Only big ideas will win in 2015

Marcus Roberts
Labour can only win in 2015 with a radical manifesto. Why? Because to win the Party needs to become a movement again and movements are motivated by big ideas. To have tens of thousands of activists having hundreds of thousands of conversations with the crucial working class C2 voters we need to persuade and the disaffected DE voters we need to turn out will require a radical agenda that both motivates our activists and mobilises our voters. So how to persuade a sceptical electorate to have faith in Labour again? The answer is two-fold: tackle the living standards crisis in the short term, and change the economy in the long term. To frame this message, Labour should continue to develop its policy agenda in the context of work, family and place so as to offer specific changes to the living standards crisis people face and the hopes families have for a better future. Such a frame allows Labour strategists and canvassers alike to ground Labours message in peoples actual lived experience. On living standards, Labour should help deliver fair and responsible credit with an interest rate cap (important to so many families struggling with rising costs and falling wages), grant permission to councils to differentiate taxation to punish anti-social businesses like loan sharks and betting shops (to improve the quality of the places that families call home), increase the minimum wage to make work truly pay, and force the utility companies and train operators to put their profits towards cutting prices and fares. But these actions are just a down-payment on the bigger policy goal of rebuilding Britain over the next decade. To do that requires structural change in our economy of a scale that Thatcher achieved. But whereas her solution was to privatise the economy so as to merely trade between state monopolies and de facto private monopolies, Labour must re-engineer the market to break up concentrations of power like the energy companies or return to public

ownership services like train operators who have consistently failed to function properly in the private sector. An active, long term industrial policy must be pursued to dramatically increase the share of manufacturing within GDP even as the UKs tax base dependence on financial services is reduced. Government support of vocational training as a genuine alternative to academia is also essential to this reshaping and will also take the better part of a decade to deliver. The politicians temptation in all of this will be to promise easy solutions that will offer the promise of change overnight at the expense of someone else. Too often this has been a particular Labour curse in which each new Good Thing is promised to the voter by being paid for by Someone else. For 2015, Labour must resist this temptation. Because believability in all of this is achieved by blending low cost, immediate change policies (like the interest rate cap) with long term expensive policies (like a million affordable homes). Here Labour can learn from the Conservatives winning frame on austerity. Consider: austerity states that things are hard, that they will get worse and that only in the long term will things improve. By tapping into ideas of shared sacrifice and long term change the politicians promise becomes believable again. After all, as any Labour canvasser can attest, voters have a remarkable bullshit detector and are increasingly likely to reject easy, overnight solutions as impossible even as they believe the truth-telling politician who offers shortterm pain for long-term gain. But thats not the only means Labour has at its disposal to convince a wary electorate to lend their vote once more. The way in which Labour does politics both in opposition and then in government must also be different. For a Labour Party that is a movement again with hundreds of thousands of activists will be capable not just of electing a Labour government but of also shaping our society both through community actions and by influencing government policy. For as Ed Miliband used to say during the leadership election: had we listened in government to the Party we would have built more houses and avoided war in Iraq. A shell of a party with fewer then 200,000 paper members can be far more easily ignored then a movement representing nearly a million activists. The implications of this approach are profound for Labours policy offer. Instead of proposing a series of changes to peoples lives on their behalf and for their own good, Labour policy becomes about what people can do together, with government, council, community, private sector and individual

all acting in concert to achieve change. A concrete example is loan sharking: whilst it is Westminsters responsibility to regulate businesses like Wonga and cap their grotesque interest rates it will take movement politics to empower and enable the credit unions that can offer fair and responsible credit even as an alternative to payday loans. Beyond this, as Labour plans a radical programme of infrastructure spend, prioritising home building transportation and energy to secure Britains long term economic future, even at the expense of traditional social democratic loves like healthcare or social security, Labour has the chance to do this differently too. Instead of just stating national need Labour can work with communities and developers alike to listen to local hopes and concerns and build community consent by interacting with citizens not just broadcasting to consumers. Taken together, this represents a radical politics that both alleviates the living standards crisis in the short term and reshapes the economy in the long term. It offers Labour a means of becoming a movement deeply embedded in British society that does its politics differently. And it offers ideas big enough to motivate masses with means practical enough to be believed. Big ideas can create big movements. Marcus Roberts is Deputy General Secretary of the Fabian Society . Political notes are published by One Nation Register. They are a monthly contribution to the debates shaping Labours political renewal. The articles published do not represent Labours policy positions. To contact political notes, email onenationregister@gmail.com