INTRODUCTION
It is a great privilege to welcome you to today’s conference.
Organised by Compass, sponsored by the Guardian, bringing together
progressive pressure groups, think tanks, trade unions and Labour
organisations to debate how we build a progressive consensus for
social justice in a third term.
It is now just 6 weeks from the election. Many of our activists
still feel exhausted. Politicians (and political journalists) are
counting the weeks til the summer break.
But tired as we inevitably may be from campaigning, the agenda for
this conference shows the appetite and energy that remain within
the Labour party to renew and reinvigorate ourselves in government.
Too many times in our history, Labour has needed a period in opposition
to renew itself and reconnect with the electorate. Even the radical
reforming post war government, seemed by 1951 to have run out of
steam.
And the current state of the Tory party is a bad advertisement for
renewal in opposition. Even eight years into defeat, they don’t
stand much chance of deciding which direction to take their party
when they can’t even agree how to elect their leader.
Perhaps more important many of the things the
Labour Party holds so dear – ending child poverty in Britain,
tackling the plight of Africa, rebuilding our public services –
take years of government to achieve. People in my constituency in
Pontefract and Castleford remember well the scars of opposition
– the jobs lost, the opportunities denied. This is not a political
indulgence we can afford.
So our challenge is renewal in government in
our third term. To build on the progress we have made, and to keep
up the passion to change our nation and champion social justice.
I believe that political renewal demands four things;
1) first that we can renew and reinvigorate our policies
– continually drawing in new ideas, shaping new policies and
programmes around our values;
2) second that we can build [what Gordon Brown has described as]
a progressive consensus, a wider public and political support across
society for our values and things we want to achieve;
3) third that we can renew the party itself and ensure those policies
and shared values actually translate into political support and
votes
4) fourth, perhaps most difficult of all, that we can rehabilitate
politics itself, and restore credibility to the political process.
Each of these tasks in their different ways, lie before us for debate
today.
CHALLENGE 1: Policy renewalOur first
challenge is that of political renewal.
After eight years in power we have travelled a long way.
The soaring unemployment and social dislocation of the eighties
and early nineties seem a long way behind us now.
If ever you feel any doubt about quite how far we have travelled,
just remember that grey April morning just 13 years ago. Friday
April 10th 1992.
I remember standing, just before dawn on the steps of Walworth Road.
I had been working for John Smith. Along with other party workers,
I stood clutching a wilted red rose that the party had bought for
us to wave in victory when Neil Kinnock arrived. We didn’t
feel much like waving as Labour conceded defeat for the fourth time
in a row.
Remember how we feared then that Labour might never win again. Had
you told us then that Labour would win three times in a row, we
would never have believed it.
Had you told us then that a Labour government, a Labour government,
would have put in place longest period of growth since the industrial
revolution, would never have believed it. Had you told us then Labour
would have not just stopped increase in child poverty, but set it
falling, would never have believed it.
And had you told us then – in the shadow of the Shadow Budget
-- that Labour would have increased National Insurance Contributions
with public support to pay for NHS, we would never have believed
it. Eight years on we have new schools, workers rights, and cranes
along the skyline of every city thanks to public and private sector
investment in renewing the places we work and live.
[How far have we travelled, but we have miles yet to go before
we sleep.]
Our country and our Labour government face serious
challenges ahead. Dealing with international terrorism and the problems
of the middle east, shaping the future of Europe, building global
support to ease the problems of Africa, and facing up to the difficulties
of climate change.
We have domestic challenges ahead too. Equipping our economy to
meet the competition from China and other nations. Addressing the
future for pensions in an ageing society, and the problem of transport
faced with congestion and climate change.
In other areas, keeping up the progress we have made will be no
mean feat. Whilst child poverty is falling, we still have a long
way to go. The employment and education gap between the most deprived
districts and the rest is narrowing, but we still have more to do
for those estates still left behind. Homelessness is now falling,
and there are one million more homeowners since 1997, but we still
have more to do to address the widening wealth gap as house prices
go up. And although opportunities for all have been widening, unjust
inequalities still cascade from one generation to the next.
