Northern Discomfort
The day after the Council Elections, a woman came to my surgery who epitomised the core labour voter. A victim of domestic violence, she had left her husband with her 15 year old daughter and was now living in private rented accommodation. A factory store-worker receiving tax credits, her income was £225 per week but her rent was £95. The council had told her there was no likelihood of getting a home. Where, she wanted to know, was Labour’s affordable housing? On the one hand, she wanted her daughter to stay in education, but the thought of living on this income for another 3 years was totally crushing.
No example could demonstrate more clearly the importance of housing if we are to give people the opportunities to learn and upskill. They need to live in the present, while they prepare for the future.
Sometimes it does feel as if in the quest for the middle ground we have stretched our resources too thin behind and left ourselves exposed and weak. So should we concentrate solely on the core vote and ignore the centre ground?
I believe the answer is no: we cannot win for our core supporters without occupying the centre too. What New Labour did in its first brilliant flush was find a set of issues and policies which appealed to these different groups, but a rhetoric which made sense across the piece. The need to tackle youth unemployment was largely a heartlands issue, while Freedom of Information spoke to the liberal middle classes. Unifying all was a sense of the vital importance of investing in our public services, used by 95% of the population.
This strategy was right and it is still right, but in the past 12 years Britain has changed, not least as a result of our progressive policies. This means the issues and language which worked in 1996 will not work in 2010. We cannot rely on mushy centrist, majoritarian populism: we need to be far more forensic. We also need to demonstrate our concern for core values as well as core voters: so for example, cutting the overseas aid programme would be wrong and immediately shown to be wrong. But having integrity does not mean being flat-footed.
Let me give two examples. In my “heartlands” seat in County Durham economic insecurity and immigration are top priorities. We do have the answers to this in terms of our long-term strategies for education, and skills and investment in science and the knowledge economy. But as Keynes said, in the long-run we are dead, so we must also demonstrate that we are on peoples’ side now. Doing this is central to our historic justice mission.
But in another part of the political landscape; other issues are more salient. Analysis shows that in 2/3 of our marginal seats, the Green vote was bigger than the Labour majority (See Annex A). The Greens held both their London Assembly seats. So we must not soft pedal on our climate change and environmental agenda. For this too is about justice: justice between generations. If our only policy lever for achieving these objectives were higher consumption taxes we would of course be setting ourselves up for a fall in terms of a conflict of interests between the two parts of our coalition, but investment in public transport and green homes; the need for tougher regulations to eradicate waste of everything from light-bulbs to TV standbys are understood by everyone. We need cap and trade and to explore personnel carbon limits.
Drawing the two groups together even more clearly, we can encourage the creation of new jobs in the environmental sector: the Department of Business, Employment and Regulatory Reform’s latest estimate is 250,000, and the small engineering firms in my constituency are already engaged in solar wall technology and wind turbines.
We also need to regain a bit of self-confidence and zing. In 1997 we introduced the minimum wage and financed the New Deal through a windfall tax on the utilities. We were told it was impossible, but it wasn’t and we did it. This is exactly the kind of bold thinking we need again.
