wisdom, as well as analysis of the outcomes, should suggest that austerity, à la Merkel and Sarkozy, does not work. A Wall Street Journal article, published in 2009 warned of the risk of EU countries entering a vicious circle of deflationary ‘beggar-thy-neighbour’ wage strategies; something which would endanger countries and lead to a spiral of poverty and lower living standards.

I am reluctant to accept historic comparisons which do not recognise the fact we live in an unprecedented time.

The process of European integration has now gone far enough that old remedies, such as currency devaluations and trade protectionism, are not viable solutions.

At the same time, solutions based on the traditional social-democratic vision of the big State are in my view outdated too, not only because resources are tight but also because big, state-led programmes have not always achieved what was hoped for.

It is within this context that Labour needs to develop a new narrative on Europe and I think the way to achieve this is by endorsing the original spirit of the Lisbon Strategy: to re-establish the social element as a key factor of growth.

Firstly, the EU is a single market, and it is in our interest to pursue a concerted social agenda among all member states. Equalising the social conditions of workers means ensuring we avoid a race to the bottom, which would ultimately affect us all. The reality is that the trend in reducing rights has already started.

Secondly, we need to compete in the wider world. In 2006 I became head of human rights for Labour sister party in Italy, and I have since advocated that if we, as Europe, want to compete with, for example, China — a country which does not combine growth with rights — we cannot follow the same path, and would not want to.

Having recognised the importance of the social element as a key factor of growth, we can relish the challenge of developing a new social agenda in these tough times.

My argument applies very well to women: maternity rights as well as the provision of adequate and affordable childcare (topics which have always been at the very heart of the Lisbon agenda) are social priorities which will trigger growth. History shows us that removing the obstacles to women’s full participation in the labour market is a key factor for growth and the creation of wealth for households.

This is why I believe the European social agenda can give Labour the bedrock for a new narrative on Europe, so long as we restore its original spirit and we make it work in today’s tough times.

There are still a few tickets available for "Social Europe: Worth Fighting For?" on Saturday 25th February. Visit the Fabian Society website to get yours today.

Checking the blind spot - Examining violence against women

2012-02-10T12:56:00.001Z

This is a guest post by Vera Baird. Vera is a member of the Fabian Society Executive Committee and Chair of the new Labour Commission on Women's Safety, commissioned by shadow home secretary Yvette Cooper.

Yvette Cooper described this Government, whose first budget took 70% of its cuts from women and 30% from men, as having “a blind spot” about women. She seems to be right when one considers, not only economics, but also plans such as the deletion of 17,000 rape suspects from the DNA database, as it becomes ever clearer to police that rape is often a serial offence.

Women’s organisations now fear that cumulatively, the Coalition’s policy, legislation and cuts are having a worrying impact on those services that work to protect women. We have found from our visits so far that these concerns are being backed up by facts from the frontline and illustrated by the experiences of the individuals we meet.

Last week Professor Sylvia Walby, UNESCO Chair in Gender Research at Lancaster, published a report showing the “dramatic and uneven” impact of a national reduction of 31% in funding for local gender violence services last year. Smaller organizations have suffered on average 70% cuts, whilst those receiving over £100,000 lost 29%.

Consequently, Women’s Aid have reported that up to 230 women fleeing domestic violence were turned away because of a lack of accommodation on a typical day in 2011. Eaves, which also provides refuges, has been forced to advise woman on how to minimise risk while sleeping on the streets or at Occupy camps.

Research by the Women’s Institute shows that women will be disproportionately harmed by cuts to legal aid, while Rights of Women demonstrate that 49% of current service users would not be eligible at all under the new rules, despite Justice Minister Kenneth Clarke repeating that such women will still get legal help. Violent men will not get legal aid either and, by handling their own cases at court, will get a state-sponsored opportunity to abuse their victim further by cross-examining them face to face.

A poll from training specialists, CAADA shows that, in 2011, 2 of the 8 major providers of Independent Domestic Violence Advisers, who are widely credited with saving lives, faced cuts of 100%. 3 lost 40% and 2 more will lose a quarter. IMKAAN, with six specialist refuges for Black Asian and Minority Ethnic women, is being forced to close two and reduce capacity in two more.

In Coventry, there is a 30% loss of floating support for survivors of violence. Cuts to housing benefit mean that a single woman under 35 who flees domestic abuse will only get the rent for a room in a shared property. A correspondent to our website says, “The Suzie Project in my home town has lost its funding, so we’ve had to end our group. Cutting funding to projects which support survivors of rape leave people like me feeling all alone.”

In one East Midlands ward, police identified domestic violence perpetrators and knocked on their doors on the nights when they were typically violent, to reassure their partners and deter these men. This preventive policing measure stopped because of officer shortages. Professor Walby found that 78% of perpetrator programmes had cut the numbers of clients they could assist.

Half of councils who responded to a Labour Party survey in November were reducing their street lighting to save cash. Local Government Secretary, Eric Pickles calls this “sensible,” while, on the other hand, the Police Federation said “the lighter an area is, the safer it is.”

Lighting cuts affect everyone in our communities, but Netta e mailed our website to say that it is women who are often left feeling more insecure:

“Cuts to street lighting – imposed by Suffolk Country Council - are happening here in Ipswich. Female friends … tell me [and I can confirm from having looked at a few] that it is quite scary. If you don't have a car, can't afford taxis and are used to walking around your own town in safety, it does make quite a difference having this "curfew" imposed.”

A national non-political women’s group told us that violence is the pre-occupation of its website traffic and women say that, as resources are cut back, they would not know how to leave a violent home if they needed to do. Professor Walby writes: “These cuts to provision are expected to lead to increases in this violence.”

Half way through the Commission’s inquiry, we are beginning to understand her fears.

Professor Walby’s report, Measuring the impact of cuts in public expenditure on the provision of services to prevent violence against women and girls (February 2012), can be found here.

More cutbacks mean more riots?

2012-02-07T13:11:00.000Z

Professor Peter Taylor-Gooby, Professor of Social Policy at the University of Kent writes for Next Left on the link between cuts and social disorder.

More cutbacks mean more riots? Many readers of Next Left might have suspected that already, but were drowned out as politicians and commentators clamoured to lay the blame at the feet of poor policing, poor parenting or simple hooliganism.

However, I've just completed a study which shows that they are the kind of response to harsh government policies which we increasingly should expect. The work takes two sets of data. The first is a database compiled by Harvard University researchers which details social disorder in developed countries (riots, political demonstrations and political strikes). The other is the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development’s international database on public spending, privatisation, job security and poverty. Both these agencies are among the most highly respected in their fields.

My study puts these two sets of data together and sets them in the context of other relevant issues such as national public policy tradition or specific factors operating at a particular point in time. It shows that over a 25 year period and covering 26 countries, greater poverty, welfare state privatisation, public spending cuts and job insecurity lead to more disorder. These findings are reasonably robust in relation to different ways of specifying policies and their outcomes, different time-periods and different countries.

Significantly for contemporary debates, it's change rather than level in the various factors that seems to be most important: the rate of increase in poverty or of shifting government services to the private sector, the speed with which social spending is cut back.The UK government's social programme involves the most profound policy changes for at least two generations. It is now beginning to bite. Projections by the Institute for Fiscal Studies indicate that at least 400,000 more children will be in poverty by 2015. The reforms to the NHS and social care, the harsh cutbacks in funding for Sure Start and for local government and the policy of contracting services like the Work Programme to the commercial sector will privatise a substantial part of state services. More stringent eligibility tests for benefits and changes to employment protection in a context of rising unemployment mean greater job insecurity.The programme also proceeds at a hectic pace. The Coalition is bent not just on achieving major cutbacks, but on changing policy so that the cutbacks are embedded, making them much more difficult for the next government to reverse.

The research reported here indicates that it is exactly this kind of rapid deterioration in living standards for the most vulnerable groups and headlong privatisation that is most likely to lead to public disorder.Last summer the poorest areas of big cities experienced the most violent riots for a considerable period. This was followed by major demonstrations and the largest strikes against government policies - particularly the public sector pension cuts - since the 1980s. Similar unrest is evident elsewhere in Europe.

As 2012 progresses we will see further increases in poverty, rising unemployment, greater insecurity for those in work and more privatisation as the welfare state is cut back. This research indicates that we will also see more riots, demonstrations and strikes disrupting our cities.Again I'm sure many readers of this blog believed that it was worsening social conditions in big cities that were responsible for social unrest. When the poor have no other avenue open to them, they riot.

The recent Guardian/LSE study of the London Riots shows how the impact of cutbacks on already deprived communities set the context for the inner-city explosion. The research reported here sets that kind of study in a larger context and shows how cutting the welfare state and increasing poverty tends to result in unrest across European countries.

The full paper "Riots, demonstrations, strikes and the Coalition programme" is available on request by emailing p.f.taylor-gooby@kent.ac.uk

In Defence of Social Democracy

2012-02-03T14:44:00.000Z

Dr Kevin Hickson is Senior Lecturer in Politics at the University of Liverpool and co-author with Roy Hattersley of "In Search of Social Democracy". Here he responds to David Miliband's article in the latest edition of the New Statesman.

Firstly, I would like to thank David Miliband for taking seriously the arguments which were presented in my recent article in The Political Quarterly, ‘In Praise of Social Democracy’ co-authored with Roy Hattersley. Obviously we disagree over the recent past and the future of the Labour Party, but this should be a debate over principles and not personalities.

What does David argue? The implication is that we are being intellectually complacent - lazy even – wishing to retreat into some kind of comfort zone, reassuring ourselves while failing to do what is necessary to win the next General Election. In fact it is the other way around, the complacency comes from David Miliband, and other Blairites in the Party who wish to have more of the same, the ‘unfinished’ Blairite agenda of the pre-2007 era. It is this agenda which seems dated and irrelevant. David is correct, Britain and the world have changed - we are now in a ‘post-crash’ era – but it is the older Labour values that seem much more relevant now than Blairism.

I wish to make several arguments in response. Firstly, there is no trade-off between principles and power. We should not think, as some on the left have done in Labour’s past, that it is better to remain in opposition so as to be ideologically pure but nor is necessary to sacrifice key principles in order to get into power. New Labour was incredibly cautious not only in the run up to the 1997 election, which is understandable, but afterwards. The feeling of most Labour supporters is surely one of regret. Labour did good things in power but overall the sense is one of a squandered opportunity. The fundamental purpose of a Labour government is to achieve greater equality. In this New Labour failed, if indeed it ever tried seriously to do so. Now the best hope for the Labour Party electorally is to be much more ideological.

Moreover, we should defend the central state. We did not argue that the state can do everything, nor is it perfect. There is plenty of scope for constitutional reform, for more effective central-local relations and for greater international cooperation between nation-states in a more global world. But what we should not forget is that the state is the only thing which can get us out of the economic mess and if there had been more effective banking regulation rather than championing a laissez-faire approach as New Labour did then the effects of the global banking crisis would not have been as severe as they were in Britain. New Labour left the British economy overexposed to financial services, lacking effective regulation and an absence of active industrial policy. This was surely the greatest failure of New Labour in domestic policy and we should never forget this. By saying that we should find alternatives to the central state David continues to miss this crucial point. It is the market – not the state – which should be the primary target for criticism and reform.

The contributors to The Purple Book and those associated with ‘Blue Labour’ share a commitment to extreme localism. David has re-emphasised that belief in his article this week. However, what is striking about this commitment is how pointless it is as a response to the major issues of the day. Few, if any, banks are based locally – perhaps they should be but they are not. It is incredibly difficult to see how effective economic regulation can be achieved by greater localism. Similarly, David wants to decentralise public services but at the same time fails to explain how this can do anything other than exacerbate the postcode lottery in welfare that Labour has historically sought to diminish. Greater powers can and should be given to local government but this also requires a compact between central and local government. The ‘big society’ is an attack not only on central government but also local authorities. An essential task for Labour is to defend the state, both central and local.

In the week that David chose to write his article Ed has effectively tapped into the sense of unfairness felt, legitimately, by the British people against astronomical bankers’ bonuses. We should have the confidence in our traditional values, not because we wish to retreat into our comfort zone but because they are both right and popular with the electorate.

You can read Roy Hattersley and Kevin Hickson's original article "In Search of Social Democracy" in Political Quarterly here.

Farewell Huhne...

2012-02-03T13:21:00.005Z

Natan Doron is a Senior Researcher at the Fabian Society

In Winter 2012 I had the pleasure of sitting opposite Chris Huhne at a Fabian Society Environmental Policy Network dinner. He quoted Trotsky and poked fun at the Big State Fabians. In the main though he spoke as someone who was on top of his brief, understood the scale of the challenge and most importantly, had the gravitas to stand up to George Osborne in cabinet. However you look at it today is a bad day for the battle to avoid the worst effects of dangerous climate change.

Because in 50 years, no one (except perhaps Paul Staines, Harry Cole & hardened Lib-Demologists) will care about Chris Huhne’s driving offences. They will however, care about what the UK did to show radical, innovative and effective leadership on the challenge of shifting our energy portfolio to a more sustainable place. This does not mean Huhne should be excused, but rather that the political debate needs to focus now on getting the right person for one of the (if not the) most important brief in Government.

A wealth of research from the Fabian Society’s Environment & Citizenship programme shows that in an age of creeping scepticism and uncertainty on climate, the public need and expects a Government that shows strong leadership on climate change. This was something that, despite his faults, Chris Huhne understood. That’s why Huhne was right to push for increased ambition in Durban when everyone had written off the chances of any deal at all being made.

As the Fabian research makes clear, the public see the Government as a legitimate voice on issues of climate and they want a framework of policy initiatives that ensures everyone is involved in efforts to reduce the climate impacts of behaviour. This Government needs to understand the importance of rules and regulations in sustaining co-operation: ‘nudging’ in itself is not enough.

The coalition is increasingly making a mockery of its self-awarded greenest government ever title. This only maximises the level of expectation on the incoming secretary of state. Ed Davey has a hell of a job on his hands to fill the boots of Huhne and to make sure we don’t fail future generations by sacrificing the stability of our climate at the altar of Osbornomics.

Boris' "75p moment"

2012-02-01T17:55:00.002Z

Fabian Society General Secretary Andrew Harrop (@andrew_harrop) takes a look at Boris Johnson's council tax cut

Boris Johnson’s announcement of a 1% cut in the City Hall component of Londoners’ council tax has been met with astonishment verging on ridicule (see Labour AM John Biggs’ “onion argument”). It reduces the average household payment by the staggering figure of £3.10 per year. At a time when people across the capital are coping with squeezed incomes, Boris’ pledge to cut the tax liability of London householders by less than a penny a day seems almost satirical.

In a typically grandiose press release issued by the Mayor’s Office, Johnson describes his “pride” in “taking this step towards easing the burden” and in an interview with the Evening Standard lauds this as “the end of an era where arrogant politicians showed contempt for London taxpayers”.

But how can we reconcile this soaring rhetoric with the measly reality?

Readers with long memories will perhaps be reminded of the furore that greeted the 1999 budget when Labour announced its 75p weekly increase in the state pension. Attacked vociferously by Conservative opponents and questioned by older people’s groups, no-one could realistically say this was the Labour government’s finest moment of political management. Fast-forward almost ten years and Gordon Brown embarked on his ill-fated abolition of the 10p tax rate, prompting dismay on all sides of the House of Commons.

At the root of the problem in those two cases was the same division between rhetoric and reality. To struggling pensioners the stark reality of a 75p per week increase jarred with the overblown statements of ministers. The abolition of the 10p tax band clashed with Brown’s promise to “ensure working families are better off” and deeply damaged his credibility. Both served only to reinforce New Labour’s association with spin and dissimulation.

Could this be Boris’ “75p moment”?

It’s certainly a lame-duck policy. It offers hardly any relief to Londoner’s struggling in these straightened economic times. If it is, as the Evening Standard asserts, an attempt to “trump” Ken Livingstone’s Fare Deal campaigning, Boris has played the wrong card.

In last month’s YouGov London mayoral poll, only 13% of those polled thought that Boris Johnson “was in touch with the concerns of ordinary people” (in comparison with Ken Livingstone’s 40%). A headline-grabbing announcement that promises so much but delivers so little for Londoners will only exacerbate this.

At best it is naïve, at worst it smacks of desperation.

Baby steps towards responsible capitalism?

2012-02-01T15:39:00.002Z

The past week has seen ~~Sir~~ Fred Goodwin lose his knighthood and RBS chief executive Stephen Hester surrender his £973,000 bonus. Headline grabbing events by their very nature, questions are now being raised as to whether we are witnessing the first steps towards responsible capitalism or symbolic gestures merely equating to the public being thrown a bone?

First rearing its head at the embryonic stage back at Labour’s party conference, the “responsible capitalism” agenda is one which seems to be sticking. Once again, much like 2011’s “squeezed-middle”, opportunistic Tories, recognising the resonance the issue has with the public, have leapt aboard the bandwagon. With this, a movement has pushed the agenda into the public consciousness. But perhaps it has only been in the past week when the concept has become a reality.

Spurred on by Sir Philip Hampton’s rejection of his £1.4 million bonus, on Monday Stephen Hester, RBS chief executive, caved into growing political pressure when faced with the possibility of a Commons vote and yesterday, with a frightfully cold evening looming, news outlets across the nation switched focus to Fred Goodwin’s “de-knighting”.

From an optimist’s perspective, one could argue that these are much more than empty gestures. Perhaps, The rebirth of accountability. And, with defiance towards unjustifiable bonuses and rewards taking their first scalps, you cannot help but think a precedent has been set for other CEOs, chairmen and executives to follow. But to be positively bleak, do we live in times of optimism?

With growth stagnating, unemployment at its highest rate since 1996, welfare reform threatening many of the most vulnerable in our society, this is hardly the time to count the odd million saved or a knight of the realm forfeiting an honour as wins. To take the less joyous path and reluctantly embrace pessimism, these somewhat positive events do not seem so significant in the cold light of day.

When it comes to real reform, where the agenda of responsible capitalism will ultimately succeed or fail, we will see whether there is real merit to the argument. Despite the term’s popularisation, in reality we find a contrasting picture. No truer than with regards to the Vickers Report, which advocated much needed regulatory reforms of banking. In December, this was tellingly confirmed to be off the table until the latter end of the decade, inexplicably being scheduled for 2019. In both a political and banking sense this is light-years away. And in all honesty, who knows what the future will bring? By 2019, the economy could be growing and the yesteryears of turmoil could be long forgotten, only for future generations to once again be blighted by further recessions.

With this in mind, in spite of the fanfare surrounding “responsible capitalism”, you cannot shake the feeling that far too many remain proponents of the notion that big business is impossible to regulate. Jonathan Bartley, writing last week for the Guardian, suggested that “responsible capitalism” is an oxymoron much like “well-mannered war”. While, this may be too cynical, there is a point here. A point perfectly articulated by gestures such as those seen in the past few days. Responsible capitalism has to mean more than simple pact mentality retribution and bonus blocking, to put it simply the idea must avoid being devalued, avoid becoming “responsible capitalism lite”.

To steer clear of such a fortune, we must be wary of finding ourselves in a rut, or continuous chain of events, where every now and again the public mood is defused with a token appeasement. Rather pressure must keep mounting, focus must not waiver and courage must form the basis of our approach.

Unquestionably, Ed Miliband has seized the initiative in the past week, and doubters must surely recognise the Labour leader’s growing ability to pick the fights worth fighting. As with Murdoch and NewsCorp, Ed has understood the public mood and capitalised to appear both earnest and true on his words concerning responsible capitalism.

The party must continue to walk this path. While, the much needed reform is scheduled for long into the political future, a future in which Labour hopefully once again form a majority, Labour and the left can still be influencing the debate now. Pushing a coherent agenda clearly defined by its goals and undeterred by nonsensical claims of angering big business. The message is clear, the public want action, Labour can and must deliver this.

This is a guest post by Kenneth Way

European Court of Human Rights: Worth fighting for?

2012-01-25T16:58:00.004Z

In his speech today in Strasbourg, David Cameron has argued Britain must use its chairmanship of the European Court of Human Rights to reform the court.

A move likely to appease the eurosceptic wing of his party, Cameron’s call is one which paints the ECHR as overly interventionist and an unwelcome party in national legal proceedings. But is this really the case? Or is the Prime Minister overstating the impact of the ECHR on British justice and in the process guilty of “peddling myths”?

To answer this, one must consider the charges the Conservative leader has brought against the ECHR. Addressing Strasbourg, Cameron focused on three criticisms in which he stated the court is a “small claims court”, transfixed with petty rulings rather than the substantial protection of human rights, argued it is bogged down by a 150,000 strong caseload and finally that the court delivers verdicts that unnecessarily undermine the authority of national courts.

For all too willing sceptics these arguments provide ample cannon fodder to push for wide-ranging reform that would reduce the backlog of cases, but much more importantly for anxiety ridden anti-Europeans limit the scope of the ECHR. With a growing concern that the court will push for the British ban on prisoner’s voting to be lifted, an issue which was incidentally subject of a Commons vote last year, governance of the court presents an ideal opportunity to counter a perceived threat to established national law.

But in contrast with claims being made from the right, statistics reveal that Cameron’s argument that Britain needs to be allowed to make more conclusive rulings is plain wrong. An excellent post on the Human Rights Blog shows that in reality, only 3% of cases the court considers regarding Britain receive a judgment. This hardly seems like the actions of an intrusive interventionist body in dire need of reform.

Perhaps more aptly, as Sadiq Khan MP has claimed, Cameron is “more concerned with placating his restless backbenchers than he is about protecting and promoting human rights across Europe.” Talk of the court undermining British law provides weight to this theory and in actuality with the majority of cases brought before the court arising from countries such as Russia, Romania and Ukraine, it seems difficult to envision Conservatives being overly fussed about the court imposing decisions on these states.

The criticism extends beyond the opposition though, with Britain once again being forced to the fringes in a supranational setting by a party seemingly hell-bent on nullifying European influence. As with the veto in December, the warning signs are plain to see. Prior to today’s speech the ECHR's most senior judge, Sir Nicolas Bratza QC, stated, “It is disappointing to hear senior British politicians lending their voices to criticisms more frequently heard in the popular press, often based on a misunderstanding of the court's role and history, and of the legal issues at stake.”

Unlike Cameron, Bratza’s viewpoint is statistically supported and it is imperative that any push for reform is grounded in a reality-based understanding of the court. This includes honesty about the statistics and a better articulation from supporters of the positive and necessary impact the court has and continues to have on the guarantee of human rights across the 47 signatories to the ECHR.

This is a guest post by Kenneth Way

He is writing ahead of the Fabian Society’s conference “Social Europe: Worth Fighting For?” which will take place on 25^th February 2012. Amongst other things, the Conference will consider the issue of human rights in a European context.

You can buy your ticket, priced £10 for non-members or £5 for members/concessions here.

Responsibility rhetoric: how Cameron is manipulating capitalism

2012-01-20T14:08:00.002Z

As Andrew Neil noted on last night’s The Week, the word capitalism can no longer be used without an adjective prefixed to it. Responsible capitalism, fairer capitalism, better capitalism, moral capitalism and predatory capitalism are just a few of its personalities. Converting an adjective into convincing policy and tangible change was always going to be difficult. However Ed Miliband’s timely push for a different kind of capitalism is starting to be watered down by David Cameron’s subsumption of the same language.

The PM’s speech yesterday was criticised as being full of empty rhetoric about responsible capitalism. But it would be foolish of us to underestimate this as unintentional; David Cameron and his army of speechwriters did not forget to include a paragraph setting out specific ‘responsible’ policy. They will not have failed to realise that they will need policy to act upon if they are going to change capitalism. What he is doing is what we have seen them do to ‘tax-payer funded’ trade unions and the ‘benefit-scroungers’ of the welfare state: manipulating the notion of responsible capitalism to his advantage. The new capitalism that Labour has made the crux of their ideology is being made to look like an empty notion.

The government have clearly failed to take any substantial steps towards ‘responsible capitalism’ thus far. The Conservative-led government has cut corporation tax by 2%, scaled back and pushed back banking reform to 2019, failed to take any tough stance on capping high pay and watched while train fare increases far above inflation. “Let's judge you on your deeds and not your words” Ed Miliband rightly challenged David Cameron.

But speaking in London yesterday, David Cameron again failed to offer any tangible policies to show how he planned to work towards his responsible capitalism. Instead he set out an aim for a “socially responsible and genuinely popular capitalism. One in which the power of the market and the obligations of responsibility come together.” However the successful creation of a market that is both free and fair seems wholly unrealistic. To expect businesses to sacrifice profit in order to regulate their own ‘fairness’ is deluded. However deluded is something that we know Cameron is not; he has shown himself to be politically astute and carefully manipulative.

Tellingly, Chuka Umunna dismissed Cameron’s speech as “high on rhetoric and analysis but [with] a great hole in the middle.” But it is crucial that this is not just dismissed as a poor politics. Ben Jackson and Gregg McClymont’s pamphlet ‘Cameron Trap’ warns against such an underestimation of Labour’s adversaries. The Conservatives have been incredibly successful in framing the debate about austerity in their own terms, and leaving Labour to look internally fraught and self-contradicting.

So warning bells should have been ringing when Cameron presented responsible capitalism as a ‘nothing-idea’ of empty rhetoric. And, conveniently, a nothing-idea that’s completely compatible with free markets. What good luck.

This tactic will attract brief criticism for the government. However by using the same language as Labour, but using it in such a way that it means nothing, they will leave the opposition saying nothing. Labour should not underestimate their opponents, and must not let the notion of fair capitalism be made defunct by Conservative manipulation. They must be clear and vocal on the policy that their capitalism encompasses. Most importantly they must make it obvious that Cameron’s capitalism is not responsible, fair, better or moral.

This is a guest post by Georgia Hussey (@Georgia_Hussey), Fabian Society Publications Intern

Any willing provider? Labour's anti-state chic

2012-01-18T15:30:00.003Z

Steve Akehurst (@SteveAkehurst) takes a look at Labour’s multi-coloured movements in a review of The Purple Book and Tangled Up In Blue

Perhaps the most striking thing about the years following the economic collapse of 2008 was the absence of new ideas on the democratic left. Labour's election defeat confirmed for most that something had gone awry with modern social democracy. Most agreed that approaches to state and market had been ill struck, and that the economy had become too dependent on the City. But these axioms never gave birth to much in the way of renewal. All the while the Tories were stitching together their own story, re-casting the crisis as one of overspending and inefficiency, co-opting Britain's other allegedly centre-left party along the way.

It's amid this impasse in 2011 that Labour's multi-coloured insurgencies have emerged, offering their own readings of the past, present and future. Chief among them have been the Purple Book, organised by Progress, and Blue Labour. and the two actually started life closer than is often recognised. A number of the Purple Book's contributors and cheerleaders (e.g Caroline Flint, Tessa Jowell, Philip Collins) were involved in the first wave of seminars and publicity that gave rise to Blue Labour. They've since sensibly gone their own separate ways, but retain their shared starting point that the root of Labour's woes lay in becoming too centralist and remote; “administrative, elitist and technocratic”, as Rowenna Davis puts it. Both claim to be interested in returning to Labour's decentralising tradition, and both eschew 'big state' Fabianism, top-down universalism and public spending as the solution to all of societies' ills.

The Purple Book

The Purple Book approaches this argument in a considerably more slick, metropolitan way. At its best, it is far more thoughtful, practical and self-aware than many of its critics have given it credit for. It hangs together in a way few anthologies do, and is more astutely conscious of itself as an electoral strategy than its rivals. There are plenty of interesting ideas on the value of co-operatives as a means of spreading social control over public services and on revenue-raising at a local level.

The trouble with it is, at times, it feels like a new language is being adopted to advance a familiar agenda, which is essentially one of marketisation. The impression gained through the book is not of a central state endowing local communities, but of diversification and the state “letting go” as an end in itself. All this is fine if one believes in it, but it's difficult to know how it differs from the current government's 'any willing provider' approach to healthcare. Co-ops are in the mix and are to be encouraged, sure, but what of the potential for conflict between different providers? Surely a Co-Op couldn't hope to compete with private providers in terms of outcomes; does the state inherently privilege Co-Ops in the contracting process to balance this out? What are the rules applied when opening services to tender? What if no local group – or demand for co-operative control - emerges? None of these questions are ever really explored satisfactory, apparently lost to the contributors reforming zeal.

A similar frustration stalks you as you read the books' sections on political economy. Tristram Hunt's contribution is fantastic, by far and away the best of the bunch. It wisely focuses on 'pre-distribution' and the need for the state - in smart, considered ways - to get 'up stream' and shape a more equitable distribution of the benefits of growth, as opposed to simply redistributing through the tax system. But this bolder, hands-on approach with the market is never matched or built on elsewhere. The living wage, pay multiples, greater democratic organisation in the workplace, regional or national investment banks - all are examples of small, fairly inexpensive things that can be done to achieve the more balanced economy the book talks of, but nothing like it is ever touched on.