Dealing with these inherited inequalities should be a central part
of Labour’s third term. It isn’t enough to talk about
social exclusion. We need to address the unfair inequalities that
mean that still at the beginning of the 21st century a child’s
chances in life depend on where they live and how much their parents
earn. And the fact is that if we are truly to give people fair chances
in life, we have to start in early childhood. If we are really to
respect the equality and dignity of every human being, we need to
go further, investing in children not just in schools, but in Sure
Start and in the teenage years.
CHALLENGE 2: Building the political
consensus
But we cannot change society just by passing a law or putting
money into a new institution. Building a better world for the next
generation demands hearts as well as minds, values not just policy
proposals. Our second challenge of renewal is to make sure we build
public support and endorsement for progressive change.
We should never forget that the success and resilience of our NHS
since 1949 is based on the fact that the values underpinning the
NHS are so deeply embedded in British political life and society.
In 56 years the Tories have failed each time to challenge the fundamental
founding principles – that health care should be provided
according to need and not ability to pay, that each of us owes a
duty to help those who are sick, and that collectively we can do
far more to provide for the health needs of our nation than we ever
can alone.
The real brilliance of the NHS has been that it has perpetuated
those values through the staff, in patient waiting rooms, and in
our public political debate. The public sector ethos of striving
to help others has been embedded in the NHS and other vital public
institutions. That commitment to shared provision has helped us
deliver services and support time and again in those critical areas
of public life where markets fail. We jeopardise those values at
our peril.
We need a deeper, wider political consensus – both to protect
our achievements, and to make possible new change.
The startling momentum of the Make Poverty History campaign should
be an inspiration – both for what it is doing for Africa,
and for what it says about the possibilities of modern politics.
What started as a plea from pressure groups and churches, a range
of single issue campaigns around debt, aids or trade, has grown
into an organised political movement, not just in Britain but across
the world. It is the coming together of thousands of British people
to help people we will never meet, a million miles away. And it
makes it possible for a Labour Prime Minister and a Labour Chancellor
to lead the way internationally, drawing on every reserve of diplomacy
to save lives.
So, as we back the Make Poverty History campaign in the coming weeks,
we also need to to build the progressive consensus around the big
challenges that face us here at home. To learn from the crusade
for Africa and to build a sense of passion and commitment to tackling
child poverty and unjust inequalities, and widening opportunities
for every child.
We need to build support for the most radical goal this Labour government
has, perhaps the most radical goal any government has ever set,
to end child poverty in Britain within a generation.
We need the extension of welfare state to under 5s and the childcare
revolution to become as unchallengeable as the NHS. Just as NHS
has nurtured and sustained values of fairness and equity which underpinned
its establishment in the first place. Now we need Childrens Centres
to embody and embed important values of fairness and promoting opportunities
of every child.
The programme of investment to tackle child poverty is not just
a consumer offer to parents (particularly working mothers), rather
than a moral crusade for the sake of the next generation, based
on the values we share.
CHALLENGE 3: Renewing the party and
translating our values and policies into votes
Our third challenge is to renew the party to ensure we
can continue to translate our values and policies into political
support and votes. We will not succeed in the next election without
strengthening our party, finding new ways to involve and enthuse
our activists. And we shouldn’t underestimate the significance
of next year’s council elections both for the future of local
government, and for the strengthening of our party at local level.
There are many lessons to be learnt from the election. We said it
was “the school gate election.” And so it proved. According
to MORI, our strongest support came from women aged between 18 and
34. 43% voted Labour, compared to around 27% for the Liberal Democrats
and just 22% for the Conservatives. Labour in government has had
a profound impact on the lives of women and children across the
country already and it translated into votes. That old campaign
poster from just after the first world war summed it up; Mothers
Vote Labour.
Among men the picture is not so positive. Indeed the MORI research
put Labour’s vote among men at 34% -- the same as the Conservatives.
