Labour's Strategy #1: Imagination
Labour must rediscover its imagination if it truly wants to return to power
The Labour Party has a policy problem. Its current polling lead is soft, vulnerable to a Conservative comeback under a new leader, because of its failure to control the narrative by setting out a coherent vision. This is despite months of ill feeling towards the government and a new policy announcement every week, because very few have cut through to the public, a casualty of that failure. While Labour successfully forced a government U-turn on an energy windfall tax, it has failed to gain any meaningful support for even its biggest pledge: £28bn a year on a green industrial revolution, universally ignored. Radical, but unexplored and unknown. Labour needs to create a forward-thinking narrative of what the country could be with a raft of new policies, as it did in 1964, 1997, and 2017. This two-part series will cover the strategy through which Labour can communicate that vision, and, in this piece, the route towards those imaginative policies.
The Route to Imagination
Ambition
The current ideas problem stems from an interminable hesitancy after the Corbyn period, an eternal defensive crouch that the party refuses to move away from. While this caution is understandable, it is also unnecessary and misguided. The scale of the challenges facing the UK demands forward-thinking, ambitious and radical policies, not tinkering around the edges.
We must see this in the most important policy areas, like education. The only detailed commitment in this area so far, despite the political room afforded Labour by consistent leads in the polls, has been pledging to expand extracurricular opportunities for worse-off children. While commendable, this is woefully inadequate for a primary and secondary state system that is creaking under the weight of teacher shortages, ballooning classroom sizes and schools that are in disrepair. Similarly, despite Keir Starmer’s focus on economic growth in the past few weeks, there has been no ambition or policy detail in these announcements, and generic policy will not inspire voters.
While this push on economic growth confronts the impression that Labour prioritises equality above all else, and is good as a marker of difference with Corbyn, it lacks the ambition to change the country. Where are the bold policies of New Labour: the minimum wage, the tax credit system, Sure Start, the Good Friday Agreement, devolution, lifting a million pensioners and a million children out of poverty? Or Atlee’s creation of the NHS and Welfare state, the Wilson era Equal Pay and Race Relations Acts, the legalisation of homosexuality and abortion, and the largest post-WW2 increases in pensions and social security. While history eliminates such simple repeats of policy, it also provides a progressive foundation with a precedent for ambition. Labour policy must be more radical, tapping into the will for urgent reform among the electorate.
Responsible Economics
This cannot, however, come with excessive levels of borrowing and taxation to fuel unsustainable spending. Investment must be fully costed, offer a good long-term return, and come with red lines on taxation increases for working people. The last time the electorate saw Labour as economic incompetents who seek to just tax and spend, they handed the Conservatives a landslide. Labour needs its 2017 ambition, but with 1997 thought. This means no rises in income tax for a start, and any spending increases funded not by borrowing, but by tax increases on big business and already held wealth. Labour needs to seize the ground from underneath the Tories and avoid any perception of punishing working people and small businesses – because people in this country, as in 1997, want better public services without the high levels of tax seen on the continent. For Blair and Brown, this meant continuing the Conservatives’ fiscal policy for two years – for Labour it should mean almost the opposite. They must promise to reverse several of Sunak’s 14 tax rises to hammer home the message, in the same way they have pledged to abolish and reform business rates.
This should tie into a message that the traditional Labour concern with economic inequality is more to do with economic efficiency than morality. The argument for increased equality is too often focused on the moral imperative – but this will not always convince the swing voters that Labour need in order to win. Rather, Starmer’s push on economic growth should include the argument for a more equal, and therefore efficient, economy. This combined policy direction would enable the party to shore up their new 7-point lead on taxation and move ahead of the Conservatives on the economy – Labour are still 6 points behind despite the high inflation, low growth economy of 2022. This was a problem at the last election, and massively contributed to the defeat, with the party 24 points behind on economic management.
Beyond the politics, it is good economics too. In a post-quantitative easing, high inflation world, the time for high levels of borrowing to fund investment is over. Labour must pledge itself to fiscally responsible investment that offers material returns in a long-term search for growth and productivity, without pushing inflation ever higher in a stormy global economy. This means specific, thought out and responsibly funded policies that will speak to the needs of the people and the nation.
Synthesis
In the silver bullet area of education, for example, fiscally responsible yet ambitious policy would mean higher starting salaries and progression opportunities for teachers, as well as greater financial incentives for students who agree to teach post-graduation. It would mean meeting the recommended £11.4bn for school repairs and further funding for extra classrooms. And it would mean funding state schools’ improvements by removing the charitable tax incentives of private schooling – which is already party policy.
This is especially important in a country poor in natural resources and lower-end industry, but rich in the social capital required to take advantage of the ideas economy and the high-tech industry that will dominate the next decades. Investment in education is playing to the nation’s strengths, which successive governments have failed to do. Spending in this area is both popular and necessary, and provides an opportunity for Labour to craft a message of equal opportunity and a bright future with ambitious but viable policies, casting off the party’s reluctance to stand for anything for fear of being seen doing it.
Conclusion
Misplaced hesitancy, then, is the single greatest factor preventing good policy strategy. This is a reluctance to define themselves, a fear of attack from a populist government and their media friends, and a refusal to set their stall out with a considered plan for this decade. They have succeeded in reforming the party away from the unpopular hard-left, and their attack lines have contributed to Johnson’s downfall – but ambition and a positive vision are required to actually win an election which, as in 1964 and 1997, must be the goal after so long in opposition.
In the Yin and Yang of politics, Labour are missing a trick – they must urgently set out fully-costed and radical policies of the scale required to give the country the change it is crying out for. This does not mean throwing money at problems, it means money going where it is most needed, wherever it offers the greatest return and wherever it supplements Labour’s vision of equal opportunity. Considering the state of the party in December 2019, Starmer has made progress, but not enough. The country cannot afford another Kinnock. Labour must go further.