Throughout there is often simply an unwillingness to leave well-worn comfort zones and suggest anything that might appear 'anti-business' or 'old Labour'. Instead the book frequently retreats into public service reform, or constitutional issues, as if the past 5 years hasn't happened. At the end of the book, editor Robert Philpot lists its recommendations – there are around 10 pages on reforming the state, and just 1 on reforming the market. But what the UK has seen is surely not a failure of the big state, but the market – or at least, the state's relationship with it. How else to understand the financial crisis, or the de-coupling of growth from wages?

In short, it's not that 'leaving the big state behind' (the books' promotional strapline) feels like the wrong prescription for the UK's problems – it's that it's the wrong diagnosis. When Patrick Diamond argues that “social democrats need to acknowledge that state intervention has left a multitude of social and economic ills untouched”, he writes as if we've just experienced 30 years of post-war Keynsianism. Nor did Labour lose because it was too statist. Philpot triumphantly reveals 1 in 4 of Labour's lost voters saw 'government as part of the problem not the solution' – but what of the other 3 in 4? Nobodies arguing there's a thirst for a Soviet-style command economy, but there is room for a positive case to be made for the state in the market, actively shaping it not least so that it puts money in the pockets of ordinary, hard-working people. A brash anti-statism simply neglects the challenges of our time.

Tangled Up in Blue

A similar misreading pops up through the Blue Labour story. It holds at its heart the mantra that “relationships are transformative”; that organising local communities is the best means by which to achieve social change. But instead, to Glasman, Davis writes, “the modern Labour party...seemed obsessed with expanding the state”. This would be fine were it just a piece of posturing, but it leads Glasman to sweeping statements (“the model that we had in 1945 of universal state based [provision]... lead to massive erosion of solidarity”) which can in turn beget frustratingly rigid policy conclusions.

Take Sure Start centres. Blue Labour, says Davis, wouldn't open more of them, because it believes they've become “a means of...free childcare” while both parents are at work, not of promoting relationships. Instead, Glasman wants the state to facilitate neighbours taking turns to look after each others kids. But Sure Start centres more often serve as a space where parents interact with and help other parents, picking up tips or sharing support as well as receiving it from staff. They foster exactly the sort of relationships that Blue Labour values in a more effective manner than ad hoc approaches. The idea that universal state services are always an anathema to social solidarity is simply false – as the public support the BBC or the NHS further shows.

This belligerence denies a more important, complicated conversation about when, where and how state services get it right in promoting relationship, and how they can change to get it right more often, rather than just cease. Here Davis tellingly notes that traditional social democrats were the only under-represented sections of the Labour party during Blue Labour's formative seminars - Sunder Katwala couldn't make it, and no Brownites were involved. It's difficult not to conclude that greater dialogue with the schools of thought Blue Labour sets up such antagonism to (particularly Fabianism) could give more nuance, and less divisiveness, to its conflict with 1945.
Yet there remains much to engage with about Blue Labour, and Davis convincingly argues that it has been received rather lazily by parts of the media (the reaction to Glasman's recent intervention serves as a case in point). Unlike both the Purple Book, and Philip Blond's Red Toryism, Blue Labour is rooted in a powerful critique of free markets, seeking to organise communities “against the dominance of capital”, on their high street and their workplace. This lends itself to plenty of thought provoking policy prescriptions. It has cogent ideas, for instance, on shifting the UK towards a more skills based economy, and its ‘a third, a third, a third’ model of public services (wherein, for example, a school would be run equally by the state, parents and staff) avoids a lot of the ambivalences of the Purple Book.

It's imperative that Fabians engage with the strength and weaknesses of these two books. Social democrats shouldn’t allow ourselves to be boxed in as reflexive defenders of the state. Not even the most ardent among us can deny that occasionally government ends up feeling top-down and transactive, or that services need to be shaped by those running and receiving them. Neither should we dismiss the power and energy of community activism as only to be harnessed for winning election campaigns; sometimes we need to govern in poetry, too. But there is an urgent need to push back against the bogeyman-esque depiction of the state that at times animates Purple Book and Blue Labour thinking. We need to articulate a vision of the state that's not in opposition to organised communities, but in constant partnership with them, providing a bulwark against the dominance of capital and the dysfunction and alienation which accompanies free market capitalism.

How’s that for a New Years resolution?

The Economic Alternative - Ed Balls' Full Speech to Conference

2012-01-16T16:29:00.002Z

Thank you to everyone who attended year's Fabian Annual Conference

Over 1,000 people came through the doors and over 100 volunteers and speakers helped make the day happen.

The response was absolutely huge with the frontpage of the Guardian, TV coverage on all major networks and over 4,000 tweets on #fab12.

Our next major event is our conference on Social Europe. Click here to get your tickets and debate one of the biggest questions in politics today.

Over 300 of you attended our breakout session on the Left's response to the new European crisis during Fabian Annual Conference, buy now to secure your place. We're already planning next year's annual conference. Remember to mark the second and third weekend's in January 2013 in your diaries.

Ed Balls' speech to conference

Thank you Suresh and Andrew – and to all of you for coming along today and giving up your Saturday.

And let me start by saying – after over 20 years of attending the Fabian annual January conference – what a great honour it is to be invited to give the opening speech.

I first spoke at this conference in January 1993 – when I was a junior leader writer at the Financial Times.

It was a very different conference then – not the huge event it has become – with perhaps 100 or so people gathered at Ruskin College, Oxford, including among them the leader of the Labour Party, John Smith.

That conference was held the January after Labour’s election defeat in 1992 – an election in which the Labour opposition had failed to pass either of the two necessary political economy tests for electoral success:

- neither having a real alternative to the straitjacket of the Exchange Rate Mechanism, which could meet the aspirations of anxious voters on growth and jobs;

- nor a credible approach to tax and spending which could win public trust.

Ten months on from that defeat, as we met in Oxford, sterling had recently crashed out of a troubled ERM, the idea of the single currency as the solution for Europe was gaining momentum in Brussels, and here in Britain Labour’s ‘modernisers’ were trying to persuade John Smith that ‘safety first’ would not be enough.

And my contribution at that Conference?

To speak about my Fabian pamphlet, published a week or so before, which argued:
- that Labour could only win the argument for a radical alternative on growth and jobs if we had economic credibility;
- that neither the ERM nor the single currency could provide that credibility;
- and that the right approach for Labour and Britain was to make the Bank of England independent – a pretty controversial idea at the time.

I remember showing the pamphlet draft to my FT colleagues Martin Wolf and John Plender, who both said: right approach, very brave – but the Labour Party will never forgive you.

THE GLOBAL ECONOMIC SHADOW

That 1993 Fabian Conference was held in the shadow of seminal events:

- German unification in Europe;

- Black Wednesday in Britain;

- a fourth election defeat for Labour.
And today’s conference – again to debate The Economic Alternative – is, without doubt, being held in the shadow of much greater and more defining events:

- political deadlock and an abject failure of economic leadership in the Euro area, Britain and the US Congress;

- following on from the biggest global financial crisis of the last century.
A toxic combination of grossly irresponsible bank lending, poor governance and weak regulation round the world which in its aftermath poses – as I have argued consistently over the last eighteen months – a threat to the world economy as grave as that which we faced in the depression of the 1930s.

So this is my starting point for today’s Conference.

If Britain and the world are to avoid repeating the mistakes of that 1930s ‘lost decade’ and the 2008 global crisis, then we badly needs political leadership in Britain, Europe and the world to meet two great challenges:

The Growth Challenge – to stop the aftermath of the financial crisis turning into years of slow growth, high unemployment and rising debts - leaving a permanent dent in our prosperity - and, The Reform Challenge – long-term reform to make sure such a financial crisis on this scale can never happen again and to build a stronger and fairer economic model for the future – what Ed Miliband has called a more responsible capitalism – which can, even in tougher times, meet our aspirations for social justice and strong public services.

LABOUR’S POLITICAL SHADOW

But of course, there is another shadow which casts itself across this Conference today – a political shadow which presents a particular challenge to Labour.

I believe we are right to resist the ideological and ahistorical Tory analysis which tries to pin the blame for a global financial crisis on Labour’s approach to public spending – when it is clear that the global financial crisis bankrupted banks and pushed up deficits in high spending and low spending countries alike.

But it is a fact that this financial crisis did happen on Labour’s watch – and that Labour lost the subsequent General Election.

We have never denied that a plan is needed to get the deficit down, and that it would mean tough decisions on tax and public spending. Before the election, I set out £1 billion of cuts to education.
But as a party and a leadership, I said then and I still believe now that Labour should have been clearer before the election that if we had been re-elected there would have been spending cuts as well as tax rises.

And I have no illusions that there is a big task to turn round Labour’s economic credibility and show – even as George Osborne’s plans deliver unemployment rising, growth stagnating and long-term reform stalling – that Labour can be trusted again.

It is not enough simply to be right in our diagnosis of the Coalition’s failures and unfairness.
And it is not enough to set out a clear alternative – on growth, as we have with our five point plan for jobs; or on long-term reform of our economy, as Ed Miliband did this week and Chuka, Rachel and John Denham have too.

The challenge we face is both to set out a radical and credible alternative; and to win public trust for that alternative vision.

‘KEYNESIAN OTHODOXY’

I referred to that January 1993 Fabian Conference.

Eighteen months later, in September 1994, just a few weeks after Tony Blair was elected Labour leader, and against the backdrop of stubbornly high youth unemployment, rising inflation and squeezed living standards, the Labour Party held a conference at the National Film Theatre on the new economy and Labour’s alternative.

As it happens, that conference was the occasion of the infamous ‘post neo-classical endogenous growth theory’ moment – which, for those who don’t know what it means, says that the rules of the game that the government sets on taxes, spending and regulation are not irrelevant to growth but can have a profound impact – for good or bad – on how the economy works.
Of course, those were very different times, and the policy debates of that time emphatically do not offer a blueprint based on the past when today we face such different economic and political challenges.

But the unspoken purpose of that 1994 conference – and its emphasis on Bank of England reform and fiscal discipline – was to address Labour’s economic credibility deficit, and dispel the idea that the party was addicted to the short-term, quick fix, vested-interest-appeasing solution to every problem.

I went back this week to look at the reporting of that conference - and in particular a preview piece in the Independent on Sunday with an anonymous briefing from ‘a senior party insider’.
The article started by saying Tony Blair and Gordon Brown will “ceremoniously ditch Labour’s traditional ‘tax, spend and borrow’ image this week, in a fundamental re-positioning of his party’s economic strategy.”

All under the headline… Labour Ditches Keynes.

As someone who had only recently studied ‘New Keynesian’ economics at Harvard, with Democrat Keynesians like Larry Summers and Republican Keynesians like Greg Mankiw, I must admit I was pretty appalled to see the greatest economist of the twentieth century traduced like that.

But the fact was that in the Monetarists versus Keynesians economic debates of the 1970s and 80s, the label ‘Keynesian’ had become - certainly in Conservative circles – a dirty word: profligate, irresponsible, statist, inflation-loving, not to be trusted.
A caricature that clearly could not be allowed to be a Labour caricature if we were to go on and win the 1997 election.

And what has been so striking to me over the past year listening to right-of-centre politicians and commentators – in Britain, America and Europe too – is how much the austerity debate has been used to try to reprise those old ideological divides.

Warn about the risks of deflationary fiscal policy – and that makes you a ‘deficit denier’.
Worry about the dangers of all countries trying to cut their deficits at once – and you are a ‘deluded Keynesian’.

Counsel that the world needs a plan for growth as well as deficit reduction – and you are ‘an irresponsible deluded Keynesian deficit
denier’.

Keynes himself must be turning in his grave.

For, as has been fully documented in Lord Skidelsky’s biography, the real Keynes was no profligate tax-and-spender. He would have had no time for some of his disciples.
His seminal 1930 Treatise on Money was as hawkish on inflation as Milton Friedman decades later.

His attitude to irresponsible wage bargaining in the 1920s was as unforgiving as Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s.

Central bank independence? I think Keynes would have backed it - though not if his contemporary Montagu Norman was the Governor.

And as for the irresponsible and inflationary profligacy of the 1970s Tory Barber boom? He would have abhorred it.

KEYNES AND THE GROWTH CHALLENGE

But – and this was his great insight – Keynes also knew that economies could occasionally get stuck in a deflationary rut.

Although he called his famous book in 1936 ‘The General Theory’, it actually was not a general theory at all.

It was a description of what can happen in the unusual and special circumstances after a big financial crash – for him 1929, for us 2008 – when the ‘animal spirits’ of companies and consumers are so depressed that private spending stagnates.

When interest rates are so low that they can’t be cut any further.

When governments crudely cutting spending risks making deficits worse.
Of course, there will be naïve ‘Keynesians’ who will think it is always a special case – time to let rip and just ‘tax, spend and borrow’ in the hope that will deliver full employment – people who think we are always in 1930s-style depression and more borrowing is always the solution to unemployment.

And that is what gave Keynesianism a bad name in the 1970s.

It is why Labour leader Jim Callaghan was right to tell the Labour Party Conference in 1976 that that you can’t just spend your way to full employment.

But, as I argued well over a year ago now in my Bloomberg speech, the reason why the real Keynes is so relevant today is that the global economy has been sliding into that rare and dangerous ‘special case’ that Keynes identified in the 1930s and Japan suffered in the 1990s.
You either learn the lessons of history or repeat the mistakes of history.

With growth stagnating around the world, every country pressing ahead with deep cuts risks being a catastrophic mistake.

Which is why Ed Miliband and I have argued for a global plan for growth, with clear medium-term plans to get deficits down, but stimulus now to avoid a global slump too.

Rejecting the complacent isolationism of the 1930s and instead following Keynes’ lead by setting out a global solution to global problems – an economic alternative based on growth, job creation and balanced deficit reduction, which is the only sane way forward for Britain – and the only way back to credibility in the Euro area too.

Let us be honest: the Eurozone crisis is a catastrophe building week by week. And the pre-Christmas summit was a disaster for Europe and the Euro and for Britain too.
Europe’s leaders failed to back decisive action by the European Central Bank; they did not address the issue of the current fiscal straitjacket; and they still have no plan for jobs and growth

– hence the downgrades of the past 24 hours.
And did our Prime Minister bang the table and demand action?
No, he walked out and undermined our national interests as he did so.
Given the huge risks that the Eurozone crisis poses for Britain, we desperately need a Prime Minister and Chancellor who can lead in Europe.

But they can’t – and not just because their party won’t let them.

Because to do so means also admitting that they have got things wrong here in Britain too.
George Osborne and David Cameron took it as read that deep and immediate spending cuts and tax rises would at least serve the goal of deficit reduction – no matter how much Labour warned that going too far, too fast would be bad for borrowing as well as for jobs and growth.
The Chancellor claimed that public retrenchment would boost private sector confidence, investment and job creation. He called it ‘expansionary fiscal contraction’.

But this has turned out to be a false prospectus – a repeat of the discredited ‘Treasury View’ of the 1920s. Fragile consumer and business confidence has been crushed by the inflationary hike in VAT, the threatened withdrawal of public sector demand, the reality of falling incomes and the fear of rising unemployment.

And now the Government claim growth is stagnating because of the chilling effect of the Eurozone crisis – when our exports have actually been over performing compared with expectations, and it is weak domestic demand that has driven growth in the UK down, borrowing up and depressed long-term interest rates on government bonds.

Conservative ministers scoff at our five point plan for jobs and growth, saying ‘Labour’s proposal is to borrow even more’. But it is Chancellor George Osborne who is being forced to borrow billions more – £158 billion more than he planned.

Not borrowing to support the economy through difficult times and help get people back to work, but wasteful extra borrowing to pay for failure – the price of slow growth, rising unemployment and a bigger benefits bill.

Because every time George Osborne revises down his growth forecast, he has to revise down tax revenues and increase the benefits bill too.

Even the IMF has said that if our economy undershoots expectations and risks a period of stagnation, then the UK should slow down the pace of spending cuts and tax rises to get the economy growing again.

Just think: last autumn, many 16 year olds who would otherwise have stayed on at school have lost their Education Maintenance Allowances, and – following the abandonment of the Future Jobs Fund – many have gone straight onto the dole, adding to the more than 1 million young people now unemployed in our country.

On the surface of things, cutting EMAs and the Future Jobs Fund saved money and reduced borrowing.

But at what cost? How much more will it cost our society and our economy to leave those young people long-term unemployed and unproductive; they and their children receiving benefits rather than paying taxes and contributing to the national wealth?

If we do not invest now in jobs and growth, if we let a year of economic flat-lining become a decade of stagnation, what price will our country pay in the long-term?

That is why to meet the Growth Challenge and get the deficit down we are right, as we have set out in the five point plan for jobs, to call for temporary tax cuts and investment in jobs and growth – to stop a decade of slow growth and higher debts becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Action now for growth, jobs and reform which does not conflict with the need for a credible medium term plan on the deficit, but which reinforces it.

KEYNES AND THE REFORM CHALLENGE

But changing times also demand new and long-term reforms to re-shape our economy for the future.

As Ed Miliband argued earlier this week, we will need long-term reforms of our economy to boost growth and deliver social justice in straitened times.

And here again, the words of Keynes writing in The General Theory in 1936 are instructive: “Speculators may do no harm as bubbles on a steady stream of enterprise” he wrote.
“But the position is serious when enterprise becomes the bubble on a whirl-pool of speculation. When the capital development of a country becomes a by-product of the activities of a casino, the job is likely to be ill-done.”

Keynes was right then and now – we cannot simply let markets, in which speculators spend their time chasing one another’s tails, dictate important investment decisions and set the benchmark for what is fair and unfair.

Unregulated capitalism is not only unstable; it is inherently short-termist too.

So just as the current coalition are wrong to reject the insight of Keynes based on his experience of the 1930s, we must, as Ed Miliband has said, learn the lessons of the past three decades and meet the Reform Challenge:

- tougher financial regulation and new capital standards with financial stability at the heart of economic policymaking and banking reform to make sure that the needs of small businesses are addressed, including examining the case for a National Investment Bank;
- stronger corporate governance to make sure decisions are taken in the long-term interests of wealth creation and jobs, not the short-term interests of traders, speculators and their chums;
- government action to back business and ensure markets work for the long-term, including tougher competition rules, tax incentives for long-term investment, research and development and skills;
- and a youth jobs guarantee with tough rights and responsibilities

- and an expectation that every young person would take up work or training.

GROWTH, REFORM AND DEFICIT REDUCTION

This is the Economic Alternative:

- to meet the Growth Challenge: short term action now to support jobs, growth and get deficits down;

- to meet the Reform Challenge: long-term reform to tackle short-termism and instability and support long-term investment, growth and fairness.

But to make that alternative work and be credible, it must be underpinned by a clear commitment to balanced but tough spending and budget discipline now and into the medium-term.

The question for Labour has never been about ‘whether’ to get the deficit down but ‘how’ and ‘when’, who carries the greatest burden, and what kind of country we leave behind for our children.

And while we would not have started from here – a fairer and more balanced approach to deficit reduction would not have choked off recovery and thrown borrowing plans off track – we are where we are.

As Ed Miliband and I have said for months this government’s failure means the next Labour government will inherit a substantial deficit
that we will have to deal with.

After just 18 months, the government’s autumn statement admitted that it will not balance the books by 2015 – the promise that was the cornerstone of the coalition.

And George Osborne has had to admit that he will now have to borrow more than the plan Alistair Darling set out before the election – because of the slow growth and higher unemployment his reckless plan has delivered.

This represents a big challenge for Labour, as Ed Miliband made clear earlier this week. As I said at Labour’s annual conference, we will set out before the next election tough fiscal rules that the next Labour government will have to stick to – to get our country’s current budget back to balance and national debt on a downward path.

In our manifesto we will commit to do the responsible thing and use any windfall gain from the sale of the government’s stakes in RBS and Lloyds to repay the national debt – not for a giveaway.

And, however difficult this is for me, for some of my colleagues and for our wider supporters, we cannot make any commitments now that the next Labour government will reverse tax rises or spending cuts. And we will not.

Because we don’t know how bad things will be on jobs, growth and the deficit. But we do know that the next Labour government will have to sort out the deficit where this government failed and deliver social justice in tougher times.

And as we make the argument that cutting spending and raising taxes too far and too fast risks making the economy and the deficit worse not better, it is right that we set out where we do support cuts and where we would be making the tough but necessary decisions.
In education, as I have said, £1 billion of cuts – but not the biggest cuts to schools since the 1950s. In policing, 12 per cent cuts to budgets – but not 20 per cent cuts which will hit the frontline hard and see 16,000 officers lost. In defence, £5 billion of cuts – but not a strategic defence review that raises more questions than answers.

And because as progressives we believe in the role of the state and public services to do good, it is vital that we are even tougher on waste than our political opponents – whether that is the £2 billion being wasted on a reckless reorganisation of the NHS, billions being lost in tax avoidance or the waste of mass unemployment.

Times will be tough – we will have no choice but to make difficult choices.
Let me give you one example.

Pay restraint in the public sector in this parliament would have been necessary whoever was in government.

But George Osborne’s economic mistakes mean more difficult decisions on tax, spending and pay. It is now inevitable that public sector pay restraint will have to continue for longer in this parliament.

Labour cannot duck that reality. And we won’t. Jobs must be our priority before higher pay.
That said, there are important issues on incomes, pay and pensions that George Osborne must get right.

We will continue to press for fair pay and fair pensions reform while defending the vital role the national pay review bodies play in delivering discipline, reform and fairness.

We believe the 3p in the pound rise in pension contributions should never have been imposed without negotiation.

And it is wrong and unfair to penalize those on low and middle incomes by cutting tax credits, hitting women harder than men and families with children hardest of all.

But pay discipline in the public and private sector needs to be accompanied by fairness.
That is why the government should also ask the pay review bodies to deliver the 1 per cent average settlement cap in a fair way – being tougher to those at the top in order to offer more protection to those at the bottom.

Pay also needs to be fair in the private sector, where there have also been tough decisions – with real pay in the private sector falling around 3% in the last year. But for those at the top boardroom salaries in FTSE 100 companies have increased by 50% in the past 12 months.

That is why Ed Miliband has rightly called for reforms to ensure that rewards at the top better reflect the success people achieve and the contribution they have make to our economy. David Cameron has now started to talk the talk on this issue, but he now needs to take the action we have been calling for.

THE POLITICAL CHALLENGE FOR LABOUR

Let me finish by returning to the politics.

Because it would be naïve for anybody to think that the government’s deepening economic failure will automatically translate over the coming months into success for Labour.

And the question the public will of course ask is: who can we trust?

Credibility is based on trust and trust is based on honesty.

And let’s be clear: the Tories won’t own up either to the scale of the challenge or the failure of their plans.

They claim Britain is a safe haven… when our low long-term interest rates are not a sign of enhanced credibility but a reflection of stagnant growth in our economy, as it was in Japan in the 1990s.

And they claim we’re all in it together… when middle and lower income families, women and young people are hardest hit, and the pain is only now beginning.

So with determination and vigour – loud and direct – we must expose day by day the huge gulf between what Coalition ministers say and the truth.

But we must be honest with the British people that under Labour there will have to be cuts, and that – on spending, pay and pensions – there will be disappointments and difficult decisions from which we will not flinch.

But honesty does not mean going along with a failed Conservative plan because it is easier in the short-term. We tried that when Labour supported the disastrous decision to join the ERM and stuck with a failing policy right up until September 1992.

I have heard much advice over the past year from people who admit that combining stimulus now to get the economy moving with a tough but balanced medium-term deficit plan may be good economics – but who argue that it is bad politics because it is ‘out of tune’ with the public mood.

But that is not honest politics either.

Now is not the time to stand aside, bite our collective lip while this government and Euro area governments make historic and terrible mistakes.

I do believe that we have both a duty to make the right argument on growth and jobs – even if this has put us outside the consensus for a time.

And I do believe this is an argument we can win.

Now is the time to hold our nerve.

To make the case for The Economic Alternative.

To speak up for the people we seek to represent and the values that we stand for.
And to do so in a typically Fabian way – steady, step by step, determined, credible and radical in our vision for a better and fairer future for Britain.

Thank you.

Closing date looms for Labour Executive Director posts

2012-01-16T16:03:00.004Z

As part of a series of wide-ranging reforms of how the Labour Party operates, party General Secretary Iain McNicol announced in November the creation of six new Executive Director posts to lead the party's work on Communications, Rebuttal and Policy, Field Operations, Commercial, Governance and Services, and Membership and Supporters.

This reorganisation forms part of former ITV Chief Executive Charles Allen's report on improving the managerial, campaigning and commercial units of the Labour Party.

The closing date for these positions is coming up this Wednesday 18th January.

Fabian Society members are most welcome to apply and further details can be found at http://www.labour.org.uk/new_job

Winning the economic argument: how to fight on Labour's own terms

2012-01-13T11:05:00.006Z

Stephen Beer is the author of The Credibility Deficit he will be taking part in this Fabian Annual Conference. Afternoon tickets are still available. Please head to www.fabians.org.uk for details.

There could not be a more appropriate theme for this year’s Fabian New Year conference than the economy. Opinion polls tell us that Labour is still not trusted on economic policy, yet the Coalition has already had to rewrite its budget plans. The government plans even more spending cuts lasting beyond this parliament. In such circumstances, can Labour retain compassion for the worse off while regaining economic credibility?

That is the theme of a seminar I’m taking part in at the Fabian conference on Saturday. When faced with the severe cuts to spending, including on the welfare budget, compassion surely compels us to campaign against such measures vociferously. Yet we run the risk that people won’t believe we are serious about managing the public finances properly. In that case, at the least they will suspect we will put up taxes to pay for higher spending.

I argue in The Credibility Deficit, a Fabian pamphlet published last year, that Labour has to take significant steps to improve its economic credibility. These include a clear plan to reduce deficits and a clear plan for growth. Since the pamphlet was published, some on the Left have taken up the same theme and argued that Labour should be more focused on reducing government borrowing levels. The problem is that we can end up fighting the next election on the basis of Tory arguments about deficits, with Labour even promising to match Tory spending plans as we did before the 1997 election. Not only does that tactic concede ground to the Tories before we have even started, it is not likely to be enough to win the election. Instead, we need to convince the electorate that our spending will be effective and that their money will be spent in a way which will produce results and avoid waste or inefficiency. Furthermore, the Office for Budget Responsibility could limit Labour’s room for manoeuvre by declaring what it believed is and is not an acceptable budget. That is why Labour should announce an ‘Effective Spending Guarantee’ ahead of the next election, with independent verification of the effectiveness of any new spending plans we have.

There are two types of economic credibility. The first is with financial markets. Taking hard decisions on spending is one way to convince investors a government means business getting debt down.. However if they doubt those decisions will actually take effect (because, for example, public protests will force u-turns) they will stop believing budget plans are credible. They will also quickly become concerned if they believe growth will be too slow to deliver tax revenues and profits that were expected. The second type of economic credibility is with our fellow citizens; not simply on whether we have the right policies here and there but whether we have the right approach and will deliver. The right approach for Labour means holding fast to our values, emphasising that we are the same Labour Party, believing that everyone should have an equal start in life, that power (including economic power) should be dispersed and accountable, and that virtue has a place in markets. Broadly, that translates as building an economy not simply so that everyone benefits from the proceeds of growth (one way or the other) but in which everyone who can contributes to growth and has the opportunity to lead a fulfilling life. And in practice that will mean for example that we guarantee employment and do all we can to invest for our nation’s future prosperity.

Stephen Beer

Feminism must be put at heart of welfare state reform and economic growth

2012-01-11T10:05:00.001Z

By Ivana Bartoletti, Editor of Fabiana

As women bear the brunt of the Tory-led Government’s reckless choices, the development of a fair and equal society for women is under threat. We are now seeing women pushed out of the workforce as their income is driven down, while cuts to legal aid undermine their access to justice and make them more vulnerable to violence.

However, stating the obvious is not enough. As has come increasingly to the fore this week with Ed Miliband’s speech to London Citizens, Labour's challenge is to re-design a welfare state with less money, and with much better control of public spending.

The welfare state has been a key ally of women, enabling them to work, access justice and healthcare and become less dependent on men.

The Institute of Fiscal Studies says that between 1968 and 2009, over a quarter of all growth in household wealth came from women working, compared with 8% from men: this means that women in the UK have been the main driver of the rise in living standards over the last 40 years.

At the same time, the UK is different to how it was 70 years ago; its demographics have evolved, and statistics still show that women have not reached the equality feminists were hoping for in the 1970s. Too often, women's freedom has been at the expense of other women, poorly paid to replace those services the State has been unable to provide effectively: childcare, in the first place.

This indicates that it is not a matter of cuts, as the simplistic but devious agenda of the Tory government dictates, but of ambition: the ambition of putting women at the very heart of a reform of the welfare state, which can and should be really rooted in women's needs and aspirations.