Mothers may have voted Labour. It seems fathers were not so keen.
And it should concern us that we lost the student vote – in
Cambridge, Cardiff, Leeds, Manchester and Bristol. After all, winning
the political identification and allegiance of the next generation
is critical to shaping the future of society. We need to win back
those seats we lost at the next election. Part of our challenge
is to win the support of the younger generation. Part of it is to
persuade them to vote at all.
CHALLENGE 4: The Rehabilitation of Politics
This is our most difficult challenge of all. The disengagement
and disaffection we have seen towards the political process is bad
for democracy. People may still prefer us to the other guys, but
if they have no faith in the political process to address the concerns
in their lives, or the challenges for the nation, then it is far
harder to build legitimacy for political action.
Addressing that disaffection isn’t easy, and it will take
time. It means defining a moral purpose to our politics, opening
up political debate and changing the style of our politics. It also
requires institutional reform. After all, the evidence from community
groups and voluntary groups across the country, from campaigns like
Make Poverty History, and even from conferences and debates like
those today, is that millions of people across the country want
to engage in community action in different ways. We need new neighbourhood
forums to provide more opportunities for people to get involved.
We need to championing local democracy and reinvigorating elected
local government.
We also need to look to Parliament itself, strengthening the role
of the House of Commons and returning to the issue of democratic
reform of the House of Lords. The idea that at the beginning of
the twenty first century we could sustain a legislative chamber
which is accountable to no one is astonishing. At its worst –
for example on fox hunting – the House of Lords has proved
a bastion of vested interests. At its best, it has been a champion
of the values embedded in our unwritten constitution and an important
check upon executive power. We need to ensure that reform properly
strengthens democracy.
In a sceptical world, with a modern media, cynicism about politics
is easy. But it isn’t inevitable. Last Friday night I watched
Bob Geldof on the Jonathon Ross show. He called for people to come
to Edinburgh not just to protest but to participate in collective
political action – because together we can achieve far more
than we can alone. He said; “We don’t want your money.
We want you. We couldn’t change politics 20 years ago. It
was a different world. Now its not charity, its about political
justice. This has to be this great national moment. This country
gets to change the world and tilt it in favour of the poor.”
Make Poverty History is not a protest movement it is a political
campaign; to make politicians and governments in the developed world
change. Because in the end, no matter how much charity individuals
show, it needs politics and government, and the determination of
Labour Prime Minister and Labour Chancellor to work with other nations
to change the lives of millions. For the sake of politics too, we
need to make sure that Make Poverty History is a success.
CONCLUSION: Politics as the art of the impossible
Thirteen years ago, in the shadow of the 1992 defeat, our
expectations and ambitions were limited by the fear that perhaps
Labour might not ever win again. Today, in the light of a third
term victory, we must raise our sights much higher. This is a precious
opportunity we cannot waste.
That Friday in April 1992, John Smith held a wake for us –
a party to thank the team who had worked for him in the run up to
the election. And he made us promise to keep believing in the Labour
Party, to keep working for the Labour Party and to keep striving
for a Labour government. He told us that the values and the dreams
of the Labour Party were too important for us to despair. And he
said he knew Labour would win power again, because as long as people
like us, the young party workers in that room, remained determined
and dedicated to Labour’s cause, we could not fail.
John Smith never got the chance to see us win. He never got the
chance to see that generation of party workers become the politicians
and campaigners in Parliament and across the country.
He never got the chance to hear this generation of politicians say;
We HAVE introduced the national minimum
wage
We HAVE lifted a million children out of poverty
We HAVE put record amounts of investment into our schools and
NHS
We HAVE proved a Labour government can deliver economic stability
and advance social justice.
We have done a lot. There is so much more to
do. We owe it to Neil Kinnock, to John Smith and to the generations
of Labour supporters who never got this chance, and to the millions
of families and children who now depend upon us for their futures
to renew our party in government and build the stronger fairer society
of which they dreamt.
That is our task. We should not flinch from
it now.
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