Why Jon Cruddas is backing David Miliband

David Miliband’s Keir Hardie Memorial Lecture delivered today may not have been, as Jon Cruddas described it, “the most important speech by a Labour politician for many years”, but it was very good. And Cruddas’s praise, from a significant figure on the left of the party who has not formally endorsed David Miliband yet, is high indeed.

I suppose that in this time of 140-character attention spans, a 4,400-word speech is quite a lot to expect people to read. It really is worth it, but here are the best bits:

We meet at a difficult and serious time.  A time of lost hopes and lost power, of broken dreams and impending nightmares.  We confront a government weak in principle but sure of purpose. And be under no illusion as to what that purpose is: to broker a centre right consensus in Britain, all the while claiming to be “progressive”, which will exclude Labour from government for a long time, and hurt those most in need in our country.  The Cameron vision must not to be underestimated.  It is to recreate in the twenty-first century the same coalition that dominated the twentieth century, that between economic liberals and partisan Conservatives.  Working people left out, Labour kept out.  Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

Yes, it’s poetic and a touch partisan, but he was in Wales.

We achieved great things and won great victories in government. I think we were insufficiently proud of our record during the election; but we lost the trust of the people and ceased to be the repository of their hopes for a better tomorrow. For that some blame attaches to the lack of humility about our mistakes.  To redeem the promise of Labour politics we need the renewal that has been too long postponed.

His account of Keir Hardie’s role in the history of the party is thoughtful, culminating in this striking passage:

We have always pursued the common good and were prepared to compromise. But in order to compromise you have to be organised and know your interests.  To act together sure in the belief that human beings and nature are not commodities to be bought and sold at the best price.  Neither are we units of provision to be effectively administered by the State.  The Labour Party alone understood the peril posed to the working people of our country by an unregulated market and an interfering state, a system which banned trade unions and imposed the Poor Laws.

Then he does something really ambitious, supplementing an account of Labour’s historic strengths by listing its historic weaknesses.

First, a shared creed that is too often undefined … In 2008 and 2009, Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling did not make the mistakes of Ramsay MacDonald and Philip Snowden.  They made the correct technical calls. Our savings were protected. But I believe in reciprocity all the way up, and all the way down.  And we did not summon the moral power of shared responsibility to supplement the mechanical power to print money of the Bank of England. That is how solidarity is strengthened, not from the centre alone, but by a mutual responsibility for each others’ fate. Yet that is not a spirit that we drew on during the economic crisis, the greatest peacetime challenge to our country. And so voters, many of them our voters, spent the election wondering whose side we were really on. And that’s no way to win an electoral war.

The second weakness relates to this.  There is an elitist streak of old-school Fabianism in our history that was too hands-on with the state and too hands-off with the market.  I say Fabian because the Webbs did love central planning – very different from the democratic, plural Fabian Society of today.  And New Labour suffered from this too.  A kind of paternalist authoritarianism that manifests itself in big things and in small.  In devolving power to Wales and then trying to fix who its leader should be.  In my friend being told that a father could not take three children with him to the swimming pool.  In a preference for procedure and policy over politics.  We renewed schools and hospitals throughout the land, we improved public services but people felt like consumers and not partners in the services they received.  We talked about ‘we’ but it meant us not them, so the workforce often felt neglected and citizens the same; the drive for managerial efficiency became seen as managerial arrogance.

The third confusion is about economic growth.  In the last twenty years Labour has gone from the prawn cocktail offensive under John Smith to a love in with financial markets to an election campaign in which not a single business would support our tax policy.  Our lack of distinction between the proceeds of financial capital, which was often concerned with its short term multiplication not its long term investment, and manufacturing capital, which was embedded in the real economy, led to a real lack in private sector growth throughout the country.  A lack of innovation and initiative, a lack of partnerships and prosperity. We did not sufficiently recapitalise the regions.  We did not intensify the redistribution of power.  We saved the City of London but we did not reform it.

Under Mrs Thatcher the public benefits of North Sea Oil were used for tax cuts – often to benefit the richest.  The Norwegians used theirs to build a sovereign wealth fund.  But we did not learn the lesson.  New Labour changed the direction of travel from the Conservative years but did not change the motor, which remained the financial services sector.  The benefits were not distributed to the wealthiest in society, as under Mrs Thatcher and Nigel Lawson.  We helped the poorest and those on modest incomes.  But we need a model of economic growth that is right for our time.  We need capital.  Outside the south-east and the London magnet, here in Wales but also in my constituency of South Shields, there was not enough capitalism.  The banks received our money in the bail our but have not re-invested it in our country.  And now there is a Conservative government confused on the banks, hard on the poor and threatening to growth.  It’s serious.

Finally, then, to his conclusion, setting out “the task for Labour today”:

• To reconceive our notion of fairness.  In our concern with meeting peoples’ needs we seemed to sever welfare from desert and this led people to think that their taxes were being wasted, that they were being used.  When we said fairness, people thought it was anything but.  What emerged as a tribute to solidarity, the welfare state, turned into a bitter division.  Many of the ‘hard working families’ we wished to appeal to did not view us as their party.  We achieved great things but we did not bring people with us, and our motivation appeared abstract and remote.

• To build our own story of political economy that embraces neither the masochism of George Osborne nor a denial of economic reality …

• We need to reclaim and re-enact our commitments to community.  Default statism turns citizens into consumers and makes government a giant problem solver, which only increases our technical managerialism.  This meant that our response to the Big Society was not to engage with its weaknesses, its lack of a political economy, its refusal to allow the society to challenge the market as well as the state, and this undermined our socialism.  A life fit for a human being is about more than money and benefits.  It’s about, responsibility, love, loyalty, friendship, action and victory, values that used to be engraved upon the Labour heart but which we have carried too lightly of late … I take the Big Society seriously.  But it is a piece of doublethink – a small society maintained by voluntarism and charity alone. I want a bigger society, based on reciprocity, not just kindness or charity, and I intend to make that a Labour issue …

• We have to make democracy our ally again, outside and inside our party.  The lack of democratic discussion, the hollowing out of the party, our administrative and managerial methods meant that we were seen as a fearsome but not attractive political machine, and that was confirmed for many by the McBride emails and the ugliness of that kind of politics.  We did not come to represent a new dawn, but another government whose time had passed.  But it was worse, in that concern with spin and media management, and attempts at triangulation, led to where I began, a sense that we did not have a creed that we would live for, a strong idea of a good society and a life fit for a human being for all our citizens.

Or, to sum up:

The task ahead for Labour is to renew the covenant of trust that Hardie forged, and become once more, the reasonable hope of a reasonable people.

Picture: The Mirror

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