The key concept of a modern welfare state ought to be responsibility: it is not about discouraging people from taking risks or initiative but encouraging them to take control of their life so they can fully contribute to the economy. Responsibility is a concept inherent to feminism, as a women's responsibility generally encompasses responsibility for others, starting from their children.

The second element ought to be long-termism. The Tory-led government is all about reckless cuts dressed up as prudence, not about true rigour and transparency of costs. How much is it really costing to prevent women from working, to make them better off on benefits than in employment, as the Institute of Fiscal Studies revealed last week?

IPPR has shown there is an economic case for universal childcare for preschool-aged children, as this would pay a return to the government of £20,050 over four years in terms of tax revenue minus the cost of childcare for every woman who returns to full employment after one year of maternity leave.

I think it is about time to treat universal childcare as a strategic priority for public services and growth. In times of financial crisis, it is up to a responsible leadership to cut unnecessary expenses, even if that is unpopular, and focus on the strategic ones: the opposite of what the Tories are doing, which are simply random cuts.

You can read the new edition of Fabiana here.

In this edition:

Hilary Cottam makes the case for a more relational welfare, Torbjörn Hållö presents a Swedish perspective, Shadow Innovation Minister Chi Onwurah highlights the untapped ‘potential energy’ of women in the UK. There are also updates on Ed Miliband’s support for Fabiana and you can catch up on our latest Fabian Women’s Network seminar, hosted in partnership with IPPR and Cambridge University on Gender Justice, Society and the State.

Don't Mock Good Capitalism: It's already on the way

2012-01-10T13:28:00.002Z

The below is a guest blog by Christian James Smith, Corporate Social Responsibility manager at ASOS, the online fashion retailer. Christian is not a member or supporter of the Labour Party and this blog represents his own views and not those of his employer

When the Conservative government mocked Ed Milliband’s idea of “good capitalism” late 2011, claiming that it unworkable, they were inadvertently mocking a number of businesses (Unilever, M+S, Kingfisher) who have adopted this model for future growth. The simple fact is that the neo-liberal system, which has underpinned years of growth, no longer meets the needs of the masses. “Good Capitalism” means being aware of the impacts of your company and striving to limit them – whether they are social or environmental. It means internalising costs that companies have long ignored. Not just because it is the right thing to do but because it can lead to further innovation and can help protect the resources (whether natural or human) needed in order for business to thrive.

The profit at all costs paradigm is over. Growth does have limits and we are seeing the results of reaching some of those limits. If people do not have money to spend, there can be no growth. If there are diminishing resources, there can be no growth. If spending on education, research and development dwindles, there can be no growth.[1] If too much of your economy is based on one sector – a sector deemed too big to fail, there can be no growth.

That does not mean the end of big business. It means that start of something more meaningful; the creation of businesses that connect people to their communities once more - a process already underway and an aspect that continues to elude the Tory Government.

The UK already possesses a high level of creativity and companies admired around the globe for quality and durability. Fashion companies such as Aquascutum, Burberry and Mulberry are desired all over the world. This desire for British inspired design is not just in the luxury sector but also further down the chain with companies such as Superdry, Topshop, Karen Millen, Ted Baker and ASOS flying the flag for the UK fashion industry. However, the UK manufacturing sector barely exists today – it was also not helped by the decision to focus on banking and services – in case you had not realised, not everyone wants to be a banker or work in a mobile phone shop. Competing with the Far East over price would have been foolhardy; competing over quality is a battle that British manufacturing would have won hands down. With a little more support from government, there is no reason why some of this sector cannot flourish once again.

Companies want to employ people at the local level. They want to be part of communities and they want to be part of progress. They want to, and in some cases already do, provide apprentices to graduates or school leavers. Part of the focus in the service sector has lead to a dearth of qualified people to work in these sectors – people with specialised skills essential to the success of certain industries. “Good capitalism” helps them and it helps the image of the UK. It can reinvigorate the UK economy, can attract the best graduates to areas other than banking and finance and can provide the counter point to the staid and unimaginative neoliberal polices of the current government.

In 1784, Kant wrote the paper “What is Enlightenment?” The answer to that was: “...man's emergence from his self-imposed immaturity..” The system does not work and government seems unable to properly address the problems we face with new ways of thinking. Those benefiting the most from the status quo need to open their eyes to the changing times. Ed Miliband is right to vocalise the need for change.

For the cutting edge of the debate about good capitalism and the new economy we need, don't miss Fabian New Year Conference 2012 featuring a keynote speech from Ed Balls

[1] 'Cornucopians' can talk about scientific progress, but that won’t happen if we don’t have excellent education systems and companies with the necessary impetus to be progressive

Why politicians are fighting over fair capitalism

2012-01-09T14:24:00.005Z

When Ed Miliband used his Labour conference speech in September to call for fundamental reform of capitalism, the media rolled out a predictable insta-critique: 'anti-business' and 'lurch to the left' were the knee-jerk descriptors of choice. But now everyone's at it: criticising capitalism is positively in vogue. Both the prime minister and his deputy have hit the airwaves over recent days with Hutton-esque attacks on 'crony capitalism'. Such is the shift that Andrew Rawnsley warned Ed Miliband yesterday he risked having his clothes stolen; Patrick Wintour was making similar points in the Guardian before Christmas.

But why the sudden surge of interest in an idea that in the autumn was seen by the chattering classes as electoral hari kari?

Firstly, it was never actually that radical. Despite 'good' capitalism being a relatively new addition to a political agenda that's been stuck in a neo-liberal consensus for decades, businesses, NGOs and academics have all been on this territory for some time.

Secondly, politicians are beginning to realise that this is where the public is.

New polling in the Fabian Review bears out both points. Rather than being a fringe concern of the dangerously detached left, concerns about inequality are now mainstream: 70% agree 'the gap between the top and everyone else is now too wide and is bad for ordinary people'. Interestingly, the gap is of greater concern to those over 60 (78%) than 18-24's (63%), suggesting this worry is not borne of starry-eyed idealism but a rational consideration that our economic model isn't working.

Ed Miliband's distinction between 'predators' and 'producers' didn't really take, but our polling suggests this may have had more to do with language and communication than ideas: only 12% think a company's first priority should be maximising short-term profit for shareholders, with 80% agreeing companies 'should be willing to forego some profit in order to recognise a wider responsibility to their employees, their customers and their communities and to ensure they invest more for the long-term, even if this means less money is paid out to shareholders'.

Business expert Stefan Stern writes in the magazine:

Ed Miliband’s speech to the Labour party conference this autumn was the act of a whistleblower, someone confronting parts of the business community and challenging them to defend their ways...This debate is still in its early stages as far as many business people are concerned. But it is heading in the right direction. My money is on whistleblower Ed achieving vindication, and sooner than you might think.

Recent political developments suggest that day is approaching fast - now the challenge is to make sure Labour is the party that benefits politically.

Read the full polling feature.

The Fabian Review Winter issue includes ideas for a better capitalism from David Coats, Patrick Diamond, Stewart Lansley, Vicky Pryce, Kitty Ussher and others. Visit the Fabian Society website for more details.

Cutting the credibility deficit

2012-01-06T14:52:00.003Z

Shadow Defence Secretary Jim Murphy has today suggested that Labour needs to have “genuine credibility” on the economy.

While Murphy is not the first frontbench Labour MP to make such a claim in recent weeks, with Ed Balls highlighting a similar approach in the latest Fabian Review, this idea was also expressed in the Fabian Society’s September 2010 pamphlet The Credibility Deficit by Stephen Beer which focused on Labour rebuilding its economic credibility and in the process regaining the public’s trust.

You can read Stephen Beer's The Credibility Deficit here.

At the centre of this pamphlet’s assertions was the notion that Labour faces a difficult challenge it must overcome in order to win the next general election. In fact Stephen Beer claimed Labour needed to respond to the tough decisions it faced on the economy, outline an economic plan for the future rather than a retrospective attack on Coalition policy and most importantly close the economic credibility gap that was first conceived and then grew during Labour’s last years in office.

It is worth noting that these same arguments are now being widely embraced by the frontbench of the Labour Party. Before Christmas, Ed Balls hit the press with his argument for what he termed a “platform of competence” stating, “Rightly or wrongly, there is public scepticism about Labour's willingness to take tough decisions on public spending. A big part of my task is to turn that round and win that argument.”

Mirroring this, Jim Murphy’s interview with the Guardian, in which he has outlined a willingness to accept £5bn in defence cuts, adds to this growing consensus. Purporting to advocate cuts to Nimrod spy planes, deliver savings on trident and instigate cuts to civilian allowances, Murphy claimed. "It is important to be both credible and popular when it comes to defence investment and the economics of defence,” adding, “Credibility is the bridge away from populism and towards popularity.”

Ahead of Saturday 14^th January’s Fabian New Year Conference there is a renewed focus on how Labour gains economic credibility in proposing the economic alternative, and it is imperative that such a policy convinces the public. To ensure this, Labour must conquer their demons and be willing to add weight behind these proposals. Coherence is key, as is conviction. With these tenants guiding the party’s path the argument can be won. Either way, success or failure, the next year promises to play a pivotal role in determining Labour’s credibility on the economy.

This is a guest post by Fabian Society intern Kenneth Way.

Glasman’s lesson to Ed Miliband

2012-01-05T17:49:00.003Z

Maurice Glasman made it too easy for headline writers and Tory opponents to spin his New Statesman article as an attack on the Labour leader and his shadow chancellor Ed Balls. The negative press coverage that charged Glassman with 'savaging' his leader has left those at the top of the party with a further hangover from the barrage of criticism they faced in 2011. Baroness Warsi claimed that Glasman had made it clear “Ed Miliband is simply not up to the job".

But there could also be an important message in Glasman’s words, and one which could prove a useful lesson for 2012. As Glasman recognises in his article, “the world is on the turn”, and Ed Miliband must be at the forefront of that change. With rumours that Lord Glasman has met with the party leader just three times in the last 18 months, this could be seen as his effort in shaping the leader’s plans for 2012; a critique rather than a criticism.

His headline-grabbing article, though perhaps ill-worded, demonstrates what Ed himself must now do; he must find a way for the “shock of the new” to be pushed into the forefront of debate, so it can be transformed into accepted policy. Ed Miliband’s ‘predator and producer’ analogy in his Party Conference speech laid the foundations of his idea for a new capitalism, and it was a move that was met with misunderstanding and derision.

But this notion has since started to win favour throughout 2011. Recent polling for the Fabian Society showed that only 12% thought the prime responsibility of a company was to maximize profit for its shareholders. 80% said that companies should be willing to forgo some profit in order to recognise a wider responsibility to employees, customers and communities. Ed Miliband was one of the first to recognise that 2008’s banking crisis was a seismic event, after which things would have to change. Glasman admits that, on this, Ed Miliband has so far succeeded. And this change would always have to be a gradual adjustment in what we expect and require from our businesses, rather than an instant change. This is what Ed Miliband did in 2011.

But for 2012 our leader must be encouraged to push further, and the New Year should be marked as the year in which Ed will grow from the position he has carefully placed himself. This placing demanded delicacy; Glasman admits Labour needed to be steered from the splits it faced in 1931, 1951 and 1979. But having done this, the time for delicacy is over. 2012 should be a time for strong and directive action, for showing voters that there is another way, by leading the way.

Balls: “Labour’s opportunity starts now”

2011-12-21T17:56:00.014Z

"Rightly or wrongly, there is public scepticism about Labour's willingness to take tough decisions on public spending. A big part of my task is to turn that round and win that argument."

In an interview in today’s Independent, Ed Balls argues that Labour have carefully bided their time before attempting to regain the public’s trust on the management of the economy.

Arguing that the focus is finally shifting towards lifting Britain out of its current mess, Balls claims Labour can win the debate on the economy as long as the party displays discipline and credibility. Labelling this a policy of ‘Credible Optimism’, Balls believes the opportunity is now for Labour, with the public increasingly searching for a credible economic alternative.

These themes are echoed in the exclusive interview with the Shadow Chancellor in the upcoming Fabian Review. Published on the 28th December, Telegraph columnist Mary Riddell interviews Ed Balls on Labour’s chance to reclaim the public’s faith on the economy and the challenge facing the party in regaining the kind of support that shot Labour to the 1997 landslide victory.

With Ed Balls set to make the keynote speech at the Fabian's New Year Conference, which is titled ‘The Economic Alternative’, Balls claims people are frustrated after eighteen months of failed economic policy, and have begun to ask, “What’s the alternative?” With this feeling of dissatisfaction rife, unemployment high and growth stagnating, Balls uses the article in the Fabian Review to argue for the establishment of ‘a platform of competence’ and suggests that Labour must both be willing to make the tough decisions and appear to be able to.

Coupled with this renewed focus on economic competence, Balls is using a range of media platforms to extend a hand to Liberal Democrats currently in coalition with the Conservatives. First formulating the basis of an offer in Mary Riddell’s column in the December 13th edition of the Telegraph, stating, “You could do it tomorrow. What’s happening is dangerous and against the national interest. If you can form that consensus tomorrow, I’d be part of it like a shot,” Balls mimics this call in both today’s Independent and the Fabian Review.

While unlikely to lead to a sudden breakdown of the Coalition, the offer itself might unnerve a coalition fraught with problems, most recently intensified by the undeniably incompatible views on Europe. Piling on the pressure, Balls makes it clear that any Lib-Lab pact will be one void of our Deputy Prime Minister, which could potentially lead to a scenario where in the near future Lib Dems are forced to usurp their leader. Either way, as times grow tougher, it will be interesting to see whether Balls' offer unsettles Lib Dems in the Coalition.

"It isn’t when somebody leaves prison; it's what leaves prison."

2011-12-21T12:59:00.002Z

The quote in the title is from Barry Mizen. Back in 2008, Barry’s son Jimmy was murdered in Lee, south-east London. In response to this tragedy, Jimmy’s family created the Jimmy Mizen foundation and his father Barry Mizen now works as a spokesman for the charity, contributing a chapter to the Fabian’s Society’s new pamphlet ‘Punishment and Reform’.

This is a guest post by Kenneth Way, Media Intern at the Fabian Society.

Speaking at the launch of the Fabian Society's pamphlet 'Punishment and Reform', Barry Mizen articulated a call for a nationwide rethink on the criminal justice system, which argued for a firmer focus on rehabilitation and underlined the failures of the current system.

With an attitude emanating from a deeply personal perspective, Barry is the type of individual who should be informing the upcoming Labour policy review and the debate on criminal justice in the UK. His passion, honesty and inspiration serves as a reminder that the media’s ‘eye for an eye mentality’ is unhelpful and often a hindrance. Instead, Barry’s approach underlines the merits of proper investment in reformative solutions rather than pure punishment and wider adoption of this model could offer an opportunity to stem the growing prison population.

It’s without argument that reaching this opinion is difficult. In fact, Barry made it very clear that his viewpoint is a result of the failures of the current system, claiming, “If harsher punishment worked then I believe me I would be the first to call for it.” However, the past few years have taught Barry that in practice harsher punishments achieve little.

In fact, as Barry informed the audience in attendance, during his son’s sixteen-year life the prison population rose from 40,000 in 1992 to 80,000 in 2008. To steal a line from the man himself: Has society got double as many criminals now as it did then? The answer to this question would have to be a resounding ‘No’. Sadiq Khan MP succinctly expressed this view, arguing we as a society are failing and our communities are failing. As a result of this worrying status quo, the new Fabian pamphlet presents an overdue and welcome opportunity to critique the criminal justice system.

Embedded in this rethink Sadiq Khan MP, who wrote the introduction, emphasises the need to put victims at the heart of the justice system. In this remodeling of the justice system, Khan believes that, “a significant shift in attitudes to and treatment of victims is required”. The Shadow Justice Secretary has spent some eighteen months with the brief, and this collabortation with the Fabian Society comes within sight of the Labour Party’s upcoming policy review.
With this in mind, event chair and Telegraph journalist Mary Riddell identified the retributive mindset of the public and media, which reached unquestionably high levels in the aftermath of the summer's riots, and austerity as the two catalysts responsible for the current prison population. To put it simply, with around half of all adults reoffending within a year of their release the criminal justice system is failing.

Considering this abysmal record on reforming offenders, Mary Riddell asked the panel: Are the perpetrators of crime also victims? Bearing in mind the public’s and more importantly the media’s attitude towards crime, this is a challenging argument to win, but Mizen gives this position credence with an approach alien to many. Coupling this notion with our growing prison population means we cannot afford to dismiss this position as pure idealistic sentimentality.
As Khan, Mizen and the pamphlet suggest we indisputably require a fresh approach.

‘Punishment and Reform’ claims victims should be involved in the judicial process, instead of baying for blood, we should be careful and deliver justice with rational heads. Alongside this, rehabilitation must conquer retribution. Preventive techniques and a focus on early intervention could be key to this rethink and provide us with a criminal justice system many may not feel they want, but definitely the system we need.

Mary Riddel's take on the event and pamphlet can be read here

Nine Paradoxes of the Euro Veto crisis

2011-12-16T11:24:00.000Z

One week later, as we enter the hangover phase of the Euro-veto crisis, clouds of paradox hang thick in the air. The last week has thrown up contortions, contradictions and ambiguities which have left heads spinning on all sides. Here are nine paradoxes to emerge from the chain of events:

Both a ‘storm in a tea-cup’ and the end of an era: The deal struck by the ‘Europe of 26’ is already fraying at the edges and seems set to unravel before it sees the light of day. Other non-Eurozone members are grumbling and Francois Hollande has said he would renegotiate. So from a legal perspective Mr Cameron’s ‘no’ may have little consequence. He could have bitten his tongue. However psychologically something snapped, in the minds of the Germans and French, as well as with Cameron himself. By walking away from the table the Prime Minister has created a rupture in Britain’s European relations which will endure even as the detail becomes a fast fading memory.

By walking away, the UK won on how the EU should do business: The deal the UK forced on its partners, outside the apparatus of the EU institutions, confirms that the UK’s vision of how Europe should do business has prevailed even without its participation. It is the death-knell for ‘federalists’ who back the authority of the independent European institutions over member states and proves that Britain and France have won their long battle for an ‘intergovernmental’ Europe. In the long-run this will put a break on the pace of political integration even if this looks implausible after the weekend agreement.

A bid to safeguard the City ended up undermining it: A veto ostensibly designed to protect the City’s interests has ended up undermining them. With Britain on the sidelines other member states are now more likely to make unhelpful decisions on financial regulation which the UK cannot veto. It is curious that Mr Cameron took a position with such a significant down-side for Britain. Of course, it was a compromise package which Cameron hoped would be acceptable to EU leaders, Liberal Democrat ministers and his own backbenchers. The risk in his negotiating position became apparent when Mr Cameron concluded that it was not possible to reconcile the competing demands. He was placed in a position where he had to prioritise his base over the national interest.

Cameron wanted to undo Mrs Thatcher’s work: The Prime Minister wanted to remove majority voting from key elements of single market decision making affecting financial regulation. It was Mrs Thatcher and her Conservative European Commissioner, Lord Cockfield, who presided over the introduction of majority voting to prevent anti free-market forces blocking progress towards the single market. Ever since, the British government has taken pride in working the Brussels machinery to achieve an open and competitive European economy. The centre of gravity has gradually shifted towards the right as a result. Cameron’s demands revealed his own lack of confidence in the Conservatives’ ability to work Europe to their advantage.

The UK said no when little was at stake for us. Eurozone members said yes to a deal which risks their future: Wielding the veto was bad for Britain’s national interest while by agreeing the

would have lost nothing. By contrast for all those vulnerable Eurozone members who accepted the accord, the outcome is very risky. The new fiscal rules do not address the problems that brought on the Euro crisis, certainly in the case of Spain and Italy which had healthy public finances before the crash. But if applied strictly, the new regime could plunge Southern Europe into enduring economic turmoil undermining the Eurozone further in the medium term. The fiscal provisions are simply there to persuade Germans to intervene. So observers on the left face the difficult task of opposing David Cameron for walking away and undermining UK influence, while also criticising a deal which would rule out the sort of fiscal stimulus which the US and UK adopted in 2009. For now there is nowhere for pro-European Keynesians to turn. This explains Ed Milibands discomfort on the question of what he would have done. In truth he would have agreed to let the Eurozone do what it wanted as long as the UK was not involved, while believing the course of action extremely unwise.

The version of Britain in Europe most people want is becoming less achievable: Since Harold Wilson’s day Britain has sought a middle-way on Europe, between isolationism and full-speed integration. Every political leader, including David Cameron, has followed this course in one way or another. The week’s events make the UK’s half-way position highly unstable. The UK may now face the remorseless pressure of disaffiliation, reversing decades spent wrestling with forces pulling us inwards. The domestic dynamics of the Conservative Party and the right-wing press could combine with the hostility and exasperation of the UK's European partners to bring about a referendum on withdrawal within a very few years. The UK may end as a small island economy at the mercy of global forces and (if we want access to the European market) of EU rules we have no power to shape. Or perhaps if a referendum says ‘no’ to exit or if the economy takes a nose-dive,

Britain

will be forced back into the European fold, on terms dictated to us. Whatever happens, the Euro-realist status quo most people actually want is becomes more and more unlikely.

Anti-European English nationalism brings Scottish independence closer: The more anti-European the Conservatives become, the more Alex Salmond can exploit it. A UK referendum on Europe would offer the SNP a perfect platform for an independence vote, predicated on Scotland’s EU membership. For some English Nationalists in Conservative ranks this may be no paradox, as they are increasingly attracted to a right-leaning, free-market England free from all encumbrances. But it represents a historic parting from the Conservative and Unionist tradition of at least two hundred years.

While all this happens Britain is becoming a more European country and the Atlantic is widening: US politics has lurched to the right over the last decade but the British public remains wedded to a UK version of European social democracy. Only one in ten voters want a smaller state, the NHS is our best loved institution, a substantial majority want to keep current employment rights and want the gap between rich and poor to close, and climate change-denial remains a minority sport. The public shares the Tory’s instinctive Euro-scepticism, but on social and economic issues the Conservatives are drifting into the mid-Atlantic leaving mainstream opinion behind.

And the EU is proving its point on the global stage: David Cameron said ‘no’ just as the value of Britain in Europe was on show in Durban. The climate change deal was far from perfect, but it still demonstrated beyond doubt the essential role of common European politics. In an Asian century the issues Britain cares about – like climate protection, but also political freedom and open economies – will only be advanced through strong, united diplomacy from the EU. Britain cannot go it alone in the 21st centrury.

'In the Black', 'Labour's Business' and 'The Credbility Deficit'

2011-12-12T10:41:00.002Z

A guest post in a personal capacity from Stephen Beer. Stephen is Senior Fund Manager and UK strategist at the Central Finance Board of the Methodist Church and chair of Vauxhall Constituency Labour Party.

Debate about the economy in the Labour Party is at a really good level now and something I was looking for when the Fabian Society published my pamphlet The Credibility Deficit – How to rebuild Labour’s economic reputation at the Labour Conference this year. However, we need to tackle how we can have a credible economic policy, not simply one that is fiscally prudent.

Perhaps the biggest splash since Conference has been made by In the black Labour by Graham Cook, Adam Lent, Anthony Painter and Hopi Sen, and published by Policy Network (interest declaration: I’m a board member). The authors maintain that Labour needs to embrace fiscal conservatism and show how it will get the annual deficit down and where it will cut spending. They argue that this is a progressive policy, because if the public finances are not under control we will be unable to be progressive about anything much. Instead of triggering a harsh reaction, the discussion paper has been well-received (including by Ed Balls). That’s a healthy sign. However fiscal probity is a necessary condition for progressive economic policy but it is not sufficient. Even if Labour relied on a promise to keep to George Osborne’s latest fiscal plans, it would still not win an election centred on the economy.

What matters is being credible. I make no apologies for banging on about this because we need to get it. It’s the point I made in The Credibility Deficit. We lost credibility with both voters and markets. We lost it with voters because living standards got squeezed for years and we had no credible plan or even rhetoric to answer it. So we need to make sure we have a credible and relevant answer today. We lost credibility with markets because we fudged the way we kept our fiscal rules. Adopting new rules and saying we really will keep to them this time is therefore not going to be enough. Besides, the scale of the financial crisis was so enormous that any fiscal rules would have had to be broken to avoid a deep depression. It will be the same next time. And we lost credibility with both voters and markets because both now need convincing (whether fairly or not) that Labour will keep spending under control and effective. The Conservatives and Liberal Democrats have successfully blamed us for the deficits but if we had cut spending to match the fall in tax revenues, millions more would be unemployed and the UK would be heading rapidly down the economic performance tables.

We are living in grim economic times, with Office for Budget Responsibility forecasts suggesting we have years of flat or declining living standards ahead of us – and that’s if the eurozone actually sorts itself out. At the moment most people believe that austerity is the only answer. It will take a while for countries to travel down the austerity death spiral before they reach out for a different answer. Even if they do, the likelihood is that we will see years of half-hearted stimulus measures some of which, by virtue of their temporary nature, will make things worse.

The big problem is that the economy lacks sufficient demand. If we have a couple of quarters of unexpected growth I fully expect the OBR to change its mind and decide that perhaps more of the deficit is cyclical than it believes today (economic forecasts are not usually accurate; a reason against giving the OBR more say over policy). Business and consumer confidence is low. Who can blame them? Governments need a convincing and credible growth plan as well as a deficit-reducing plan (the In the black Labour authors make this point too) and not merely a new tax cut or spending tweak here and there.

Governments need to convince people and markets that they are fully committed to proactively increasing the productive potential of the economy for the next decade or more. Such a policy will be highly focused on encouraging enterprise and investment: spending on infrastructure will be high; a national investment bank will sit behind bank loans and stimulate small businesses. And government – or at least a Labour government – would stand behind the labour market with a jobs guarantee. The current debate about how Labour can be fiscally sound is welcome and much needed. But we need to do more to restore the economic reputation we spent so many years of opposition building last time around.

Cameron veto undermines Britain's future

2011-12-09T16:49:00.001Z

This is a guest post by Kenneth Way, Media Intern at the Fabian Society.

David Cameron’s veto of the proposed EU treaty change is a gross error of judgement and undermines Britain’s future within the union.

Back in May 2010, the Coalition agreement promised Britain would play a “strong” and “positive” role in working with our European partners. However, as Britain woke to discover Cameron used his veto, it became painfully apparent that the government has reneged on this promise and in the process worryingly sidelined Britain in Europe.

This is not the first time the government have forgotten their promise on Europe. In October, in the midst of the crisis, the Conservatives thought it helpful to hold a “symbolic” debate and subsequent vote in the Commons on EU membership. Despite defeating this vote, albeit with the largest rebellion ever on Europe from backbenchers, eurosceptics remain worryingly at large, vocal and influential within the party.

Lest Conservatives forget, in the past Europe has ripped stronger blue governments apart. This government does not have the privilege of a stable majority. Modern European history reveals that a severe lack of foresight at the insemination of the European project saw Britain say ‘No’ to Europe on multiple occasions. When the merits of Europe were finally understood, Britain started knocking on Europe’s door only to be rebutted by a dogged and insulted Charles De Gaulle adamant to block British membership. It took until 1973 to join the EEC, some sixteen years after the Treaty of Rome and some sixteen years locked outside a growing union.

We must learn from our past. While we currently remain justifiably absent from the single currency, envision a completely feasible world with a recovered booming Euro and a Pound in freefall. An economy under threat, Britain could look to the single currency as a saviour. This current short-sighted approach towards helping Europe could trigger a response akin to De Gaulle’s refusal to accept Britain into the union. Wise, farsighted decision-making will help ensure that the eurozone survies not only beyond this week, but long into the future, so that one day, if we want or need to, we can join our counterparts in a stable, secure and prosperous single currency.

Rather than fruitless attempts at holding Europe to ransom as the “awkward partner” determined to get a better deal, the government should therefore be forcing its way into discussions central to Europe’s future working side-by-side with our Franco-German counterparts. A Britain standing alongside France and German would remain powerful in these days of the emerging BRIC nations. In fact, if our beloved allies across the Atlantic continue to search for new partners in this globalising world order, the importance of Europe multiplies for Britain.

To counter this approach, British exceptionalism must end in the hearts and minds of the public. We must fight to change the wholly negative European discourse and question the idea that sovereignty is always king. Unquestionably, being pro-European is a traditional vote-loser in Britain. The notion of “Europe bad, Britain good” means the EU is seen as greedy, intrusive and unwelcome, the public are bombarded with press who inform us “Brussels controls Britain” and most of the union’s good work is buried beneath a combination of irrational jingoism and scaremongering hysteria. This attitude must change before it is too late. Failure to respond to this challenge could leave Britain in the European wilderness for generations to come.

You can follow Kenneth on Twitter @kennethway

The Price of Patient Privacy

2011-12-06T17:46:00.002Z

Guest post by Georgia Hussey

Yesterday’s announcement that NHS patients’ data is to be opened up to aid potentially life-saving research seems, initially, to be a fair one. Excluding external factors, such as potential leaks of information, deliberating between patient privacy and the advancements that could be made with patients’ data seems weigh considerably on the side of the potential benefits of the research. Moral philosophy tells us that when presented with an ethical dilemma between two things, the right choice is the one that does the least harm and the most good. So long as anonymity is guaranteed (and the fact that perhaps it can’t is another issue), the potential harm to patients is far outweighed by the benefit of the availability of such information. With an opt-out system resembling the successful organ donor policy held by countries such as Spain (where there are 33 inhabitants in a million are organ donors, compared with 14.1 in the UK), the change can be justified in a similar way; its likely that most people would be happy for data to be used, just as 90% of us support organ donation. The consequences of this decision would indeed be positive: greater medical innovation, encouraging research and facilitating the fight against diseases.

However moral philosophy also tells us that the consequences of an action alone aren’t enough to make it morally right, it must also be motivated by the right reasons. The context of this announcement is therefore crucial: it’s hard not to consider this another move in the right’s creep towards NHS privatisation.

After the controversy that has surrounded the government’s policy on the NHS, hearing David Cameron and Andrew Lansley utter the words ‘private firms’ and ‘NHS’ in the same sentence triggers scepticism. Lansley’s Health and Social Care Bill has faced significant opposition, with many criticising the speed with which it’s been pushed through parliament, as well as the far-reaching implications it will have for our country’s health service. Lansley dismissed claims that the bill will be a major step towards the privatisation of the NHS as “ludicrously scaremongering”, but a document that emerged two weeks ago seemed to also point in this direction. Medical professionals said the implications of the document -a report on ‘Developing Commissioning Support: Towards Services Excellence’- which was sent out to various health organisations, would inevitably be that large sections of the health service would be overpowered by private providers. GP commissioning groups would eventually have to hand over responsibility for some services to private companies, unable to compete with them without support.

The further changes to the NHS announced yesterday seem more worrying within this context. In his speech on life sciences yesterday, David Cameron detailed his plan to open up the NHS to pharmaceutical companies for clinical trials as an effort to foster a closer relationship between the industry and the NHS. With a brief reference to the patients that could be helped, Cameron’s speech centred on the life sciences as “a jewel in the crown of our economy” with the NHS as the convenient cloth to polish it with before the auction. The focus on the economics of the decision exposes where the true interest of the government lies in opening up the NHS. Andy Burnham has rightly warned of the need to “tread carefully” on this issue. Rather than showing themselves as making an altruistic move to encourage medical research, the announcement is the Conservative party’s inability to forgo a chance to twist the NHS into turning a profit.

So although the consequences of using the NHS as a resource for medical research and clinical trials are likely to be mostly positive, the government’s motivation for doing so is cause for concern. Perhaps David Cameron has deliberated about the ethical dimensions of the dilemma, and reasoned that the potential risk to patient privacy is worth the good that will result. But if his motivation is actually based on a “calculation about what’s best for our economy” we do indeed need to tread carefully; if the motivation that lies behind the decision is economic, then David Cameron has sold patient privacy for another jewel to go in his crown.

Was Osborne Right On Public Sector Pay?

2011-12-05T17:35:00.004Z

A guest post written by Peter Kenway, Director of the New Policy Institute. A longer version of this article can be found here

George Osborne's claims on public sector pay in the Autumn statement do not stand up to scrutiny. In his statement to parliament on 29 November, George Osborne said the following:

"We will set public sector pay awards at an average of 1% for each of the two years after the pay freeze ends.

"Many are helped by pay progression – the annual increases in salary grades that many people are entitled to, even when pay is frozen.

"It is one of the reasons why public sector pay has risen at twice the rate of private sector pay over the last four years."

Was he right?

The latest statistics on average weekly pay from the ONS is for September 2011. These show that compared with four years earlier, average weekly pay in the private sector had risen 6.2% whereas average weekly pay in the public sector had risen by 12.8%, that is, an excess of 6.6% . Osborne’s basic premise is therefore correct – public sector pay has risen more than twice as fast as pay in the private sector.

What about pay progression in the public sector as the reason for this difference? While it is true that many public sector workers do enjoy pay progression, the information needed to quantify its extent, in both the public and private sectors, cannot be gleaned from the official statistics. So no evidence here either way.

But are there other factors that might explain the difference in the rates of growth of pay in the two sectors over the four years and for which evidence does exist? There certainly is, and once this is accounted for, the picture changes dramatically.

Bonuses and Arrears

First, it is clear from the data that bonuses in the private sector were down sharply in January 2009 compared with a year earlier. Given what had happened to the economy and the financial sector in over the previous year, that is entirely understandable. But since this is exactly what is meant to happen with bonuses at times like this, it is absurd to use the collapse as a reason for holding down public sector pay.

Luckily, the ONS publishes alternative series for average weekly earnings which strips out the effect of both bonuses and pay arrears. On this basis, instead of rising just 6.2% over four years, private sector weekly earnings rose 7.8%. Over the same period, public sector earnings rose 12.6%. While the overall picture is the same, leaving out bonuses reduces the gap between the two sectors by nearly two percentage points.

A chart that plots these two series from 2005 onwards can be seen here. One thing this chart shows is how the public and private sectors seem to take it in turns to lead on earnings growth. In 2005, public sector earnings were rising faster than those in the private sector. Between 2006 and 2008 the private sector led. Then from late 2008, the private sector fell back again – for a period of about 18 months substantially so. Since mid 2010 the two sectors have been tracking one another closely.

The Changing Public Sector

Much more surprising is the sudden step in average public sector earnings in mid 2009? What was this? A sudden bout of generosity on the part of public sector employers at the tail end of the recession? No. It is a statistical quirk caused by the fact that from July 2009, earnings in the now nationalised banks, RBS and Lloyds/HBOS, started being included in the public sector. When this is taken account of – luckily again, the ONS produces a public sector average earnings series excluding financial services – the apparent step up in public sector pay in mid 2009 disappears.

It is true that in mid-2009 the public sector was still doing better than the private sector (where earnings at this point had slumped). This would still be true even if the two banks were still in the private sector. We estimate that if they were, private sector earnings would have risen 8.4% over the four years. Over the same period, public sector earnings excluding financial services rose 11%. So there is still a gap but it is down to 2.6%.

Conclusion

Failure to take account of the effects of something as big as the nationalisation of RBS and Lloyds is a gross error. Osborne’s claim depends upon it. Once that error has been corrected however, it is less the small difference between the two sectors that is the story than the large difference between earnings growth in both sectors and inflation at 5%. The resulting fall in ‘real’ wages – that is wages after allowing for inflation – is a major reason why the economy is now so sluggish. Since the economy will not recover until pay picks up, bigger rises in both sectors, and especially in the private sector, are fast becoming a patriotic duty.

Labour’s Business and the Unions

2011-11-30T10:49:00.002Z

One of a very limited run of Labour’s Business will be given to every delegate who attends our annual conference entitled The Economic Alternative on January 14th. Full details and how to buy your tickets can be found here. Please purchase your tickets early to avoid disappointment.

Mark Rowney has worked for several years as a senior finance lawyer specialising in transport, energy and infrastructure at Clifford Chance LLP.

On Monday, two well known Labour party activists (Luke Bozier and Alex Smith) launched a pamphlet entitled “Labour’s business: Why Enterprise must be at the heart of Labour politics in the 21st century”. It aims to be not “a Labour manifesto for business”. Instead recognising that “in twenty-first century Britain, business must be at the very core of what it means to be Labour”, it aims to “inform future work on how Labour can become the party of enterprise”. When so far to date, Labour’s business policy is the incomprehensible distinction between so called predators and producers, and with yesterday’s budget statement offering little hope for the future, “Labour’s business” is a very welcome development.

Chapter Two of the pamphlet acknowledges the extremely important and valuable relationship that Labour has with business through the unions. Mark Glover is to be commended for giving thoughts on how Labour should embrace this relationship rather than give the tired and dated argument that comes from the right of the party for distancing Labour from the unions (not so say that many of Rob Marchant’s points in Chapter Three, such as weakening the hold unions have over candidate selection aren’t valid).

It’s understandable that many in Labour want to distance themselves from the unions. The unions, on the whole, have failed to modernise their public perception and relationship with the public. As a result, public discontent with the unions tars the image of Labour. However, Labour should help the unions to come up to date, not distance itself from its founding associations.
With polls showing that only 38% of the public back today’s strikes, it is clear that despite the simplicity and eloquence of the unions’ message, it does not get through. Hand on heart, the best I can empathically say for the unions is that if you kick a dog, don’t be surprised if it bites back. I know I’m factually wrong on that metaphor, but it’s what I feel.

Unions exist to support their members but their definitions of “support” and “members” seems weak. I have no idea if the day after Gaddaffi died, union members started sending recruitment and development teams to Libya, but they should have. Supporting members means growing in membership, targeting the 81% of people in the private sector who aren’t members. It means spreading the values of basic employment rights, non-discrimination and health and safety laws, to other developing countries. It means sitting on the board and taking responsibility for social corporate responsibility. It means being seen to be a positive force for business and change in society, not a barrier. Labour should help the unions achieve this goal.

“Labour’s business” doesn’t just talk about the internal relations of Labour with business and aims to be a jack of all trades. By its very nature, the pamphlet is superficial but that is its strength rather than its weakness; it aims to promote debate rather that set out a detailed line of argument. With eighteen chapters written by twenty different people and edited by two, the pamphlet varies in its tone and thought processes. Conflict in the thinking inevitably and happily arises.

Yet my suggestion for the initial focus for debate is to be found in Section One of the pamphlet. For as Section One argues, how can Labour really have a serious policy for business if it first does not have the internal relations with business and the capacity and culture for those relationships to develop and grow?

The Fabian Society would like to thank Alex Smith and Luke Bozier for their kind donation of the book.

Autumn Statement 2011: the Fabian reaction

2011-11-29T16:08:00.001Z

George Osborne must be secretly delighted at the Eurozone debt crisis. Not only can he pass on the blame for a UK slowdown that is largely home-grown but, more importantly, the prospect of irrational bond markets turning on the UK offers the only possible justification for the fiscal stance he reaffirmed today.

That is the thin veneer masking the truth of this Autumn Statement. Standing back from the detail this was a ‘no change’ budget. Yet everything has changed in the last year. Osborne’s deficit reduction plan was written when the Chancellor had reason to hope for a V shaped recession and recovery. Now we know this will be an L shaped depression. It is already inevitable that British GDP will sit below its pre-crisis peak for longer than in the 1930s. On top of that comes the Eurozone debt crisis and political stalemate in Washington. No wonder that despite the cuts Osborne will now borrow more than Alistair Darling ever planned.

All our economic history suggests the only route to recovery from such dire straits is to stimulate domestic demand. But instead the Chancellor is persisting in sucking public spending out of the economy. His proposals for encouraging more private sector consumption and investment are well meaning enough, but totally inadequate for the task at hand. To kick-start the economy we need a big increase in business investment, financial sector lending and spending by asset-rich households. But none of that will be enough to resist the double headwinds of fiscal contraction and global economic turmoil. Osborne is becoming the counter-Keynesian chancellor, content to see pro-cyclical fiscal policy that actually exacerbates stagnation.

So those are the headlines. Here are some of the details that lept out for me:

(1) The Liberal Democrats deserve credit for preserving inflation indexation of out-of-work benefits. Low income groups find it hardest to cope with rising prices and we must remember that over the last 30 years the value of benefits in comparison to median earnings has plummeted. It’s only fair that, on the rare occasion that inflation outstrips earnings, poor households see the benefit.

(2) The flip-side is that the big reduction in tax credit payments will hit low and middle earners hard, reducing overall consumer demand and worsening work incentives. Although the poor are protected for now, these reforms further undermine the universalist principles of our welfare system. Fabian Society research indicates that tightly targeting welfare on low income families and reducing entitlements for mid and high income groups stores up problems in the long run. Evidence from across the OECD shows that because public consent is so important for sustaining welfare, systems which support higher income groups are also the most effective at preventing poverty. It is depressing that ‘anti-universalist’ sentiments seem to be dominant within both Coalition partners, even though each party contains proud universalist roots (Beveridge and Macmillan spring to mind).

(3) The fresh cuts to current spending are particularly concerning, given that they will pay for capital spending which may not come on stream for some time. This risks sucking money out of the economy at a moment of crisis. The idea of using public money to leverage in private investment is good in principle, but the rumblings in the press suggest that the deal is far from sealed. The Treasury will need careful watching to see if the pension funds and sovereign investors really come up with extra infrastructure spending.

(4) A final thought on State Pension Age. The chancellor seems once again to have pre-empted consultation on what is a key change to welfare entitlements. In principle I support increases to State Pension Age, if they are sufficiently gradual that each generation can expect to draw a pension for the same share of their adult life as the last. But there is a big caveat, which I wrote about a few weeks back. With health inequality rising, any increases to State Pension Age have a disproportionate impact on low income groups. On average men in the poorest fifth of English neighbourhoods become disabled at 55. Until this public health disaster is addressed can the left really feel comfortable with a rising pension age?

Unlocking our housing wealth: a Keynesian stimulus on the cheap?

2011-11-21T17:09:00.001Z

Andrew Harrop, General Secretary of the Fabian Society, outlines a proposal featured in yesterday’s Independent on Sunday for a time-limited voucher to incentivise people to unlock their wealth and get spending. A government cash-back deal worth £2,000 per home would see £100 million of public money turn into at least £2 billion of cash. The money would boost consumer spending and increase the volume of home sales.

The Government’s housing strategy, launched today, is intended to be a boost to economic growth. But by focusing entirely on the construction of new homes the Government has taken a very narrow view on how housing can stimulate the economy. For owner-occupied homes are a huge reservoir of wealth which could be converted into higher consumer spending, if we get the incentives right.

British households own around £3 trillion in housing wealth. Just converting a tiny amount of this into cash could boost consumer demand by billions. For the sake of the economy there couldn’t be a better time for those with housing equity to run-down some of their assets and use it to maintain their standard of living. People can do this by moving to cheaper homes and using the proceeds or, if they want to stay put, they can take out either a second mortgage or an equity release product. Overall the result would be that households would own a little less of the nation’s housing wealth and the financial sector, awash with money from quantitative easing, would take on a little more.

To make this happen the Government should introduce a simple, eye-catching voucher to encourage people to cash-in while times are tough. It could be modelled on the car scrapage scheme which offered people £2,000 to upgrade their car. That was an incentive to persuade drivers to spend from £10,000 upwards on a new car. The multiplier effect would be much greater if a similar voucher was used to unlock housing wealth, as the sums involved tend to be a lot higher: an average equity release is worth £50,000 and when people downsize their home the sums are at least as much.

The voucher could be used towards the upfront costs of moving for anyone making the shift to a cheaper home, or it could be a cash-back offer to top-up a financial product. How would it work? If the first, say, 50,000 applicants were eligible for £2,000 each for unlocking at least £40,000, that would unlock a minimum of £2 billion of cash at a cost of £100 million. Schemes like this always have some ‘deadweight’ costs, but today far fewer people down-size their home or take out cash than might be considered economically rational (at the last count only 15,000 equity release products were sold in a year). The attraction of the scheme would be partly to publicise the benefits of cashing in on housing and this might have lasting behavioural benefits.

The immediate beneficiaries of the scheme would be people with existing equity, who are mainly in mid and later life. In itself this may be no bad thing as many ‘asset rich’ older people live off very low incomes and could in principle spend a lot more of their money. But the scheme would also help free-up our sticky housing market. A good proportion of the cash would no doubt pass to younger relatives to help them raise a deposit for a home; meanwhile when older households downsize they would free-up larger homes: two different routes to boosting the volume of housing transactions, with all the wider economic activity this implies.

The obvious pitfall for this scheme is that it is regressive by design: a cash incentive to encourage people with wealth to spend it (although perhaps a mere £2,000 would not be much of an incentive to sell-up for the genuinely rich). It would only be distributionally fair as part of a broader package with more progressive elements (such a great deal for the Daily Mail reading classes might even buy political cover for other pro-poor elements of fiscal stimulus). Even if it were introduced on its own however, the very strong multiplier effect of the voucher means Keynsianism should beat socialism on this occasion. And if the scheme was successful in boosting house sales it might even be self-funding, through the proceeds from all that Stamp Duty.

Men-only policy debates must go

2011-11-18T10:56:00.002Z

A new campaign to end all male panels was launched this week. The campaign is promoted by a growing group of women from many walks all life, including politics, think thanks, charities and academia, all involved in promoting gender equality as the way forward to build a more progressive, sustainable and fair Britain.

The campaign is timely, as we are witnessing the dire consequences multiply of a world long dominated by men and by masculine visions. The finance empire, which has collapsed dragging Europe into darkness, was built on short-lived money and little or no interest in a long-term outlook, is a key example. The crisis in the EU, far from being simply a crisis of the Euro, is, to me, the crisis of an ideology which has pervaded for too long.

Women, and women’s approach to development and growth, can drive radical change. It is not by chance that women do often manifest change and progress. The recently elected female-led Denmark’s government, just to name one. Or the leading female figures in Latin America. This is why it is appalling that some organisations could even conceive an all-men panel in a policy roundtable. These gentlemen’s conversation can no doubt be lively but they are history in reverse.

A few months ago we launched Fabiana, the new magazine of the Fabian Women’s Network to respond to a new way of feminism which is surging across the UK. We realised that women’s presence is necessary, but just the starting point: women need to be driving change at all levels across public life, from politics to businesses.

We see the next vital step is creating policies from a feminist perspective, and how that perspective can shape a vision for Britain and the world. To achieve that, it is essential to establish a fresh dialogue between genders: for this reason, Fabiana hosts both female and male voices to deepen understanding and debate of foreign policy, welfare state, and financial markets. We want to encourage this dialogue between women and men who share the same conviction that female presence and ideas are the way forward to create the innovative policies we need to modernise our world.

I grew up in Italy, a country where all-men debates are quite common, to put it mildly. Once in a while – the best case scenarios – I would hear frantic conversations followed by the afterthought: ‘We need a woman, let’s find one’, as if it were only a matter of courtesy or some tedious formality. The country where I grew up and where I have been involved in politics for ten years before moving to the UK in 2008, is now in the public eye because of the downfall of its misogynist PM (Silvio Berlusconi). Being a feminist in Italy – together with many others – has been challenging, but has taught me a great lesson: that women need to remain vigilant at all times, as their rights and achievements are always a slippery slope.

With that conviction, together with Seema Malhotra and many others, I supported the idea of reacting and firmly saying we will not attend any all-men panels policy debates, without exceptional reason: there is simply no space for this in today’s world.

We live in a difficult age, and history shows us that financial crises are always hard times for women. Not just financially, but also in terms of ethics and the erosion of progressive values. In addition, women are bearing the brunt of the reckless cuts perpetrated by the Coalition government, being pushed out of the workforce, seeing their income driven down whilst cuts to legal aid undermine their access to justice and make them less protected from violence.

Let all progressive men stand with us women, and join us in our campaign. All-men debates are a worrying sign of sickness. Let’s stop it now, for the sake of women, men and Britain.
To join, you can sign here.

Ivana Bartoletti
Editor of Fabiana
w. www.ivanabartoletti.co.uk
t. @IvanaBartoletti

Fabian New Year Conference: Looking back (and ahead)

2011-11-17T10:19:00.001Z

Labour’s storming victory at the first by-election of the Parliament in Oldham East seems a long, long time ago. It was just after that Ed Miliband gave his speech to the Fabians New Year conference.

Looking back now. It’s clear to see how much of what happened in 2011 for Labour was sketched out in this speech. Talking to a packed hall of Fabain members, Miliband set out the three challenges Labour must face to win back power.

The first challenge was the need to understand why our economy has stopped working for the majority of people. This line of argument showed clearly the thinking that led to the good/bad capitalism theme that formed the centrepiece of Miliband’s conference speech. This theme is now at the heart of political debate.

From Peter Oborne to the Occupy LSX movement, discussions about the failure of our economic system and its effects on people are taking place across the political spectrum. But looking back to Janurary 2011, Fabian New Year Conference was talking about and debating these issues indoors long before we saw the steps of St Pauls occupied.

As well as the economy, Ed Miliband set out two further challenges in that speech: How to move away from managerialist policy-making and reconnect with our communities; and the third was about moving politics away from vested interests and renewing our democratic spirit.

The Blue Labour agenda, one of the most colourful internal Labour debates was precisely about the need to reconnect with communities. This was about identity politics. The Fabian Society continue to be at the heart of this discussion. How we reengage locally without dismissing the important role that the active state can play will be a major focus for the Fabians and the Labour party in the coming years.

The challenge of taking on vested interests was seen no more clearly than in the phone hacking scandal. Ed Miliband’s capturing of the public mood over the summer gave the ultimate platform to this central challenge. It’s a challenge that is now also a central part of the economic message. Vested interests, asset strippers have been identified as part of the problem.

Renewed democratic participation and wealth creators are some of the solutions we now explore. Whether this was in the refounding Labour process or laying out the challenge for taking on monopolies in the energy industry - the agenda was set out at New Year Conference 2011.

Today, as we reach the last few weeks of the year, the news is that we are to miss our deficit reduction targets. In addition, youth unemployment has hit 1million. We are also hearing murmurs of contagion fears in the Eurozone crisis. The coalition said there was no alternative. But one is very much needed. It is against this backdrop that we prepare for Fabian New Year Conference 2012: The Economic Alternative where Ed Balls and a host of other leading commentators will set out their stall on what that alternative should be.

How we engage with the big questions on the economy are now the key to being seen as a credible government-in-waiting. Once again, if you want to be at the heart of the debates driving Labour in 2012, there is no better place to start than the Fabian Society New Year Conference.

Tickets for the The Economic Alternative are on sale now and going fast. Don't miss out: http://www.fabians.org.uk/events/events-news/the-economic-alternative-fabian-new-year-conference-2012

The Minimum Wage is Not Red Tape

2011-11-16T15:37:00.001Z

Dominic Raab framed his Conservative Home article today with this statement: “Gloomy unemployment figures out today show unemployment at 8.3% and, more disturbing still, youth unemployment at 21.9%.”

Aside from using the word unemployment three times in one sentence, what else is wrong with this picture?

The answer lies in Raab suggests as a means by which to address the problems he cites. Here are some of the main ideas he puts forward for young people out of work today:

- Allow small businesses to pay below the minimum wage for 16-21 year olds
- Make it easier for employers to fire people
- Abolish the need to employers to invest in their workforce and offer training

These are just three of the ideas from the Centre for Policy Studies’ ‘Escaping The Strait Jacket – Ten regulatory reforms to create jobs’ published today. This publication looks at how red tape is holding back the UK economy.

Let us be very clear about something. The minimum wage is not a form of red tape that holds back growth in the economy. The minimum wage is one of the finest achievements by a Labour government that sought to raise living standards to build a better economy and society. The minimum wage is one of the most important policies for ensuring that work really pays.

Furthermore, employment laws are as such that it is already easier to fire someone in the UK than it is in the rest of Europe. Who would benefit from changes our system further in favour of employers? Working for less pay with less security is a horrible suggestion for solving our growth and jobs problems. Add in ideas like lessening investment in training and we have a viscous cycle of low-paid, low skilled workers with insecure jobs.

The sum total of all this policy is jobless growth. This is the kind of recovery achieved by the policies Raab is advocating.

The dividing lines with the solutions offered by the centre-left speak volumes about the space between the two main parties today. From the 5 point plan spearheaded by Ed Miliband & Ed Balls, number one offers a much better suggestion:

A £2 billion tax on bank bonuses. This would fund the building of 25,000 homes and 100,000 jobs for young people. This approach takes money from the sector in the economy that enjoys some of the highest pay and if banks won’t lend to small businesses, it is right and legitimate that we tax them to invest in jobs and growth.

The dividing line between Tory and Labour policy could not be illustrated any clearer than in Ed Miliband’s consistent support for a national living wage. The living wage would see living standards rise at a time when those in the middle are feeling the pinch of rising prices. This would truly increase the will to work by increasing the rewards of it. Raab offers instead to lower wages, and in turn lower living standards.

There is plenty more depth and detail to the economic alternative emerging from Labour. The five point plan includes reversing the VAT rise and bringing forward long-term investment projects to stimulate the economy. An approach that top economists agree is now necessary to avoid a decade of high unemployment and slow growth. It is exactly this kind of economic alternative that we’ll be discussing in depth at this year’s Fabian New Year Conference. Make sure you’re there to be part of the debate.

Widening health inequalities signal trouble ahead

2011-11-02T14:40:00.000Z

Last month brought depressing news for political observers of an egalitarian bent. The Office of National Statistics announced that the gap between life expectancy in the poorest and richest communities in the UK had widened, with men in Kensington and Chelsea now living on average 13.5 years longer than men in Glasgow.

This headline measure of health inequality actually masks an even worse story. For in recent years geographic differences in the length of disability-free life have increased more quickly than variations in life expectancy itself. In poorer neighbourhoods people not only tend to die earlier. They live with ill-health for longer as well. And the gap is edging higher.

This matters because health inequality is ultimately the most important dimension of social justice. Not only do most people value long, healthy lives above all else, but variations in health in middle and later life mark the culmination of lifelong inequalities. The overwhelming conclusion of the 2010 Marmot Review on Health Inequalities was that gaps in the incidence of long-term disability and then premature death are the result of enduring inequalities of money, power, educational achievement, employment opportunity, and environment. Stereotypical health-related factors, such as unhealthy lifestyles or industrial accidents, only explain a small part of the variance.

This is just the latest piece of bad news on inequality. Since 2007 income inequality has reached its highest level since records began. This has been caused not just by the well-documented excesses of the super-rich, but also by low income families failing to keep up with the middle. In hindsight, it looks like Labour's anti-poverty agenda before the crash was a heroic effort at running up a down escalator. Income inequality was stabilised through redistribution, but the underlying economic forces driving wider inequality did not go away. Now, with the economy still becalmed and the coalition's priorities elsewhere, the prospects for closing income gaps are gloomy.

Income and health inequalities are very different, however. Income is a snapshot (albeit a very important one) while health inequalities tell us about our whole life-course. In this respect looking at health is more like looking at our lifetime earnings profile. The gaps we see today are a result of the accumulated experiences of decades, not the period of office of the most recent government. Indeed, over the long-term, Labour's time in office may well turn out to have a positive bearing on gaps in lifetime health and wealth, because many of the key childhood inequalities, such as gaps in GSCE attainment, did close modestly. It goes without saying that it will be decades before we know what impact this will have on earnings differences let alone health inequalities.

Meanwhile the widening gaps in life expectancy should be ringing alarm bells within the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP). Ministers are about to consult on rapidly accelerating the planned increases to the state pension age. When you look at the averages, it is hard to quarrel with the proposition that the pension age should rise so that future increases in life expectancy are split fairly between working life and retirement.

But widening health inequalities make the argument far harder to sustain. If men in Glasgow can only expect to live to 73 and the rate at which their life expectancy is improving is not keeping up with the national average, why should their pension come later? The dilemma is then exacerbated by inequalities of disability. In the poorest fifth of English neighbourhoods the average man can expect to become disabled at 55, a figure that is rising gradually but by less than the nationwide figure. Can we really expect these people to wait longer for their pension, or will solutions to such tragic concentrations of ill-health need to come first?

The DWP may not like to hear it but its next wave of reforms will be a non-starter, unless the formula for increasing state pension age is firmly anchored on prior improvements to healthy life expectancy in poor communities. The prospect of savings to the massive pensions bill should be an incentive for all corners of government to work together to prioritise closing the health gap.

A version of this post also appears on politics.co.uk

Homes for Citizens: the politics of a fair housing policy

2011-11-02T11:40:00.002Z

The Fabian Society returned to the housing debate last week with an excellent debate at the launch of our collection of essays, Homes for Citizens; the politics of a fair housing policy.
Hillary Benn had his first outing as Shadow Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government – and judging by what we saw, Benn is looking like good news for progressive housing policy.

This is not the time for simple opposition to current housing reforms; but for imaginative and fairer solutions to real problems, across all tenures. These range from the scarcity of social housing, to the problems of an increasing unaffordable and often poor quality private rental sector, and to the thwarted aspirations of those who want but cannot afford to buy their own home.

These problems all require clear policy thinking – and we saw much of this at the seminar in the contributions of Brian Johnson of Moat housing association, and Duncan Shrubsole of Crisis. A flexible approach to tenure, allowing far more fluid movement between ownership and renting, is crucial if we are to meet people’s aspirations whilst providing real security and making the best use of stretched resources. That may mean, for example, that a social housing tenant’s rent increase as their financial position improves. But if we are serious about individual security and stable communities with a mix of tenures and incomes, we can never endorse a policy that forces these households to up sticks and leave their homes. Flexible rent should never threaten anyone’s sense of security in their own home.

There is also a desperate need for clearer policy thinking about the needs and rights of those in the private rental sector. Whilst there are many good landlords, there is very little obligation placed on those who – either through intent or simple lack of experience – do not offer a quality service. Disrepair and poor quality housing is all too common. Security, too, is a real issue. A six month tenancy offers no one a sense of stability in their own home.
But in addition to all this, policy must be embedded in a clear and principled political vision. The changes we need to make in British housing provision are wide reaching and challenging. Labour’s housing policy will not begin to be heard if it does not build on the common stresses and strains experienced by so many households, regardless of their tenure. Polling frequently shows that one in four adults, across all tenures, experience high levels of anxiety because of the seemingly ever increasing costs of all types of housing.

With so many households in this position, it is surely the right time to make housing a central pillar of Labour Party politics. And the aim should be not to speak to different group as if their problems were unique to the tenure they find themselves in, but to stress instead the interconnection of these problems. Better private and social rental sectors is not at the ‘expense’ of homeownership but a benefit to all, taking much of the heat out of the market for those that really do want to own their own home. There is no ‘zero-sum’ trade-off here – and no inherent conflict of electoral interests.

What we have instead is the potential for a wide coalition of interests – and potentially a deep consensus behind a far fairer approach to housing reform than is currently on offer. This, we hope, is the kind of message that Benn will take to heart, and it is a process of principled and practical change that we hope to have contributed to with Homes for Citizens.

James Gregory is a Senior-Research Fellow at the Fabian Society.

Vulture or dodo? - Expanding On Ed Miliband's Vision

2011-11-01T15:39:00.000Z

A guest article by author Philip Monaghan. Philip argues that whilst Ed Miliband’s idea to reform the capital markets is well intentioned, it needs to be backed up with big and bold policy specifics if it is to boost UK prosperity

Philip Monaghan is a writer and strategist in the fields of economic development and environmental sustainability. He is the acclaimed author of the books How Local Resilience Creates Sustainable Societies (out February 2012) and Sustainability in Austerity (2010). Philip is Founder & CEO of Infrangilis.

Whilst the response to the Labour leader’s conference speech has been mixed, Ed Miliband’s contentious attack on “predatory asset-strippers” and subsequent campaign against alleged overcharging by greedy energy companies has chimed with hardworking but struggling households across the social spectrum. Yet a nagging concern is that Miliband’s emerging remedy for the “fast buck” ethos of the market vultures is destined to go the same way as the dodo unless it is thought through a little more.

A call for “long termism” as part of a better capitalism is all well and good. But people will quickly want more specifics for this vision. To be credible it needs be able to withstand the charge it is anti-business. To be sustainable it must make best use of diminishing resources as we embark on a long and slow recovery.

As my new book sets out, core to this is an understanding that reform on how we get money to work for the people (as opposed to the other way around) is a complex situation that requires global and local interventions as well as national ones. It has to be about more than just letting big banks go bust next time or forcing the bailed out banks to lend to small businesses. These are necessary but not sufficient. Let me take two cases in point here, where there is a gap in the current thinking on key leverage points.

Reigning in the credit raters: firstly, at the global level, it is time to downgrade the racket of country credit rating agencies. Firms like Moody’s, Fitch and S&P are profit-motivated actors that have the power to make nations go bust. When they downgrade the credit worthiness of countries like the USA, Italy or France, the cost of borrowing goes up, this slows the pace of recovery from the recession but more than this hurts the poor the most. Yet it is these very same firms that gave AAA ratings to Lehman Brothers, with disastrous results, and so helped to create the global banking crisis in the first place. To solve this power imbalance and get big money working for the public good again we need to force Parliament to properly scrutinise and regulate this invisible but corrosive industry. As a first step, this must involve rating each of the raters according to the transparency of their decision-making, competency to operate and avoidance of conflicts of interest. But to work, this UK action needs to be part of a transnational effort with liked minded reformers in Europe and the USA, to ensure there are clear and consistent global rules.

Re-directing the £143bn of local authority pension funds to the green economy: secondly, at the local level, we need to make it much easier for local councils to access their own municipal pension funds for local regeneration schemes. It is legal to do so already, yet this practice is uncommon due to the regulatory red-tape and a lack of awareness and competency. We not only need UK government to make it clear that this is possible but that it is expected, and as such will be monitored. This should include the presumption that any low carbon regeneration projects (e.g. district reneweable energy schemes which generate clean power and a healthy profit) that meet their investment criteria shall take priority for these funds. As part of this, local ‘low carbon enterprise zones’ should be widely established through existing local authority planning frameworks (similar to the ones springing up in Manchester, Zaragoza and Baoding). This zoning involves nurturing clusters of low carbon business start-ups, including the promotion of local apprenticeship schemes to get young and unemployed people on the jobs ladder. Additional benefits of this intervention is that it make our communities more resilient against national energy price rises, and frees up some of the money earmarked for the coalition’s (well intentioned but delayed) Green Investment Bank for other frontline public services like social care and education that are under threat during a period of financial austerity across our town halls.

This is an aggressive and progressive approach to boosting the UK’s prosperity. It not only makes best use of scarce resources at a time when money is tight, it also provides a fresh injection of life into our flagging manufacturing base, whilst protecting the planet for tomorrow’s generations. Do not listen to the naysayers who will argue it is too difficult. Fighting and winning the Second World War was also difficult. This is all very doable, but only as long as we have the appetite for the fight and the collective nous to make it so – regardless of one’s political colours.

Decentralisation, pluralism and people power: who could possibly disagree?

2011-10-31T17:21:00.003Z

Labour’s long tradition of participation, self-government and moral reform is being re-claimed by voices from all sides of the party. Decentralisation, pluralism and people power: who could possibly disagree? It’s one thing, after all, that members of Progress, Compass and Blue Labour all sign up to, in their different ways.

But politics is about trade-offs and priorities. Yes, Labour should adopt a ‘presumption of decentralisation’, but there are clear restrictions on how, and how far, this should be pushed. This is both because there are difficult tensions within the left-decentralist agenda, and also because decentralisation risks becoming a distraction from the huge national ambitions we need to embrace.

Our politics of the state must first be about the big, long-term challenges which only collective action on a national scale can resolve: growth and productivity; demographic change; carbon reduction; housing supply - and, for us on the left, a fairer labour market for the middle and bottom, reduced health inequalities and closing the gap in life chances. Labour’s years in office show what the state can achieve, and not just through tax-and-spend; for example long-term, sustainable frameworks for pensions provision and carbon reduction.

Britain

’s public finance settlement remains overwhelmingly an issue for the central state too. To win again we need to provide cast-iron reassurances against spending profligacy, overseen by the Office of Budget Responsibility. This could take the form of a promise on the deficit, perhaps animated by a pledge that during economic recovery, taxation and spending would only rise in line with growth.

Creating this ‘cover’ with respect to the overall size of the state, would provide Labour, if we win, with the opportunity to radically restructure how public money is raised and spent. This could include greater devolution of public service spending, and perhaps the introduction of more local taxation. But most of the task is for the national state. Labour should re-write the tax-code to make it pro-green, pro-work, pro-asset stability, long-termist and progressive. We should also see what scope there is to integrate tax and welfare, to bind everyone into a common, more universal and contribution-based system. Nor should we any longer tolerate social security being a cause of widening inequality, but instead index state credits to earnings; an example of a small change from the centre which over decades will transform life chances.

So the decentralist agenda will need to jostle with an inevitable and desirable programme of central action. But there is also intense competition within the decentralist camp itself, with many visions and versions of the new empowering state. Decentralisation may be a guiding principle, but it is also a toolkit, and there are different objectives and consequences implicit in the tools we choose. Some decentralist solutions seek to disempower and by-pass local democracy, while others aim to strengthen it. Giving cash to service users and big payment-by-results contracts are both pluralist innovations, but their consequences are totally different. At every turn we must ask what means and ends we are pursuing and how they may rub-up against each other: personal control and responsibility? stronger democracy? professional autonomy? savings, efficiency and competitive innovation? enduring public institutions? community and civic life? and of course, better service outcomes?

Finally decentralisers on the left must be extremely wary that they are not widening, rather than narrowing, inequalities of power. There is always the risk that those with the nous and sharp elbows will act in ways that benefit themselves rather than the community at large. There is a fine line, for example, between creating aspirational inner-city schools that bind professional parents into comprehensive education and Michael Gove’s vision of free schools which seem to be all about giving privileged parents the ability to opt-out. The left’s version of power-to-the people must be about levelling-up, for those without control over their lives, not just giving more to those who do.

A version of this article appears in November’s Progress magazine

Free Schools for Social Justice: Opportunities for Twigg

2011-10-18T12:02:00.000+01:00

A guest post by @eylanezekiel from @ON_School provides us with an insight into how the Education policy review debate is perceived from outside the Westminster bubble. The argument is that the debate about free schools provides a real opportunity for Labour to demonstrate a positive alternative.

For those of us outside the Westminster Village, and working around public services, we can see that change is needed. Those of us working in Education understand that Schools are an organ of community and recognise that we are connected to all aspects of the world that the families around us live in, and create.

The Tories defined the recent debate in the late 80s, and seem to have done so again, for the next cycle in policy in education. There are many fears about the future these changes will bring. The belief in free market forces, in public services, has opened the doors to poor outcomes for all communities in England.

In the Purple Book, Stephen Twigg talks the language of decentralisation and empowering local communities. If Labour is actually to own this space instead of talking about it in seminar rooms, it needs to better engage with the programme of reforms being undertaken by the Coalition Government.

In education, there is the perfect opportunity to do so. By engaging in the policy debate and pointing out how Labour values of equality, fairness and social justice can enhance them, Labour will actually be doing the job of offering an optimistic vision of the future. This is what states like Singapore are doing. They have watched our experiments in ‘Raising Standards’ through national strategies closely and learned that this is not the flag to gather round. After all, who would lower standards? In Singapore, they are moving away from a results-oriented culture, to practices that are more "holistic and balanced” - not because it is politically easy - but because it produces better outcomes for their children and their society.

At the moment the coalition are decentralising for the sake of it, more than likely so the market can come in. If Labour can engage to show how empowered communities can come in, it’ll be a long way to making that optimistic offer.

The debate must change. It is time for us to accept that we need to rethink of how we fund, organise and educate our kids. There are some key challenges, both national and local:

Build new governance and accountability arrangements for schools
Ensure that schools have the right to create a local curriculum
Build tools for mapping students' and schools' wider education ecology
Reconnect education with housing, economic, transport and environmental policies
Assess for competency not certification
Rethink Child Protection Policy
Rethink teacher education and build a programme of public engagement with education
Build school-university collaboration to democratize research
Develop and ethical code for the educational use of digital and bio-technologies

Prof. K Facer - Learning Futures - 2010

The Free School policy is a badly formed plan for change - however, it did create some exciting possibilities. We believe it is possible to answers some of these challenges in the city of Oxford - by building Oxford New School - or ONSchool.

ONSchool is an attempt to hijack this Tory policy, and put this movement of social entrepreneurship, back towards the principles of a healthy and fair society.

We have placed social justice and community values at the core of a Free School Proposal.

We have proposed a school that is governed through Cooperative Values, accountable, reflexive and transparent in its administration, innovative in the use of curriculum and technology, and in Collaboration with local schools and the Local Authority.

However, ONSchool is one proposal in a national policy picture that is bleak and uncertain. In order to succeed and thrive, ONSchool needs to be part of a wider debate that is able to offer a challenge to the domination of Academy Chain sponsors.

We need to be innovative and fast. Otherwise, the legal frameworks will be in place to make change impossible for another 15 years (see Sweden).

There must be other, fairer ways to do this. We are trying to do this in Oxford - but we need help - as the tide towards a more divisive education system working against us.

We need a clear, bold, innovative policy from Labour, and fast!

You can read more about Oxford New School here: http://www.onschool.org.uk/

Two tribes: Labour must reach out to the Lib Dems

2011-10-14T11:24:00.001+01:00

Looking back on the second conference season of the coalition era, it's clear that the ‘two tribes' of centre left politics are in very different places on the prospect of working together. The overwhelming feeling at the Liberal Democrat conference was that the party stood ready to cooperate with Labour again any time the electoral maths permit. Meanwhile Labour is at a cross-road and divided on how it should approach the Liberal Democrats.

The party needs to reach out the hand of friendship by recognising that the coalition is a tragedy of electoral maths, rather than a betrayal of principle. The alternative will be significant Conservative gains in the south and the spurning of swathes of recent Liberal Democrat converts who could be persuaded to give Labour another chance.

At the first of a pair of conference meetings hosted by the Fabian Society and Centre Forum, Liberal Democrat delegates were overwhelming positive about working with Labour, despite feeling bruised by the rough-and-tumble of Labour's opposition tactics. Norman Lamb, Nick Clegg's key parliamentary aide, went as far as to call for ‘civilised dialogue' with Labour well in advance of a general election.

By contrast, a week later in Liverpool, there was deep division within the Labour ranks on how, or indeed whether, to engage with the Liberal Democrats. The immediate, visceral anger at the Lib Dems for getting into bed with the Tories may be starting to fade, but Labour remains sharply divided along more historic lines. Pluralists, those open to broad alliances of left and centrist political voices, are pitted against tribalists, who view Labour as the only legitimate vehicle for progressive politics and see Lib Dems, Greens and Nationalists as just competitors to crush.

Labour's tribalists risk making a huge mistake of electoral strategy. Election battles between Liberal Democrats and Labour are often bitter and brutal (with sins on both sides) but they cast too long a shadow over Labour's thinking, considering how infrequent they are. In almost every English constituency the battle at the next election will be between the Conservatives and either Labour or the Lib Dems. For both parties to prosper they need to return to the days of an informal anti-Conservative alliance.

The starting point is for Labour to recognise that in the minds of voters, the two parties are at least partly substitutable. Historically this has played to Labour's advantage with each party ‘lending' voters to the other to win marginal seats. These patterns of support go part of the way to explaining why, at the last election, Labour would have needed only a 3% lead over the Tories to win a majority, while the Tories' needed 11%, according to UK Polling Report. The changes to constituency boundaries narrow this gap, but only a little.

Take the Lib Dem marginals first. For decades, many instinctive Labour supporters have voted for the Liberal Democrats where they are the main contender. If this support were to unwind the Lib Dems could face electoral catastrophe, perhaps returning to a rump of 20 MPs. So far this does not appear to be happening. According to the Tories own polling, Lib Dem support is holding up a little better in Tory-Lib Dem marginals than it is elsewhere. A quarter of Labour sympathisers in these seats say they would vote Lib Dem, despite everything that has happened. It is hugely in Labour's interests to maintain this position. In the event of another hung parliament, whether the Lib Dems or the Tories take twenty odd seats in southern England could be decisive in determining who will govern.

Voters who backed the Lib Dems last time are also crucial in the far more numerous Labour-Conservative battlegrounds. Although pundits like to talk about ‘swing' voters, who switch straight between red and blue, Labour's fortunes are just as dependent on how many people vote for the Lib Dems and other minor parties. Nationwide, over the last two general elections more of Labour's lost votes went to the Liberal Democrats than to the Conservatives. That pattern may be beginning to play-out in reverse, with the polling in the Labour-Tory marginals suggesting that Labour is regaining a little more support from people who voted Lib Dem than Tory last time.

Labour's polling lead is soft, however. Hanging on to these disaffected Lib Dems will be crucial for Labour in the bumpy three-and-a-half years to the next election. Labour faces a choice about how to shore up this new found support. It can continue to present Nick Clegg as a latter-day Ramsay Macdonald, guilty of selling out the centre left and his own convictions. But this message of scorn and disparagement implies his voters were foolish and gullible in 2010. Is that really what Labour wants to say to them?

An appeal on these lines of course greatly diminishes the chance of Labour supporters lending their votes to Lib Dems in the south in 2015. But it is also very high-risk in the Labour-Tory marginals, given the likelihood that the raw wounds of the coalitions' first year will heal. Labour activists may see Liberal Democrat actions in government as betrayal and hypocricy, but who is to say the public will in three years time? Far safer, surely, to woo the Lib Dem vote? Labour should represent the coalition as a tragedy of electoral maths for both the tribes of the centre left.

Reaching out a hand of friendship is more likely to win back Labour's post-Iraq diaspora, rather than maligning the electoral choices voters made to punish Labour in power.

The Colour Purple

2011-10-12T18:50:00.001+01:00

by @natandoron

Last night, in a packed room in Portcullis House, a large number of the Centre-Left commentariat assembled to discuss the Purple Book. The Book, launched this month was billed in the right-wing press as a coup against the EdM leadership, an attack on the Labour left from within and the platform from which feuds would flow.

The event discussion was in reality, much like the Purple Book itself: Sensible, largely consensus-based and filled with healthy discussion and reflection on Labour’s record as well sketching out the challenges ahead. No attacks on Ed Miliband. Just an agreement of the need for the Labour Party to have a grown-up conversation on the role of the state. A conservation that needs to be won from the left to prevent the Tea-Party tendencies of the Conservatives setting the agenda.

Former Blair speechwriter Phil Collins attempted to inject some controversy into the evening by calling the Purple Book ‘an affront’ to all that Labour has done in power. Douglas Alexander dismissed this by calling Collins ‘a pyromaniac in a field of straw men’. The Shadow Foreign Secretary, along with Shadow of Secretary of State for Work and Pensions (plus head of Policy Review) Liam Byrne, then began to caution against big state politics for the sake of it, whilst also emphasising the need not to play too much into the politics of the right in abandoning the need for a strong state in certain situations. Nuanced and pragmatic was the nature of the game. The unkind would say dull, but myself a proud policy wonk, it was an engaging and substantive discussion.

Central to that discussion was Fabian Society general secretary Andrew Harrop giving a pragmatic and cautious endorsement to much of the Purple Book narrative whilst introducing some important caveats. Harrop highlighted the rich history of Fabian engagement with localist traditions through the work of G.D.H Cole amongst others whilst also emphasising the importance of an active state in retaining a sense of national vision in macro-policy making areas. Examples of such areas are to be found in climate change mitigation/adaptation and industrial activism. An active state is key to success here. Harrop emphasised that the Purple Book offers a ‘flexible toolkit’ but should not become a new dogma.

If this is how the Labour Party does infighting, the Conservative Party could certainly learn a thing or three. This time last year, Labour think-tank events were characterised by the licking of wounds and facing the hard truth that the public had stopped listening. Heartening now is that the conversations are bolder, more innovative and beginning to engage with what an optimistic policy offer to the British public in 2015 could look like (Purple Book examinations of cooperative and mutuals business models are a case in point here).

With Ed Miliband setting out some key directions of travel such as building a better capitalism, fiscal responsibility and a new, contributory politics of welfare - the conversations in the Labour Party are starting to resemble the kind of heavy lifting needed to rebuild confidence after such a shattering election defeat. A key question raised by all the panelists was what social democracy looks like without any money around. This is one of the harder intellectual challenges facing the left.

There are of course criticisms to be made of the Purple Book (a faliure to engage with class or a definition of aspiration that is too focused on the individual among them) but the reality is that this is an exciting contribution to an important conversation within the Labour Party.

Also, whilst all this is important internally, the public remain largely turned off by these debates. Focus groups commissioned by Lord Ashcroft last year showed that most participants didn’t know what reducing the size of the state actually meant. Some assumed it was getting rid of Cornwall.

Finally, there is a need for all those on the left to close the gap between the controversial noises that followed the release of the book and the balanced discussion that actually characterises it. The former risks overshadowing the latter. There is nothing helpful in caricaturing different views held by differing positions within the Labour intellectual spectrum. The Fabian Society houses no Stalinist authoritarian voices and on the evidence of the Purple Book, there is nothing of the small state-in-principle, free-market extremism which sits so comfortably on the Conservative Party benches. This means the sensibilist voices out there have to get a bit more aggressive about being sensible.

On the evidence of last night though, and contrary to the media coverage, the state doesn’t stand any chance of being to the Labour Party what the EU is to the Tories. Ed Miliband will be relieved. Referendum on the EU anyone?

Natan Doron is a Senior Researcher at the Fabian Society

End of a Faustian Bargain

2011-10-12T11:03:00.000+01:00

A guest post by Guy Standing, a Professor of Economic Security at the University of Bath, and author of The Precariat – The New Dangerous Class (Bloomsbury).

Now that the party conference season is over, Labour must reach out to the class-in-the-making that successive governments have done so much to construct, the precariat. It consists of a vast and growing number of people without occupational identities, in chronic insecurity, in and out of jobs, anxious, alienated, anomic and increasingly very angry.

The Fabian Society should be a forum for identifying the frustrations and aspirations of the emerging precariat, and not be befuddled by public relations talk of a ‘squeezed middle’ or some lingering image of the proletariat.

The precariat is not an underclass, and commentators do a disservice by presenting the problem in that way. The precariat was wanted by the global market system, and is not peripheral, consisting of drug addicts, petty criminals, dysfunctional families and so on. If the establishment succeeds in presenting the problem as a bunch of social misfits, ‘feral’ or otherwise, it will get away with a concoction of charitable pity for the ‘deserving poor’ combined with workfare and prisonfare for those labelled as ‘mindless’ and ‘undeserving’. Only if the challenge is recognised as generic to a large and growing stratum of society will progressive policies stand a chance.

We are witnessing the end game of a Faustian bargain made by the Conservatives and New Labour in their long periods in office. Workfare and prisonfare were the long-term price.

The Faustian bargain was simple. When globalisation was accepted, centre-right and centre-left parties, not just in Britain but across Europe, North America and Japan, accepted a certain logic. Liberalising meant that labour supply to the global market economies trebled, with more than a billion new workers prepared to work for a fiftieth of what workers in the rich countries had come to accept. Convergence was bound to mean declines in wages and enterprise benefits in the latter and for productive jobs to shift to where labour costs were lowest.

With labour costs put back into international trade and investment, mainstream parties opted for a policy euphemistically called ‘labour market flexibility’. This meant making the lower end of labour markets, and increasingly up into the middle, more insecure in many respects. No government did more to achieve this than New Labour, which set out to make the British labour market more flexible than the rest of Europe, in order to boost ‘jobs’ and draw investment from elsewhere. The great early Fabians, Tawney, Shaw and the Webbs, would have been shocked and scornful.

But as governments pursued flexibility, there was a prospect of sharp falls in wages and a whittling away at elements of hard-won social income. A rapid decline in living standards was politically and socially unsustainable. So, a Faustian bargain took shape. While the precariat grew and had its social income chipped away, tax credits and cheap credit bolstered living standards in the short-term, allowing an orgy of consumption and rising indebtedness. It was a reckless postponement of adjustment at a time when more redistributive measures could have been taken.

With a flexible labour market, social insurance was unsustainable. So, a wholesale shift to means-testing and behaviour-testing took place, premised on the polemic that scarce public resources had to be targeted on the deserving poor. This flaunted Richard Titmus’ famous aphorism: Benefits that are only for the poor are invariably poor benefits.

As the Faustian bargain played itself out, poverty traps and what I have called precarity traps spread, reflecting the fact that more complex tests for entitlement created a long dreary process for the poor and precarious as they sought to obtain benefits. New Labour failed to overcome these trends with its tax credits; it was like Canute trying to hold back the waves of downward pressure in the labour market. Real poverty traps and precarity traps worsened under its watch. In the end, there was no positive incentive for many in the precariat to take available jobs.

The Faustian bargain imploded in 2008, since when austerity measures have further stripped away elements of social income, as well as chipping away at ‘the commons’, and making millions of people more fearful of falling into the precariat. The precarity trap has been intensifying, epitomised by recent reports of claimants being sent to food charities while they wait for their benefit claims to be considered. If you were a claimant and if you managed, after weeks of trying, to obtain entitlement to a modest benefit, would you rush to take a minimum wage temporary job, where you would be facing what is an effective rate of tax of 80% in lost benefits and the prospect of being out of a job within weeks and thus have to start trying to obtain benefits all over again?

While poverty traps and precarity traps grew, the predictable legacy of the Faustian bargain was a trend to workfare and prisonfare, driving more people to take insecure low-paying, career-less jobs because there is no positive incentive to take them. Now, government threatens more people with benefit cuts, spells of graffiti cleaning and criminalisation. They chip away at entitlements – the ‘disabled’ (pseudo-tested by Atos and declared ‘fit to work’), working mothers (shamelessly called non-working, and therefore implicitly ‘idle’), youths (idle by definition, of course), oldagers (pensions postponed and declining), migrants, and so on. Inequalities continue to mount.

The Faustian bargain is dead. But our politicians refuse to acknowledge their folly. They must wake up to the reality that continuing with its model is socially dangerous, inequitable and a recipe for social discord on a scale much greater than we saw in August. They must seek another road, one that makes the reduction of inequalities and insecurities the central guideline to their politics. So far, none of the flood of coloured books and factional tracts has tried to do so. Illiberalism will not do.

The left must relearn two lessons. Great progressive movements emerge from identifying the insecurities, anger and aspirations of the emerging mass class. And the forward march occurs only through the collective action of that class. Noisily, in the squares of dozens of European and other cities, a movement is taking shape. All of us who believe in the great values that underpinned the Fabian Society should be taking part.

To hear Guy Standing talk more in-depth about his work, you can catch him presenting The Precariat at the following venues in the UK over the coming months:

October 12: London School of Economics, 1245-1400
October 19: University of Leeds, 1600-1800
October 20: University of Bristol, 1500-1700
October 21-24: University of Cardiff, 1500-1700
October 25: University of Greenwich, 1700-1900
October 26: University of Brighton, 1230-1400
October 27: St.Anne’s College, Oxford, 1230-1400
November 1: Child Poverty Action Group conference, London, 0930-1400
November 21: Scottish Parliament, Edinburgh, 1100
November 21: University of Glasgow, 1530
November 22: Glasgow, Centre for Population Health, at 1630
November 23-24: University of Cambridge
November 29: Royal Holloway College, University of London.
November 30: Cambridge Fabian Society, Dinner talk
January 16: Bath, Royal Literary and Scientific Institution
January 17: Trades Union Congress, London, at 1230.
January 19: Manchester, Manchester Industrial Relations Association
February 15: University of Southampton, ‘Marshall Lecture’
March 3: Bath Literary Festival
March 7: Hertford University – evening debate.

Say my name, Dave

2011-10-06T13:38:00.001+01:00

by @natandoron

It already seems like a long time since Ed Miliband’s 2011 conference speech. That’s a good thing. As dust settles and the media reaction fades into memory, we are left with the actual content and what it means for the party’s direction of travel over the coming months. David Cameron didn’t mention Ed Miliband once by name in his speech yesterday. Next year, things could be very different.

In a recent collection of essays looking back at New Labour, Peter Kellner asks a really important question about the future of social democracy in the UK. Is the post-New Labour phase of social democracy going to be a purely defensive position that clings to all achievements in government? Or is it to be a project that sets out the framework for a new model of doing centre-left politics? In Ed Miliband, the party has elected someone who has opted for the latter. It is in this context that we should consider his conference 2011 speech.

Ed Miliband used his speech to assert that Labour needs to set its stall in a way that is radically different. The Thatcherite consensus of the New Labour period that was built on a sort of benevolent neoliberalism is now territory that Ed says, can no longer be occupied. What Ed Miliband is trying here is something radically ambitious. Like most things today, it has to be viewed through the prism of the deficit. And despite what some on the right (within and without the Labour party) say, the deficit, as high as it is now, is due to the global financial crisis.

There was a period during the worst early and shocking moments of the global financial crisis where commentators were saying that it was time to ask the big questions. The questions about how we let banks gamble with our savings, how we let them create financial products so linked to toxic debt which caused the whole system to unravel. Well those questions are now being asked by a leader of one of the major parties. This is at the crux of Ed’s point about how we can’t treat all business the same.

If Labour can get this right, it will deserve to be back in Government. If it doesn't, it doesn't. That is because voters so sick of Labour in 2010 won’t see anything different enough to vote for. Yes, Gordon Brown was unpopular in May 2010, but polling done by Stan Greenberg for RSA showed that Tony Blair was even more unpopular. Booing him at conference is another matter entirely, but the point still holds - New Labour was for 1997. And whilst understanding that Tony Blair was popular in 2005 and remains so with an important part of the electorate needs to be taken on board, 2015 will require Labour to be different and a lot bolder then it has been in recent years.

And I say 'Labour' because this is the important part. Yes, leadership matters. But what matters just as much is what Labour does as a party. Of course Ed Miliband represents at the national level, and there should be criticism to ensure delivery and messaging is coherent. But the party has to start making the case for this bold new cooperative capitalism that Ed is starting to sketch out. This will of course need policies in time to help construct argument around. But right now it’s about asking the right questions and showing that Labour has the right values to allow it answer those big questions. If it is done with with passion, unity and clarity - it’ll be a big part of making that offer to the electorate. And conference season 2012 won’t be one in which David Cameron can ignore Ed or the thousands of Labour party activists working to make this a one term Tory-led government.

Natan Doron is a Senior Research at the Fabian Society

Building a society that is ready for anything

2011-10-05T10:50:00.002+01:00

Our now traditional Fabian Dragons' Den was a great success at this year's Labour Party Conference with a parallel session taking place on Radio4 as we conducted our live event in Liverpool Town Hall. In the end Daniel Elton, of the website LeftFootForward, walked away with the prize for best idea with his pitch to break-up the big six energy companies.

Before the event we asked for entries from Fabian members for their one idea to win the next election. We recieved over 0ne hundred submissions, the quality was extremely high and Manchester Fabian William Cook put forward his idea on start-up capital for new businesses to the panel and came a very respectable second place.

We recieved a few ideas which, had we the time, we'd have definitely put to our panel. Below is one such idea from David Robinson.

Building a society that is ready for anything

Nef and Catch 22 have shown that every £1 spent on work with young people facing ‘complex’ problems could save £5.65. Youth unemployment currently costs £8bn a year, and youth crime £1bn. Similarly KPMG have calculated that the failure to learn how to read in primary school has a lifetime cost to the state of between £45,000 and £55,000 per child. A reading recovery programme costs £2,600, has a 79% success rate and yields a return of between £11 and £17 for every pound invested.

Where ever you look the story is the same. Youth unemployment, debt, anti social behaviour, bullying, underachievement at school particularly in the basic skills, family breakdown, drug abuse, homelessness, violence in the home or on the streets, cost more, if tackled later. And that’s at best. Sometimes later is too late for any intervention to ever be totally successful.

The next Labour government should commit to building a society that prevents problems from occurring rather than, as now, one that copes with the consequences. I picture a cliff with a “ready for anything society” at the top. Its people are ready and able to learn at primary school, to thrive in secondary, job-ready as young adults, primed to be good parents when the time comes and, because we all experience difficulties at some point in our lives, ready and able also to manage adversity - to cope with losing a job or a relationship, to rebuild after illness or bereavement, to adapt to change. Such a society is characterised by "Enabling services" and by clear rules that build capability, equip us to flourish, protect us from harm and prepare us for change.

Even here things will sometimes go wrong. “Prompt interventions” at the cliff edge pick up the first signs of difficulty and respond to them targeting services at individuals, families, communities with identified problems which, if not forestalled, could lead to more serious difficulties. An open-access play scheme, a learning support group or detached youth work in communities where many young people are on the streets might be examples of such a “prompt intervention”

Further down the cliff face the service becomes more targeted at those with more developed problems and prompt intervention gets closer to an "Acute service". Eventually it is primarily focused on “Containment ” - warehousing problems that we haven't resolved and people that we aren’t helping

CLG officials have been required by the coalition government to ask of every initiative "how does this promote localism?" and "how does this give power to citizens?" Suppose policy makers under the next government in every department and in every delivery agency locally and nationally were expected instead to ask of every service, "Is this in good time?" And, if not "how might we next engage one step sooner?”

A swift and radical switch of resources from acute provision to enabling services and preventative action is impractical but a steady, incremental migration could be achieved with Early Action Transition Plans.

The last Labour government’s stepped approach to the reduction of carbon emissions with Low Carbon Transition Plans is not dissimilar. Absolute proportions will vary from service to service but if the aspiration is to gradually shift the balance, government departments and local authorities might be required to publish Early Action Transition Plans with Early Action Milestones visibly charting progress on Early Action Scorecards. . For example, “We spend 5% of our budget on prevention and early action. We aim to increase that proportion by 5% each year for the next three years.”

Commissioners, charitable trusts, the Big Lottery, the new Big Society Bank could be encouraged to follow incentivising and sustaining the transition in the third sector with similar milestones and, of course, if we expect open and ambitious milestones from the funders we should expect them also of the funded – the organisations delivering the services from community groups to council departments: Government leadership on publicising and promoting this good practice would frame it as the expected behaviour of a progressive, forward thinking organisation.

A stitch in time is common sense but it isn’t common practise. It is socially intelligent and financially smart. It should be the organising philosophy for public services under the next Labour government.

David Robinson is a member of The Fabian Society

No apologies on economy says Cooper

2011-09-25T22:16:00.005+01:00

Labour shouldn’t apologise for its record and needs to fight back against Tory myth-making about the economy, said Yvette Cooper at the Fabian Question time event at Labour conference.

Rejecting the proposition put by Times columnist Philip Collins that by accepting they had lost the argument on the economy the party will gain a hearing again in the country, Cooper said Labour would be wrong to back down because the Conservatives had misrepresented the financial crisis.

“We shouldn’t concede argument on the economy. It goes against the principles of the Labour Party to concede on things that are wrong. You don’t get credibility by saying things that are wrong and will be proved to be wrong.”

Cooper said the focus should instead be on growth and showing “the Labour alternative to what is happening now.” She argued that the Conservative "myth-making" turned the financial crisis into a crisis of the public sector, whereas in fact it was the public sector that saved the economy from the failures of an under-regulated financial sector.

She argued Labour still had to challenge the Conservative version of events, but should also focus on the future: “this is a growth crisis not a debt crisis” she said.

Collins argued however that no one is listening to Labour because they won’t concede any mistakes. “Refusal to give an inch loses whole argument” he said, highlighting that spending did get too high in the government’s final years, tax revenues were misjudged and the language of ‘boom and bust’ was a mistake. He said – which he acknowledged was surprising coming from him – that the party should return to Gordon Brown’s slogan of “prudence with a purpose”.

Fabian Society General Secretary Andy Harrop agreed Labour needed to work harder to regain economic trust and said that a promise on public spending was central to this, but also warned against “carping about troubles coalition is facing…it’s not in our interest for economy to tank” as the right tends to triumph in downturns.

Maurice Glasman suggested the debate about the economy was too centred around public spending and should be more concerned with talking about how to make the economy more productive. "The price of successful political action is a constructive alternative" he said.

Dragons - and Fabian audience - support breaking up the energy companies

2011-09-25T15:43:00.001+01:00

Emily Thornberry began our political Dragons' Den on the Fabian Fringe at Sunday lunchtime by saying that the dragons - Luke Akehurst, Hazel Blears MP, and Anthony Painter - have been arguing about which dragon they each want to be.

First up into the Den was David Goodhart who - while taking at least twice his allotted time - argued that immigration should be capped at 150-200,000 a year.

Luke Akehurst called Goodhart's immigration ideas 'courageous' but 'impractical'. Blears was rather more interested and said it'd get support on the doorstep. She also agreed with Goodhart that Turkey should be refused membership of the EU.

Anthony Painter said there has definitely been a 'fundamental breakdown of trust' between government and ordinary people on immigration. Ultimately Goodhart's solution of the immigration cap won't solve this, he argued.

Risking the wrath of the Fabian audience, David Goodhart responded "We need to deal with the rioting hoodies, for Christ's sake, before opening the floodgates to more".

Next up was Daniel Elton, who argued that the energy market is broken, we need to break up the big six companies, and let in, say, Tesco to run some of it. The NHS, local authorities should buy its energy in one bulk deal.

Blears rightly predicted he'd get all the Dragons on his side. Old energy companies were monolithic and gave no choice to the consumer - and nothing has changed, she said. There were price rises announced on the same day as British Gas announced a £750m profit. Akehurst agreed and thought the proposal should be put to the Shadow Policy Forum process: "Run with it, please, it's great." There were no votes on the panel - or in the audience against this proposal.

Sally Gimson argued we should have new Commissioners for Victims' Rights, as they do in Australia, who are hands-on, nationwide and take crime seriously. Commissioners who stand up for victims and witnesses in court rather than courts that simply perpetuate the working practices of lawyers.

Blears agreed that the current Commissioner is "hamstrung" and that the views of victims and witnesses are not accorded enough importance and respect. "Do I think it's an election-winning idea that'd really resonate with the public? The answer sadly is no." said Luke Akehurst. However, the proposal got a unanimous yes from the dragons.

Will Cook argued government should provide access to start up capital as soon as someone has made five years' worth of NI contributions: "It's the lack of availability to capital that holds people back", he said. "We need to get away from the consensus that 'education, education and education' alone is enough... This would be a popular policy - nearly half of all British workers say they'd rather be self-employed, yet only one in ten is."

Anthony Painter called it 'an interesting twist' on how to get money into new businesses. His one question was whether the state is the right vehicle or whether it could better be delivered by a credit union or bank. Blears said the single biggest issue at the next election would be jobs. There is no shortage of entrepreneurialism - "some of Salford's gangsters are the most entrepreneurial people you could meet!"

Chair Emily Thornberry then put the four proposals to an audience vote. Goodhart's immigration proposal gained 1 vote; Elton's energy proposal gained 27, Gimson's Commissioners got 6 votes, and Cook's start up capital proposal got 13.

THINKERS AND DOERS – YOUNG FABIANS AT LABOUR PARTY CONFERENCE

2011-09-23T16:56:00.000+01:00

Some readers of Next Left will be familiar with the Young Fabians, others may only be vaguely aware that the Fabians have a dedicated section for under-31s. Run by volunteers, it is one of the most active areas of the society, with record membership reached during the last year. We thrive on being many things to many people, and Labour Party Conference in the coming days provides us an opportunity to show what the Young Fabians do, and what young people can get from membership.

The Young Fabians helps young people develop their thinking on policy and get their voices heard by senior politicians. We run skills workshops, and provide opportunities to write (for the YF Blog and our quarterly magazine, Anticipations). We organise UK campaigning days, lead foreign delegations, and hold socials for members to get to know each other. The Young Fabians is for people new to politics, for those looking to develop a professional network, and many more in between. At the heart of our work this year has been a commitment to involving and empowering young members in the society. Members can participate in a variety of ways and as little or as much as they want, from reading the magazine or organising their own events. We are the thinkers and doers of the left’s youth.

There will be two Young Fabian events at Labour Party Conference in Liverpool – one social and one policy-oriented. No conference passes are required and everyone is welcome (whatever your age!).

Young Fabian Reception
- supported by UNISON -
7pm-10pm, Sunday 25 September
Portico Cantina & Bar, Albert Dock (Britannia Pavilion), Liverpool
Drinks provided, all welcome
Speakers throughout the night: Sadiq Khan, Andy Burnham, Glenis Willmott, Lisa Nandy, Luciana Berger, Stephen Twigg, Kate Green, Adrian Prandle (Young Fabians), James Anthony (Unison)

Securing the future of the next generation
- fringe debate supported by ICAEW -
8am-9am, Tuesday 27 September
West Reception Room, Liverpool Town Hall
Breakfast provided, all welcome
Speakers: Andy Slaughter MP (Shadow Justice Minister); Joani Reid (leading YF ‘Next Generation’ Policy Commission); Rosie Chadwick (Catch 22); Fatima Hassan (ICAEW). Chair - Adrian Prandle (Chair, Young Fabians).

The fringe debate will tackle all important issues for Britain’s ‘squeezed youth’ and showcase the policy ideas and work of the Young Fabians Policy Commission dedicated to this important topic.

The Young Fabian Reception is a great opportunity to come and meet active Young Fabians and find out, in an informal environment, about all the great work we do. Please note that in Labour’s official conference guide, the event has been listed on the wrong day – so do make sure you don’t miss us on Sunday evening!

If you’d like to join the Young Fabians – or know someone under-31 who you think would be interested in getting involved – then take a look at all there is on offer and sign-up here: http://bit.ly/jointheyfs. And don’t delay - all new members this week will be entered into a prize draw.

See you in Liverpool!

Adrian Prandle is Chair of the Young Fabians and also sits on the Fabian Society Executive Committee

Moving to the country

2011-09-22T17:01:00.008+01:00

How has Ed done in the year since he won the leadership of the Labour Party? The consensus verdict is in: he found his feet this summer after a slowish start. His position within the party is now firmly established, which is a more comfortable platform from which to tackle the big challenge for the next year: establishing himself within the country.

New polling conducted by Deborah Mattinson and Ben Shimshon of BritainThinks for the new Fabian Review bears this out. (You can read the full polling and analysis here) They show how all leaders of the opposition suffer declining poll ratings in their first year; it’s during the second year the ones that go to be prime minister start to really connect with voters and see their numbers improve accordingly.

BritainThinks have been talking to people about the idea of leadership and what characteristics are important now. Two recent events seem to colour people’s ideal-type of leader: the MPs' expenses scandal and the financial crisis. And the political consequences of these trends are that, currently, the former is playing in Ed’s favour but the latter in Cameron’s.

The overwhelming loss of trust politicians have experienced over the last few years has seen ‘integrity’ leap to number one in people’s leadership wish-list. Here Ed has a slight edge (similarly he also has the lead over Cameron in being ‘a good listener’ and ‘empathy’). However at the moment Cameron has a bigger lead on being ‘decisive’ and having ‘a vision’.

What Miliband is experiencing here is the ‘Mommy problem’ familiar to politicians of the left: that in times of insecurity, voters tend toward the ‘strict father’ model of leadership more usually offered by the political right – a more disciplinarian, strong-on-defence-and-moral-responsibility type of offer. The left’s more social, empathetic vision of government can get crowded out by the machismo.

So Labour strategists either need to shift the political conversation onto those areas where Ed already has a natural advantage – a tough sell during a period of economic uncertainty that doesn’t look like going anywhere soon – or beat Cameron on what is presently home turf.

The ability to be ‘a great communicator’ (the polling’s 3rd biggest prize) is there – remember those ‘Ed speaks human’ placards at his leadership launch? They weren’t meant ironically, but some of that skill got a little lost in translation to a national audience. The next year should recapture that. And ‘decisive’ is also within grasp if the message of ‘responsibility at the top and bottom’, outlined in Miliband’s best speech so far, continues to guide his response to events, as it did over the summer (although, publically at least, more obviously over phone-hacking than the riots).

Overall the polling – as with many of the assessments in the magazine of Ed’s first year – gives a sense of ‘lots done, lots to do’. The greatest strategic challenge for the next year is to bring together the various plays that have been set in motion into a singular and compelling story of what Ed Miliband’s Labour is all about. The ‘squeezed middle’ and ‘the promise of Britain’ both tap into very strong currents of feeling and speak to the world as many people find it, as does the focus on rebuilding our sense of community and instilling responsibility across society. This is all fertile territory; to harvest the votes, the next year needs to find the narrative that binds it all together.

The Challenge for Labour

2011-09-21T17:15:00.001+01:00

Ahead of Sunday’s Labour Party Conference Fabian Question Time ‘The Challenge for Labour’ Andrew Harrop, the society’s new General Secretary argues that the party needs to reach out to three distinct electoral groups. To win again it needs a strategy based on rupture with the past, credibility in the present, and ambition for the future.

No one should underestimate the challenge ahead in returning Labour to majority government. Although the party only lost one million votes between 2005 and 2010, the electoral maths suggests its needs two million more voters to be confident of winning next time. Since 1997 our support ebbed away, not just to the Tories, but also to smaller parties, principally the Liberal Democrats, and to people not voting at all. The latter two causes together count for three-quarters of Labour’s lost support so it would be folly to focus exclusively on Tory-Labour swing voters.

Labour’s aim must be to steadily build long-term support from all three camps. First, the party must give people turned-off politics a reason to vote. Some of this group may respond to the communitarianism of Blue Labour, but it seems unlikely that an appeal based on locality and tradition will work for the millions of young people disconnected from politics. Then there are the centrists who started 2011 well-disposed towards Cameron but still sceptical about his party. They will look for leadership they can trust, respect and feel is on their side. This is the group where Ed must compete head-to-head with Cameron. Finally, there are the millions of voters who have supported progressive parties, but favoured Lib Dems, Nationalists and others over Labour. This group will be particularly important because of the boundary changes, since the overall number of non-Tory seats is falling but the distribution is hard to call. To win we will need to convince the anti-Tory majority, and particularly disaffected Lib Dem voters, that Labour offers a home of principle not just convenience. To brew this electoral cocktail, Labour’s pitch must reference past, present and future.

Past: Ed Miliband sees just how toxic the new Labour brand of the Blair-Brown past had become. His game-changing decision to distance himself from much of our recent legacy has already proved a huge asset on phone hacking and will again in future on other issues, like student funding. But it is the broader impression of contrition and renewal that really matters, if Labour is to re-earn permission to be heard by the millions we turned-off when we were in power.

Present: The here-and-now matters too. Although the last few months have gone better, Labour’s frontbench still needs to master the slow attritional war of Opposition. The twin aims must be to discredit the Government and prove that we offer a strong, trustworthy alternative. It may be true that ‘governments lose elections, oppositions don’t win them’ but dogged and creative opposition is needed to show up the Coalition’s failings, exploit crises when they do emerge and win the public round to the idea of Ed Miliband as a credible Prime Minister-in-Waiting; someone who understands people’s lives and can be trusted to be strong on tough decisions. This battle will fundamentally be about the economy, whether we face a ‘double dip’ recession, a Japanese lost decade, or an over-cooked 80s-style pre-election boom. The two Eds need to nail Cameron, as well as Osborne, for sucking money out of the economy and anaemic private sector growth. The goal is not to be right for its own sake, but to win public confidence as trusted, in-touch stewards of the economy.

Future: Labour will only ‘seal the deal’, however, by looking forward and setting out positive reasons to vote Labour. We need to appeal to the heart, to remake the emotional bonds we slowly broke after 1997. This is not just an electoral scheme to hoover-up disaffected progressive voters. Ambition and radicalism are essential to avoid always singing to someone else’s tune. After a decade in Government we were still a party on the defensive, fighting against the prevailing currents of right wing economic doctrine, institutional interests and media power.

Labour needs to re-make an aspirational, confident case for social democratic values in a way that speaks to a broad electoral base not just to ourselves. We need to be become the standard bearer of the centre-left British mainstream, against the powerful minorities on the Right. The Fabian intellectual tradition can make a vital contribution to this optimistic future vision, notwithstanding the criticism we have received from within the left of late. For to fight on the front-foot in 2015 Labour must reinvent and set out afresh the two most enduring Fabian principles: the case for equality and the case for state action.

Do you have one idea to win the next election? The Fabian Fringe at Labour 2011

2011-09-09T17:13:00.001+01:00

Labour Party Conference is fast approaching and as with every year we’ll be running one of the largest fringe programmes on offer. Come and join us and our partners in Liverpool Town Hall, just five minutes walk from the Secure Zone. No conference pass is needed to secure attendance.

Do you have one idea to win the next election? If so please submit your ideas to Me and the winner will get to pitch their ideas to our Dragons in this year’s ‘Fabian Dragons’ Den entitled ‘One Idea to Win the Next Election’ (Sunday at 1pm).

Hazel Blears MP and Mehdi Hasan (Senior Editor New Statesmen, co-author ‘Ed: The Milibands and the making of a Labour leader’) will be joined by a special guest to pass judgement on your ideas.

To take part all you need to do is submit your pitch via e-mail and be ready and available to speak at The Fringe event itself. The pitch should be no more than 500 words and a few runners up will have their ideas posted on our prestigious and influential Fabian blog ‘Next Left’.

At the Fabians we are committed to involving our membership as much as possible in our events. A Fabian member will be on every panel and others are actively encouraged to ask questions from the floor.

Our traditional Dragons’ Den is just one event we’re doing this year. They’ll also be ‘Fabian Question Time: The Challenge for Labour’ featuring Yvette Cooper MP; ‘Is There Such a thing as Society?’ Featuring Andy Burnham MP and a discussion on the phone hacking scandal in our ‘Labour After Murdoch’ event featuring David Blunkett and Sadiq Khan MP.

Our programme consists of public facing fringe events set up to ignite debate and a series of specialist roundtables on a wide variety of topics. You can download a pdf of our full fringe programme here or read about it more on the website here

The changing politics of 'family values'

2011-09-02T17:30:00.004+01:00

Guest post by Sunder Katwala, former General Secretary of the Fabians

The recent New Statesman coverage on the family - which I blogged about on Next Left - hinted towards, but hyperbolically exaggerated, an interesting contrast between right and left in how they tackle the politics of the family.

The right has been very clear about what it wants to say about the family, but much shorter on what goes with the rhetoric. The centre-left has often been able to generate a “policy rich” agenda, but has been less successful in articulating the principles.

Margaret Thatcher was a vigorous advocate not just of “family values” but of a traditionalist Victorian-inspired reading of them. If we have had a slow decline of these values over decades, as the Prime Minister reiterated today, then a large part of that must have taken place while a staunchly traditionalist reading of family values were a constant staple of ministerial speeches.

The problem for the Thatcher family values agenda was that, across a decade, the Downing Street Policy Unit did not find many ways to put that rhetoric into practice. Rates of divorce and of births outside of marriage continued to rise across the 1980s and afterwards. Partly the creative destruction of markets trumped the instinct to social stability, but it was also because nobody in mainstream politics succeeded in identifying what could legitimately have been done to quickly or sharply reverse those trends, at least without significantly transgressing on the values of an open society.

That the right is usually more ambivalent than the left about intruding on market freedoms in the cause of family values, as proposals over parental leave have tended to demonstrate, is one reason why social democrats have often had more policy content on families and children as part of a concern for social inclusion and integration – introducing new institutions such as SureStart for the under 5s, to increased financial support for families in work, and progress on maternity and paternity rights and flexible working - but were weaker on a public articulation on the vision of family which brought this together.

Both right and left have changed their approach to family. The right has toned down the rhetoric significantly since the days of Peter Lilley singing ditties about single mothers at the Tory party conference. It has got practical, particularly drawing on the work of the Centre for Social Justice.

The left has been talking about how to develop its hands-on focus on children and families in its analysis of social exclusion into a more coherent public narrative, which also reflects on the evidence of lessons of what has worked and what didn’t over the last decade. So a caricatured portrait of a debate between hyperindividualist 68ers and traditionalist reactionaries misses out the real world in which most of us live.

So, when the Fabians brought Iain Duncan Smith and Polly Toynbee together at the Labour conference to discuss poverty and life chances, they still had some differences of course, but both proved rather much more struck by the extent of common ground too, especially on the need for greater investment in early intervention, where IDS has alighted on a central preoccupation of many Labour thinkers too.

The potential convergence is illustrated by Tim Montgomerie’s consensual pitch from the right in the Guardian, which included a surprise offer to become a conciliatory pioneer on the right for a mansion tax, as well as for early intervention, and asking in return:

Can Labour politicians get to the point where they agree that single parenthood is sometimes wonderful, often unavoidable but rarely ideal?

Yes, that seems to me to be something that most people on the left could endorse pretty straightforwardly, not least because the nuanced expression and avoidance of scapegoating marks a significant shift in the discourse and rhetoric of the right too, decisively rejecting the scapegoating and stigmatising which will naturally generate a defensive response.

The ambivalence in the left’s approach to the family is not presentational – the fear of channelling the Daily Mail – but also substantive - about the complexity of strengthening the family in the society we live in, not an idealised version of what once was.

The real difficulty here that the family is rightly the most private and so jealously guarded of social institutions and yet also, at the same time, acknowledged by both right and left to provide the most important foundations for our civic life too. That tension presents significant challenges, generating fears of excessive intervention and the spectre of the ‘nanny state’ alongside recognition of the shortcomings of a laissez-faire approach, whether pursued from social individualism on the left or market individualism on the right, which heads into there is no such thing as society territory.

Dystopian claims of a broken society lack both a credible evidence base and, usually, any coherent or possible agenda for change, while, at the same time, significant sections of our society are fractured and damaged, so risk further entrenching a segregated minority, in which both disadvantage and dysfunction are too easily transmitted from generation to generation.

Both left and right have liberal and traditionalist wings which are still motivated primarily by the urgency of the need to contest or protect the legacy of the social liberalisation of the 1960s.

But the potential for a good measure of common ground can be overlooked if we do not recognise the engaged debate about public policy has mostly moved beyond that.

There is a broad sense that the bulk of those changes are irreversible. Britain is in this respect a more European society, with our public debate much less dominated by the sharp “culture wars” polarisation which continue to frame much US debate about “values issues”.

Use housing policy positively, not as a punishment

2011-08-23T11:52:00.007+01:00

Guest post by Angelo Sommariva, Public Affairs and Policy Manager at the housing association Moat

Over the last week, housing issues have certainly been brought to national prominence; for all the wrong reasons. There seems to be a pattern where we mostly focus on housing as a response to a crisis – riots, overcrowding, a fire, welfare benefits cheats, the list goes on. So how do we shed positive light on the issue? How do we look ahead to what we want in future, rather than looking over our shoulder to what we don’t like now?

The sensible starting point might be to decide on some basic concepts that we want to see incorporated into a reformed system. In the Fabian book Homes for Citizens, an essay by Brian Johnson, Chief Executive of Moat, picked up on a number of basic principles that could be used as ‘tests’ for a progressive housing framework.

Lets start with the one that’s most topical: aspiration. We have seen recently that the present housing system could do so much more to encourage people to improve their circumstances. As Tim Leunig has argued for Policy Exchange, it is in nobody’s interest to see areas of “concentrated poverty” which are “dislocated from the labour market”. It is, however, in everybody’s interest that the system encourages participation, leading to an increase in educational achievement and wealth. So how do we do this? With carrots, or with sticks? I would propose that punishing people with little to lose is the wrong approach; incentivising people with much to gain seems like a sensible option.

Incentives could be more easily found with increased co-operation between departments. Despite the promises – from governments of both colours – the ‘personalisation’ of services is still a target rather than a reality. But why shouldn’t housing be more integrated with employment? And health? And education? Perhaps it will ultimately be housing associations that lead the way on a new partnership model for delivering services to residents.

This leads nicely into a discussion about flexibility – both for tenants and for landlords. Firstly, tenants need to feel unrestricted to move for various reasons, such as job opportunities, study, or to be closer to support networks. A system that locks people in, mostly due to red tape, is simply not fit for purpose anymore. For landlords, the system must be equally flexible and should encourage solutions that suit local factors. This should include everything from tenure type, to programme design – eg. as already discussed, programmes that overlap into non-housing areas like employment.

Security is also an issue that we can’t ignore. We need to tell people that if they want to keep their homes for life, they can. But equally, it needs to be clear that the state will not subsidise the home forever – unless, of course the subsidy is genuinely needed. People’s circumstances do change over time, and indeed, we encourage improvement – usually measured by income, education, or other factors. However, we are being contradictory by creating a system that only suits the status quo. Let me briefly explain: under Affordable Rents, social landlords have no available mechanism for phasing out subsidy when it is no longer required – such as when someone’s income improves over time. The only available option to a housing association in this case is the ‘flexibility’ to kick people out of their homes (after a minimum period of two years – although it has been suggested this is only to be used in extreme circumstances). We can do better than that. If we are to create a flexible system that provides both security and aspiration, we need to give landlords the flexibility to phase out subsidy past the 80% rent levels. This will allow people the option of staying in their homes even when public subsidy is no longer applied. However there need to be safeguards. Tenants need to see this rent increase as an investment – not an extra spend. This could be done by giving people the opportunity to enter home ownership, via shared ownership schemes, if they choose. The rent money, which would flow in to housing associations as extra income, should also be ringfenced for the development of more affordable homes.

Then, what of mixed communities? Surely this ought to be one of the flagship ideals of a progressive housing system? Mixed communities are not only desirable because of the egalitarian qualities they reflect, but they provide opportunities to residents that would not otherwise be available to them. This is especially true in higher-cost locations, such as inner city areas, where access to employment comes into play more significantly.

Finally, all of these things need to be looked at in the context of the current financial situation. There needs to be a rethink of what ‘proper use of public subsidy’ means. Regardless of who is in government, we know that public funding for new programmes will be tight. This leaves us with no choice but to think about how we distribute our housing resources and, as obvious as it sounds, we have to rebalance subsidy so that those most in need always get priority. Value for money ought not be a term purely used in the City, but our definition may be somewhat different; to ensure that subsidy is every bit as socially beneficial as it is financially.

In short, housing holds the key to a number of the social problems highlighted by the riots. But let’s use the aftermath to consider the future, rather than self-flagellate over mistakes of the past. A good starting point would be to distance ourselves from reactionary policy-making in favour of sketching out the system we actually want.

Follow Moat on Twitter @moathomes

For more information about the Fabian Society pamphlet 'Homes for Citizens', published in association with Moat and the homelessness charity Crisis, visit the Fabian Society website.

Ken's Little Joke.

2011-08-19T17:18:00.001+01:00

Yesterday Londoner’s were greeted with the following headlines:

‘OUTCRY AS KEN LIVINGSTONE SAYS BORIS JOHNSON IS LIKE HITLER’ – Daily Express
‘Boris just like Hitler says Ken’ – The Sun
'Ken Livingstone accuses Boris Johnson of being evil’ – Daily Mirror
‘Boris Johnson is Hitler, says Ken Livingstone’ – Evening Standard

All quote the following from the Press Association

"It's a simple choice between good and evil - I don't think it's been so clear since the great struggle between Churchill and Hitler."

Here is the full quote from Amber Elliott’s original article:

‘Asked why people should vote for him, Ken jokes: "It's a simple choice between good and evil – I don't think it's been so clear since the great struggle between Churchill and Hitler… The people that don't vote for me will be weighed in the balance, come Judgement Day. The Archangel Gabriel will say, ' You didn't vote for Ken Livingstone in 2012. Oh dear, burn forever. Your skin flayed for all eternity.'… I'll come round with a serious pitch nearer the time."’

Two reactions; the first is barely worth repeating but, “don’t mention the war” is probably one of the first rules of media. Ken, you were stitched up, but you are dealing with a press pack that didn’t see phone hacking as unethical so what did you expect.

The other is the old moan about the quality of media debate in this country. Most commentators I know read the quote tutted a bit and got on with their lives, but there are many journalists whose ideology weighs heavier on them than the truth. Even though they realise the story would be debunked in about five minutes they know that today tens of thousands of Londoners probably saw the headline but didn’t see what was behind it, so job done.

The real story about Boris Johnson “demanding” David Cameron reverse his police cuts even though it is Boris who is responsible for these cuts and started to make them during a time when his budget was going up?

Well that’s a bit more nuanced, a harder case to make in a headline, more difficult to boil down into an easy argument, so it’s a story that remains untold. It’s been said here before but if Ken wants to win London, we need less jokes and a serious campaign about the damage Boris Johnson’s decisions have done London in the past four years.

Don't mention the family!

2011-08-19T15:52:00.003+01:00

Guest post by Sunder Katwala, former General Secretary of the Fabians

Oh no! Don’t mention the family! Though I may have mentioned it once, but I think I got away with it, as Basil Fawlty once said of the war. The New Statesman has a rather eye-catching cover to promote its post-riot wares this week. But it was the tag-line which caught my eye.

We dare ten left-wing thinkers to break the family values taboo

A taboo. A forbidden topic, which can never be spoken of without ostracism from the tribe.

“Don’t mention the family” has apparently been an unwritten rule of the left. That is the headline introducing the feature from New Statesman editor Jason Cowley, explaining the magazine’s challenge, asking “can the left talk about these subjects without channeling the Daily Mail”.

Hands up, it’s a fair cop. Until this summer, I was running one of the major left-of-centre think-tanks for the last seven years at the Fabian Society.

If there is a taboo among the thinking left about talking about the family, then it must be partly my fault. So, why did we refuse to talk about the family, about values, and the role of fathers? Was it benign neglect or an ideological blindspot, or a more sinister agenda to undermine social institutons?

Whatever the cause, perhaps it is time to turn myself in for causing the riots.

But keeping a subject taboo could never really be the work of one institution alone. It wouldn’t be nearly enough for me to insist on turning a deaf ear to all offers to write Fabian outputs about why family matters. We would need a broad front - a collective, tight-knit conspiracy of silence not to mention the family, so that we would all respond to any questions about it by saying “look, sorry, I think you’ll find that’s a question for the political right”. In a concerted push to keep the family off the agenda of public debate, it would probably be advisable to have regular meetings between the think-tanks, ministerial advisers, trade unions and civic campaigners on feminism, poverty and inequality to make sure we would all hold the line. We would have to make sure that the Staggers itself wouldn’t break ranks and, these days, you would need the main bloggers to join the omerta club too.

Some people seem to think that this is pretty much precisely what has been going on.

Melanie Phillips can give you chapter and verse. The blogger Guido Fawkes regularly propagates the same meme, characteristically tweeting to me only last weekend that the “Fabian kulturkampf against the family" for the last century now reaching its final stages.

Now the New Statesman seems to have discovered the conspiracy too.

But the truth, dear reader, is that we failed.

Miserably.

This “taboo” on discussing family values on the left has been observed mainly in the breach across most of the last twenty years. It is a funny old taboo when t would seem to be all but impossible to find any significant institution or strand of thought within the thinking left which has been observing it.

Unless, that is, the real conspiracy here has been most cunningly disguised – by devising a smokescreen of a seemingly endless series of publications, speeches, conferences and seminars on the subject of the family, no doubt to throw the gullible off the scent.

One counter-intuitive way to police this taboo on family values was to produce a “family special issue” of the Fabian Review. Its cover line: FAMILY VALUES: the left’s winning ticket?

You can read the issue here.

My former colleague Tim Horton wrote several thousand words acknowledging the ambivalence still felt by some on the left about “the family” and setting out why policies to support families also required the left’s own account of family values, to avoid the left’s account of family simply becoming an “arid” one about the family as a transmission mechanism of advantage and disadvantage.

Horton set out why a values-based account of family matters, writing:

The Government and Labour Party talk about ‘children’ and talk about ‘families’ (and, famously, ‘hard-working families’). Focusing policy on children is surely right. That the priority should be to support all children, not pick and choose which children to support depending on the relationship status of their parents, is an important fairness principle. But talking about ‘children and families’ isn’t enough. ‘The family’ is an incredibly important and resonant ideal in society. While that ideal might be vaguely (though decreasingly) attached to an image of a nuclear family, its strongest images and resonances are less about family structure than about duties of care, nurture, love and all that is dear to us in our personal relationships. The word ‘families’ does not tap into that imagery or emotional resonance: ‘the family’ does.

But the Fabians were far from alone in identifying family as an important focus for the left.

I remember the ippr pamphlet ‘Daddy dearest: active fatherhood and public policy’ well – because my Fabian colleagues were kind enough to give me a copy as I headed off on paternity leave for the first time. (It was a good read on policy, but I remember ‘What to Expect: the first year’ being of more practical use that month). That was just one output of a consistent ippr focus on the role of the family in social policy, often returning to the question of fathers, including ‘Men and their Children: proposals for public policy’ (1996) and ‘Fathers Figure’ (2000) on how policy should accommodate and promote the changing role of fathers in public policy.

Just after the publication of the Social Justice Commission in the 1990s, ippr published a response from the commission from two of the great left thinkers, AH Halsey and Michael Young. Their 1995 monograph ‘Family and Community Socialism’ “looks at the family as a unit and the need to support it through government measures and ensure its survival in modern society”.

Clearly, those two sociological greats of the twentieth century left didn’t get the memo about the taboo either.

Nor did Demos. One of the constants across the think-tank’s different reinventions has been a focus on the family. Current Demos director Kitty Ussher was among the contributors to the Fabian family special issue. This had also been a major theme of their earliest publications from Helen Wilkinson and Geoff Mulgan, though the pro-marriage agenda in reports like ‘The proposal: giving marriage back to the people’ (1997) had its more offbeat moments. Demos joined ippr in often focusing on potential dilemmas in promoting family-friendly policies with the modern economy in a series of reports such as ‘Family Business’ (2000) and ‘The other glass ceiling: the domestic politics of parenting’ (2006). Cherie Blair spoke on that theme and the role of fathers to the think-tank the following year.

A later Demos director Richard Reeves had earlier written a ground-breaking 2002 report ‘Dad’s Army’, for the Work Foundation, setting out how the responsibilities of the working father were not yet on the corporate radar. He returned to the clash between the demands of family and the economy in the 2004 Fabian collection ‘Family Fortunes’, at that time billed as a New Statesman columnist and self-identifying as a social democrat, quoting Gloria Steinem: “The majority absolutely believes that women can do what men can do. The next step is to believe that men can do what women can do”.

As Zohra Moosa tweeted with regard to the New Statesman cover, “pretty sure left-wing feminists have consistently been talking about family values for, oh, forever”.

Take Katherine Rake, who headed the UK’s main feminist campaigning body, the Fawcett Society, for seven years. So what did she do next?

She became Chief Executive of the Family and Parenting Institute, clearly in the belief that advocating for the family and advancing feminism could be complementary causes, rather than in conflict. I just hope that the FPI does not find the “taboo” too much of a block on its “campaigns to build a family friendly society”, or its research “offering insights into family life”.

The Smith Institute’s contribution to taboo reinforcement included jointly publishing, alongside the Centre for Social Justice, or Graham Allan and Iain Duncan Smith’s report “Early Interventions: Good Parents, Great Kids, Better Citizens”, as part of its research programme on Education and Families in 2008.

More recently, Blue Labour has made a politics of “faith, flag and family”, relationships and reciprocity, part of its pitch. It is true that this has been contentious. I myself, in a previous blog post, was a bit unclear about what Jonathan Rutherford meant by his discussion of the decline of patriarchy. Rutherford has explained that he is advocating a shared politics of parenting for men and women, with which few social democrats could object – writing that “Labour needs a new patrimony that offers the world equally to its daughters”.

There were different drivers towards making family more central to the debates around the left since the mid-1990s.

An engagement with the family theme was an important strand of the left’s shift to the centre and engagement with communitarianism in the early and mid-1990s, where New Labour emulated Clinton’s New Democrats. EJ Dionne’s 1992 book ‘Why Americans Hate Politics’ was influential on both sides of the Atlantic, arguing that “while the left’s core programmes were broadly popular, the left had stopped justifying its efforts in the name of values to which most Americans subscribed – work, family stability, consequences for criminal behaviour, and a respect for the old-fashioned bonds of locality and neighbourhood”.

If there was a taboo – perhaps, more accurately, a blindspot – it would be difficult to claim it remained in place after Tony Blair’s speech as shadow home secretary after the death of Jamie Bulger. The rather similar Blue Labour critique of New Labour is that the thought got lost in power.

But there was also an important pro-equality driver and dimension to the left’s engagement with family issues across this period.

The core agenda of the Fabians during my time there was to bring equality back into mainstream political debate, arguing for a “life chances” framework to do this. I made the politics of equal life chances my central theme in a presentation on political themes of the next decade when being interviewed for the Fabian job back in 2003. The very first question, from Tony Wright MP in select committee grilling mode, was “so, does that have anything to say about the family then?”

Of course, the shocking life chances of children in care offer the starkest possible evidence that families matter. So, from this perspective, it makes very little sense to think of the left facing a choice between a socio-economic politics of structural inequality and a cultural concern with family.

So family was a peripheral issue, occasionally addressed, because groups on the left thought it was symbolically important to be seen to have something to say if asked. Rather, making children, family and early intervention a much more salient areas of policy focus was a central consequence of core egalitarian concerns with equal opportunity and social mobility.

I co-edited a 2004 collection – ‘Family Fortunes: the new politics of childhood’ - with Patrick Diamond (a Downing Street advisor to Blair and Brown) and Meg Munn, where we had this to say in its introduction, acknowledging some complexities, anxieties and uncertainties in how to frame a left response to these challenges, but appearing quite unaware that the taboo was in place:

Why the left needs a new politics of the family
Many families today experience huge strain. Relationships are breaking down at a rapid rate, and more children are growing up in disrupted families. There is a direct public policy interest here. Weakened families cost the state money both directly and indirectly and as such the state has a public interest in strengthening families, regardless of their structure. Families are the foundations of civic society, where we first learn moral values. Families generate social capital – the trust and relationship skills that enable individuals to cooperate.

The left finds it easy to discuss children but difficult to discuss families. Yet families have a greater impact on childhood development and life chances than any other factor. We must have the confidence to debate these issues openly and reshape the politics of the family. Ironically, it has been parties of the centre-left, not the centre-right, that have led the way in thinking about ways to stablise family life … While the left should respond sceptically to fantasies of a ‘golden age’ of the traditional family, we have shied away from acknowledging the importance of two parents for children’s life chances – despite the strength of the evidence. Supporting families to cope with the stresses of everyday lives is important in helping parents to put their children first. A new politics of the family should aim to strengthen families disrupted by divorce or breakdown, with children’s well-being at the heart of policy. Families matter and the state cannot simply compensate for their absence.

Public and media debate remains polarised around the question of what type of families we want. But it would be more productive to focus on how public policy can respond to the empirical evidence – how we best support the families we’ve got. The social revolution in the position of women is permanent. Only an extreme fringe minority in our society wish to turn back the clock.

The idea that children are better off with two loving parents than one has long seemed like common sense to me, other things equal (as they aren’t always, of course). I am minded to believe the social science evidence on that because of my own subjective experience too: that it can often be relentless and knackering enough to be one of two parents of very young children to be grateful that I am not trying to parent alone – though that instinct naturally also leads to admiration for many of those who are.

But what are the policy implications of that? That belief certainly doesn’t, therefore, lead me to want to disadvantage further the single parents who already often have this tougher and most crucial job – whether that is through bereavement, divorce, break-up or whatever - though I am certainly in favour of the most effective efforts possible to ensure absent fathers meeting their financial responsibilities to their children.

If one is interested in the distribution of life chances, advantage and disadvantage, there is a good case for seeing the presence (and distribution) of stable and loving parenting and secure relationships as probably the most important of all goods in the left’s thinking about society. We know that resources matter here, given how economic insecurity, low pay or long hours place stresses on relationships and the time which parents have for parenting, but we know too that this is not a question of money alone.

The appalling prospects in education and employment of children in care, is certainly important evidence behind continued efforts to make adoption more common, to assist the formation of stable families. There were important recommendations on this from Martin Narey and a Times campaign recently. Similarly, there is every reason to believe that a child being brought up by two committed gay parents would tend to have much better life chances than if remaining in the care system.

Personally, I am pro-marriage. That’s certainly the case if you rely on revealed preferences. I got married. But I am sceptical about whether financial incentives and small tax breaks significantly would affect marriage rates – the costs of both weddings and divorce proceedings would suggest otherwise. And I am, anyway, am not at all sure it would be a good idea to incentivise those few ‘marginal’ marriages which would be nudged into existence, though the evidence that people who want to marry are deterred from doing so by the financial pressures could well be a legitimate cause for concern.

It is possible to argue that almost everybody on the left seems to have some potential to be pro-marriage – though, curiously, the best evidence for this is the pride almost universally taken in the important civil rights advance of the happy availability of gay marriage (also endorsed by a strong majority on the right) since many do remain rather more ambivalent about marriage more generally. If the whole liberal-left can whole-heartedly celebrate civil partnerships, I can’t myself see identify any logical barrier to extending the principle to celebrating marriage more generally, even for those who aren’t gay, without fearing that doing so would stigmatise those who choose not to marry.

***

There are taboo subjects in British society, public and political debate. Examples include the advocacy of paedophilia, bestiality and incest, and holocaust denial. There is a very solid consensus for maintaining these taboos – so you probably shouldn’t hold your breath waiting for New Statesman covers taking on those subjects which really are taboo in British public debate.

Even if you double dare them.

More puzzling is the common claim that subjects which are frequently and loudly debated in public, political and media debate are off limits – something usually attributed to the pernicious effect of political correctness.

A good rule of thumb is to always avoid reinforcing the conspiracy frame, and instead insist on having reasoned public debates about every major social issue we face.

The great problem with conversations which start “why aren’t we allowed to talk about x” is that they too rarely seem to get beyond that first base. Of course, we must talk about the family, and immigration, and race, and other subjects said to be closed down by the

Let’s move the conversation forward by asking those shouting about not being allowed to talk about the subject to get onto the substance of what it is that they want to say about it.

Let’s talk about where we are on the family in our society, and what we would aspire to. And let’s talk about what we might reasonably expect, perhaps sometimes from government, perhaps sometimes from employers, sometimes from ourselves too – that might help, or at least not get in the way.

Let’s officially call the taboo off – even if that involves slaying a largely mythical dragon. What is needed from left, right and centre is not just a willingness to talk, but the ideas about what can be done, which prove effective and command public legitimacy and consent here in the real world for the type of society that we have become.

The state after the riots

2011-08-16T10:28:00.004+01:00

The political battle over last week’s riots began in earnest yesterday, with both David Cameron and Ed Miliband beginning to stake out distinctive territory. The key front is over how to frame the causes and consequences of the riots. Already the contours are taking shape around different conceptions of ‘responsibility’: for Cameron, responsibility is personal and “pure and simple”; for Miliband it's a more nuanced concept, involving wider societal considerations and obligations.

But there is another key political divide, and it’s one that adds a very live dimension to the themes discussed in the recently published summer issue of the Fabian Review. ‘The State Under Attack’ is the theme of the magazine – looking at how Labour’s relationship with the state has been painted by both internal and external critics as the root cause of the party’s political woes. Different authors investigate the charge that Labour was ‘too statist’ when in power, accepting where it’s fair, knocking down the caricatures, and stressing where there is positive role for government.

The prime minister sought to cast the state as the bogeyman in his response to the riots yesterday: “Some of the worst aspects of human nature tolerated, indulged – sometimes even incentivised – by a state and its agencies that in parts have become literally de-moralised”. Under fire are state welfare, burdensome ‘elf n’ safety’ regulations, and the EU prescribing a monolithic conception of human rights.

But as Gaby Hinsliff pointed out in the Observer at the weekend, it was the strident small staters who were first to call for the army to be mobilized - a massive extension of the state's reach - and Cameron returned from holiday to grab hold of whichever of Whitehall’s levers were nearest to hand. As Hinsliff wrote:

”He threatened to evict looters from their council homes, injunct gang members, restrict access to social media ... Suddenly a decentralising prime minister was pushing at the boundaries of executive power.”

What this goes to show is that even the fiercest critics of the state see it playing some role, and so we need to get over the current 'state good or bad' debate. Our polling in the magazine – recently reported in the Independent – showed that even most Conservative voters don’t want the government’s cuts to be permanent: they positively value public services and do not share their party leadership’s Thatcherite vision of a small state. So the important thing for Labour – both in its response to recent events and in its ongoing policy rethink – is to recognise that the debate it should be having is about the appropriate level of the state; where it got that balance wrong; and, crucially, how to go with the grain of the wide public support for lots of things that the state does for us that we would struggle to do ourselves.

Cameron must avoid the rush to law

2011-08-12T15:54:00.008+01:00

In his summary of David Cameron’s “marathon” statement to the Commons yesterday, Andrew Sparrow reported on the “series of measures intended to show that the rioting crisis is over and that order has been restored”.

"There were at least 10 separate announcements in the list— some of which were relatively minor, or very provisional — but collectively they amounted to a reasonably weighty package which should convey the impression that, after a period when it looked weak, the government is now firmly back in control."

The full scope of this remains to be seen, but the government should avoid the urge to legislate in haste.

For the most part, the political debate following the riots has been restrained, focusing on concern for victims, condemnation of perpetrators and criticism of policing. The focus will broaden over time, as people dig deeper for answers as to why and how this happened, and how to stop it happening again.

In the meantime, the government will try to reassert control – and as yesterday’s announcements showed, make sure it seen to be doing so.

But rushing measures onto the statue books often results in bad law - as a thoughtful essay from Will Straw in the summer issue of the Fabian Review shows, explaining how ‘something must be done’ syndrome led the Labour government into difficulty. If there is truth to the charge that Labour was ‘too statist’ in power then it is often in these moments of public outcry that it is to be found.

Straw tells the story of how Labour’s legislative response to the Soham murders resulted in across the board condemnation. Needing to be seen as ‘tough on crime’, here and elsewhere, led to laws being passed when often a less centralised approach would be not only less coercive, but more effective.

How can Cameron avoid falling into the same trap in his response to the public's rage at the rioters? Legislation should be the last resort argues Straw and sets out 3 tests for when it’s justified:

“First, ministers should justify whether there is really a problem that needs addressing in order to avoid fiascos like ID cards and 42-days. Second, they should ensure that a legislative approach – rather than tighter enforcement of existing rules or closer working between different government agencies – is absolutely necessary. Third, they should explain why a national rather than a local approach is the right answer. "

You can read the full piece here.

One London: Leadership Matters

2011-08-09T09:18:00.002+01:00

I'm a born and bred Londoner and at times like this it's almost a cliche to say that we are at our best when our backs are against the wall. Two incidents stick out in my mind; the 1990 London Stock Exchange explosion and, of course, 7/7. Both times I remember this undefinable feeling that there was a unified London response to the riots. You were scared, you were sad, but there was leadership and you were defiant. There was a sense that we would stick together and would come back stronger. Last night however I just felt lost.

Now I'm not one of those idiots who demands a recall of Parliament every year and believes our politicians should under no circumstances, ever, take a holiday, but leadership matters. Those in authority should have been all over our screens last night telling us what they are doing to stop it happening, trying to articulate the reasons behind it and attempting to empathise with the majority of Londoners who were in their homes, scared and feeling alone. No one even tried, the story that "no one from was available" was pathetic.

The closest anyone has come was Diane Abbott. Now I'll admit I'm not a huge fan, but she was on the streets of Hackney talking to residents and the press surrounded by neighbours, Labour members and passers by. On the brink of tears she told the story of Hackney and how she was worried that the businesses won't come back, taking the jobs and the futures of thousands of law abiding Hackney youngsters with them.

In truth. The story of the locality is perhaps the story of the riot. Round the corner from my house Turkish shop owners fought back and held the line against a group of looters. Local residents cheered them on and stood in solidarity with them, all over London social networks whirred and kept people informed of trouble spots ensuring people got home safely. For the police, it was a nightmare with hundreds of decentralised cells across London quickly forming, disbanding, then rejoining and moving to new targets at the speed of a text. Fourteen hundred policeman were simply unable to cope.

No one is telling the story of London. No is one leading us, showing us they care, there is no message to rally behind. The only vague thing I picked up is that we were to keep our children indoors, it's not enough. Last night I was thinking do I go to work tomorrow? Will transport be working? Will I be able to get home at the end of the day? I had no idea. Some online are crying out for a tough on crime message, it's a start but nowhere near enough.

Today Boris Johnson will return, so will Cameron (and Miliband and Harman for that matter) and there will be attempts to try and articulate what we're going through but they'll probably get lost in the ether. Ken Livingstone tried, but despite his dignified response to 7/7, he was too charged with the past and an upcoming election to really cut through. It'll be up to Cameron, Boris - or if they fail - Miliband to try and give voice to this horrible mess.

I know London will recover - initiatives like "riotcleanup" show that the blitz spirit remains alive and well - but London asked for leadership and were told to take responsibility and sort it out ourselves. Maybe sixty Turkish business owners carrying metal poles is Cameron's vision of the Big Society? Who knows, but what I'm certain of is that in the past couple of days our elected leaders could have risen to the challenge and become more than just career politicians, but they put their holidays first and they failed London.

Labour's renewal must look to the future

2011-07-22T17:42:00.002+01:00

Guest post by Jon Trickett, Shadow Minister of State for the Cabinet Office. He has been the Member of Parliament for Hemsworth since 1996.

Rebuilding our covenant with the British people will require some tough decisions and an up-front acceptance of the things we got wrong.

The Party stands at a cross roads. We reject the turning towards 1980’s style ultra-leftism. Equally we should refuse the call from a voluble minority of backseat drivers who would turn Labour to a pale blue echo of Toryism.

Our future lies in opposing the Tories not mimicking them.

Equally it means embracing the mainstream concerns of the majority.

Unity is Strength. So said the ancient trades union and labour movement banners. Our leader has laid out a path forward which we can all support. The electorate will reward a unified party which knows which direction it wishes to take the country.

This is particularly so given the splits in the coalition.

But identifying mainstream concerns and transforming our party will require discussion and debate. Conducted in a tolerant, open and democratic way, discussion will enhance our capacity to win. Progress, New Labour, Compass and Blue Labour have all made valuable contributions to the debate and other voices need to be heard too from beyond the Westminster village.

It is fascinating, for example, to see the emergence of Winning Labour (www.winninglabour.org) based on a group of activists in Yorkshire. Equally a group of Young Compass committee members have now become “Next Generation Labour”. Frank Dobson MP has initiated discussions amongst Labour MP’s which will analyse the growth of inequality and advocate a more equal society. And a group of MP’s, under the title Working Labour, is starting meet to look at how the Party can reconnect with working people.

The debate which these and other initiatives will engender within the Party will help us to renew ourselves but such debate must not be rancorous, factional or divisive.

There are several issues which will need to be addressed in this debate.

In recent decades mainstream progressives on both sides of the Atlantic lost our way. We lacked confidence in our capacity to win a popular majority for our values. First Clinton and then Blair pioneered ‘triangulation’ that we must shift to the right in order to win.

The electoral demographics of this politics involved a laser-like focus on the so-called middle income ‘swing voters’, assuming that the ‘core vote’ among manual workers would continue with their historical attachment to parties of the centre left.

And so ‘New’ Labour followed on from the New Democrats and the Third Way was born. Both President Clinton and Tony Blair won famous elections. Much was achieved. But in the end they lost touch especially amongst people on middle and lower incomes.

Yet it is not clear, even now, that Conservative, or “Blue” social values, are as hegemonic in our society as is being argued by some. It would be foolhardy to underestimate the strength of the right, but equally we should not base our electoral strategy on an overstatement of the Conservative strength.

Consider the following: the Conservative vote under Major and Thatcher never really fell below 13 million but since then has never fully recovered. Even in 2010, Cameron’s Tories only gained 10.7 million votes, over 2 million behind their historic vote. Indeed, astonishingly, their share of AB votes actually declined from 41% in 1997 to 39% in 2010.

Whilst David Cameron significantly outpolls his party, the Conservative brand remains toxic to many.

It is instructive too that the Tory parts of the Coalition have not felt confident to press ahead in the short term with many of its clearly ideological project: the transformation of the NHS into a privatised service, the sale of the forests and the suggestion that they would privatise whole sections of the civil service.

Lord Ashcroft, who is a serious minded Tory strategist, recently carried out a major opinion poll, sampling 10,000 voters. The results must have caused him some anguish. Anxious that an outright majority may be out of reach, he says. “For those who considered voting Tory in 2010 but thought better of it, the biggest barrier ... was the continuing impression that the party is for the rich, not people like them.” Among people considering voting Tory he noted that “most said they would prefer the present coalition to a Tory government with an overall majority – a potential obstacle to them voting Conservative if an outright Tory victory looks like a real prospect.”

We should not conclude from all this that right wing ideas can be ignored as Labour rebuilds. But nor should we be mesmerised into thinking that it is necessary merely to track rightwards in order to win.

Labour’s immediate task is the rebuilding of its own electoral base. There are still some strategists who insist that we should focus exclusively on the ‘swing‘voters. They are wrong.

When analysing Labour votes by social class over the New Labour years and comparing 1997 with 2010, we lost 4.1 million votes among manual workers but actually gained 120,000 professional classes. Early signs of some recovery of the labour vote under Ed Miliband’s leadership should not be taken as an indication that all is now well. Widespread hostility to the Coalition’s more right wing initiatives does not mean we have won the argument.

For great scepticism about Labour remains based on our time in office.

The Tories are flat-lining at under 40%. People don’t buy in to their politics. There is a clear non-Conservative majority in the country. But if this majority is divided then Cameron can win a majority in a first past the post electoral system. The Tories understand this. Why else would the Murdoch press argue for a vote in Scotland for the SNP? Their strategy is to ‘balkanise’ the non Tory majority.

Labour’s response must be to create a majoritarian politics, sensitive to local and regional as well as class, gender and other identities, but which speaks to the country as a whole. For the truth is that the Conservatives do not offer a vision of the future which speaks to our sense of optimism and hope. There is a sense in the country that as a nation we have lost our, and that so many communities are insecure and facing a future which is bleak.

Whilst retaining the support of more affluent voters (and indeed strengthening our support), Labour must first understand, and then reconstruct, its relation with the C2DE social groups where the rupture with New Labour was the greatest. We must also understand the reasons for the regional differences in that vote for in the South it does seem to be the case that there is a currently less strong propensity to vote Labour, whilst in Scotland and elsewhere there are different challenges.

This will require a process for Labour as profound that as the creation of New Labour.

In my view Labour will need to be more than a party which re-finances the public services, we need to develop a new Political Economy which rejects the values of the casino and instead rewards hard work and thrift and one which also addresses the question of production as well as distribution. Our economy is less productive because of a huge collapse in investment, and the sources of finance for investment have been based on short-termism whilst the economic sectors into which finance has been investing are too narrow to prepare us for the new global challenges.

Re-founded, Labour must draw together the various progressive strands in the wider society and which form a majority. We can be optimistic that we can win because there is a progressive majority in the country. To do so we must show that we are serious about liberty and a democratised state, the environment and about low wages, working time, inequality.

As Ed Miliband once said ‘Heart and head come together in a politics based on clear values’.

This article is derived from a speech Jon Trickett gave at the Leeds Civic Hall on 9 July 2011.

This is not the 'Blue Labour view' on immigration

2011-07-20T09:20:00.005+01:00

Guest post by Marc Stears, political theorist at Oxford University and Fellow at IPPR

“Blue Labour’s line on immigration is toxic.” That was a headline I woke up to this morning. I greeted it initially with some disbelief for the simple reason that I didn’t know there was a “Blue Labour line” on immigration. But then I realized that it came on the back of an incendiary Daily Express front page citing an apparent report produced by Maurice Glasman for Ed Miliband calling for an immediate moratorium on the vast majority of immigration to Britain.

There is no such report, of course. That was a fiction in true Daily Express style. But Maurice Glasman has nonetheless made a series of comments in interviews with the Fabian Review and with the Guardian this week and so the story begins.

What must be made entirely clear, though: this is Maurice Glasman’s view and not the view of others who have been associated with the debates around “Blue Labour” or who contributed to the e-book, The Labour Tradition and the Politics of Paradox. Those debates have not been programmatic statements of policy positions, and certainly not recommendations for areas of policy as deeply complex and controversial as immigration. They have concentrated on just one thing: how can Labour restore its democratic tradition.

In these debates, Labour people like Jon Cruddas, Jonathan Rutherford, James Purnell, David Lammy, and Tessa Jowell have been calling for a more relational, open, truly democratic politics in Labour. All of us involved have shared a desire to build a politics that starts from people’s everyday experiences and encourages the citizens of Britain to come together to campaigns for a better life together. It is a politics that celebrates the trade union and co-operative heritage of Labour, and that recognizes in movements like London Citizens the possibility of recapturing the best of that tradition today. It is a politics that has strong resonances with Ed Miliband’s recent insistence that social responsibility and a radical attack on concentrations of power should be at the centre of Labour’s agenda.

In my view, this kind of politics is peculiarly ill-suited to a policy of dramatic immigration restriction. The British Labour tradition is an open, tolerant, and welcoming one. It is one which, as Maurice Glasman himself recognises in the e-book, has a strongly internationalist as well as nationalist dimension.

That is not to say, of course, that Labour should proceed towards a politics of fully open borders. That is a utopian abstraction. Nor is it to say that Labour has ever properly put its case on immigration straight to the British people, as it surely must. But it is to say that a politics of the common good, one that is grounded in relational obligations, sceptical about the domineering power of the state, sensitive to everyday experience, and open always to democratic renewal, should be an instinctively generous politics and not a restrictive one.

Labour needs to recommit itself to its co-operative, democratic tradition. This is a real and practical call. We have seen the merits of it in the leadership Ed Miliband has shown in the last few weeks in taking on the Murdoch empire in the name of social responsibility. Labour also needs open debates on difficult questions, of which immigration is very high up that list. But for that open debate to flourish we need to be absolutely clear about where each of us stands and about how our values relate to our policies. That clarity has been obscured this week. It is time to restore it.

How Blue Labour could talk about immigration in the real world

2011-07-19T10:00:00.001+01:00

Guest post by Sunder Katwala, former General Secretary of the Fabians, who will shortly be launching a new organisation to inform and deepen the public debate around immigration, responding to Maurice Glasman's interview for the next Fabian Review.

***
Britain Must Ban Migrants, the Daily Express' front-page splash today is, on the face of it, a pretty fair shorthand summary of what Labour peer Maurice Glasman told Mary Riddell in a Fabian Review interview, published by the Telegraph yesterday.

So Glasman, the brains behind “blue Labour”, is now advocating by some distant the most restrictionist approach to immigration of any mainstream political voice in British politics. He proposes a much more restrictive policy than the government’s comparatively modest aim to cap immigration. Prime Minister David Cameron aims to have net inward immigration in the “tens of thousands, rather than hundreds of thousands” by 2015. The evidence suggests that will be challenging to achieve, but Glasman would like to take the bidding much closer to zero. And, unlike the government, which is committed to maintaining British membership of the European Union, Glasman advocates a fundamental rethink, and the UK’s departure from the free movement of labour – which, in the real world, almost certainly entails getting out of the EU itself.

Glasman’s comments were immediately critiqued from several perspectives. Matt Cavanagh of ippr has warned that the public are rarely impressed by sweeping rhetoric on immigration which is not likely to be followed up with action. Glasman’s comments are akin to Gordon Brown’s “British Jobs for British Workers” on steroids. Don Flynn of the Migrants Rights Network set out why the proposal faces formidable practical barriers, and questioned whether the apparent populism would prove politically helpful to Labour in any event. Several writers with broad sympathy to blue Labour thought this intervention went well over the top, while others who fear it offers a nostalgic cul-de-sac felt that Glasman had proved their point.

Glasman’s comments have all the hallmarks of a blue Labour provocation. Jon Cruddas, an ally of Glasman’s, recently described this as its “hand grenade” strategy of being deliberately provocative and antagonistic to start a row. But there are real limits to this approach, which too often now sees a leading Blue Labour thinker says something provocative and unworkable, gets criticised for it, and then claims that the critical reaction proves the blue Labour point the whole subject is taboo and off limits within the Labour Party and the broader cosmopolitan liberal left. But the stale shock tactic of self-caricature and provocative polarisation has now run its course – because it does little or nothing to help Labour to engage seriously with the difficult issues of economics, identity and belonging which Blue Labour wants to put on the agenda.

A debate about whether or not we are allowed to have the debate gets us nowhere.

Immigration is a major public issue – of course we should debate it. Like every major party, the Labour Party needs to work out what it wants to think, say and do about immigration. As a party which aspires to govern, Labour needs to come up with political arguments and policy proposals that they sincerely believe could and should be adopted by a British government, and that our society would benefit from. (Though that test is less pressing when framing the Green Party or UKIP manifestoes, this is a good test of integrity for smaller parties too). So we should expect contributors to that debate to come up with serious arguments. We might particularly expect that from those elevated enough to be Labour Parliamentarians, or even gurus to the leader.

Glasman’s immigration comments seem to me to fail that test. At one level, they are perhaps sincere in the sense that Glasman must clearly think it would be good to make a populist Pim Fortuyn-style “Britain is full” proposition part of the mainstream centre-left debate. But this strikes me as a highly rhetorical intervention rather than a serious one. There is no evidence that it has been thought through in any serious way as the basis for politics or policy. So I am left personally rather sceptical as to whether Glasman genuinely thinks it would be a good idea for a Labour government to try to close the borders, as as opposed to wanting to chuck another one of his hand grenades into the political conversation.

But I disagree with Daniel Elton of Left Foot Forward’s assertion that Glasman’s comments are the politics of the 'dog whistle' – "pure and simple”. While I believe that Glasman’s advocacy is misguided, I just don’t believe that he is motivated by making a coded appeal to a minority segment of racist voters. And I think it would be a significant mistake to make that the argument we end up having.

There are many effective critiques of Glasman’s argument. But critics should be clear that Glasman is arguing an anti-immigration position that is a legitimate one in British public debate. He has in effect raided the UKIP manifesto, and hardened up an argument made from the Eurosceptic Tory right (though some fundamental Eurosceptics, such as Daniel Hannan, advocate liberal principles on immigration).

The question here is not one of policing discourse, and whether or not it is legitimate to say it, but whether it makes sense to say it and to want it to happen too. The important question is whether we would advance or damage our national interests, our economic prospects and the cohesion of our society to adopt it.

Against those criteria, it seems to me clear that Glasman’s policy would be damaging and almost certainly impossible too. There are at least three dimensions on which Glasman would need to offer a great deal more clarity before it was possible to work out whether he had the intention of trying to be taken seriously as a voice on the immigration debate.

On economics, sweeping claims that legal and illegal immigration were used as a deliberate policy to hold down wages require a proper evidence-base about the impacts of migration on inequality and low pay. The existing evidence shows that there are impacts of immigration on pay at the bottom of the labour market – but also show that that Glasman much exaggerates the impact of immigration on low pay, inequality and economic insecurity, as Chris Dillow summarised yesterday. Given the importance of political economy to blue Labour, this could be a serious strategic mistake. Immigration is too easy an explanation which risks crowding out the deeper debate about the range of causes and consequences of the political economy we have.

On politics, there are a range of existing debates and real world ways in which EU members might advocate changing the labour market rules. Removing the general principle of the free movement of labour within the single market is not one of them.

On values, sweeping rhetorical remarks like “Britain is not the United Nations” also sound designed to signal that Glasman may want the UK to consider withdrawing from international obligations. I hope that is not the case, and that he is targeting economic migration and would continue to accept refugees. But if that were the case, then it is not clear what the UN-bashing is intended to signal. (Perhaps surprisingly, elsewhere in the interview Glasman backs the military intervention in Libya, using British troops and resources to protect the people of Benghazi, though that sounds precisely like the type of discretionary liberal cosmopolitanism he is arguing against).

There are a wide range of types of migration – does Glasman’s concern with the economic impacts of economic migration mean he would want to halt family reunion, for example? Is this Blue Labour hostility to immigration all about economics – or does it have significant cultural drivers too?

So, what could Blue Labour say about immigration?

It is not enough for Blue Labour to shout “we should be allowed to talk about immigration”, reinforcing (false) claims of a conspiracy to close our noisy immigration debate down, and seeking to polarise the debate into competing ‘open’ and ‘closed’ identity politics camps.

Yes, we should talk about immigration. So Blue Labour should be challenged to engage seriously in the immigration debate – and to develop a workable public politics of immigration.

Instead of just trying to shout blue Labour down, it might be more constructive to ask how it could seek to engage productively with a debate about immigration if it did want to put forward important political and policy options for Labour on this major issue, with the aim of being principled and fair to citizens and to migrants.

So how might a credible Blue Labour argument about immigration proceed?

It is possible to sketch some of the motivations and arguments which a serious Blue Labour engagement in the immigration conversation might involve. These would often resemble the constructive role which voices like Jon Cruddas and Jack Dromey have brought to public debates in this area over the last few years.

‘Close the borders’ is not the only thing blue Labour might find to say about immigration.
In fact, Blue Labour already combines the politics of “zero migration” with the politics of amnesty. Glasman’s experience of bottom-up campaigning with London Citizens means that he joins a fairly broad elite coalition, with the Liberal Democrats and Boris Johnson, in favour of the unpopular minority position in favour of addressing the issue of long-standing migrants in the UK.

Firstly, blue Labour would certainly be sceptical about whether cosmopolitan liberalism is going to be enough, and aware that liberals who celebrate diversity as a social good are a minority quarter of our society. (Most Blue Labour advocates belong to that social group themselves). Instead of simply caricaturing and goading liberals, blue Labour might instead seek to persuade them that they need to engage with economic concerns and anxieties among a large section of centre-left voters, and try to open a conversation about what would need to change to engage with those who either lose out from globalisation, or who fear doing so.

Secondly, a serious blue Labour approach would try to engage with the evidence about the impact of immigration to construct its response. It would not adopt the type of “lump of labour” fallacy of “they take our jobs” which makes intuitive sense to a section of public opinion but lacks a credible evidence base. A serious Blue Labour argument would know there are macroeconomic benefits of migration – but think it as important to recognise that the gains and losses are not evenly distributed, either in terms of income, class or place.

That would enable it to explain why arguments for the overall benefits of immigration have often fallen on deaf ears – because of a mismatch between the elite advocacy of intangible benefits for national GDP, against the expression of public concern about whether or not local impacts were being managed. Jon Cruddas has consistently noted the difficulties and unfairness in the fastest changing areas of allocating resources on the basis of census data which can be a decade old. That may seem a rather wonkish, academic "technocratic" point to Cruddas' blue Labour allies, but technocratic in the sense of 'workable' need not always be a pejorative term in policy debate.

So what to do about an uneven pattern of winners and losers? Glasman’s approach is to reject the moderate economic gains of immigration (too intangible to be worth having?) in order to protect the interests of those who lose out. An alternative would be to promote a political renegotiation of how the gains are distributed, by challenging those who have an economic interest in liberal immigration policy to gain public consent for openness, including by paying more attention to compensating losers, or addressing anxieties. This might, for example, be another reason to campaign for living wages, and to promote other policies to reduce social inequalities of income and wealth. Levels of inequality are a product of collective social and political choices; not simply a function of policies on trade or immigration.

If Blue Labour wants to be about relationships, it would want to avoid and challenge a politics of polarisation or competitive grievances which sets poor communities against each other. Instead, it would look for the areas of common ground. It might campaign for better pay and conditions in the care sector – which might build a coalition between those interested in improving the current conditions of workers (both migrants and non-migrants) and making the jobs more attractive to native Brits.

On the European Union, blue Labour would need to decide whether it is in or out. The Glasman position certainly involves a “fundamental renegotiation” of Britain’s membership of the European Union. To put it more simply, it involves withdrawing from the EU. “Fundamental renegotiation” has almost always been a code, endorsed as a gradualist strategy by those whose preference is to withdraw from the EU. (This is what Trotskyists used to call a ‘provisional and transitional demand’). I have almost never seen calls for a “fundamental renegotiation” of the terms of membership by somebody fully commited to Britain staying in. Though Blue Labour has Eurosceptic instincts, I doubt that “blue Labour in one country” would get very far with a new political economy. Blue Labour might advocate significant reforms within the EU – but it needs to take multilateralism and building alliances within the EU seriously if it wants to go beyond critiquing the failures of our current political economy to proposing remedies.

Blue Labour would also need to decide whether its scrutiny or scepticism about low skilled economic migration can be separated from its approach to a range of different – from the students who want to pay fees at our universities; from issues of settlement and family reunion; and from issues affecting refugees and asylum seekers. On Britain’s international obligations, Blue Labour needs to decide whether it wants to reject these and to join those who promote the popular meme that Britain is a “soft touch” on asylum, or whether it wants to join those who challenge that claim, and who are campaigning to reverse the effect of punitive approaches which leave people in destitution.

So let’s talk about immigration.

But it is now time for Blue Labour to decide whether to further polarise our often toxic shouting match about immigration – or whether it is seriously committed to wanting a proper political conversation about the issues which affect people’s lives.

Sunder Katwala is director of the new social justice communication organisation [working title], which will launch this Autumn.

Lessons from Crisis

2011-07-18T15:44:00.003+01:00

By James Hallwood of the Fabian Society

The crisis News International has created is unprecedented, but it isn’t unparalleled. The abuse of power by unaccountable big business, reckless and corrupt practice and a Parliament that for too long was enthralled by its allure rings as true for News International as it did for the banking crisis. Four years on can we honestly say the banks have learnt their lesson? They remain unbroken, the bonuses are back and they’re slowly regaining the influence over Parliament they once held. We have an opportunity to learn from past mistakes. Not just those of the corporations but the failure of government and indeed our own collective individual failures that have contributed to this latest crisis.

If these crises can teach us anything it is that light-touch self-regulation does not work. Just as the banks were allowed to get away with malpractice so too was a blind eye turned to the behaviour of News International. For some Tories, Orangebookers and Blairites this was a question of ideology, of rolling back the state. But in a liberal democracy all power must be accountable. A sovereign Parliament should be the ultimate power, legitimised and accountable because of its election. It is therefore its duty to ensure that the unelected but hugely powerful are accountable to Parliament and thus the people.

Power was perhaps the reason that so many held back from interfering with the banks or the press. There was an ingrained culture that held that big business and the Murdoch press were essential for electoral victory. Some merely kept quiet while others actively courted them. There was almost a sense that these bodies were more powerful than Parliament itself, that taking them on would be futile and potentially disastrous. With its infiltration of the police and civil service I cannot doubt that some MPs were silenced by blackmail or worse still payment. Parliament must learn to regulate better but perhaps more importantly actually be aware of its own power. The banks and Murdoch failed, the public were outraged, and Parliament stepped in. The myth that big business trumped Parliament’s power was exposed, our MPs must never forget the lesson and responsibility that this gives them.

The proposals to break up the banks seem to have remained such. Ed Miliband’s own campaign to break-up Murdoch’s media hegemony must not be allowed to fail. The lesson for business is clear: monopolies and lack of accountability incite malpractice and encourage a sense of invincibility that sooner or later will be revealed as false. Far from stifling competition sometimes government must encourage it, never is this truer than with our press. This scandal provides an opportunity to rebalance our media, making it more plural and rewarding the publications that respect the law. News International will be the paradigm of pride before a fall in business, a lesson for all. The very real anger at the banking scandals seemed to come to nothing. We must harness our shock now and use it to legislate for a better and more accountable system.

We must also look to ourselves. We can’t sit back and feel happy enough to blame Parliament, the banks, News International, when so many of us to varying degrees have played our part in these crises. Just as our demand for endless credit, cheap goods and property contributed to the banking crisis so too have so many of us played our part in Murdoch’s empire. The huge popularity of his papers has been because of the demand for gossip and scandal. Stories that have torn people’s lives apart but have been voraciously read. How many have decried Murdoch but paid their monthly subscription to Sky? Make no mistake, we are not the perpetrators, but we have at times been complicit. As consumers and as citizens we have the power to change the poisonous culture that has infected Parliament and society at large. Personal responsibility when replicated en masse can make a huge difference. Just look at Liverpool where, following Hillsborough, you’d be hard-pressed to buy a copy of what they call ‘the Scum’ in any decent newsagents.

I haven’t given up on a fresh approach to the banks but time is ticking. Meanwhile a cleaning up of our press and the culture that’s gone with it is surely best achieved while the hammer is still hot. There are lessons to be learnt from how we dealt with the last crisis, lets then hope that Parliament, business and we as individuals try and act upon them. Culture is far harder to change than procedures; this is a one-off chance to make a change we desperately need, let’s get it right this time.

James Hallwood is an Events Manager at the Fabian Society

Glasman: women are central to Blue Labour

2011-07-15T15:42:00.003+01:00

Guest post by Ivana Bartoletti, member of the Fabian Women's Network Committee, and Seema Malhotra, Director of the Fabian Women's Network

“Blue Labour is a form of contemporary feminism,” Maurice Glasman argues, in a conversation to be published in the first issue of the Fabian Women’s Network (FWN) new magazine this September.

Glasman’s stirring claim may come as a surprise to his more vocal critics, who have been asking where (if anywhere) women fit into the Blue Labour project. The encounter was a great opportunity for FWN to start off a conversation that can test and challenge the faultlines of the Blue Labour and feminism debate.

Blue Labour's discourse originates from a radical critique of the way capitalism has exploited workers, reduced people to commodities and deprived them of what they need for their life to feel worthwhile. It argues the case for some of the more traditional aspects of community life and empowerment that existed at the time of the founding of the Labour party, which lies in workers who, through organisation and strong relationships, can be a resisting force against the power of markets and financial capital.

The main objection to Blue Labour has been that it is a male dominated affair, with a male vocabulary, which totally fails to acknowledge how feminism and women’s participation in work and public life have changed politics and society.

Blue Labour places a strong emphasis on communities – as the places where individuals engage in relationships with others and nurture their sense of belonging. Seemingly solid ground. But the centrality of ‘communities’ and 'relationships' is highly problematic when it doesn’t acknowledge that women only thrive when their rights belong to them irrespective of the community to which they belong, the religion they profess, or the family they happened to grow up in.

As Helen Goodman has highlighted, dismissing the role of the state too quickly is very problematic for women, as they find that winning their struggle for emancipation relies on a government embracing the idea. Progressive governments create welfare and work policies, instigate vital legislation to tackle abuse and promote political participation through quotas.

Maurice Glasman has welcomed the challenge to talk to FWN about what he calls a ‘misunderstanding’, and the conversation offers fresh insights into Blue Labour’s approach to women’s equality.

He stresses that he believes women are central in Blue Labour’s vision, and how that vision itself would not be possible without the influence of the feminist movement and its literature. He concedes Blue Labour is still a “new baby”, an ongoing work that probably still needs to fully develop its vocabulary and ideas.

During the conversation it emerges that the point of contact between Blue Labour and feminism is the breaking up of the distinction between the public and the private spheres. This is crucial in Glasman’s discourse, which he claims gives it an inherently feminist nature. He says women need to gain power in both spheres. In the public sphere, it is a matter of increasing women’s assets, financial power and independence, identifying tools to achieve equality at work and finding forms of welfare to transfer money directly to women.

In the private sphere, it is a matter of how to honour women’s choices and redistribute power within families and relationships such that the burden of care is no longer left on women. This calls for greater involvement of men in private life. Paradoxically, Blue Labour claims to advocate for more ‘public space’ for women and more ‘private space’ for men.

Glasman himself uses a vocabulary which is really dear to the feminist tradition, words such as ‘relational politics’, 'reciprocity' and ‘redistribution of power', and these concepts are central to Blue Labour's discourse as a whole, not just when it comes to women.

Other contentious issues still remain, and they relate to both the theoretical and the practical side of Blue Labour. For example, a lot needs to be discussed in relation to another of its key concepts, the common good, and how it is negotiated. In particular, women need non-negotiable values, as they are essential to them: past history and today’s newspaper headlines remind us that, even when established, women’s rights are always very tenuous.

But probably the most complex and unpredictable outcome is what policies might be born out of Blue Labour's ideas. Glasman says that now is the time to think, and he is probably right, as complex times demand innovative answers, not rote responses.

It remains to be seen how this debate will develop further. But there is no question that Blue Labour, like any voice within Labour today, needs to advocate principles of equality that take the debate about empowerment and gender roles forwards, not backwards.

Contrary to popular opinion, home ownership may actually make workers less economically mobile

2011-07-15T10:44:00.005+01:00

This week the TUC launched a new report - ‘Can Housing Work For Workers?’ - by James Gregory of the Fabian Society. The report finds that home ownership and economic ‘independence’ do not necessarily go hand in hand. In many cases, economic immobility is a problem shared by working home owners and those in the socially rented sector.

Here James Gregory outlines some a of the key themes, in a blog that originally appeared on the LSE's British Politics and Policy blog, http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/2011/07/08/home-ownership-and-economic-mobility/

In 2007, with the publication of John Hills’ report into the future of social housing in England and Wales, policy-makers and politicians finally came to the realisation that they could no longer ignore the relationship between housing and employment policy. In response to Hill’s clear analysis of the prevalence of worklessness in social housing, politicians, think-tanks and policy makers rushed to suggest ways in which we could and should ‘join up’ our policy interventions.

There have been some successes, notably the housing association led drive to offer employment services to their tenants. And few in the policy world could not now be aware of the perils of building concentrated social housing in isolation from key services and viable labour markets.

Yet the belated realisation of the interaction of housing and employment was only ever partial. Crucially, both private renters and owner-occupiers have been excluded from this new policy consensus (though the labour market impact of recent benefit reforms on the private rental sector could be profound, forcing households into cheap accommodation in areas with high rates of unemployment). Why is this? The short answer is that a majority of the policy elite are still beguiled by the British ideology of ownership and ‘independence’. This means that owners are free from the need for state support, and are free to exercise choice about where they live and work.

But – as I argue in a new TUC Touchstone report- both of these assumptions are based on myth. Many owner-occupiers are far from being independent, or if they are they suffer for the privilege. And for many households owner-occupation can hinder movement within the labour market.

Let us deal with the independence myth first. As I write in the report, 27 per cent of those living in poverty are actually living in owner-occupied households that are being bought with a mortgage:

“When we extrapolate the total numbers from these proportions, what we find is that after housing costs there are a total of 3.1 million working-age individuals in owner-occupied housing that are experiencing poverty. Of these, 2.1 million (27 per cent of the total number of working-age individuals in poverty) live in an owner-occupied and mortgaged home. These are serious numbers, directly comparable with the 2.6 million working-age social tenants living in poverty”.

There is something about the nature of our labour markets that can make the owners that are active in the labour market vulnerable. By this I do not mean simply that the loss of a job is a key trigger for poverty (of course it is). More subtly, we are seeing more and more workers on ‘flexible’ contracts with flexible hours, placing great pressure on their ability to meet housing costs in a sustainable and predictable way.

This should force us to confront a major political and policy question: why have we spent the past 20 years actively pursuing ‘flexible’ labour market policies whilst, simultaneously, seeking to push more and more households into homeownership?

The answer to this question lies at least in part in our second myth, that owner-occupation is a vehicle of social and labour market mobility.

Part of this myth rests on a view of the potentially transformative effect of assets and property. Homeownership is often thought – perhaps most famously by Margaret Thatcher – to positively nurture individual independence. Many on the left – notably advocates of ‘asset-based welfare- have also bought into this vision over the last ten years. Asset-ownership, it is thought, gives us confidence and makes us less risk-averse and better able to take risks with our careers. In other words, it’s not just that we don’t need to worry about homeowners because they are independent; we can increase the number of ‘independent’ households (and individuals) by encouraging more people into ownership.

Yet there is actually very little robust evidence to support this argument. Where there have been attempts to establish ownership as an independent variable in the assessment of individual wellbeing the results have been weak. Typically the households under the microscope were owners because of the type of attribute that some expect ownership to foster; greater confidence, higher incomes, better educations – all these tend to be the variables that lead to ownership, rather than being produced by it.

And to the extent that there is evidence in support of the transformative potential of assets, it has actually been based on relatively small amounts of wealth (as little as £300 in savings or a £5k inheritance). There is very little reason to extrapolate the same conclusions when we are considering the effect of the large amount of wealth invested in a home. Indeed, it strikes me as something of a leap of faith to think that just because a small nest-egg creates the confidence to take a risk (setting up a business or taking time out for training) the same can be said when one’s home is at risk. After all, the order of risk here – what we stand to lose – is dramatically different.

Much of the evidence with regard to ownership suggests that the opposite is actually true: high transaction costs and psychological attachment can make owner-occupiers more risk averse and less economically mobile. This is borne out by our TUC polling, which found that one in six mortgagees (16 per cent) have turned down a job because of the pressure to keep up with their housing costs. A further 1/8 said that they had turned a job opportunity because of the ‘hassle’ of moving.

This brings us back full circle to the 2007 Hills report. One of the problems it highlighted here was the immobility of tenants in the social sector, unable to move to look for or take better job opportunities. For many, homeownership has a similar impact. This matters for the economy as a whole, as we risk a repeat of the slow labour market recovery of the early 1990s, when greater negative equity compounded the inherent immobility of many owner-occupiers. At the time we also saw a very real manifestation of the way in which housing booms can create a broader economic bubble, with a sometimes illusory sense of housing wealth underpinning a consumer driven economy. As we may well see again, a loss of confidence in the housing market can hit this kind of economy hard, along with the employment prospects of many in the labour market.

So housing matters for workers and their prospects in life, and it matters just as much for many owners as it does for renters.

There are a range of conclusions we could take away from this. Three stand out. Firstly, we should be far more circumspect about the desirability of pushing more and more households into owner-occupation. Secondly, we need a more sophisticated range of policy responses for home-owners, offering similar advisory services (for example on debt and training opportunities) that are often available to social tenants. Crucially, this advice needs to be available long before the crisis points of unemployment or repossession. Our TUC report offers a range of proposed responses to these first two challenges. Finally, we need to stop telling ourselves that there is a clear hierarchy of tenures, with ownership at the apex and social housing at the bottom.

James Gregory is a Senior Research Fellow at the Fabian Society.

No great leap, but no small business - by @natandoron

2011-07-14T14:07:00.009+01:00

I like Daniel Knowles. He seems an honest and genuine chap (based on our limited online exchanges). Whenever I read his analysis of a situation in his Telegraph column, it does however seem to confirm something entirely different to what he is arguing. His commentary on the problems now facing the Murdoch empire is a fine example of this.

Knowles claims that the fall of Murdoch won’t produce a “Great Leap Leftwards”. His use of Maoist terminology to paint all those on the left as Marxists is fairly amusing and telling in itself. He even expends his second paragraph explaining the Marxist concept of false consciousness. Fairly good way of reinforcing telegraph caricatures of all those who vote Labour as swivel-eyed Marxist-Leninists. More intriguing is Knowles’ claim that “Most people form their political opinions based on conversations in the pub or at dinner parties, or as a result of seeing party leaders on TV.” Firstly TV is of course a form of media (and the subject of the Murdoch BSkyB bid) and these pub conversations are presumably based on some prior knowledge about politics. Some of this knowledge may be in part taken from a source of media such as, I don’t know, popular daily newspapers?

By trying to caricature those on the left as believing that Murdoch is the only thing stopping the revolutionary vanguard from shaking the public out of their political apathy, Knowles misses what a lot of these commentators are actually trying to say. The recalibration of mass media ownership and influence in a country is obviously hugely significant and to some extent, a game changer. Everybody knows that the media is a very important and effective way to convey political messaging. Otherwise politicians wouldn’t expend so much effort trying to shape their coverage on the front pages and TV news bulletins. The career of someone like Alastair Campbell is testimony to this. Coverage in mass media helps form opinions.

In essence, Knowles is right - Murdoch’s fall won’t bring about Communism. The fact that the people who actually think it will probably number less than 10 doesn’t really matter. In his dismissive tone, my instinct is that Knowles understands this all too well. His article is in essence an attempt to downplay the significance of these events and essentially frame any attempts to applaud them as left-wing extremism. A clever use in itself of media to try and shape opinion.

The point is breaking up a monopolisation of media sources is only ever going to a decent thing. We need more diversity of opinion and indeed more competition in our media sources. What we also need is more transparency and methods of investigation that aren’t outside of the law and/or widely believed to be morally reprehensible. The current events will, I hope, contribute to the attainment of these wider goals. This is important and significant. Berlin wall references and Maoist slogans may be lazy, but make no mistake - this week will go down in history.

Natan Doron is a Researcher at the Fabian Society